“If I tell you that I’m here to save you,” he said, “I need you to give me a fair trial.” I sat fully up in the bed and pressed soft pillows back against the headboard.
“Saved?” I said with an invisible smile. “Saved indeed! Who are you?”
“These Limeys call me Edward,” he said. “My real name, though, is Aaron P. Krellburger—Aaron P. Krellburger,” he added with a touch of pride, “from the once fair city of St Louis.” I looked at him a little longer in the darkness, then reached for my cigarettes. I looked at him in the flare of the match—he was very young, and he was here to “save” me! Perhaps he was mad. But I had no reason whatever to suppose he’d come into my bedroom to kill me.
“As you please, Mr Krellburger,” I said drily. “But it would please me very much to know how and from what you are proposing to save me.” I laughed and blew a stream of smoke into the air above my head.
“You can’t have fallen for Big Mac’s lies?” he sneered. He could see more of me in his torchlight than I of him. I put a quizzical look onto my face and flicked ash into the tray beside my bed. “Don’t you see?” he went on, an impatient tone coming into his voice. “If he gets his hands on that document, he’ll use it to destroy all civilisation in England and the world. He’s been scheming to get it for months. He’s getting a meeting arranged here at the weekend, where he’ll read the whole document out and start his revolution. You’ll be the one who authenticates it. Can’t you see how everything he said to you over dinner was a lie? There is no German plot. The only danger to your national security is Big Mac himself.”
“My dear young fellow,” I said, stretching my arms out and putting on a voice of patronising contempt, “are you expecting me to believe that Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs—‘Big Mac’ as you call him!—is engaged in some act of treason?”
“Yeah,” came the instant reply. “And if you think he’s gonna stay Foreign Secretary much longer, you haven’t been reading your newspapers. You’ve gotta come with me now. You’ve gotta help us get to that document before his people do.” I pushed the blankets aside and swung round to sit on the bed. I could see that my patterned silk pyjamas were shimmering softly in the torchlight.
“And how, Aaron P. Krellburger,” I asked, “have you discovered a dastardly plot that no one else appears to have noticed?” The answer was an impatient snarl. I reached for the cigarette I’d parked in the ashtray. But the young man was on his feet and standing over me.
“Because I’m his—I’m his special friend,” he hissed into my face. “I’m able to overhear things when he doesn’t know he’s being watched.”
“I hope you don’t intend by those words what I understand them to mean,” I said grandly. “I’ll have you know that Harold Macmillan is a happily married man with children.” The answer to this may have been another snarl. It may have been a suppressed laugh. But further conversation was stopped by a sudden glare of car headlights through the window. My bedroom overlooked the front driveway of the house, and I could hear the soft purr of a petrol engine and the crunch of tyres on gravel.
Krellburger jumped up and went to the window. He looked carefully through the drawn curtains and turned back to face me.
“OK, Professor Markham,” he jeered, “if you don’t believe me, I think I can show you something that even you might understand. It’ll save us the trouble of discussing what I was sent here to do with you.” He pointed at the clothes one of Macmillan’s servants had laid out for me. “Get dressed,” he snapped. “Bring your shoes, but don’t put them on.”
Birch Grove isn’t a big house as these places go. Even so, its many changes over the years to suit each successive owner, and the arrangement of its fourteen bedrooms, make it labyrinthine in the dark. But Krellburger knew his way about. We padded our way noiselessly along a corridor hung with photographs of what looked like Scotch grouse moors. Before reaching the top of the main staircase, he opened a door in the wall and we continued down some narrow spiral stairs that I supposed were there for the servants to come and go without bumping into the above stairs household. About half way down was another door. This took us onto an internal balcony that looked over the billiard room I’d seen on my arrival. Another door took us into another part of the balcony that had been closed off except for a wideish downward slit where the panelling on the other side had shrunk back. Through this came a dim light. Krellburger poked me from behind and indicated I should get on my knees to look through the slit. One of his elbows sticking into my back, he took his own viewing position above me.
I looked down over the study where Macmillan had first received me. The fire had now burned down to its last embers. With only a table lamp turned on, the paintings showed only as large areas of blackness on the dark panelling of the walls. The room was empty. I twisted round to whisper something at Krellburger. But he pushed his elbow sharper into my back and pushed his free hand against my ribcage. His own added weight pressing down on me was making my knees hurt on the bare wood of the balcony, and I was bent at a most unnatural angle. But I kept still and waited.
How long we waited there I can’t say. It might have been ten minutes. It might have been a quarter of an hour. I was debating whether to get up and laugh into Krellburger’s face, when I heard the soft click of the door handle and a burst of whispered conversation. Above me, I felt Krellburger suddenly tense. He jabbed a finger into my ribs to keep quiet. I pressed my face harder against the slit to try and see more of the room.
Directly underneath me, there were two men in the study.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“I really don’t see why you had to come straight down from London,” Macmillan was saying, a slight nervousness in his voice. “Everything is pretty much under control again.” I heard a soft click as the door was closed again. Then a key turned in the lock. “I imagine you took the usual precautions?” he asked. “But, really, everything is under control.”
“If it’s that much under control, Harold, I’d like to know when I can hold Winston’s minute in its entirety,” someone else said. He cleared his throat, and there was the sound of something heavy dropped onto the carpet—a bag, perhaps? “More to the point, though, I’d like to know what the fuck is going on with this little squirt Markham. If the newspaper reports are even half correct, it looks as if you gave those Americans a right homicidal maniac.”
The other man was speaking low, but there was a certain familiarity about the voice. I pressed harder still against the inside of the panelling. But the two men were directly below me, and I couldn’t see them.
“A little local difficulty,” Macmillan replied in a tone that was surely accompanied by one of his dismissive waves. “I’ll be in a better position to tell you about the police involvement tomorrow. I’ve had F.A. sodding Hayek all day—half an hour on Goering’s state of mind, the rest on Hayek’s new book on Edmund Burke and David Hume. Unless you’ve met the man, you can’t imagine how he loves the sound of his own voice.
“Whisky, old boy?” There was an amused snort, then the sound of a match striking against a box. “Oh, God,” Macmillan cried now, though still speaking soft, “not another of those ghastly things! I’ve had Markham smoking like a bloody trooper all evening. Do you know how long it takes to get the smell out of the carpets?” There was another snort. A moment later, I smelled what might, but for the touches of Player’s Navy Cut about it, have been a Woodbine.