The typist turned as Mum bustled into the room, thickening body rigid with the effort of carrying the Hoover. Mum frowned and said, “You snooping on that man again?” She looked worried. “I don’t know, dear, really I don’t. What’s he to you, anyway?” Mum put down the Hoover and pushed nervily at a grip in the wiry hair, smoothed the flower-patterned overall across thick hips. She repeated, “What’s he to you, Joy dear?”
“Oh, nothing, Mum.” The typist had turned back to the window, and Mum came and breathed over her shoulder, steaming up the window so that the man’s back became hazy through the glass. “Wonder what he is, Mum?”
“I don’t know.” Mum too stared after Shaw, swinging along angularly. She screwed up the flesh round her eyes. “Looks like one of those musicians, if you ask me, dear… in a band somewhere.”
The way she said it wasn’t complimentary, but professionally speaking Shaw would have been quite pleased.
As Shaw walked past he never noticed the typist and wouldn’t have had eyes for her if he had, though if she’d ever summoned up courage enough actually to speak to him on some pretext or other he would have treated her as politely and considerately as he treated all decent men and women. He was, in fact, thinking of a woman and wishing he understood her better so that he could feel easier about leaving her — he knew he’d have to leave her for a while again, unless (unlikely thought) this was a London job he’d been marked down for by the Old Man. And with Debonnair you never knew, never knew just where you stood… he thought a lot about Debonnair and about his appointment as he walked down the North End Road, with the paper and refuse blown along from the market swirling around his ankles. He turned up at the end past Olympia and did the whole long stretch of the High Street away beyond Barker’s to Knightsbridge Barracks before the rain started and he had to hail a taxi.
“Cockspur Street, please,” he told the driver. Shaw’s friendly smile touched the corners of his eyes. “Could you drop me by the Sun Life of Canada offices, please?”
As always, the smile brought the response. The driver swung the door open, grinned back. “Anywhere you like, sir, and it’s a pleasure.”
Shaw got in, bending awkwardly through the door and contorting to slam it after him.
When they got there Shaw paid the driver, tipping him neither too much nor too little. Just right. Be average, was the order in the outfit; never let yourself look conspicuous in ordinary surroundings by the tiniest word or act. Shaw felt wry amusement as he went into the doors of the Sun Life building. He went right through and came out on to the pavement the other side, wormed his way through traffic, and got into the Mall by a side-alley between the shipping offices. It was roundabout, but it was orders. It was orders — not to be cloak-and-dagger, of course, but at least to use every opportunity of throwing people off the track. People like taxi-drivers, for instance, because you never knew who might be driving a taxi. It was a good habit to get into, and orders had to be obeyed. Shaw knew that there was a reason for everything in the outfit, just as there was a reason for the appraising up-and-down look which the Whitehall watchdog gave him as he came into the old Admiralty building. His face wasn’t all that well-known there.
The man came for him, squarely reliable in a neat, dark-blue uniform, friendly but wary. “Good morning, sir. Can I help you?”
Shaw smiled, a smile which seemed to tilt his eyebrows into an appealingly crooked zigzag. He said, “I’ve an appointment in Room 12.”
He held up his hand, and in the palm was a small, thin, folded card embossed with the naval anchor on a bisected red-and-green panel. It wasn’t quite an ordinary naval identity card, and that red-and-green panel meant something to the initiate, but the watchdog wasn’t among the elite. He just glanced at it, noticed as Shaw opened it that it bore the name and rank of Commander Esmonde Shaw, D.S.O., D.S.C. and bar, Royal Navy, and sniffed a little. Commanders were two a penny these days, but the officer had a right of admittance, and the watchdog knew that all sorts of people came and went from Room 12, so he got the Commander to sign in, and then he beckoned up a messenger.
He said, “Take the officer to 12.”
Shaw followed behind a portly man with a solitary wisp of hair breaking the shining monotony of his scalp. As Shaw followed this man up a broad staircase he had a nasty attack of heartburn, and he felt like death as the messenger stopped outside a door which bore a small white card with the name in black lettering: Mr G. E. D. Latymer.
CHAPTER TWO
Mr George Edward Dalrymple-Latymer always, when in conversation with people outside the tight closed circle which constituted the department within a department, liked to let it slip out — quite casually, of course — that his was really a hyphenated name. He managed to add, without precisely saying so, that, being a democratic kind of man, he preferred to be known to simple sailors as just plain Latymer and no nonsense. In many respects Latymer was the opposite of his Number Two — The Voice, or Captain Carberry, R.N.
Latymer’s body was not thin, it was plump from lack of exercise; his voice was quiet — authoritative, and not always genial — and its quiet decisiveness seemed in some way at odds with the full, round, almost self-indulged body, the important manner, the pink, expressionless oval mask of his face — until you looked at the eyes. Like his voice, the eyes were steady and reliable, and they, even more than Shaw’s, held that echo of the seas and of foreign lands and sun and storm. They were coloured a greenish steel, and they seemed to look right through a man into his innermost thought-processes, and those eyes and the voice saved him from appearing just another fussy, old-maidish bachelor of settled habits and prim outlook. Shaw often thought he’d have done well in Russia — there was, at times, a certain quality of grim ruthlessness — not, of course, that he could have done better than he had in England, and for England too. Shaw knew a lot about Mr Latymer, and that was why he never paid any attention whatever to the ‘Dalrymple’ business, which, like the pompous manner, was nothing but propaganda.
At this moment Mr Latymer was looking thoughtfully at Shaw, as he sat opposite him on the other side of the big desk, a desk so vast that the three telephones seemed almost lost in its wide expanse of sumptuous leather top, so vast that even the big panelled room, with its long windows and carved ceiling, didn’t dwarf it, while it almost hid the steel-lined filing cabinet with its elaborate card-index system at the back of the room. It was a beauty of a desk, finely finished and with beautifully contrived secret hiding-places in it for documents — or other things, such as a small automatic which Mr Latymer prized. Mr Latymer also prized the desk itself very highly, for it represented youth and dare-devilry — Mr Latymer had in fact looted it from the Admiral’s day-cabin in a Turkish cruiser during the closing stages of the First World War, and had embarked it in a crate heavily labelled Superintending Naval Store Officer, Devonport. On arrival in Plymouth Sound he had deleted this designation and had substituted the address of his own home, removing the crate, from the battleship in which he was then a very junior watchkeeper, by means of subterfuge, a ginned-up Customs Officer, a crane, a working-party borrowed from the battleship’s commander, and a Pickford’s pantechnicon. Even in those days Mr Latymer had been able to get away with things like that, and the experiences which he had suffered during and after the Second World War had not altered that — though they had altered his personal appearance quite a lot.
Quite a lot. And his name was altogether different.