Horse Under Water

G-Plan said, ‘We will have learnt it all by then, chief? What are you going to find us to do on Monday morning?’

‘Monday morning you start all over again,’ said Edwards. He stepped outside the door and raised his powerful voice. ‘They’re spending too much time on the ladder, Barker. They aren’t on the steps of the Prince Regent’s bathing machine.’ Then turning back into the hut again his voice lowered. ‘Yes, you’ll be starting all over again on Monday. Theory seven: Preparation and service of Swimmers’ Air Breathing Apparatus. That’s the aqua-lung works with a demand valve and compressed air — quite different to these oxygen sets. And by the way, Stewart,’ that was G-Plan’s name, ‘if the officer of the watch comes round, you’ll keep that medicine bottle of yours out of sight. I wouldn’t like him to think any of my divers were not well.’

‘Yes Chief,’ said Stewart. He had eyeballs in his buttons that Edwards.

4 Man with a tail

Some heavy lorries making smoke at Horndean, a sharp rainstorm rolling across Hindhead, grass as green as creme de menthe, and then bright sunshine as I came on to the Guildford by-pass. I watched my mirror, then tuned the radio to France III.

Putney Bridge and into King’s Road; shiny, shoddy and deep-frozen. Bald men with roll-neck pullovers. Girls with bee-swarm hair-dos and trousers that left nothing to the imagination. Left, up Beaufort Street, past the Forum cinema and on to Gloucester Road. Men with dirty driving gloves and clean copies of Autosport, and landladies weighed down with shillings from insatiable gas-meters. Left again, on to Cromwell Road Clearway. Now I was quite sure. The black Anglia was following me.

I turned again and pulled up by the phone box on the corner. The Anglia came past me slowly as I searched for a threepenny piece. I watched out of the corner of my eye until it stopped perhaps seventy yards up the one- way street, then I got quickly back into my car and backed around the corner on to Cromwell Road again. This left the black Anglia seventy yards up a one-way street. Now to see how efficient they were.

I drove on past Victorian terraces behind which un-painted bed-sitters crouched, pretending to be one grand imperial household instead of a molecular structure of colonial loneliness.

I stopped. From under the front passenger seat I reached for the 10 ? 40 binoculars that I always store there. I wrapped a Statesman around them, locked the car and walked over to Jean’s flat. Number 23 had peach curtains and was a maze of corridors down which the draught got a running start at the ill- fitting doors. I let myself in.

A fan heater provided a background hum while Jean tinkled around the kitchen fixing a big jug of coffee. I watched her from the kitchen doorway. She was wearing a dark-brown woollen suit; her tan had not faded and the hair that hung across her deep forehead was still golden from the summer sun. She looked up; calm, clear and as still as a three-quarter-grain Nembutal.

She said, ‘Did you straighten out the Navy?’

‘You make me sound pragmatic,’ I said.

‘And it’s not true, is it?’ She poured the coffee into the big art-pottery cups. ‘You were followed here, you know.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said quietly.

‘Don’t do that,’ said Jean.

‘What?’

‘You know very well. It’s your Oreste Pinto voice. You say things to provoke a fuller reply.’

‘All right. All right. Relax.’

‘You don’t have to tell …’

‘I was followed by a black Anglia, BGT 803, maybe all the way from Portsmouth, certainly from Hindhead. I’ve no idea who it is, but it could be the Electrolux company.’

‘Pay them,’ said Jean. She stood well back from the window still looking down towards the street. ‘They could be from the refrigerator company; one of them has an icepick in his hand.’

‘Very funny.’

‘You have a wide circle of friends. The gentlemen across the road feature an azure Bristol 407. It’s rather dreamy.’

‘You’re joking, of course.’

‘Come and see, child of Neptune.’

I walked to the window. There was a Bristol 407 of brilliant blue, sufficiently muddied to have done a fast journey down the A3. It was awkwardly parked amid the dense mortuary of vehicles in the street below. On the pavement a tall man in a flat peaked cap and short bold-patterned overcoat looked like a wealthy bookmaker. I focused the Zeiss and studied the two men and their car carefully.

I said, ‘They aren’t working for any department we know, judging from the tax bracket they’re in. Bristol 407 indeed.’

‘Do I detect a faint note of envy?’ asked Jean, taking the binoculars and looking down upon my would-be companions.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You wouldn’t join the enemies of democracy and threaten the existence of freedom-loving western capitalism for a Bristol 407, would you?’

‘What colour?’

Jean was looking out of the tall narrow window. ‘He’s getting back into it again. They are going to park outside 26.’ She turned back to me. ‘Do you think they are Special Branch?’

‘No: only West End Central cops have big cars.’

‘Do you think they’re friends?’[4]

‘No, they wouldn’t let an overcoat like that through the front door of the H.O.’

Jean put down the field-glasses and poured out the coffee in silence.

‘Go on,’ I said, ‘there are plenty more security departments.’ Jean handed me the big cup of black coffee. I sniffed it. ‘It’s Continental roast.’

‘You like Continental roast, don’t you?’

‘Sometimes,’ I said.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ll drink it.’

‘About the men.’

‘I’ll find out who they are.’

‘How?’ asked Jean.

‘Well, I shall go upstairs, climb out along the roofs, find another skylight, go down through the house. You, meanwhile, put on my overcoat and move about near the window so that they catch sight of what they think is me. At a prearranged time-lapse, say twenty minutes, you will go across and start up the engine of my VW. They will have to pull out the Bristol in order to have any chance of catching my car before it disappears. Got it?’

Jean said, ‘Yes,’ very slowly and doubtfully.

‘By that time I shall be in the porch of, say, Number 29. When they get their car started I will take a potato, which I shall have taken from your vegetable basket and, running forward, crouching very low, I shall jam the raw unpeeled potato on to their exhaust pipe and hold it there. It’s only a matter of moments before the pressure builds up enough to blow the cylinder head off with a tremendous crash.’ Jean giggled. ‘There they will be with an expensive disabled car. They will never get a taxi at this time of day at Gloucester Road cab rank, so they will have to ask for a lift in the VW, which by this time will have had the heater going long enough to make it warm and comfortable. On the way to wherever they wish to go I shall say — quite casually, mark you — “what are you two young fellows doing in this neck of the woods on a Saturday midday?” and from one thing and another I shall soon find out who they work for.’

Jean said, ‘It’s not had a good effect on you, that Naval Depot.’

I dialled the Ghost exchange number and switchboard answered. I put a hand over the mouthpiece while