They both stared at it without a word. Then Manning pulled out all the other books on the shelf. There, lined up against the wall at the back, were four more tins of Nescafé.
‘You lost six, didn’t you?’ asked Manning.
‘She brought one back.’
They picked up the tins and examined them. One of them was almost empty, as it had been when it disappeared from Proctor-Gould’s room. The others were still full. But they had all been opened and unsealed.
‘What do you make of it?’ asked Manning.
Proctor-Gould shrugged.
‘I suppose he opened them to make sure they were genuine.’
Manning thought.
‘Would you have opened them,’ he said, ‘if you’d been buying them?’
‘I might.’
‘You wouldn’t, Gordon. Not if you’d wanted to sell them again.’
‘If I had a suspicious nature …’
‘You might have opened one at random as a sample, Gordon. But not all of them.’
Proctor-Gould fixed Manning with his great brown gaze.
‘What’s your explanation then?’ he asked.
‘I think he was looking for something.’
‘Looking for something? What?’
‘I don’t know, Gordon. Do you?’
Proctor-Gould went on gazing at Manning for some moments. But the focus of his eyes shifted, so that he seemed to be looking right through Manning’s head at the wall beyond. Finally a great sigh heaved his shoulders up and dropped them again.
‘No, Paul,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t.’
There was a conclusion about another matter that the tins suggested to Manning. He caught Proctor-Gould’s eye.
‘I wonder if you’re thinking what I’m thinking,’ he said.
‘What about, Paul?’
‘Who the girl is who shares Konstantin’s room.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Proctor-Gould. He sighed again. ‘Yes, that did occur to me.’
‘No mystery about her any longer.’
‘No.’
‘Nor where she’s been for the past few weeks.’
‘I suppose not.’
Proctor-Gould picked up the single nylon stocking and rubbed it softly between finger and thumb, then put it in his pocket. He noticed Manning watching him.
‘She’s probably looking for it,’ he said.
26
They staggered along Kurumalinskaya Street with their arms full of books until they found a taxi, and drove to one of the big department stores, where they bought another suitcase to put the books in. Then they took the bus to the Kiev Station, and deposited the suitcase in the left luggage office.
‘Will you keep the ticket, Paul?’ asked Proctor-Gould. ‘Now that we’ve got things straight again I don’t want to take any more chances.’
When Manning had folded the ticket away in his wallet he looked up and found that Proctor-Gould was gazing at him, his head a little on one side, so that he could just touch the lobe of his ear with the tip of his finger.
‘It’s a strange business,’ said Proctor-Gould.
‘Yes.’
Proctor-Gould went on looking at Manning.
‘You were very quiet on the bus, Paul,’ he said. ‘It occurred to me that these events might be imposing some strain on the confidence between us. I suppose they might suggest that I’m involved in some undertaking outside my work for my clients.’
Manning was silent.
‘I see that, Paul,’ said Proctor-Gould. ‘It certainly does seem as if Konstantin was looking for something in those Nescafé tins. But on my honour, Paul, I’ve no idea what.’
Manning still said nothing. They began to pace slowly across the station, side by side. It was a good place for confidential talk, thought Manning. They looked as if they were waiting for a train.
‘Then again,’ said Proctor-Gould, ‘the business of the books seems even odder. Why did Konstantin say he’d sold them when they were in his room all the time? Was it just to get me to raise my offer? But then he said he couldn’t get them all back at any price – only one of them for nothing. Another explanation struck me when we saw his room. He’s an educated man – perhaps he wanted the books simply for his own use. But in that case, why did he make me a price in the first place? What do you think, Paul?’
‘I don’t know, Gordon.’
‘I know what was worrying you, Paul. You thought I was prepared to pay rather a lot to get the books back. I can only say what I said before. A lot of those books don’t belong to me. I may be old-fashioned, but if someone entrusts me with something I feel a certain obligation to take care of it. And since I’d lost these books – through my own foolishness, as I fully recognize – I felt obliged to make considerable sacrifices to get them back. I don’t think there’s anything mysterious about that.’
Manning drew in breath to reply, then let it out again.
‘In fact, Paul,’ said Proctor-Gould, ‘two hundred roubles here or there really doesn’t mean very much in terms of what it costs me to stay in Russia anyway. I should have charged it to expenses, of course. It was a much bigger sacrifice to break into Konstantin’s room, I can tell you. I’ve never deliberately put myself on the wrong side of the law before. I shan’t be doing it again, either.’
They turned at the far side of the station, and began to walk back.
‘I think my motives in all this are fairly clear,’ said Proctor-Gould. ‘What Konstantin’s are I don’t know. It looks as if he thought there was one book I should value above all the rest, and he wanted to find out which. Why did he think it would be valuable to me? It couldn’t be anything about the book as a book. None of them has any value to a collector. None of them is on the banned list in Russia – I took great care about that. It would have to be something the book contained. Now if we rule out secret compartments and the like, there’s nothing much a book can contain, except perhaps some sort of message. Perhaps something in code, perhaps in one of those micro-dots one reads about. In other words, it looks as if Konstantin was trying to blackmail me because he thought I was involved in some sort of espionage.’
‘It’s possible,’ said Manning.
‘Not that it’s really necessary to follow Konstantin’s reasoning through. You’d reached the same conclusion about me yourself, hadn’t you, Paul?’
‘Well, look, Gordon….’
‘I’m not complaining, Paul. I’m rather flattered to be taken for a spy. It just doesn’t happen to be the case.’
‘I must admit, Gordon, the thought occurred to me. It seemed a logical explanation of the facts. But as a matter of fact I’d rejected it.’
Proctor-Gould looked at Manning with interest. As they paced along Manning could feel the great brown eyes examining his profile, as if the shape of his nose or the configurations of his ear might hold some clue to the thoughts taking place inside.
‘I’ve come to know you quite well in the past few weeks,’ said Manning. ‘At first I thought you were rather a charlatan. All this interest in improving Anglo-Soviet relations – I thought it was just a way of making more money and more contacts. But now I don’t think it is. You’re a public man, Gordon. You don’t do things for complex or ambiguous reasons, like the rest of us. You do simple things with simple aims for simple motives. People always suspect that public men are dishonest and insincere. But from observing you, Gordon, I don’t think they can be. Dishonesty and insincerity are too complex to be within the range of public men. Public men may deceive others – but only if they are deceiving themselves, too. They’re part of their own audience. I don’t think you could promote good relations between Britain and Russia with one hand, and undermine them with the other. I don’t think your character is capable of such complexity.’
Proctor-Gould thought about this for some moments.
‘Thank you, Paul,’ he said at last. ‘I must admit, I’m rather touched. It’s the testimonial I should most have liked to hear about myself.’