‘Don’t like the officialdom of government service,’ started out Wilson. ‘Never have done.’
‘I have difficulty with it myself sometimes,’ said Charlie.
‘Bloody forms and columns of figures.’
‘I’m not looking forward to getting back to that,’ said Charlie, anxious to keep an important conversation going.
‘Think you should,’ said the Director. ‘Had a man in the regiment once, first class soldier operationally but a lousy administrator. Got himself involved in some mess account and there was a discrepancy or two. Payments to tradesmen for which there were no receipts, that sort of thing. Forget the figures: ?800 comes to mind but I think the final audit was nearer ?1800. Hell to pay: couldn’t protect the poor bugger, although I didn’t want to lose him as a soldier. Tragedy: an absolute tragedy.’
‘I can imagine it must have been,’ said Charlie. Christ, what a smashing bloke Wilson was! Charlie said: ‘Strange that we should be talking of accounts. Had a long conversation with Harry Lu, before he was killed. It was all a misunderstanding: just forgot to list those informants.’
Wilson topped up their glasses and said ‘Ah!’ but there was a great deal of satisfaction in the expression. Then he added: ‘Glad you did that.’
‘I do like to keep the records straight, although I don’t enjoy the form filling,’ said Charlie.
‘Nuisance factor of the job.’
‘Nuisance factor of the job,’ agreed Charlie.
‘We haven’t talked about Yuri Kozlov yet,’ said the Director.
Charlie set out the meeting and the ultimatums of the previous day in Tokyo and Wilson sat nodding and adding to their glasses when it was necessary, and when Charlie finished the Director said: ‘I like that. I like that a lot.’
‘I want to make it happen,’ said Charlie, a promise to himself.
‘I don’t think you can go, not the way the Americans feel,’ said the Director.
‘I told him I would be the one.’
‘I suppose you could use a different passport, but we’ve hammered that system a bit lately,’ said Wilson, doubtfully.
‘We’ve got time to think it through,’ said Charlie.
‘You’re right,’ agreed the Director, reaching around for the second bottle. He said: ‘You must be bloody tired, what with the flight and everything.’
Charlie recognized it wasn’t a polite, social enquiry. Accepting the opening, he said: ‘Yes I am. Very tired.’
‘Why not spend a couple of days at home, resting up? No need to come into the department until, let’s say, Wednesday at the earliest.’
‘That’s extremely thoughtful,’ said Charlie.
‘Never have been able to get over the tragedy, losing a first class field soldier over a miserable ?1800,’ reflected the Director.
‘Like you said,’ agreed Charlie, ‘a tragedy.’
‘An absolute tragedy.’
When Charlie opened the cocktail cabinet on the return to London he found the whisky decanter half empty: the driver took the lanes back to the motorway with considerable care and Charlie decided that half a bottle for half the speed was a pretty good deal. He said. ‘Sorry I can’t offer you one.’
‘Never drink and drive,’ assured the man. ‘Good meeting?’
‘Couldn’t have been better,’ said Charlie.
The memorandum from Harkness, demanding an immediate meeting, was uppermost in Charlie’s in-tray when he arrived at the office on the Wednesday, so he put it to the bottom and summoned a messenger instead of using the inter-office postal system, entrusting to the man his own expenses with an explanation of the addendums and, in a separate envelope, enclosed a list of informants with a second memorandum that they constituted the omissions from Harry Lu’s accounts. Hubert Witherspoon was a blurred figure through the fluted glass. Charlie flickered his fingers but the man didn’t respond, and Charlie thought fuck you then.
The telephoned summons did not come until after lunch, which was longer than Charlie had expected, and he guessed the deputy had been adding up the figures and he hoped he’d got them near enough right.
‘You wanted to see me?’ he said, ingenuously, as he entered Harkness’s office. It was directly below the Director’s, with a lowered view of the park.
‘Do you believe in coincidence!’ demanded Harkness.
‘I’ve heard it said that life’s full of them,’ replied Charlie.
The pink face became pinker. ‘You seem to have realized your previous expenses had a discrepancy of something like ?1802: and although you drew ?1000 before you went to Japan, you seem to have spent ?500 more than that.’
‘Lucky I had my American Express card,’ said Charlie. ‘I attached those little blue receipt things.’
‘You didn’t use the card and retain the money!’
‘Of course not,’ said Charlie. ‘That wouldn’t be honest, would it?’
‘No,’ said Harkness, sharply. ‘It wouldn’t have been honest.’
‘I don’t find accounts easy,’ said Charlie, apologetically. ‘You may even have thought that yourself. But I do try to keep a rough tally. According to my records, the department owes me ?500.’
It seemed difficult for Harkness to talk. He said: ‘To be precise, it’s ?502.’
‘See!’ smiled Charlie. ‘I don’t find it easy.’
‘I don’t find some things easy, either,’ said Harkness. ‘Like coincidence, for example. I’ve checked the registers, against the names you list for informants to whom you paid money and against the names that you’ve offered to whom Harry Lu paid money. And do you know what I found?’
‘What!’ said Charlie, his voice apparently excited at the thought of a revelation from Harkness.
‘All the names on your list and all the names on Lu’s list are of diplomats or staff who
Charlie regarded the other man innocently. ‘If they were still serving in the West, you could hardly ask them if they were acting as spies for Britain, could you?’
‘Were they!’
‘But of course!’ said Charlie. ‘In my case, I’d swear to it. I can only pass on the names that Harry gave me, naturally. He didn’t feel it was safe, from a security point of view, to put them in those reports that you ordered.’
There was a long silence from the man at the desk opposite. ‘Reports?’
The case histories you asked for: a record, in fact, of what Harry did for us over a lot of years,’ said Charlie. ‘I know I can talk to you in the strictest confidence …’ He sniggered, as if he’d made a joke. ‘What else, considering what we are and what we do? But he told me he was very surprised and I must confess that I was, too, at assembling together in one document something that would cause so much trouble with Peking – sorry, they call it Beijing now, don’t they? – if it ever became public. You know what?’
‘What?’ Harkness’s face was crimson masked, like the make-up of those actors in the traditional Japanese theatre that Charlie hadn’t this time had the opportunity to see.
Charlie extended the moment, enjoying it. He said: ‘Harry was bloody good. Although I understand some people didn’t think so. Harry actually thought there was something odd in the request: maybe that there’d been some Chinese or maybe KGB infiltration into the department here. He took precautions, of course.’
‘Precautions?’ Harkness was actually talking now with the strained, grunted delivery of that Japanese theatre.
‘Well, he didn’t want to let us down, did he?’ invited Charlie. ‘Maintained a copy, along with all the requests from London. From you. Just to be on the safe side.’
‘Does his wife have the copy?’
‘She knows about the document, but Harry was too professional to entrust it to her,’ said Charlie. ‘Said something about it being an insurance for her. A bank maybe …’ Charlie smiled, brightly. ‘Talking of which, no objections to my drawing that ?502, are there?’
