"Yes?" A middle-class, south-east accent, overlain with the drawl of the fashionable urban. "What d" you want?"
"Sara Morrison?" She nodded. "Could we have a word about Tricia Quin. I believe —" the warrant card was in his hand, his shoulder against the door as she tried to shut it. "I believe she shares this flat with you."
The girl resigned herself to not being able to close the door on him.
"Past tense," she said, her eyes bright with calculation.
"Really?"
"You're Australian."
Too right." He grinned disarmingly, but the girl did not respond.
"In Birmingham?" she mocked. "An Australian pig, in Birmingham?"
"Could be. It's not only politics that travel distances. May I come in?"
The girl shrugged and released the door. He opened it on an untidy, cramped room with two single beds against opposite walls. A window in the end wall overlooked the campus car-park. Clothes draped over a functional chair, books spread across a small, cheap desk. Posters on the wall — Mao, Lenin, Sex Pistols, a Playboy centrefold with a crudely drawn moustache and glasses and even white teeth blacked out, Castro, Margaret Thatcher used as a dartboard, a Two-Tone band.
"What do you want?" the girl demanded belligerently as he observed the door leading off, bathroom and toilet. "She isn't here, you know." Her accent wavered between the glassy superiority of her background and undoubted money, and the urban snarl she felt he deserved.
"I suppose not. Someone would have seen her. The porter for instance?"
"Beria, you mean?"
Hyde laughed. "May I sit down?" The girl swept her clothes off the single chair, and squatted on the edge of her bed, feet drawn up beneath her, signalling indifference. Hyde sat down. The girl studied him.
"A trendy pig."
"We try, darling — we try."
"You fail — or should I have said, try and condemn?" She parted her lips in a mirthless grin, flashing her cleverness in that precise visual signal.
"A hit, I do confess. Can we talk about your erstwhile girlfriend?"
"What is there to say? She isn't here. End of story."
"Not her story. You know she's been seen. Have you seen her?" The girl shook her head, her face betraying nothing. "Sure?"
"I told your thick mate from CID that I hadn't seen her. Don't you believe me?"
"Not if I asked you for the right time. What would I get — the time in Moscow, or Peking?"
"Cuba," Sara Morrison replied without expression.
Hyde looked up at the ennobled poster of Fidel Castro. "He's a bit out of style, isn't he? Even Arthur Scargill's heard of him."
The girl applauded ironically. "Very funny — oh, too witty for words."
"Blimey, thanks, darling," he replied in his broadest accent. "Now we" ve both tried on backgrounds we never came from." He leaned forward in his chair. Unexpectedly, the girl flinched. He said, “This isn't France or South America, darling. Or Nazi Germany or Kampuchea or the Soviet Union. I could have you down the station, true, but your daddy would get you out by tea-time, I should think," The girl's face wrinkled into contempt, then smoothed to indifference again, as if she had revealed too much of herself. "Always too busy at the office, was he? Chased other women? Self-made man?"
"Fuck off." The obscenity came almost primly from her lips.
"In a minute. Look, Tricia Quin is in trouble — not with us, before you harangue me again, with some people who you might think you like, but wouldn't if you met them."
After a silence, the girl said, "National security bullshit, I presume."
"Sorry darling, it's the only excuse I have."
"Why can't you fucking well leave her alone!" the girl suddenly yelled at him, her face bright red with rage. The mood was sudden, manic in its swing.
"I want to. She has to be protected."
"Crap."
"Not crap. Listen to me." The girl's hands were bunched into fists in her lap, or twitched open, as if gripping some imagined weapon. There was a violence— of rage and guilt and outrage in her that found the body inadequate to express such depths of feeling. "I can't help the situation in which she finds herself. Blame her father, blame national security, blame the bloody arms race if you want to — but I'm the only chance she's got. People want her because they can get to her father through her. They won't mind what they do to her to discover her father's hiding place. And before you say it — yes, I want her father, too. But I don't want to harm him, and I want to help her."
His dismissal passed like a flicker caused by dust in her eyes. Politics in place, attitudes firmly fixed, cemented. She would not tell him. Hyde saw the weapon of threat present itself, and wanted to reject it.
"I don't know where she is — and I wouldn't tell you if I did."
"For Christ's sake, girlie!" Hyde exploded. "Some of the two hundred or so Soviet diplomats with the ill-fitting suits and the poor-diet boils are looking for your girlfriend right now! When they find her, it will be a little bit of slapping about, then the closed fist, then the bucket over the head and the baseball bats, then the cigarette ends for all I know — they won't have time to talk to her politely, some bigger bastard will be breathing down their necks for results. Even if they wanted to be nice. Your friend could tell them she was a card-carrying member of the Party and they'd pull her fingernails out until she told them what they wanted to know." He was speaking quite calmly during the last sentence, but the girl's face was white with anger and with surprised fear. There was something unselfish as well as disbelieving about her.
"You really believe all that?" she said at last. Her composure, her closed-minded prejudices, had reasserted themselves. "Christ, the perfect functionary!"
"My God, but you're stupid —"
Tricia's been frightened out of her mind — don't you realise that?" the girl shouted at him. "Before her father disappeared, she was depressed, moody, frightened. Then she left — just like that. She hadn't slept a wink the night before. Doesn't that make any impression on you?"
"Was she frightened when you saw her two days ago?"
"Fuck off, clever sod."
Both of them were breathing hard. Only the wind, moaning more loudly round the building, offered a larger perspective than the cramped hothouse of the small room. The girl's face was implacable.
Hyde stood up, then crossed swiftly to her, clamping his hand over her mouth, holding her wrists in his other hand. He pushed her flat on the bed, kneeling beside her.
"You know what's coming now, darling. You" ve imagined it, talked about it, often enough. You're Blair Peach, love — you're a Black in Detroit, you're Steve Biko. I'm untouchable, darling. It'll be an accident." He could feel spittle on his palm, and sweat, and her eyes were wide with terror. "Everything you" ve ever thought about the pigs is true. Now you're going to find out."
Then he released her, moved away, sat down. The girl wiped at her mouth, rubbed her wrists. When she found her voice, she coughed out his eternal damnation.
"Sorry," he said. "You would have told me. Your eyes were already regretting your earlier bravado." His voice was calm, casual, unemotional. "We both know that. Tricia would tell them even quicker, even though it was her father."
"For God's sake — " the girl began, but there seemed nothing she could add.
"Yes. You're right again. She came here, didn't she?"
"She bloody didn't!" He knew, with an empty feeling, that it was true. The girl appeared hurt and useless. She'd have helped — lied, hidden Tricia, given her money, taken on the pigs, anything. But Tricia Quin hadn't even asked. Hyde felt sorry. Useless energy and emotion slopped around in Sara Morrison, mere ballast for a pointless journey.