Shaw had an amused glint in his eye, but he said smoothly, “I assure you it won’t happen again, Mr Latymer, and I’m sorry you’ve been troubled.”
Mr Latymer trotted away, pompously demanding the attentions of a messenger for some triviality, and Shaw walked out of the building, passed under Admiralty Arch into Whitehall, felt the seeping drip of rain, and decided to go back to the flat by Underground. Taxis were an easily acquired habit, and too many of them rolling up at the unpretentious flat in West Kensington might be remarked upon; and it was a principle of the outfit that its operatives, who were in fact paid lavishly enough, shouldn’t make a splash — not that Shaw would want to do that — but should live as befitted ordinary officers of their rank doomed to an Admiralty appointment; so Shaw, who believed that easily acquired habits were lost only with difficulty, made a habit of economy in things like that.
As he was herded down the steps below Trafalgar Square he found himself hoping that Debonnair wouldn’t get delayed in Paris. He had to see her before he left, and her movements were always a little uncertain when she went away on these business trips. His job was always liable to be dangerous… his nerves were playing him up again now, and he felt desperately that he couldn’t go away again without getting things sorted out with Debonnair — just in case he didn’t come back.
In the Tube, swaying westward after he had changed on to the Piccadilly Line, it came to him how you couldn’t trust anybody in this game. Look at them, he thought, sitting there under the adverts for wool, toothpaste, building societies, and London Transport, or standing up against the half-bulkheads… bored, indifferent, glazed eyes staring into nothing, blank and wooden and pale. Damp macs and umbrellas. England on a wet day. A couple of teddy boys, a housewife up for the shopping, a man with a bowler hat and a briefcase, a soldier, two Indian students, a couple of nuns… the man opposite him, a plum-coloured man who looked like a banker but almost certainly wasn’t if he had to travel by Tube, despite the parking problem, was gazing straight at him without seeing him. Any one of those people in that Tube might be there for a purpose. You couldn’t trust anyone… all this and much else passed through Shaw’s mind, and he watched every one in the compartment while he was thinking, but because he was a good operative his eyes remained as blank and his expression as wooden as anyone else’s as the train rocked and racketed him towards Baron’s Court.
CHAPTER THREE
The hand-case down by the girl’s long, nyloned legs in the Paris air terminal had a number of old, half-torn off hotel labels on it — the Galle Face, the Barbizon Plaza, the Hotel Australia — but the most recent was a plain one which read:
Miss Debonnair Delacroix, c/o Eastern
Petroleum Company, Rue des Feuilles, Paris.
Nevertheless, the lady was London-bound, had merely forgotten to change the label. The little fat, dapper man with the bow-tie, edging closer through the crowd and trying to catch the girl’s eye, had taken a brief squint at that label because it was always handy to know a girl’s name — but after that brief squint his whole attention was on the girl herself. Debonnair Delacroix was half French, and unmistakably so even to the little fat man who kept a pub in Balham. And even in a crowd which had a fair sprinkling of whole-blooded French girls in it, Miss Delacroix stood out a mile. Figure, hair, clothes all helped to do it, though personality could have managed pretty well on its own. She was a tawny girl, fresh and golden-skinned, with a light, attractive dusting of freckles — lion-coloured, almost, and with the same grace in her movements — and there was just that delightful touch of imperious carelessness, a carelessness which wasn’t in the least studied as it might have been in a wholly English girl, and a faint air of unleonine helplessness, rather appealing helplessness which was actually entirely misleading. Shaw’s own opinion was that for sheer efficiency she had him beat to a frazzle, and Shaw knew what he was talking about, because he’d worked with her in the past.
The Eastern Petroleum Company, not knowing Shaw, couldn’t have expressed an opinion on their relative efficiency, but they did know that when she had left the Foreign Office she had been given a first-class write-up; and they had given her a pretty high position in their Travel and Service Department, the organization which dealt with the arrangements for transport of the Company’s employees by sea, land, and air throughout the world and the accommodation, entertainment, and customary flapdoodle for General Managers and other V.I.P.’s visiting the London Office from overseas — and that was quite a big job for a girl of not quite twenty-eight to handle.
A high-heeled shoe tapped rather impatiently as Debonnair’s bright-eyed glance swept over the heads of the crowd. The glance came to rest on the little fat man. The little fat man tweaked at his bow-tie, gave a slight wriggle of an overdressed bottom, and ogled her from under a bald head which reflected back the lighting system of the air terminal; the glance, unsoftened by these tactics, refused to melt into a smile, rested on him coldly, though amusement lurked in the corners of the mouth and in the eyes.
“Toffee-nosed,” muttered the little man in disgust.
“Not in the least,” said Miss Delacroix frigidly, “but I think that’s your wife approaching, isn’t it?”
The little man shrank. Looking round, he saw the large bosom bearing down on him from the Ladies’, a long string of cheap imitation pearls cast round it like a griping-band on the swelling broadside of a lifeboat; the straw brim of the meal-coloured hat, the one with the violet clusters which he’d bought her at the Co-op before they came away on holiday, topped her like a crust on a cottage loaf. The dapper little man had never hated that hat as much as he did at this moment; he looked sad, jowls drooping into a blue-shadowed line like a long-suffering bloodhound baulked once again of its quarry.
“You win, dear,” he muttered to Miss Delacroix. “Bin different if the old woman ’adn’t a bin here, p’raps?”
Miss Delacroix smiled then. She was attractive already, but those dimples, the fat man thought, cor! They didn’t ought to ’ave bin allowed. “Perhaps,” she agreed kindly.
The bosom hove in between them with a glare from a turkey-red face above, and then the loudspeakers hummed and woke into voluble urgency.
Hie crowd got on the move.
She hadn’t been back in the tiny flatlet in Albany Street for long when Shaw telephoned.
She said delightedly, “How lovely of you to ring, darling. I’m just in, only this minute. How’re things with you?”
“So-so.” Shaw was non-committal. “I thought we might have dinner somewhere. Like to?”
“Would I?” She thought: I know that tone — he’s off somewhere again. Just for a brief moment she regretted the events which had led to her having to quit the Foreign Office— events which, through no fault of her own, had blown the gaff about her, and rendered her useless in the job she’d been doing. She hadn’t wanted to take a humdrum desk job in the familiar environment of the F.O. where she’d always be in contact with the forbidden past. There had been something about those undercover days that had been so much more exciting than Eastern Petroleum… in particular, her career and Shaw’s had touched — that was how they’d met in the first place and it was something she would never, never forget. She came back to the present, said, “I’d love it, Esmonde darling.” She spoke decisively. “I was just wondering what I could possibly face in this kitchen after Paris. This brute of a stove.”