McCoy handed him another piece of paper and he was off again, this time in his scolding tone, like a girl let down on a date, and I had the easy feeling of just being a cog in the wheel again.
“As some of you know,” Williams looked at the dry men from Whitehall, “Edwards was our provisional replacement in the Middle East for Everley, who was head of our operation there, and it was his job to re-activate the network: the ‘Cairo-Albert circle’ as we know it. Edwards had the go on all our new contacts, codes and so on — right through the area … Losing Blake was bad enough.” He paused and I thought for a moment that he might be going to echo Wilde’s remark about the carelessness of losing two parents. But the same thought may have occurred to him (Williams had been brought up in all the right places, indeed he had been born somewhere near Goring-in-Thames) and he veered away from what looked like being a catalogue of all the embarrassments which Henry’s sudden departure had caused. We knew of them already in our section — the Whitehall drivers chatting with the receptionists downstairs, Williams arriving an hour earlier in the mornings instead of an hour late; and many of us knew too of Henry’s fresh responsibilities, since we weren’t supposed to know. It’s difficult to keep a secret among men who are already a secret in a building which isn’t supposed to exist; the strain is too much and people start giving away odd things the moment they get inside the doors.
“Well, I don’t have to go into every detail — except to impress upon you all the seriousness of the matter.”
Williams was marking time, I thought, before moving into his final peroration. Nothing would be decided but we’d be out of this frightful room in a minute. McCoy passed him another piece of paper.
I knew then that I’d been wrong in my calculations about the outcome of the meeting, indeed that I’d probably misunderstood its whole purpose — for pinned to the top of the sheet was the ten-piastre note I’d given the barman. Someone, McCoy no doubt, had been hard at work at quite a different angle.
I suppose by my saying nothing of importance about Henry’s disappearance — by inventing nothing — they had detected a certain evasiveness in my attitude towards the whole thing and had decided to check more carefully. I didn’t mind being a temporary scapegoat, that was to be expected, I’d been the last person in the section to see Henry apparently. But it was obvious that Williams was looking for more than that. If Henry really had defected and there was a public scandal when the fact came to light, then Williams wanted a permanent scapegoat, a victim. As had happened so often before when someone had left us — he was followed by his friends. Williams had at last decided to bolt the stable door. I’d been unlucky enough to be caught inside when the music stopped.
“What was Edwards talking to you about when you last saw him?” Williams continued in a livelier tone.
“About Egypt. We were talking about Egypt,” I answered at once in as tired a way as possible, hoping that my words might slip by unnoticed in the stream of previous banalities. “We taught there together. I was recruited in Cairo, as you know. Just chatter, that’s all. Old gossip.”
But already the others round the table had perked up, noticing the personal level the meeting had dropped to and sensing it might go deeper.
“And this note. Why did you pay your bill in the pub with this Egyptian ten-piastre note?” Williams was fidgeting with the grubby piece of paper, twisting it about with his fingers as if it were counterfeit. “Where did it come from?”
“Henry hadn’t any money with him. So I paid with that instead — a sort of deposit until we came back and settled up. A joke, I suppose. We knew the barman. Henry had given me the note earlier that day, I don’t know why.”
The others round the table were fully roused now, as if my last words clearly hinted at a confession of some terrible truth. And certainly, if they thought, as they seemed to, that a man could be bribed or paid off with the equivalent of a shilling, the business over the note looked incriminating. No one said anything. I felt they were trying to decide which of us had been buying whom: had Edwards been anxious for my silence — or I for the barman’s? Or was the note part of some elaborate code — a signal passed from hand to hand heralding some devious Arab plot?
The tired piece of paper could only arouse their wildest suspicions for they were incapable of seeing in its movements through that day the casual attributes of friendship.
I said, “The whole thing, the money and so on — it was a bit childish really. But I don’t see that it’s got anything to do with his disappearance.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Williams was happier now, as if, in the matter of the note, he’d elicited another vital piece of information and was considering all its implications. Yet suspiciously, I thought, he didn’t go on about it. He said nothing more to pin me down, though with these shocking intimacies I’d surely given him every opportunity. Perhaps he was working on a next incisive, embarrassing question, so I said the first thing that came into my head to stall him, thinking of the note again — the ten piastres which had done as a tip for so many good things in Egypt in the past.
“Perhaps he’s gone back to Egypt. He had a lot of friends there. He liked the country.”
But McCoy had already eased another piece of paper in front of Williams and I didn’t think he heard me. I could see it, the yellow office memo paper we used. It was the frugal report I’d written.
“Why do you think Edwards told you he wanted to leave the section that last evening you saw him?” Williams said, looking at the piece of paper very carefully.
“He didn’t say that. That’s not in my report — ”
But I’d been too eager. For the first time I’d flatly contradicted Williams while the sudden urgency in my voice was enough to discredit everything else I’d said as unimportant and suggest that my last response had been a lie. I’d made the oldest mistake — of suggesting murder in an enquiry about a natural death. But no one had noticed. Williams simply looked puzzled.
“I’m sorry. Didn’t McCoy show you his letter? His letter of resignation — it was posted some days after he’d seen you. I thought you knew about it. He says you can explain about why he left, that he told you all about it that evening.”
Williams shoved the paper across the table. The letter had been typed and it looked like Edwards’s scrawled signature at the end; a short note on office paper pinned in front of my report. Of course, it could have been forged.
“I’m sorry to have gone off the subject — about why he left. That’s not so important. What interested me was your saying he’d gone to Egypt. You mean he told you this? — it’s not in his letter.
“On the other hand if he actually told you beforehand he was going back to Egypt that puts it all in a much more certain light. We may gather that he was going back — just to work for them.”
Williams broached this last phrase as if such an exercise in free will were a far more serious matter than being bundled up in a trunk.
“So you see our problem. Either way we shall have to find out what’s happened to him. We can’t wait till he crops up on their side — in Moscow or Cairo or wherever — and makes a fool of us. Like the others.”
There were always the others for Williams — the others who’d left us and lived to tell the tale. Like a tune reminding him of an unsatisfactory affair Williams couldn’t stand a change of heart.
“I’m afraid he’ll have to be stopped.”
McCoy shifted in his chair and the others raised their eyebrows, like a jury in a bad courtroom drama. For what Williams meant in his discreet, Thames Valley manner was that if Edwards had gone back just to work for the Egyptians — or even if he’d simply been kidnapped by them — we’d have to get him. To kill him. When Williams used the word “stop” he always meant “kill”. It was a euphemism which he’d introduced into our section long before, an ideogram for death quite in keeping with the polite, slightly academic reputation our section had.