"Yes, Miss." The inspector made a note and went on looking at Maxim with a wary smile.
"It wasn't on your patch," Agnes reassured him. "Not even in this country. Come on, Harry, the pumpkin may be back from the ball."
The ball was really, in George's phrase, a 'Common Market rave-up'. To celebrate the end of a conference on energy conservation, the two big drawing rooms on the first floor were flooded with light and heat and jammed with guests in evening dress. Maxim and Agnes sneaked up the staircase feeling like very poor relatives.
The butler recognised Maxim, looked apprehensively at his suit, and asked: "Should I announce you, sir?"
"No thanks. But could you get word to Mr Harbinger that I'm in my room?"
"Very good, Major." He sounded relieved. Beyond him, Maxim glimpsed the Prime Minister, weaving politely through the roar of cocktail chatter, stalked a few feet behind by a tall hawk-faced woman who ran the Press Office but was now busy brushing aside anybody she thought wasn't worth the PM's time. Most of the world fell into that category. Maxim wasn't even in the world.
The working parts of the house were discreetly closed off with elegant ropes attached to little wooden pillars. A uniformed messenger lifted aside the rope to the next staircase, winked, and said: "Nice to see somebody's minding the shop, sir."
In his cubbyhole, Maxim turned on the light and drew the curtains. Agnes looked around.
"Gawd, how you ruling classes do live. Swung any good cats recently?"
Maxim had forgotten she'd never been there before. "I can do you tea or instant soup. Nothing stronger."
"Never mind, I'll wait." He didn't realise just what she'd meant until George came in a few minutes later, wearing a very old-fashioned dinner jacket and carrying a nearly full bottle of champagne. He flopped in the desk chair, leaving Maxim leaning against the desk itself.
"Oh God, but good causes do make bad parties. Have you got any glasses?" He pulled open his collar and unwound his tie, then poured champagne into Maxim's collection of tea/soup mugs. "So – how far have we got?"
"We've established that the Other Side was represented there," Agnes said. "Harry's identified one."
"How did they find her?"
Maxim shook his head slowly. "A dozen ways. She'd read a couple of thrillers and thought she knew it all, then hid out a few miles from where she was born. She'd left a track like a tank going through a wheat field."
George grunted.
"Probably a Major Azarov," Agnes said. "We had him down as just a support agent, but Harry says he's a trained tearaway as well. Luckily we had our trusty flick-knife with us…"
"A flick-knife?" George said heavily. He was slightly drunk, but knew it. "A flick-knife. You didn't tell me you were taking that.
"You didn't ask."
"I didn't ask if you were taking one of the new FH-70 howitzers, either, but next time I'll have a complete list. And you really burned down that houseboat?"
"The letter might have been on board; it wasn't in the papers I'd pinched. I was just trying to stop as many rabbit-holes as I could."
"If she was going off with you," Agnes said, "it was most likely in her handbag."
"If she read thrillers," George said, "she probably left it in a sealed envelope with her solicitors and orders to send it to number 2 Dzerzhinsky Street in the event of her untimely demise. Do we know who her solicitors are?"
"I can find out tomorrow," Agnes said. "And then…" she delicately took a book of matches from her handbag and laid it on the desk beside Maxim.
"Thank you," he said politely. "But I prefer my own."
"Dear Heaven, are you two trying to give me a stroke?" George asked.›From the floor below, there came a gentle rumble of applause; somebody had just finished a speech. "And now where are we?"
"If Professor Tyler was bidding for it, we know the letter's real," Maxim said. "At best it could have been burned. At worst we know who wrote it."
"Who?"
"Robert Reginald 'Etheridge." Maxim took a notebook from his pocket. "Born 1923 in a place called Bishop Wilton near York. He was a farm boy brought up on tractors. He enlisted in 1940 and the Yorkshire Dragoons took him as a driver…"
"Whatever happened to them?" George asked instinctively, pouring more champagne all round. The room was small enough that nobody had to get up, just reach.
"The Yorkshire Dragoons were amalgamated with two other regiments to form the Queen's Own Yorkshire Yeomanry in 1956. Since then, they've been reduced to just a squadron in the Queen's Own Yeomanry."
After a while, George asked: "Did you just happen to know that?"
"I never look these things up just because you might ask."
Agnes swallowed a chuckle and choked on it.
"Go on," George said stiffly.
"He was in Egypt with their motor battalion and volunteered for the Long Range Desert Group in 1942. They accepted him with a drop from corporal to private, and the only mention of him in The Gates of the Grave is on the last patrol Tyler led in the LRDG. Etheridge was one of the three survivors. After that he was shipped home and never went abroad again. He finished the war as a sergeant driving instructor, demobbed late '45. No claim for any disability pension."
"Why d'you say that?" Agnes pounced.
"There seems to be a doubt about his mental stability. Just a hint in his records."
"Doubt?" George said. "I should have thought it was a crystal certainty. The man went to Canada voluntarily, didn't he? – and then changed his name to Bruckshaw and drank himself to death. Guilty on all three charges."
Maxim smiled politely and sipped the lukewarm champagne. He didn't much like champagne, even cold.
"You say three men survived," Agnes said. "Etheridge, Tyler himself, and…?"
"A French lieutenant, Henri de Carette. We don't have his records, of course, but it's in the book. He was a career officer, commissioned just before the war and retired as a full colonel something over ten years ago. He's still alive."
"That can't be in Tyler's book," George said suspiciously.
"I rang our military attache's office in Paris. They're going to find his address."
"God, I hope they go carefully. The French get paranoid at any hint of us playing the Great Game on their pitch. No, they'll know what they're doing… So now where does that leave us?"
Maxim shrugged.
"There's one other person who knows what's in that letter," Agnes said.
"I know that," George said. "But we can't exactly walk up to him and say, 'Excuse me Professor but what horrible thing did you get up to in the desert in early '43 that could be the subject of a letter from the late Sergeant Etheridge?' We need that man."
"What for?"
George held up the champagne bottle, stared moodily at how little was left, and poured it out. "The state provideth and the state drinketh, blessed be the name of the state. The taxpayer can always eat cake." The bottle clanged into the waste bucket. "You two can keep shut up; you wouldn't be in your jobs if you couldn't… In a couple of weeks Tyler goes to Luxembourg to talk to the French and West Germans about nuclear targetting policy. All this is rather behind the Americans' backs.
"He's the only person we've got whom the French will listen to on defence, particularly nuclear. He speaks the language well, he doesn't trust Washington, and he really seems to believe in a third world war. What more can they ask?"
"I believe in a third world war," Agnes said. "It's the fourth one I've me doubts about. But thank you for telling us this, since Greyfriars must have known long ago, the way they've stepped up their campaign on Tyler."