"The heater's on the blink."
She gave a cackle of laughter. "More cuts in defence spending?" The elocution hadn't reached as far as her laugh; it was plain raw meat.
"How did you get in touch with them? I wouldn't know where to start."
She looked at him sideways. "Really? You should read more spy thrillers. What you do is, you write them a letter – on Mo D paper so they'll take some notice of it – and then you don't post it or deliver it yourself. You drop it in at the Aeroflot office in Piccadilly and hope they'll have the sense to see it gets to the right people."
"And they did."
"If they hadn't, I'd have tried some other way. I wasn't going to risk another little visit from bloody Security."
He glanced at her; her mouth was clenched shut and her eyes fixed.
"And then?"
"Then… then they put a message in the Telegraph, a meaningless one I'd given them, to show they'd got my letter. So I sent them another."
"Did you say who you were?"
"Of course I did, man. I had to or they wouldn't have believed a thing."
Maxim had a weird disembodied feeling, like going under an anaesthetic. At Ashford they'd told him about traitors who had to confess, but this was ridiculous.
She had cheered up. "So then I told them they had to give me a telephone number which I could ring, and they did. They put it in the Telegraph in code: you added one to the first number, subtracted one from the second, that sort of thing, I'd told them how to do it, but I'm sure they'd be used to it anyway."
"I'm sure," Maxim murmured.
"So they never got to know where I was."
Abruptly, the high wooded banks on either side of the road ended and they came out onto an open headland overlooking the Lough. On a whim, Maxim swung off onto the turf and parked facing the water that rippled like stretched grey silk in the wind.
"Would you like a can of beer?"
"Surely."
He found the two cans on the back seat. She snapped hers open, took a quick drink, then started running the broken-off can ring up and down her finger until it just squeezed over the knuckle to touch the wide wedding band. She didn't know she was doing it.
"Could you tell me why you began all this?" He wasn't at all sure it was the right question.
She looked up, sharp and sly, and reached into her handbag. "I'm not breaking any law, Major, not a single bloody one. Because do you know what is the best book I've ever read in my life? It is this book, Major Harry of the British Army."
She waggled an Irish passport in his face.
"When I married I got dual nationality, but Ireland won't let you have but one passport so of course I had to have a British one. But now, now I'm back home again. And I'm not breaking one single Irish law, Mister Major Harry." She took a triumphant swig of beer.
"That doesn't tell me why you approached them."
"I don't have to tell you any reason at all."
"No."
She stared ahead through the windscreen at the misty hills on the far side of the Lough. "It is a gentle land. And now at last it is making some money. Have you been here long enough to see that?"
Maxim nodded. Every little house he had passed seemed freshly painted and the cars on the road were new and shiny and plenty of them. It had impressed him.
"He promised that when he retired," she went on, "we should buy a place here, in the old country. He had been very careful about his life insurance. But do you know what happens to life insurance when you are driven to suicide, Major Harry?"
It was as simple as that. Agnes's Mob had robbed her of a husband and a second home and real security. Of course she hated them, and this was a beautiful two-pronged revenge because it could turn into money as well.
"I'm sorry about that," he said lamely. "I hadn't thought…"
"They could do it to you, too."
"Not quite…" Maxim squeezed the steering-wheel very tight for a moment. "And… have they made you an offer yet? We know they want that letter badly."
"What letter?"
"The letter about Professor Tyler. If we aren't talking about that, then I'm sorry to have troubled you."
He watched her as she carefully and rather drunkenly tried to work out whether it was in her interest to lie to him.
"The funny thing," he went on, "is that Tyler says the thing must be a fake. He never even knew that chap in Canada, whats-his-name…"
"Etheridge," she said automatically.
"That's him." Maxim tried to keep his voice calm. "Tyler says publish and be damned. Anybody who does will just make fools of themselves."
"You're a bloody liar," she growled.
"I'm not," Maxim lied. "But Tyler could be, I suppose."
"Somebody bloody is," she said, suddenly happy. "Or why would he be wanting to buy it off me as well?"
Oh God, why hadn't he thought of that, of her offering it to Tyler as well? If she was trying to turn the letter into money then an auction was so obvious…
"You're into a rather high-stakes game, Mrs Jackaman," he said thoughtfully, "trying to play off Professor Tyler against the KGB. They won't mind a bit of argy-bargy about money – they're quite used to that – and they don't have cash-flow problems. But had you thought how they'd feel if they believed they were going to lose, not going to get the letter? They've already been looking for you, ever since you contacted them."
She glanced at him suspiciously.
"Oh yes. All the letters and classified ads and telephone calls aren't what they really want: they want to meet you. And a lonely houseboat is just where they'd choose. We knew you were in the Shannon area because the defector told us. After that, it took me just two and a half hours of phoning around until I found out just where-"
"Who told you?"
"It wasn't their fault; they didn't know you wanted it kept a secret. The point is that if I can do it, anybody can."
She brooded on that for a moment. "I'm getting cold. Can we go back?"
"Of course." The car skidded across the greasy grass as he turned around onto the road.
He walked her to the gangplank and as she unlocked the door she said: "You'd better come in and get warm, Major."
They went through a small cabin that was just for summertime, with big windows and wicker furniture that had once been gilded. Then down past a tiny kitchen – or galley? – into the main cabin. It was stuffed with furniture and as precisely tidied as a Victorian parlour. Everything that could be centred – the fruit bowl on the table – was centred, everything that could be polished was polished, and the books and magazines in the shelves stood as rigid as Guardsmen at a Trooping.
From the corner, she said: "I'm having a small Jameson – will you join me?"
"Yes, please." He moved carefully through the cabin and sat on an utterly un-seagoing chair at the table. None of the furniture was particularly good, or even matching, but it was clean. Probably she had nothing else to do, except drink. A warm paraffin smell crept up on him; she had turned up an unseen heater.
"Well, Major Harry," she put a heavy glass down before him, on a small embroidered mat to save the table surface. "Well, and what do you really want me to do?"
"Tell me what's happened to the letter."
"Ah, now that would be telling." She smiled coyly.
"Will you sell it to us? You know there are secret funds for this sort of thing."
"Perhaps I've sold it already. I might have sold it to Professor Tyler, mightn't I?" She took a big sip of neat whisky. "Shall I tell you something about Professor Tyler, Major Harry? He gets people killed."
"I don't think he had anything to do with your husband's death."