"That's the story when something goes wrong: 'Not our normal standard, just somebody we picked off the street, don't judge us by her blah blah.' But she was one of his, all right. And overall, they seem to be doing pretty well. If Plainsong actually comes off it'll be a big boost for the whole Sovbloc desk. Then they can go back to asking each other where they got their blow-drys and leave the rest of us in peace."
After a minute or so, Maxim said: "Mrs Howard had a gun. Two, in fact."
"And look what a power of goodthat did us all. "
Chapter 15
The doctor had been and gone by the time Maxim reached the little cottage on the hillside above Caswell's father-in-law's garage. Maxim suspected that the cottage belonged to the old man, too, and went with the job. He wondered how long Jim would stand that.
"Said he's doing very well," Caswell reported. "Gave him some more shots, his temperature's well down. Told me to keep himstill for a couple of days. "
"Is he awake now?"
"Yes, he's listening to the radio. I'll shift the telly in there for him tomorrow, that might keep him quiet."
"Has he heard about the one in the hospital?"
"Yes. It doesn't seem to bother him."
"Well…" But did they want it to bother him? Blagg's touching faith that Maxim would save him from murder charges in two countries might at least mean that he would stay where he was and do nothing – for once. Caswell led the way.
Blagg was lying flat on his back but bulging out of a small single bed that itself crowded the tiny room. It was all very cottagey, the uneven walls papered with a tiny flower pattern and all filled with an odd green light reflected in from the hillside that sloped up just outside the window. Blagg pulled out the radio earpiece and struggled to sit up.
"Lie still, you stupid little man!" Caswell thundered, all sergeant again. Blagg relaxed sheepishly.
For a couple of minutes they made sickbed small talk while Maxim tried to decide just how Blagg was. The right side of his face was a mass of scratches, there was a sticking plaster on his ear, and his chest was heavily bandaged, but even in that sickly light he seemed bright-eyed and calm. Best of all, hewas talking long sentences without a hint of breathlessness. Maxim was fit enough himself but, he thought wistfully, there's no medicine like being only twenty-five.
"Is this the first time you've copped one?" he asked.
"Nah, I got one in Armagh. Smack in the arse, but it was probably just about spent. Bloody funny that was, for everybody else. Have you, sir?"
"Years back, out in the Gulf." Maxim touched the outside of his right thigh; through the thin cotton trousers he could trace the hardedged crater that had come close to killing him, out in the desert hours from real medical aid. Instead, it had only taken away six months of his life – at a critical point that just might have foreclosed on his promotion hopes. If, of course, he still had any. Well, as they said, why didy oujoin the Army if you can't take a joke?
"One thing," Blagg said; "I'm lucky I don't smoke." He grinned slyly at Caswell, who had already twice taken out and then put away his cigarettes.
"Right, then," Maxim called the meeting to order. "I've talked to Six, and somebody in the Foreign Office. I'm sorry it took all this to get them out into the open – as far as they've come. They've said they'll do what they can for you, and I believe them. That wound might help with some fairy story… But you've got to tell me everything now. You hadn't remembered you had that gun, last time. "
"Lucky I had, though, wasn't it?" Blagg said aggressively. "Who was they, those two at Dave's place?"
"Supposed to be East German. They're involved, anyway."
"How did they know where I was?"
Maxim thought for a moment. "My guess – it's no more than that – is that somebody came around earlier and told Mrs Tanner that there'd be a couple of hundred quid in it for her if you showed up. She's out of work, and I don't suppose Dave makes a fortune…"
"That littlescrubber," Blagg breathed. "I didn't think she liked me much, but I'm one of Dave's oldest mates and… when I get up, I'll bloody-"
"You'll do nothing. She can still tell the police you were in that shooting and oncethey get you, you can forget you everhad any friends or were ever in the Army. All right? Why didyou go back to London in the first place? – why didn't you stay here?
"Dave rang me, see, and he said there'd been some blokes asking around about me and he didn't think they were coppers at all, and I thought well, that could be The Firm -"
"It was."
" – and I wanted to get in touch with them, anyway, and… well…"
"And I didn't seem to be doing much that was any use. Goon."
"I thought I might get just to chat to one of them, but instead I suddenly found a whole bleeding pack of them behind me. Just following, but still…"
Sadly, Maxim remembered how long – and how much luck – it had taken for him to spot his own pack.
"So I thought bugger this for a lark and got rid of them, and the next couple of days I tried to ring you, but…"
The two days Maxim spent ambushing his own followers and then kicked into exile by George.
"All right," he said. "Problems all round us. Butnow let's hear the rest about Bad Schwärzendem."He sat down on a tiny painted nursery chair beside the bed.
Blagg hesitated, or perhaps was trying to remember, and Caswell said in a firm voice: "The shooting was just after ten, you said. You left the car at Dortmund and caught an early morning train for Ostend – you said. Dortmund's less than a hundred miles, mostly by Autobahn, so you could have been there by midnight. And the first boat train's at half past six. Now don't tell me you spent the night sitting on the station, because they wouldn't let you, or parked in a stolen car, because you're not that stupid, not quite. Now…"
Caswell hadn't only been doing some thinking, he'd been looking up maps and timetables.
"Well," Blagg said slowly, "what it was, see…"
George belonged to things. He liked to boast that, in central London, he was never more than a couple of hundred yards from some club, institution or association of which he was amember and which could provide, at the very least, a roof in a rainstorm. "You can'tlose a club, the way you can an umbrella," he once told Agnes. She had replied that it still seemed an expensive policy compared with even the dearest of umbrellas, and George had thought about that and said: "You can't piss into an umbrella, either. Not without attracting unfavourable comment anyway."
This particular club faced across Green Park, which on that evening looked very green and crisp, the trees standing tall and full against the restless sky. It was probably something to do with the view that had convinced George he ought to be drinking a very large glass of dry sherry from the wood. Agnes had taken a smaller one; she had just got back from her service's registry.
"You do appreciate," she was saying, "that all our material on Eismark is about thirty years out of date? We don't try to keep up with people like that. Really all we've got is what his sister told us when she came over."
"We're supposed to be interested in his first marriage and that's more than thirty years ago, isn't it? What did she have to say about that?"
"Well…" She was sitting in a very old overstuffed leather sofa and hiding a notebook behind her large handbag because she wasn't sure notebooks were allowed in the club; not much was. "Gustav's the younger by just over two years… he was nine when his father died… they moved away from Rostock, went to stay with relatives in the Harzmountains… mother married again and rather faded away, they were brought up mostly by grandparents and aunts. They don't seem to have been poor: she had all her piano lessons, Gustavhad a racing bicycle when he was still at school. Did you know he had a glass eye?"
"Can't say I did. Why should-Ah, I see: no war service for young Gustav. Wasthat the bicycle?"