penetration of his intellect and the gimlet sharpness of his suspicion, he was almost always alone, often on the outside of the group. He was feared, he was avoided, he was respected. Through narrow-rimmed and thick-lensed spectacles, over a close-cut brush of a moustache he watched the bobbing endeavours of the rubber dinghies that circled the short and white-painted hull of the capsised yacht.
Two searchlights that were powered by mobile throbbing generators played their beams from the shore onto the water where the frogmen dived and where the ropes with the grappling hooks were thrown. And they were futile, the efforts of these searchers, an obligatory show with very little prospect of success. Three hours since the angry keeper of the marina beside the Jardin Botanique had telephoned the Residence to ask how much longer was he supposed to wait for Monsieur Guttmann to bring back the yacht that was on permanent hire to the delegation. When anyone was late, missing, overdue at the Residence Sharygin went first to their sleeping quarters with his pass-key, sifted their possessions, and evaluated whether their tardiness was innocent or criminal. There had been clothes scattered on the floor, money and a half-written letter to his father on his desk, a bag of laundry by the door, an empty suitcase under his bed. One hour later the Second Secretary to the Permanent Mission had run into Guttmann's room, found Sharygin rifling a drawer, hesitated in an embarrassed silence and then blurted the information that the drifting boat had been sighted from the Coppett road. So Willi Guttmann, junior interpreter, had overturned a yacht on a foul afternoon when only an idiot would have put out from the marina.
Who knew how far the yacht had drifted since or how far the deep currents had transferred a water swollen corpse? Futile the efforts of the searchers. They should wait for daylight, they should wait for the body to be washed to the shore.
'Monsieur Foirot…' Sharygin shouted against the wind towards the group of his countrymen and the Chief of Police. He stood his ground, saw illuminated for a moment that glimpse of annoyance as the policeman detached himself and walked up to him. 'Monsieur Foirot, from your experience, please, when should we find him?'
'Difficult to be certain, the lake water has many vagaries
'Tomorrow, the day after?'
'I cannot tell you. He was not wearing a life jacket; we have recovered that. If he is far down then we have no method of measuring the patterns of the currents that will take him. Normally they surface within forty-eight hours, but I cannot tell you where that might be and there are relatively few craft on the lake before the season, it could be many days before the body is sighted if it is carried far out. And then again, Monsieur Sharygin, if he has tangled himself with a rope, if the rope has snagged on the lake bed… I cannot tell you.'
Sharygin looked away, back to the water, back to the divers and the dinghies and the yacht that was now righted and sluggish in her movements from the water she had taken on board.
'He was a lunatic to go out in such weather.' Sharygin stamped his feet against the cold.
'If you say so, Monsieur. What position does he hold with the delegation?'
'He is nobody. Twenty-four years old, an interpreter for us. This had been his first assignment outside the Foreign Ministry. He was due to return tomorrow, now that the conference session has ended. A fool.'
The Russian pounded away across the beach towards his car. A lunatic and a fool, that had been Willi Guttmann. But would Moscow have sent an idiot…? That was the missing segment of the circle. He might find the answer in the boy's personal file. He would find no answer here, not in the rain and the cold and the wind.
'Mr Mawby?… It's Carter.'
'Why didn't you call from Geneva?'
'Behind the clock there, he was running late. But I wanted to put you in the picture as soon as possible, because it'll be another hour before we're at the house.'
'That's good for you, Henry. Home and dry are we?'
'We're home, the boy's not dry… He had a rough time in the water, Mr Mawby. When he turned her over I think he was trapped for a bit under the mainsail. Sounded a bit nightmarish, and the weather was ghastly, the swim would have taken a deal of pluck.'
'He chose the way, he made his bed.'
'It was the first thing he said to me, that his father had to be spared. Had to seem an accident, that's what he said, Mr Mawby.'
'So be it, and apart from a throat full of water, how is he?'
'A bit choked up about the girl not coming on the second leg. He's quiet and sullen most of the time, sort of bottling it.'
'That's damned stupid, not much point in going through with this charade and then having his girlfriend disappear on the same night. The boy has to see that.'
'I think it's the girl. Flood of tears at the parting, quite a scene really.'
'You're going soft in your dotage, Henry.'
'He said they'd kept it very secret, plugged the keyhole I suppose.'
'Chatter him through the Geneva end for a couple of days, then I'll send an armour king down to you.'
'Right, Mr Mawby. We'll be on our way again.'
'Good… oh, and Henry, it's been very well done. Very smooth.'
'Thank you very much, Mr Mawby.'
For a man of his build, Henry Carter had quite a sharp step as he returned to the car. At his position in the Service with a lowly plateau of advancement reached and little to look forward to bar the cut glass decanter and the hand- shakes and the good riddance and the bored smiles of the retirement party, praise was welcome. It was his talent that he sold himself short, that was what his wife said anyway, and he usually told her she was right.
Lying on the carpet in his small study, wearing the Guernsey knit sweater that provided him with a boyish sense of the outdoors, puffing at a cigarette that dropped from a monogrammed holder, Charles Mawby studied the mole hills of paperwork that he had dispersed across the floor. His wife never disturbed him while he was working, left his coffee and tea outside the door before going at tip-toe back to the living room of their Knightsbridge flat, and the consolation of the portable television.
Sometimes he wished that she would intrude so that she could flavour the concentrations of files and maps and photographs with their 'Secret' and 'Restricted' stamps, but the door stood as a barricade between his professional life and what private existence the Service permitted him. If she had come in then Charles Augustus Mawby, of good pedigree, good school, good Cambridge College, would have assumed irritation and made a show of covering typescripts and said something about 'Not really good for you to see this sort of stuff, darling', and wallowed secretly in a sort of pride. An Assistant Secretary nominally working at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Mawby was a career officer of the Secret Intelligence Service, climbing high and well. A bright future at every compass point in the offing.
The paper mounds represented the briefings he had received during the previous week. They concerned a success that was not spectacular but might be significant. A mite of triumph in the unending struggle for information and the placing of pieces in the jigsaw that had no horizon.
Two years back Mawby and select colleagues had taken a private room at the Garrick Club and over champagne and lobster, and afterwards port and Stilton had celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the Service.
They had toasted their Elizabethan founder, Sir Francis Walsingham, who had created the principle that knowledge is never too dear, that no price could be set on intelligence material. For Mawby that evening had set the seal on his determination that within the confines of his influence the Service would remain a virile and lively agency. He munched at the sandwich he had retrieved from the doorway, scattered crumbs on the papers left by the Ministry of Defence (Intelligence) and the Service's Russian Desk/Military.
If the Service were to remain the vital agency that he con- jured in his mind, stay free from the constraints of the 'parsi monious politicians' that the Deputy-Under-Secretary was for ever complaining of, then it must be alert to chance, responsive to good fortune. In the case of Willi Guttmann they had much with which to be satisfied.
An English girl of good county stock, employed by the World Health Organisation, leaning towards middle age and fear of the shelf, had plucked up the courage to jump from her virginal pedestal and launch herself into an affair with a junior Soviet diplomat. And managed to get herself pregnant for her pains.
A nice girl from a nice home and father doing well in the Inner Temple, and so, of course, the thought of termination was unthinkable.
And Willi Guttmann, naive and infatuated and far from home, had been persuaded that a baby needs a father, and wet little blighter that he was had agreed that Lizzie Forsyth should trip round to the British Consul in Geneva
