I looked at him with a limp smile. ‘Do we have to? I was just beginning to enjoy the music.’
Manston said, ‘The general opinion is, Carver, that while you may be holding back a few details . . . you know, magpie stuff, little bright bits that you can’t bear to part with . . . the serious aspect is that you are refusing to admit the overall truth. You can keep your little bits. But you must give us the basic truth.’
‘You’ve had it.’
‘No. I’ll admit the truth of your story, right up to the time you went to Tripoli and discovered that the Dawson who had been kidnapped was the Prime Minister’s son.’
‘Thanks. Can I get a drink now without electrocuting myself?’
Perkins, a true white man, got up and filled the plastic tumbler for me. Then he drank it himself and leaned back against the edge of the basin.
‘When you learnt that, you realized why Duchêne and Paulet were stringing you along with a phoney story, and you made a good guess as to their interest. So—’
‘Let me tell it, please.’ I got up and went to the basin. I looked at Manston. ‘Tell this gorilla to get out of the way. I want a drink and if I don’t get one I’ll tear his stupid Anglo-Saxon head off his over-muscled rowing shoulders.’
Manston looked at Perkins, and Perkins stepped away. I drank like a camel. I probably sounded like one as well.
Bloated, I turned. ‘So,’ I said, ‘the moment I’d got the dope about the Villa La Sunata from La Piroletta, I did a deal with Duchêne and we all went up there together. Right?’
‘Right.’ Manston nodded. The carnation in his buttonhole was wilted. Not so much as I was.
‘And we worked out a plan to keep me in the clear. A phoney kidnapping of Wilkins and so on. And me to come back here and play the man under duress to you. And eventually the prisoner exchange deal would go through and I’d get a whacking great secret payment for my services and Wilkins would come home, safe and sound, and never know what a triple-crossing, corkscrew-minded man she had for a boss. Is that it?’
‘Precisely,’ said Perkins.
‘You believe that?’ I asked Manston.
He nodded. ‘Knowing you, yes. It measures up to your kind of morality.’
‘Oh, sure. No real harm is done to Dawson or Wilkins. Brooke comes back from Russia, and the British tax-payer is saved the expense of keeping two people in prison here, and by now anyway they have no vital information to hand over to Mr V. Semichastny—he only wants them as a matter of face. So what harm is done to anyone? And I get fifty thousand pounds in a numbered Swiss account. It’s all been good clean fun. You believe that?’
‘It’s the truth, isn’t it?’ said Perkins. ‘And, now that you’ve got it off your chest, why don’t we go on to the main point? Where is Dawson? Don’t tell us you don’t know that.’
Standing there by the bunk, I raised my eyes to heaven and clamped my hands to my brow in a gesture of despair. The trouble was, I was so fatigued that the movement made me collapse on the bunk. Leaning back against the wall, I said, ‘This government spends eight million pounds a year, openly acknowledged, under State Expenditure, Class XI, Miscellaneous, for its Secret Service—and you two morons draw part of it in salary. Stick with it. Don’t go out into the big, hard world of industry and commerce. You’d never survive. You’ve got to have intelligence and common sense to hold down a pay-packet out there. Go away, you bother me.’ I rolled over and lay down. I was tired, too tired even to be angry. Too tired even to be afraid. Heat and cold and brass-band music can do that to you.
Manston said, ‘All right, Perkins. He’s yours for five minutes. Don’t mark his face, that’s all.’
He didn’t. I tried to kick him in the groin as he came for me, but he grabbed my ankle and damned near broke my leg as he jerked me off the bunk. Then he worked me over, strictly for five minutes, which is a long time when you are being bounced from wall to floor. It might even have been from wall to floor to ceiling towards the end. I wouldn’t have known, because I passed out without a mark on my face.
*
When I came round my watch said twelve o’clock, but whether it was midday or midnight I had no idea. Hackett appeared with a tray and no consolation. On the tray was a glass of milk and three very dry cheese biscuits.
I stood up from the bunk as he put the tray on the table. My body was so stiff and bruised that I functioned like a badly manipulated puppet. Hackett waved me back with one hand.
‘Don’t try nothing like jumping me, Mr Carver. There’s someone outside the door.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t jump over a matchstick.’
‘That’s what you get for being difficult. You really ought to understand, Mr Carver, that you’re in deep. The boss is still off his food. Not like him a bit.’
He came over and handed me the glass of milk.
‘Why don’t you be a good boy and tell’em what they want to know?’
‘They’ve had the truth. Why can’t they be content with that?’
‘There’s truth and truth. Mind you, I got to say that whichever one you stick with it won’t do you any good. The boss, he’s always had it in for you because you would never come and work for him. And because the times you have come in on a part-time basis you’ve always played it your own way. Bad, that. He likes things done proper even by temporary staff’
I said, ‘Is it day or night outside?’
‘Midday. Lovely day, warm and bright. All the girls with skirts right up above their knees, birds
