Here Comes Charlie M

Charlie left the room and started the search of the first floor. It was easier here, because there was less furniture. In two of the bedrooms, it was actually protected by dust-sheets. Snare’s bedroom was as neat as the study, the shoes not only in racks but enclosed in tiny plastic bags and the clothes carefully arranged in a wardrobe like a colour chart, running from pale, summer-weight material through to the darker, heavier suits.

‘Housemaster would be very proud of you,’ said Charlie.

He found the locked cupboard on the floor above and sighed, relieved. It was specially made, he saw, the doors flush and with two locks, top and bottom. He pulled at the handle. There was no movement. So it was rigid- frame, too. Probably steel.

It took less than a minute to return from the study with the unidentifiable keys. The second fitted the bottom lock and when he retried the first, the top clicked back into place.

Charlie edged away, pulling open the door, and then sighed in open astonishment.

‘Oh, the fools,’ he said. ‘The bloody fools.’

The Faberge collection was laid out almost as if for inspection, arranged on three shelves. On the floor beneath were the plastic bags in which Snare and Johnny had carried it from the gallery.

The whole point of the entry had been to find something – anything – with which he might have been able to incriminate Snare; a plan of the Brighton bank, for instance. Or maybe some connection with the Tate. But not this. Not the single most damning thing there could possibly be.

Of course the proceeds of the robbery could not have been openly taken into the department, accepted Charlie. But Snare should and could have made his own security arrangements; he’d been inside enough banks in the last month to be a bloody expert. His judgment of those who had taken over the department from Sir Archibald and even survived the Kalenin affair wasn’t, as Edith suspected and of which she had accused him, the biased sniping of someone who had been dismissed as unnecessary, thought Charlie. They were amateurs, like the men who could not accept that Kim Philby was a spy because he’d been to the right school or that there was a risk in Guy Burgess, boozing and male-whoring in every embassy to which he’d been attached.

He packed the jewellery, relocked the cupboard and returned the keys to the desk. He spent fifteen minutes assuring himself that he had replaced everything in the position from which it had originally been moved, then a further ten in one of the spare, unused bedrooms.

Finally he went out the back door, quietly pulling it closed after him, climbed easily over the separating fence at the bottom of the garden and then out through the front gate of the neighbouring house on to the road parallel to that in which Snare lived.

The car was still warm from the drive back from Kent, he found, pausing gratefully before starting the engine.

‘You’re a lucky sod, Charlie,’ he told himself.

‘What about the safebreaker?’ suggested Cuthbertson, matching everyone else’s desperation. ‘Perhaps he followed Snare home?’

Onslow Smith sighed at the confusion that had grown in Wilberforce’s office since his entry.

‘Oh come on!’ he said, rejecting the idea. ‘This is stupid, panic thinking.’

And there was damned good reason to panic, he thought. If he weren’t very careful, this would make the Bay of Pigs and the Allende overthrow in Chile look like a training exercise for Boy Scouts. Which, upon examination, seemed about its right level.

‘It’s a possibility,’ Cuthbertson said defensively, his thick voice showing he knew it was nothing of the sort.

The American picked up the note that had been taken from the Mayfair bank.

‘That’s rubbish and you know it,’ he said, waving the paper towards the ex-Director. ‘We’ve been suckered. Well and truly suckered.’

‘Personal animosity isn’t going to help,’ said Wilberforce, trying to reduce the tension. It had been impossible to sleep after Snare’s visit the previous night and the hollow feeling that had gouged out his stomach at the man’s breakfast telephone call, reporting that the collection was missing, had developed into positive nausea. He’d even tried to be sick, thrusting his finger down his throat in the bathroom adjoining his office, and merely made himself feel worse.

‘I don’t know what will,’ said Smith. ‘I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe that you didn’t take any precautions. Jesus!’

‘Would you have stored it in the American embassy?’ threw back Wilberforce.

‘No,’ admitted Smith immediately. ‘I’d have certainly put it in Snare’s house. And then I’d have made damned sure that there were so many people watching that house that a kitchen mouse couldn’t have taken a pee without someone knowing it.’

He was going to get out, decided Smith, suddenly. He was going to withdraw all his men and get to hell out of it, before the smell really started to rise. From now on, Wilberforce was where he’d always wanted to be. On his own.

‘I made a mistake,’ conceded Wilberforce, reluctantly. ‘I’m very sorry.’

The other Director looked crushed, thought Smith, without any pity.

‘Does anyone in your government know what’s been going on?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Wilberforce. ‘And yours?’

‘No.’

‘It’ll be a miracle if it remains a secret,’ said Wilberforce.

‘It is quite obvious that Charlie has taken it,’ said Braley.

‘To return to the insurers?’ queried Cuthbertson.

Wilberforce nodded at the question. ‘Equally obvious,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way he could ensure that Rupert Willoughby wouldn’t be damaged by association. Don’t forget how close he was to Sir Archibald.’

Wilberforce laid aside his worry pipe, looking across the desk encouragingly.

‘The Faberge collection was always intended to be returned to the Russians, which is now what will undoubtedly happen. So the damage at the moment is still minimal.’

‘But we don’t know where the hell Charlie Muffin is,’ said Snare.

‘But we know how to re-locate him,’ said Wilberforce. ‘There’s got to be some sort of pattern in the woman’s tour. The moment there is any contact, we’ll have him again.’

Smith decided he’d wait until he organised the removal of his own men before letting Wilberforce know what he was doing. Then the son of a bitch could do what he wanted about watching Edith.

‘I’d like to think so,’ said Snare. He felt revulsed that Charlie Muffin had entered his home and actually touched things that he owned. Quite often, he recalled, the man hadn’t bathed every day.

‘Where’s the flaw?’ demanded Wilberforce. No one guessed the depths of his uncertainty, he knew.

Smith shook his head at the other man’s stupidity.

‘The flaw,’ he said, patiently, ‘is what it’s always been – Charlie Muffin.’

TWENTY-FOUR

Quite irrationally, which she even recognised but still could not prevent, Edith had developed a conviction that despite the lengthy list of cities and hotels that Charlie had given, he would have contacted her almost immediately.

She’d actually invoked ridiculous, childlike rituals. If the waiter at dinner were Spanish, then Charlie would telephone before midnight. If the winter coldness broke, turning to rain, then that would be the day she would walk into the car park and find Charlie waiting for her.

The desperation had grown with each day until that morning, just before leaving her Cambridge hotel and starting the drive southward to Crawley, the next town designated, she had had to hold herself rigidly at the bedroom door, fighting against the overwhelming impulse to cry.

That it should happen there, today, was understandable, she supposed. She had read history at Girton and the memories had soaked through her. She had driven along the Huntingdon Road and gazed in, trying to locate her old room. And walked past King’s Chapel, so that she could stand on the tiny, humped bridge to stare down into the