Agnes asked: "Has probate been granted?"
"Yes. He left quite a small estate, but very tidy. Most of the money was tied up in the English house. It's for sale now."
"Where's Mrs Jackaman?" Maxim asked.
Husband now had no smile at all, and his voice was petulant. "You see, that was one of the reasons why we regarded this material as being undeveloped. Her pension is paid into the local bank, but she hasn't drawn any of it out, yet. Their only child lives in America now, and-"
"You mean," Agnes said sweetly, "that you have no bloody idea at all."
18
"And that", Agnes said after Husband had gone, "is all that stands between us and the Red Peril."
"There's me and my pistol as well," Maxim volunteered.
George said: "He obviously isn't a field man."
"He isn't even a field mouse."
"They've got some good men over there. I tell you, you're just being old-fashioned." George poured them all another round of drinks and looked impatiently at his watch. "Why the hell don't they broadcast debates? At least they could do it on a land-line to here and the Cabinet Office and the Departments. All right, where are we now?"
Maxim had been picking through the photographs – which Husband had made a feeble attempt to take with him, since they were his service's documents – and found that they spent half a page on Mrs Jackaman's background. Until then he'd known nothing about her except that Who's Who gave her family name as Brennan. He read it carefully.
"We assume," Agnes said, "that Greyfriars' interest in Jackaman is because of their interest in Tyler. And that centres on the famous Tyler letter."
"If it still exists," George said quickly.
Maxim lifted his head. "It sounded from what Zuzana Kindl said that the KGB had only just heard about it. And they weren't working directly on Tyler at that time. So they either tripped over it or somebody…" he let the idea hang in the air like an unmentionable smell.
"Could it have been your little chum Charles Farthing?" George asked hopefully.
"No. He's a bit of a nutter, but a patriotic nutter. He didn't think Tyler was pure enough in heart for us."
"You don't think Greyfriars actually have this letter?"
Agnes said: "I doubt they'd be going through all this hoop-de-ha if they had it already." She looked at Maxim, who shrugged and went back to the blurred typescript in the photograph.
"It all comes back to Mrs Jackaman," Agnes said remorselessly. "If anybody's got that letter, it's most likely her."
"Why did Jackaman commit suicide in the first place?" Maxim asked.
"Or, of course," Agnes added, "the last place."
"Because," George began with the reined-in patience of a kindergarten teacher, "Box 500 confronted him with rumours of his illegal French bank account."
Maxim shook his head slowly. "I don't follow that. Most suicides are despair, hopelessness, things are only going to get worse… I'm assuming Jackaman wasn't a complete moron, so he must have known that account could wreck his whole career. So – did he simply say to himself. Okay, if I'm found out, I'll shoot myself? And if he hadn't decided that, why did he do it? I just can't get hold of it."
George started a slow circuit of the Cabinet table. Since it seated about thirty, that took time. He stopped at the far end and called back: "You aren't, God help us all, trying to turn this into a country house murder mystery?"
"I'm just asking."
"And," Agnes persisted, "why wasn't there a suicide note?"
"Oh blast it, there aren't any rules for committing suicide."
"Yes there are. Look at Japan. And Jackaman was a senior civil servant; paperwork was his daily bread. Minutes, memos, reports, letters, just let me have a draught paper about that, will you, old boy?"
Maxim said: "Perhaps it wasn't anything to do with the bank account, but he just despaired of paperwork."
"Or perhaps," George snapped, "he had a horrible prevision of his life being batted around by you two clowns." He cruised slowly back down the fireplace side of the table, past the PM's chair.
Maxim asked calmly: "Who found his body?"
George stopped and looked at him suspiciously. "His wife. There were only the two of them in the house and it was fairly isolated. She heard a shot but thought it was him having a crack at a pigeon or something, then after a time she went to see and… I read her statement."
"I don't call that very sensitive of him," Agnes said. "He can't have expected to look very palatable."
"He wasn't a very sensitive man, not in an imaginative way. He just had a strong sense of honour and duty."
"Except where money was concerned." Maxim suggested.
George slumped into a chair, took a thin cigar from a case in his top waistcoat pocket and stared moodily at it. He sighed, clipped the end, and lit it with a plain match. He looked defeated.
"He left a note," Agnes said quietly, "and he left the Tyler letter. She suppressed both. I don't know why. Then she let the KGB know that she had it. Again, I don't know why. And we don't know where she is to ask her."
"I rather think," Maxim said, "that I do. But if I do, then so does Greyfriars."
It was past midnight. Whitehall was still brightly lit, still empty. The ministerial palaces on either side wore, for once, a stark blue-rinsed beauty, with fringes of snow on their cornices where they reached up almost out of the light.
"Sometimes this town remembers its past," Agnes said, huddling in her sheepskin and breathing like a dragon. She began to quote: "Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet wilclass="underline" Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!"
"When I first joined the Army," Maxim said, "most suicides happened in the lavatories. I suppose it was the only place the poor kids could get any real privacy."
She stopped dead and stared at him. "Bloody flaming hell's fire. Did you hear one word of what I said?"
"It's Wordsworth, isn't it? The one about Westminster Bridge."
They walked for a while in silence, then Maxim asked: "D'you want a lift anywhere?"
"No thanks. I'll drop in at one of our offices around the corner. I want to know if they've turned up anything more."
But she wasn't in any hurry, and it was a rare privilege to have the centre of London to yourself. They drifted past Maxim's car and instinctively headed for Westminster Bridge.
"Where do you get a handle like Maxim?" Agnes asked. "Are you descended from the restaurant or the machine-gun?"
"Neither, I'm afraid. But it's supposed to be a French Huguenot name, so perhaps we're all umpteenth cousins."
"I should try and inherit the restaurant; the patents on the gun must have run out years ago. You don't come of an Army family?"
"I'm the first, as far as I know. My father tried to join up in '39, but he was a skilled tool-maker by then, a reserved occupation… I think he's always felt bad about not having Done His Bit. His father had been in the Navy in the First War. No-" he shook his head as she was about to ask something. "He didn't push me into it. He doesn't have a very high opinion of Army officers in peace-time. He'd rather I was doing something useful for exports."
Agnes gave a sympathetic grunt.
They came out of Bridge Street below Big Ben into the blast of Siberian air funnelled up the Thames, and scurried across the road to the bridge.
"And how did a nice girl – and all that?" Maxim asked.
She thought about it. "I don't know if I was pushed or just fell. I was reading Modern Languages at Oxford and I hadn't got much idea of what I wanted to do afterwards, and one of the dons suggested I might pop down to London and have lunch with an old friend of hers.. so you do that, and gradually you begin to realise what they're talking about. It sounded more interesting than translating French comic books for a publisher, so…"