When he made his first evening reconnaissance he went out at dusk when the light was poorest. He used the underground a bit but mostly buses; never taxis.
Chartermain’s garden was a horseshoe around the house, well tended but drab this late in the year. On the fourth side—the left—a paved lane ran past the kitchen door, made a little dogleg at the rear corner of the house and ran on through the back garden to a coach house that had been converted into a garage with servants’ quarters upstairs—a remodeling job that had been done in the 1920s when occupants of such a house could afford a large staff. Goosenecked streetlamps bathed the front garden and the porte-cochere but the lane went back through a patch of shadow beyond the kitchen; the illumination at the rear was poor, thrown by a single lamp high on the side of the coach house at the head of an outside stair that clung to the ivied wall.
Past the garage the lane continued in a gentle bend, going on between two five-story Georgian monoliths into a street beyond. But there was a gate across the front of the lane and at its other end a chain hung across it to prevent traffic; it was no thoroughfare out of the mews.
It took him several days to work out the population and routines of the household. There were two servants; they looked like husband and wife; they lived in the quarters above the coach house. Presumably the maids’ and butler’s quarters in the main house were unoccupied—perhaps closed off to conserve heat. The wife evidently performed as housekeeper and cook, the husband as butler, chauffeur, gardener and handyman. On the second night of his surveillance there was a gathering of eight couples among whom Kendig recognized a member of Parliament and a man who had been, and perhaps still was, the Deputy F. O. Secretary to whom Chartermain’s department reported through the Chief of MI6. On that occasion two additional servants worked in the house but they went home afterward and presumably had been supplied by some agency on a temporary basis.
Each morning a Humber saloon piloted by a liveried driver—a government employee—collected Chartermain and drove him away to his duties. The garage housed two automobiles—an Austin Mini which the servant husband used for errands and the wife for shopping, and a Jaguar 3.8 saloon which the memsahib used twice in the four days, both times for afternoon excursions lasting several hours (shopping? hairdresser? liaison with lover?); she drove herself. When she returned she let herself into the house with a single key, indicating there was no burglar alarm system. That conformed with what he knew of Chartermain; the man was as old-fashioned as Yaskov, he probably had contempt for gadgets and gimmicks and the electronics of modern espionage.
He performed his surveillance from stolen cars, He would boost a car, park it somewhere in the mews and watch the house; he would drive the car to another part of London and abandon it within a few hours before the description could have got onto the hot-sheets.
His break came on the Thursday evening. The servant husband emerged from the kitchen door carrying two valises; the memsahib, who was quite trim and attractive in her lean fifties, came along a moment later tugging on her gloves with brisk little jerks. She wore a topcoat and a little pincushion hat—a traveling outfit. The servant fed the luggage into the boot of the Jaguar and the memsahib smiled and spoke, got into the car and backed it out into the mews and drove away. Chartermain had private means and a country estate; quite likely she was going down to Kent for the weekend.
He’d had the Cortina since morning and it would be heating up by now. He drove out of the mews ten minutes behind the memsahib.
After dinner and a movie he purloined a Rover from the car park of a block of high-priced flats near Victoria Station. He chose it for three reasons: it was expensive enough to be in keeping with Chartermain’s quarter; it had a Spanish plate and diplomatic tags which meant it wouldn’t be disturbed by traffic patrols for illegal parking; and the keys had been left in it.
By the time its operator discovered the theft in the morning Kendig would have abandoned it like the others; in time it would be returned to its owner with the apologies of the Foreign Office and a shrug of the shoulders and a word of advice about leaving keys in the ignition.
He drove into the mews at half-past ten and made a three-point U-turn at the end of it and drove out again. It happened five times a day, drivers losing their bearings and not knowing they were going down a dead end. He drove slowly out of the mews again, scrutinizing the house. Two windows were alight upstairs; and a light burned in the bedroom of the apartment above the garage.
Both servants would be in the coach house by this hour. The two lights in the house were at the head of the main stair and in the memsahib’s room—some sort of reading or sewing chamber where she seemed to spend part of each evening when they weren’t entertaining. It didn’t seem a room to which Chartermain repaired. The conclusion to be drawn was that there was no one in the house; the lights had been left on purposefully by the servants. Chartermain might have gone from his office straight down to Kent but it was more likely he was working late trying to collate the clues to Kendig’s whereabouts.
He made three successive left-hand turns and parked the Rover in a no-parking space within fifty feet of the gap between the two Georgian blocks where the rear of Chartermain’s lane emerged, chained off at the pavement. The Watney’s pub at the corner was getting ready to close but he squeezed in and used the pay phone. He let it ring seven times; there was no answer. He went back to the lane and stepped over the chain and walked into deep shadow between the two five-story buildings, guiding on the weak lamp at the head of the servants’ stair.
He stopped under the stair and studied the rear of the main house. There was a light burning in the cupola over the kitchen door, illuminating the steps down to the lane. Beyond at the head of the lane was a streetlamp. But the back of the house was dark; upstairs the middle window showed a vague glow from the stair-head chandelier at the far end of the corridor. He’d been up the main staircase, along that corridor and inside Chartermain’s study which was at the rear of the house on that floor.
He wasn’t a second-story human fly and that sort of ivy probably wouldn’t hold his weight. An expert might do it but Kendig’s expertise didn’t run in that direction. He’d have to enter at the ground floor and go upstairs inside the house.
He crossed the lane, stepped over a cultivated bed that had held annuals in the summer, crossed the back lawn and stood in the shrubbery examining one window. It was a casement affair, latched on the inside with a heavy brass fitting. The only way to get at it would be to cut or smash a pane, reach inside and undo the latch. He had no glass cutter and he couldn’t risk breaking a pane because the servants’ bedrom window looked out on the house and they’d hear the glass shatter.
He tried four windows—all there were. They were latched firmly. He had no better luck with windows on both sides of the house toward the rear and he couldn’t try the ones nearer the front because he’d be exposed to the mews there.
It left only the kitchen door. It could be seen from a small area in the end of the mews but he didn’t see anyone there; it also would be plainly visible to the servants if they happened to look out their bedroom window but their curtains were drawn.
He had with him the only tools he’d bothered to improvise—a coiled length of coat-hanger wire and one of the hotel’s plastic pocket calendars. The latch was a modern spring-loaded affair and the plastic sheet unlocked it easily and without sound but when he pushed the door open it creaked a bit on an unoiled hinge. He made a face, slipped inside and slowly pushed the door shut behind him, twistting the knob to prevent the latch from clicking when it closed. Then he turned to the window and looked out toward the coach house.