Afterwards we dropped the subject and talked again about Egypt ten years before — about everything we’d done then, except the woman I’d married towards the end of my time there and who at that moment seemed as remote as it.
When we left Henry didn’t have enough money to pay and he’d somehow mislaid his cheque-book — probably among the debris he’d thrown down on my desk — so I gave the barman, a friend of ours, the ten-piastre note as a sort of deposit. “Don’t worry, he’ll be back,” I said.
Anyway, when McCoy said Henry had gone I’d assumed he meant on another trip, and I said, “So soon — where to?”
“No, I meant ‘disappeared’ not ‘gone’.” He underlined the difference like a schoolmaster, looking at me as if I’d been responsible for the inaccuracy.
“He was to have reported on his whole Mid-East operation last Thursday. At the area committee. He never turned up.”
I said nothing. I’d known Henry to be away for days on a drinking bout without too many ill effects; he’d always turned up again and I was sure that McCoy knew this too. He’d probably been the first to report him as a security risk for his drinking years before. But people didn’t listen to McCoy — not the sort of people who ran our section. He wasn’t one of them.
McCoy was from Belfast, a Navy man and a Nonconformist who’d been a shipping movements officer in Port Said for part of his war. An abrupt, short-sighted fellow, he’d been taken off active duty — there had been one or two near collisions in the harbour or something — and had joined Middle East Intelligence. He was good at picking up languages — perhaps the missionary spirit of his creed hadn’t quite died in him — and he’d made his way up through the ranks in London after the war. It was one of his jobs to coordinate reports from the field for “processing” at “committee level”—his words for the endless, pointless, claustrophobic chatterings which went on all over our buiding — and he treated his informants, and their information, like a breach of Queen’s Regulations. He wasn’t at ease in matters of deceit. He didn’t like his position as a filter between the sordid and respectable and he looked at me now like a shopkeeper I’d not paid in full.
“You mean he’s left — for good,” I said flatly, playing as limp a hand as possible since I’d no intention of making things worse for Henry by being helpful. None the less McCoy perked up a little as if I’d presented him with a vital clue to the mystery.
“Yes, that’s one way of putting it. Nothing good about it though.”
“Anyway, why should I know about his leaving? I’m just a friend of his. I’m not his operator.”
“You were the last person to see him apparently. He came to your office the day before — well, sometime before he left. Perhaps he told you something and perhaps — ” he paused like a ham actor settling into a role — “perhaps you might tell me. There’ll be an enquiry. It might help if you spoke to me about it first. It looks as if this may be something on the Blake scale all over again. You may want to sort your ideas out beforehand. I shall want a full report from you anyhow.”
McCoy paused after each sentence, like counsel bullying a witness with inessentials before slipping in a loaded question — looking at me each time for a response I didn’t give.
What with the disappearances, deaths and defections over the years — and the odd person who had genuinely retired — the ranks in our Middle East section had thinned dramatically by the spring of 1967. We were a few survivors, still snooping around by hand as it were — planning cunning sorties along dark alleyways in Cairo and through hotel bedrooms in Beirut only to find when we got there that the lights had gone on again all over the Middle East; that whatever bird it was we’d had in mind was flown or dead, the blood already congealed by the time we turned the body over. Other powers ruled the area where once we had been the sword of punishment and mercy — and did so with a thorough modern brutality which we couldn’t hope to emulate, much as our superiors would have wished it. We could only work off our energy by keeping up appearances at home, for the sake of the press or a new Minister — or the Americans. And of course everyone sprang to attention and looked like Kitchener whenever someone defected from our section — when one “disappeared” as McCoy put it, as if one had been the victim of some fiendish conjuring trick and we only had to put the squeeze on the magician to get him back. For even after so many tricks McCoy still couldn’t face the fact that one of his men had gone for good. When this had happened before, like the headmaster of some wretched prep school trying to placate a parent, McCoy had always implied in his approach to the enquiry that the laggard would be back in time for chapel.
Still, even if Henry had done something careless it didn’t seem important. He’d always struck me as being too sensible a person ever to want to defect; he was too sure of himself, his pleasures and his friends and the way they all fitted into his London to want to throw it all over, I thought. In our section there wasn’t much left to betray anyway. Blake had pretty well cleared the shop. But perhaps Henry had been involved in some drunken accident, some schoolboy nonsense — as when he’d broken his ankle lunging out at a taxi at a zebra crossing.
“Has he been in some brawl? Have you checked the hospitals? He lived alone you know. And are you sure I was the last to see him? Have you been in touch with any of his other friends?”
McCoy sat there quietly. It was my turn to ask the staccato questions; the chance that Henry had been hurt seemed to me something to worry about. Like a parlour game McCoy let me run through a variety of suggestions. None of them got a response. In the end he smiled.
I knew then that Henry really had disappeared, that there hadn’t been any stupid accident and that in so far as McCoy could manage it there would be a fuss. It was McCoy’s fashion to smile when something really serious occurred — that’s to say when something big enough happened to ensure him a substantial role in the matter.
“Where do you think he is then?” Williams said, in his usual violet shirt and polka-dot bow tie. He asked the question with a monumental lack of interest as if Henry himself had simply been late for the meeting. I knew Williams liked these preparatory enquiries with his subordinates even less than McCoy did. He would be at home in the matter only while making his confidential report to the Minister. McCoy sat next to him, feeding him papers every now and then — mechanically, invisibly, like a dumb waiter — and there were several other people from Whitehall in the basement room which had just been repainted so that my eyes were smarting.
“I don’t know. You’ve read my report. I don’t think he’s defected. He could be anywhere — just gone off on a holiday or something. He was like that.”
Williams’s face winced painfully as if he’d been stuck with a pin. His eyes closed and he drew his face back into a hideous grimace — nostrils dilated, his mouth twisted up above his teeth in a colossal sneer. Then he sneezed twice, his whole body surging to and fro across the table uncontrollably.
“Gone on holiday did you say? McCoy — has Edwards simply taken leave?”
“Well — gone somewhere …” I interrupted. I wasn’t really interested. Edwards would turn up and being in the room was torture.
“Exactly. ‘Gone somewhere’, as you say. And that’s why we’re here. To find out. Where.”