‘So why’s he out on the Pennines all by himself?’
‘I told you. Bobsleigh accident.’
‘In Australia?’
‘Well, a surfboard, then.’
‘I think you’re wrong. Why don’t we ask him if he wants to eat with us?’
‘Why?’
‘Well, we’re all going to be walking back the same way tomorrow and he did carry your backpack.’
‘Him Tarzan, we Jane?’
‘I think he might be just a little bit lonely. Maybe he’s not a fascist. There’s something quite romantic about him.’
‘Margo. I’m starting to think you’ve got it bad.’
She had her way, though. They knocked on his door and soon they were sitting round an old oak table in the dining-room of the bar, looking at menus.
‘The vegetarian bit’s on page three,’ Heather said to Margo.
Johnny flipped over to it. ‘Oh good,’ he said, ‘I was wondering. Broccoli and mushroom mornay sounds about right.’
One preconception gone, thought Heather.
‘I did a bit of work for the Flying Doctor Service, out around Alice Springs,’ said Johnny. ‘One of them was a dietitian. He put me off meat for life.’
‘I should think that’s an uphill struggle out there,’ said Heather. ‘I thought they liked their meat raw.’
‘Some of them,’ he said vaguely. ‘This guy was big on additives too. Scary stuff.’
Margo and Heather exchanged a look.
‘Are you going to go on flying now you’re back?’ asked Margo.
‘I hope so. Plane deliveries, air-taxi work, that sort of stuff. If I have to, I’ll train as an instructor.’
Heather was studying him. ‘Why did you come back?’ she said suddenly.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose I missed it.’
‘Your family?’
‘I don’t have any real family.’
‘What then?’
‘All this’ – he indicated the room, or maybe the hills outside – ‘Shared experience.’
‘Has it changed much?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a lot. It’s got much more repressive in many ways. People don’t seem nearly so free. I’m surprised more of them don’t complain at what’s being done to them. I think you have to be prepared to stand up and be counted.’
‘What are you prepared to stand up and be counted for?’ said Heather.
‘No,’ he said, ‘you first. You’ve asked me lots of questions.’
The waitress arrived and took their order. They waited until she’d gone.
‘That’s fair,’ said Margo. ‘Go on, Heather, you tell him what you’re prepared to stand up against.’
Heather looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Have you ever heard of a place called Ramsgill Stray?’ she said.
‘You’ve been in there?’ Johnny asked incredulously when she finished.
‘Of course I have,’ said Heather in surprise. Margo laughed. ‘Heather’s spent more time in the Stray than some of the people who work there,’ she said. ‘I have too in the past. There’s an injunction says I can’t now.’
Johnny was having the utmost difficulty covering up his emotions. It had all fallen into place with a thud. Heather’s list of offences suddenly made complete sense. Honest answers weren’t on the agenda at the moment but when she asked him if he’d ever heard of Ramsgill Stray the completely honest answer would have been: “Yes, of course, but only as an enigma.” In the office he’d had plenty to do with GCHQ, but that was only two or three stops along the secrecy line. Everyone out there in the civilian world knew about Cheltenham even if they didn’t know the full extent of what happened there. Ramsgill Stray was different. If Cheltenham was the tip of the iceberg, Ramsgill Stray was somewhere down in the frozen Arctic depths below its base. In the business you couldn’t help knowing about it but that was like saying you couldn’t help knowing about the abominable snowman. It was an enormous mystery, a prompt for silent speculation, something you just didn’t try and probe too far – because you knew you’d get nowhere. Now here was this healthy fresh faced attractive girl telling him that she’d spent much of the last three years wandering in and out of the place at will.
Sitting here in the companionable fug of the pub, relaxing after an ideal day, an extraordinary thought rose in him, quickly suppressed. It would have been nice to be honest.
He looked at her with new eyes. Back at Thames House, no one at his level was ever told anything that mattered about US Siglnt operations in Britain. Whatever the NSA was up to, MI5 would rather not know officially if it was likely to prove embarrassing. You picked up the subcurrent, though, and you met NSA staffers, so you learned to read between the lines. What you heard if you listened hard to the silences was that the Stray was there whether the Brits liked it or not, that if you were a good boy you might just get some intelligence crumb allowed to fall from its groaning table. If Cheltenham couldn’t get you what you wanted, maybe some wire-tap the Home Secretary wouldn’t sign the warrant for, then your last resort was to hope the Yanks might play ball and slip you a transcript like it came out of thin air.
It was what they were doing the rest of the time that used to worry some. Heather’s quick description chimed in with that worry. ‘It’s just sitting there on our land,’ she’d said, ‘listening in on our phones just so some fat-cat Americans can get richer. I mean, I don’t give a damn about the British defence industry, but what we hear is it’s not just defence – they’ll bug anything or anyone if they think it might give one of their own companies a leg up at our expense and we just sit back and let them.’
‘Isn’t it guarded?’ he said, feeling idiotic. Of course it was.
‘Yes, but there’s lots of ways in.’
‘That’s brilliant,’ he said, ‘you’re very brave. What do you do when you’re in there?’
‘Grab anything I can get my hands on. Look round to see what new installations they’re building. Talk to people.’
‘Talk?’
‘I’m trying to change attitudes, Johnny. Some people just need it explained to them, that’s all. It’s amazing what you can do with a bit of rational conversation. One or two of them even get quite sympathetic. You have to talk to these people. If you let things go on without trying to change them, you lose your right to complain.’
It was only then, as they moved into the lounge for coffee, that CN512 came back. The implications hit him hard. This woman arranging herself gracefully in the chair in front of him had sent a document on CN512 to the inquiry. It must have come from inside Ramsgill Stray. That meant it had either been given to her by a sympathizer or she had stolen it. Its presence there in the first place had to mean the NSA was bugging GKC’s communications and was presumably taking a close interest in their mysterious product.
‘I think it’s terrible,’ he said, ‘I had no idea. I’d like to come and look at it. Would you show me?’
‘It’s not hard to find,’ she said.
Margo was sitting back in her armchair, reading a paper from the pile on the table. Johnny looked at Heather, studying her face while she was pouring out more coffee. One of the foundations on which he had constructed his world began to crumble a little at the edges.
It was not Johnny’s fault that he was as he was. Whatever genetic inheritance it might have brought to the party, no impressionable infant mind could have survived Lady Viola’s assault: the early years of autocratic female domination ploughed deep furrows in a mental landscape surrounded and isolated by the acres of blinkered privilege. Johnny’s first images of womanhood were of his mother and battalions of like minded nannies, the domestic shock-troops lined up to take him on in her frequent absences. Then came a single-sex public school education. Grappling with the furtive stirrings of sexuality, those around him took their various vague directions. Many veered towards other boys for a while or for ever. Some locked themselves inside a shell which in the long-term they would only ever open fully to expensive S&M experts in leather catsuits. A larger group sought refuge instead in a fluffy romantic dream of dehumanized girls, submissive, sexy, socially acceptable and domestically skilled, who would never threaten or challenge or vie for personal space. In Johnny’s mother’s world of house parties, shooting parties and hunt balls, there were such girls, or at least girls who until experience broke their shackles lived the same dream – a dream in which the most thrilling word they knew was ‘fiancé’.