The man’s father had been a master printer. They’d traced that back easily enough — and no doubt that explained his interest in these graphics and suchlike, but this did nothing to ease McCoy’s temper; indeed it increased his resentment. These gastronomic and artistic concerns reinforced McCoy’s unease tenfold; made him suppose that just as the man visited so casually so many different restaurants and strange imaginations, so in the end he would give them the slip too and disappear forever into the world, where he seemed to have a season ticket, whereas a choice of sausages and suet puddings and smutty seaside postcards would inevitably have limited him and McCoy would have slept easier.
They walked quickly past the window but McCoy had time to glance again at the tweed jacket, the broad back leaning forward at that moment, reaching for an olive or glass. He wasn’t that tall but the face was like the back, McCoy remembered — a good square face, slightly leathery and tanned from years in the sun, relatively unlined for a man more than forty. He had the air of a sportsman, McCoy thought — like one of those bronzed Australian cricketers that he’d seen playing in England just after the war. Not muscle-bound; his would have been the summer games, of rules born in fine weather, played on strings and wood, on beaches and underwater: the lightly-coppered face, like the dust of travel — gestures so fluid that they seemed melted down by the years of sun and recast in a happier mould, sinews that had relaxed and lengthened with fulfilled pleasure. He was like the end of rationing, McCoy thought, the bitterness rising in him sweetly like justified tears, or a hamper from America in the famished winter of 1947.
The face was conventionally handsome in a lost way, as in some old advertisement for pipe tobacco in the thirties; the clear, open expression of a ‘good sort’ in those times: a casually tended but reliable face, gleaming spontaneously from an enamel hoarding. He might have driven a Sunbeam Talbot around Surbiton before Munich and married a little woman of those parts that blowy suburban day Chamberlain landed at Croydon with a piece of paper. There were nowhere about him clues to a contemporary life, nothing indoor or metropolitan, no smoky rooms or brandy or modern art — no suggestion anywhere of McCoy’s horror at what he had always seen as the epitome of dissolute bohemianism: an interest in graphics and oysters.
Above all there was nothing of Moscow in that quickly good-humoured face, no trace of Beria, the Berlin Wall and all the good men gone. But there it was, and McCoy realised he ought to have seen it sooner: trips to view the likes of Messrs Warhol, Nolan and Bratby were commensurate with the worst the KGB had to offer. There was no doubt they were clever people, fiends …
They came to the end of the High Street to the great grey hulk of the Methodist Church on the corner, where they met Reilly, one of Croxley’s men, who had just left the Greek restaurant. He was wiping his mouth surreptitiously, shamefacedly indeed, like a Bunter come to grief. A streak of something, some foreign gravy, ran down his lapel.
‘Nothing, sir,’ he reported. ‘Except —’ He choked a little. ‘Except those wicked little starved sardines to begin with —’ He stopped again, trying to batten down the hatches on some sickness within him.
‘Anchovy, Reilly, anchovy.’
‘Sir! Well then that flour paste, four sticks of pig, most of a bottle of Greek red biddy and a glass of that caramel water they call brandy. Quite a blow-out in fact. Think it means anything?’
‘You’re getting quite expert, you lot, aren’t you?’ Croxley said. ‘In the Greek manner.’
‘I don’t know about that, sir. I shouldn’t like to be in the Greek Special Branch, I can tell you.’ Reilly smothered a belch.
‘I expect not, Reilly. Though they do very well on it out there these days.’
‘Oh, and the olives. More than the usual quota I’d say. Piping and poking at them all through the meal he was.’
‘Summers is still inside with him?’
‘Frankly, sir, I came over a bit queasy after the meat. Needed a spot of air. Summers is looking after him.’
‘All those sheeps’ eyes rumbling about the belly a bit, eh, Reilly? Have to get you an easier pitch next time. Surveillance from a caff in the Mile End Road.’
And then the man was sick. At first it seemed he had just turned away to cough, cupping his hand over his mouth. But the cough rapidly matured into a long groaning spurt, a violent eruption of purplish liquid which shot from his mouth like a hose, all over one corner of the church steps. The two men jumped in surprise at the violence of the fit and then went for Reilly as he began to fold.
‘I’m sorry, sir, I shouldn’t —’ Reilly erupted once more, coming again like an experienced lover. ‘I shouldn’t —’
‘Well done, Croxley. Well done!’ McCoy almost shouted. ‘If he sees us now —’ McCoy danced around the steps in a wild fury. Croxley did no more than growl at him by way of reply. He was looking after one of his own men. ‘Give me a handkerchief,’ he said. ‘A clean one.’ Then he was on to Reilly again.
‘Get right down, Reilly, right down. Get it out of you!’
Reilly had his hands to his throat, gasping. He was a wretched sight.
‘It’s all right now, sir,’ he murmured after a time. ‘I should have had an omelette.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Croxley brushed him down with McCoy’s handkerchief like a parent. ‘It doesn’t matter. Probably better you had the Greek stuff, olives and all. He could well have been suspicious, seeing a man eating an omelette in that sort of restaurant. Get back to the van, take it easy. We have enough men. You know, back entrance to the Wigmore Hall, where they bring the pianos in.’
Their backs were turned when the man came to the end of the street by the church. He paused and glanced at the three wavering figures, the most unsteady man in the middle, and reflected, not for the first time, on the British tendency to public drunkenness — squiffy at midday, staggering by early afternoon. But it was a form of release he understood well enough. He had used it himself in less happy times. It was a necessary tool of his trade. You had to know how to handle it, that was all.
He re-lit his pipe, savouring the burnt sweetness for a moment, waiting for the traffic to pass. Then he crossed over, going in the opposite direction along Hinde Street, towards Manchester Square. It had been a good lunch, simple, yet full of precise flavours. And now what? Why not a glance at the Wallace Collection? How true it was, he reflected, that one never gets round to seeing the treasures on one’s own doorstep.
Summers had walked after him to the corner and now he almost ran to where the three men were standing.
‘He’s moving, sir!’ Croxley turned. ‘He’s on his way now, towards Manchester Square.’
‘The Wallace Collection.’
‘I should think so,’ Summers said. ‘Bound to be.’
Croxley turned to McCoy, but didn’t bother to take the advantage. He was serious now. In his book these games were coming to an end.