Somewhere along the Archway Road, not quite sure of his bearings, he dropped off the truck and made his way afoot off the lighted thoroughfare into a dreary lane of grim Victorian brick—identical attached row houses of Dickensian bleakness. Cars were jammed together along both curbs but it wasn’t transport he needed just now.
He went the length of the lane—two hundred yards, not much more. It ended against a parapet; a steep slope fed down into a railway cut. He saw no signal lights along the tracks; perhaps it was an abandoned line. Garden allotments were terraced into the slope, each with its little padlocked tool shed, a few with greenhouses.
He’d worn no topcoat because he hadn’t wanted the clumsiness of flapping skirts in his burglary; he was chilled to the bone in shirt and jacket but what mattered was that they knew the clothes he was wearing and they knew he had no money to buy different garb. He couldn’t very well go back to his hotel for a change of clothes; they’d have that sealed off first thing because one or another of them was bound to be inspired by that plastic calendar with the hotel’s advertisement on it.
He got up on the stone retaining wall and made his way around behind the row of houses. The back gardens had their degrees of individuality and some of them were fenced but none of the fences was too high to scale. He began to explore.
Each house appeared to have been subdivided into flats, one apartment to each floor; the three ground-floor windows at the rear of a house represented kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Toward the front he surmised there’d be a sitting room and a stair hall. They weren’t tenements but neither were they upper-middle-class digs; these were workingmen’s flats.
The windows were of two kinds: casements on the baths and kitchens, old-fashioned bay windows on the bedrooms. These were vertically hinged-in panels and could be held open at specific apertures by ratchet-holed interior levers that lay at angles across metal pins on the sills. The Englishman was a creature who had a mystical faith in the curative powers of fresh air irrespective of chill, humidity or pollution. Nearly every bedroom window in the row was open at least one notch.
He judged it near three in the morning; they were as sound asleep as they’d ever be. He went along the row exploring. It was only a matter of reaching the fingertips inside, lifting each lever off its pin and swinging the window gently wider; then quietly press a curtain aside far enough to see inside.
They weren’t people of uniform habits. Some were married, some slept alone; some were pin-neat and must have hung their clothes in the cupboards while others had left jackets and trousers strewn across chairs or dressing tables. One flat was postered with psychedelic colors and ban-the-bomb slogans and the bed seemed to be occupied by at least three people. It was the only iconoclast; the other bedrooms he investigated were sedate.
He retraced his way to the stone wall, climbed over and went carefully down the allotment paths. He broke into a splintered tool shed and picked the longest-handled tool he could find, a garden rake, and worked the rake head off the handle. It gave him a pole the length of a short fishing rod. He scrounged in the bins, found an old nail that would do and banged the nail at a right angle into one end of the pole, using the head of the rake for a hammer. He was thinking: if they’d found the manuscript he’d cached in the hotel basement than he’d have to grant them the victory and call off the game. The carbon copy was still safe in Florida but it would stay there untouched; he’d hidden it there for use only in the event some blind accident should destroy the original. But if Cutter’s minions found it in the soap carton that wouldn’t be blind accident; he’d have to concede Cutter the game.
But he didn’t think they’d look for it there. They’d be more clever than that. They’d stake out terminal lockers and they might canvass the banks to find out if a man answering Kendig’s description had rented a safe-deposit box. Probably it wouldn’t occur to them to search the rest of the hotel if they didn’t find the script in his room. And even if they did think of it they’d have to make it no more than a cursory search and the odds against their looking in that particular carton among many were pretty good.
He carried the hooked rod back up to the wall, went over it and started to work through the bedroom window of the second house. He used the pole to reach in through the narrow window, hook the trousers off the chair and pull them out through the window. He did it with a great deal of stealth. The pockets were empty. He hung the trousers back on the hook and pushed them back inside onto the chair. The configuration wasn’t the same as it had been but the man would never notice the difference and even if he did he’d be no more than mildly puzzled; nothing had been removed from him.
The third window was useless; he passed it up. The fourth yielded the first prize of the night: a tweed jacket with a wallet in the inside pocket. There were sixteen pounds in five- and one-pound notes. He took ten pounds, left six, and returned the jacket to the bedroom, hanging it carefully over the back of the chair as it had been before. Then he closed the window back to its original aperture. The man would have to conclude he’d miscounted the contents of his wallet.
The next window was latched shut; the one beyond was the ban-the-bomb hippies; the seventh yielded up a pair of dungarees with only two and a half quid in the wallet. He didn’t touch the cash but he lifted half the loose change from the front pocket and he liberated a Barclay Bank plastic credit card from among three cards in the wallet pocket. He replaced the dungarees on the floor whence he’d hooked them and moved on down the row.
There were twenty houses in all; he hit seven of them with his fishing rod and stole not more than one or two small items from each—never enough to induce the victim to report the theft. When he was finished he had a threadbare topcoat, a trilby hat, an umbrella and a pocketful of mismatched identification, credit cards and money. He hadn’t lifted any wallets because that would be noticed; but a wallet was easy enough to buy.
After a counter breakfast in Highgate he bought a shave and a short haircut in a barbershop. In a drugstore he bought essential kit—toothbrush, paste, razor and a cosmetic tinting kit for people who wanted to cover grey hair. He rode a bus into the King’s Cross district, bought a few items of clothing and chose a small unpretentious commercial-travelers’ hotel and walked straight in across the lobby as though he had business there. No one challenged him; he went upstairs and searched the corridor until he found the bathroom for use by those whose rooms did not have private bath. It was past rush hour and the chamber was not in use. He locked himself in and took his time bathing, darkening his hair and getting into the new clothes—underwear, socks, dark blue slacks that fit well enough, an ordinary round-collar white shirt, a Navy four-in-hand, an imitation-suede sport jacket for which he’d laid out five pounds twenty. He brushed off the topcoat and trilby and put them on; wrapped his old clothes in the parcel from which he’d taken the new ones; and sat down to examine the night’s haul of credit cards and money.
He’d taken three driver’s licenses and now he chose the one that came closest to his own age and decription; he tore the others into pieces and flushed them away. He had a bit over fourteen pounds remaining in notes and coin. It would do for the moment.
He carried the parcel of old clothes out with him and deposited it in a dustbin two blocks from the hotel; went down the King’s Cross station and rode the tubes to Covent Garden. He had the hat down around his ears—he’d stuffed the bands with newspaper and it was still a fraction too large but that was all right. With the umbrella in hand he knew he was well camouflaged; nevertheless every stranger’s face might be an enemy’s and as he threaded the crowds he felt sweat break out like needles, prickling his scalp.
In a passage off Drury Lane there was a philatelists’ shop run by a man who dealt not only in rare postage stamps but also in stolen documents and passports. The shop was on the Agency’s list of sources but Kendig had never been inside it. There was a chance they’d be watching it; there was a chance they wouldn’t be.