Charlie’s Apprentice

Snow came to pick it up? That would have been the obvious thing to do.’

‘That was their mistake, moving too early,’ said Miller. ‘What other reason can there be?’

‘Don’t know. They were certainly quick at the railway terminus, when they did try to pick Snow up. That really puzzles me, how that happened.’

‘Why?’ asked Patricia.

‘How they knew he was there,’ said Charlie.

Miller sighed, impatiently. ‘For God’s sake man, that’s obvious, surely! They followed him!’

Charlie shook his head, doubtfully. ‘It wasn’t easy, evolving a way to get Snow out: nor accepting, as I had to accept, that there would be a watch for him at airports. That’s why I made the phoney plane booking out of Beijing. And rehearsed him through the visits to the Foreign Ministry and the Security Bureau …’

‘Which failed as badly as everything else you tried to teach him and Gower!’ sneered Miller.

‘But that’s the problem,’ persisted Charlie. ‘It was the best I could think of – the only thing I could think of – but I wasn’t happy Snow could carry it off. He hadn’t had any proper training, after all. So I didn’t trust him to do it by himself. I set the routing: knew where he was going and how he was going to try to do things. So I picked him up when he left the Bureau. Not that he could see me, of course. Stayed a long way off. To see if he was still followed. If he had been I was going to feign some encounter at the terminus: lost Westerner approaching another obvious Westerner for help, to abort the whole thing and try to think of something else. But he wasn’t followed. I was sure he wasn’t. He had confused them. I covered him all the way to the ticket queue. And became even surer there. That’s why I got on the Shanghai train, to wait for him …’

Miller sighed again. ‘This sounds to me like a weak defence to a miserable failure that’s going to mark the end of any future for you in this department.’

Charlie frowned at the threat, refusing to be stopped by it. ‘Think more about it!’ he urged. ‘There were at least twenty people there. Soldiers and civilians. And Li, in control of it all. To keep the hypothesis going, let’s concede that they did follow him, even though I know they didn’t. It would have been two or three men. Four at the most. From the time he arrived at the station and queued to buy his ticket to the time he disembarked from the Nanchang train to cross to where I was waiting was precisely seventeen minutes. I know. I counted every one of them.’

‘What is this laborious point?’ demanded Miller, a man close to exasperation.

A point for my benefit, not yours, thought Charlie. ‘There wasn’t enough time, even if they had followed him, to get more than twenty people, soldiers as well as civilians, into position. With Li in charge. You’d agree with me about that, wouldn’t you?’

‘You were clearly mistaken, about his not being followed,’ insisted Miller.

Wrong! thought Charlie. ‘Still not enough time.’ How much more could he say, at this stage? How much more could he say at all? Not much. It was a pity: more than a pity.

‘The fact is they did get into position!’ rejected Miller. ‘Where’s all this getting us?’

‘I was trying to explain why I took a long time to get home,’ offered Charlie. ‘I thought it best to use my own airline reservation as a decoy and come out another way.’

‘Which way?’

‘Through Hong Kong, on the first leg,’ disclosed Charlie. ‘It was a hell of a trip. I had chronic jetlag.’

‘You took a holiday, at our expense!’ challenged Patricia.

‘There were some other things in Beijing that didn’t make sense to me,’ continued Charlie. ‘Like the obvious observation on the mission. There was observation, you see. It was easy to locate, when I approached the mission the first time …’ Charlie paused coughing. ‘But then there was a funny thing. I made another check, the day after Snow died. And do you know what? All the surveillance had been lifted. No one was watching the mission any more.’

‘What’s so surprising about that?’ demanded Patricia. ‘Snow, their suspect, was dead!’

‘One priest out of two,’ reminded Charlie.

‘What?’ asked Miller.

‘Snow was the younger priest, the man better able physically – despite the asthma – to move about on fact- finding trips. But if you had been carrying out the investigation, from your long previous career in counter- intelligence, wouldn’t you have suspected that Father Robertson and Snow might have been operating together? And that it might be useful to maintain the watch on the mission to see what Father Robertson might do? Particularly when Father Robertson was somebody who had been arrested and jailed, in the past? Was someone they’d already accused of crimes against the State?’

Miller remained clearly disdainful. ‘My interpretation is that the Chinese aren’t interested in him.’

‘Oh but they are,’ said Charlie. ‘I wanted to be very sure the surveillance had been lifted from the mission. I was thinking of going there, to talk to Father Robertson. But I was glad I didn’t. On the last two days I watched the place I saw Father Robertson with Li Dong Ming, the man who escorted Snow on his trip and then pursued him, right to the time he went under the train and was killed …’

‘What?’ It was Miller who asked the question, voice scarcely above a whisper.

‘Li and Father Robertson,’ Charlie said again. ‘Very friendly with each other. Laughing, in fact. Once they walked quite a long way up the road leading from the mission and Robertson even held Li’s arm, for support, although he didn’t look like the frail old man I had seen at the embassy.’

They were both looking at Charlie. Patricia’s mouth was slightly parted. All the attitudes had gone from both of them.

Charlie was regarding them just as intently in return. ‘I could never quite understand why, having arrested and jailed Robertson like they did, the Chinese let him stay on to run the mission. But what if he broke, in jail? Agreed to work for them? It all makes sense then, doesn’t it? They’d have someone who is part of the Western community in Beijing, with access to the British embassy, perfectly in place to spy. The perfect asset …’

‘… No!’ said Miller, shaking his head, his voice still distant. ‘No!’

‘Wouldn’t that also explain why Robertson is still there: why the mission is still open? They lost their chance to stage a trial with Gower and Snow, but they’d have closed the mission down. Thrown Robertson out. But they haven’t, have they? Because he’s too useful to them, remaining in place.’

‘There’s no proof of any of this!’ said Patricia. ‘It’s all surmise, based solely upon your seeing Li and Robertson together. And we’ve only got your word for that. It might not even have been Li.’

‘It was,’ insisted Charlie. ‘Definitely. I think for a long time the Jesuit mission in Beijing had one priest working for Britain and one for the Chinese. With neither supposedly knowing about the other. We’d better warn the embassy, hadn’t we?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Miller. He sounded distracted.

‘So it wasn’t a miserable failure, was it?’ pressed Charlie.

‘No … maybe not …’ faltered Miller. ‘We need to analyse everything.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Charlie. ‘It all needs to be analysed.’ But not any more by me, he thought: I’m sure I’ve got it all right.

Natalia based herself in Cologne and on the third day took a river trip on the Rhine. The ferry made several stops, the longest in Koblenz.

Forty-nine

It was Charlie’s suggestion they go to Kenny’s, in Hampstead’s Heath Street, where they’d eaten the first time they’d gone out together. Julia agreed without apparent thought and didn’t remark upon it when they got there, so Charlie didn’t bother either. He hadn’t chosen it for any special significance anyway. Charlie was careful with the choice of table, getting them into a far corner, close to the speaker relaying the background music which would overlay whatever they talked about. They had a lot to talk about. He ordered Chablis and told the waitress not to worry about the food for a while, they weren’t in a hurry.

‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘There was chaos after I left.’