‘Mac, are you trying to warn me off?’
‘No, just trying to salve my conscience. I wouldn’t like you to get into any kind of trouble, Tom — not on my account.’
‘You think if I go through with this, I might be putting myself in some danger?’
Mac said, ‘A few years ago a couple o’ lads in Italy tried to pull a fast one on ABCO. They chartered a tanker full of high-grade crude and made a swap in mid-ocean for low-grade stuff. Then they tried to cash in on the difference. I say “tried”, because they’d hardly started negotiations when their car was in a head-on collision with a road tanker outside Rome. Both were killed outright. And the funny part of it was, the tanker belonged to one of the rival companies. You can draw whatever moral you choose from that.’
He banged out his pipe in the hearth and stood up. ‘Keep in touch, laddie. I’ll be thinking of you.’ He insisted on seeing Hawn to the front door: but no suspicious cars waited in the lane.
Hawn drove back carefully, and checked in his mirror every few seconds: but this time there was nothing to arouse his suspicions. His street behind Notting Hill Gate was quiet in the late summer evening.
His flat was still double-locked and empty. Anna had been due home nearly an hour ago. She was a punctual girl — sometimes irritatingly so — and was never late without warning him in advance. He realized that she might have tried to ring him that afternoon, and had got no reply; he had not given her Mac’s number and had stayed longer than he had expected.
He had a hot bath, to freshen up and sweat some of the malt out of his system; then lay down on the bed, still wrapped in a damp towel, and fell asleep. The names of Doktor Mönch and a wrestling drug peddler called Salak had receded into a haze of alcohol and pipe smoke: the memories of an old man who lived alone, growing tomatoes.
It was more than an hour later when he woke. He heard the lock turn, then footsteps. Anna stood in the main room in her monk’s habit, holding her satchel-like bag. ‘Tom.’ She looked at him defiantly; she was rather white. ‘They’ve stolen my string bag. The one with my books and notes in it.’
He blinked at her. ‘Who have?’
‘You tell me.’ She went over and poured herself a drink. ‘It was while I was in the library. They went to the old man who looks after the coats and personal belongings. They said it was a bomb scare and they wanted to look at all bags and parcels. They took mine, to examine it. He said he couldn’t stop them.’
‘Who were they? I mean, what did they look like?’
‘He said they were well-dressed, well-spoken. Might have been police, but he didn’t think they were ordinary police. Special Branch, or Terrorist Squad, I suppose.’
‘Have you told the police?’
‘Yes. They just asked me a lot of silly questions.’
‘What was in the bag, Anna?’
‘Oh God. Practically everything. I mean, most of my notes brought up to date. All the petroleum import and export figures for the neutrals during the whole war, against the same for oil exporting countries for the same period, month by month. Sounds pretty simple, but it’s been a bloody headache. At least a month’s work up the spout. But that’s not the point. I know where to begin again — but so do they. They know exactly what I’m on to, and how far I’ve got.’
Hawn told her about the three cars following him to Mac’s that afternoon. She listened impassively, then went into the bathroom and returned almost at once.
‘Tom, someone’s been in the flat. They’ve turned it over — thoroughly.’
‘How do you know? It looks all right to me.’
‘My toilet things — they’ve been moved. Not much, but enough.’ She went quickly over to her desk on which were arranged tidy piles of books with paper markers in them, documents, photostats, the rest of her typewritten notes. ‘They’ve been through these, too.’
Hawn went to the bookcase. He had a large collection of books, amassed since his student days, and he took pride in arranging them in selected categories. He noticed almost immediately that among his hardcover editions of Orwell’s Collected Essays and Letters, Volumes I and II were in the wrong order. ‘Funny sort of break-in. The locks haven’t been broken — no damage, nothing taken, that I can see. Usually they piss on the carpets.’
‘Tom, when did you get back?’
‘Over an hour ago.’
‘And when did you leave here?’
‘After lunch.’
‘They must have been watching the flat, then. But who? Not the police?’
‘No.’
‘Then who?’
‘ABCO.’
‘Oh my God.’ She drank some whisky very fast. ‘You don’t mean they’ve got on to us this soon?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so — until what’s happened this afternoon. At least, I’d have expected them to hold their hand a little longer. And what about the stuff on your desk? I haven’t read any of it yet.’
‘Mostly German fuel reserves and their commerce with Rumania. All very technical, and some of it quite useful.’
‘These boys this afternoon were technical. They knew how to pick two security locks, and they also knew what they were looking for. Sweden — Turkey — Rumania — Switzerland — and comparative oil import figures for all of them. Anna, all this might just be a roundabout way of scaring us off. Now, you tidy up,
