‘And you.’
‘And us, Marlow. All of us are going to be happy. I’ve thought a lot about it.’
‘I’ll bet you have. Another plan up your sleeve for dumping me somewhere worse than this.’
‘What could be worse than this, Marlow?’
The main door into ‘E’ wing opened and slammed. I heard the milk lorry leaving, the churns bouncing over the little concrete ridges they had before Main Gate to slow the traffic down. Then the train robber’s door opened down at the end of the corridor. He was going out for exercise. The dogs had been shut in between the new electric fence and the east wall. A siren shrieked, then died, in the town. Automatically I knew the time, the date, the day. The Governor’s twelve o’clock lunch, lamb chops and HP sauce, the tin canteens that would come up from the main kitchen to our wing, to be left untouched. Then the doctor’s orders, the hospital food that was just as unpalatable. I’d come to live on crackers and honey at that time, listening to the talk of drip feeds behind the screen.
The only thing I really doubted then was my strength to play the role McCoy had offered me. I had already accepted it, there was no doubt about that, listening to the robber’s footsteps, his high-pitched laugh with the warder, as they went out to walk those concrete circles in the gloom. He would always be stuck with the man he had been, the failure of his past. Even if he reached Copacabana beach he would never throw off his grubby identity; he would always inhabit the same devious turns of mind, trying to swindle Allende now, instead of the Postmaster General. But I was being offered a whole fresh personality, a cure which would really make a new man of me. It would be a matter of survival to forget my own past, not to look backwards, to live in a new present: rehabilitation in the grand manner. I might learn to forget vengeance, too, and the other acids that eat up time, forget disenchantment in the swirls of another man’s future. That was the theory anyway.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘All right then. You’d better give me the details.’
The rain started in earnest. All morning it had fluttered minutely on the window pane, spotting the glass in odd hurried squalls before dying. But now when it came the sky was so black and full and close that it was hard even to imagine fair weather. McCoy’s face darkened in the gloom but the features were clear enough — those of a smiling conspirator, of a boy who sets out happily once more from the softly lit stairhead into the darkest recesses of the house, hiding from Nanny before bedtime.
McCoy got up and switched on the light.
‘You’ll be out of here by morning. We’ll do the rest in London. You’re being transferred, Marlow. Another jail. Place isn’t safe enough to hold you. They’re dispersing all the dangerous fellows, you know. Sending them all over England. Into the wide world.’
I spent a long time that night taking McCoy’s plan apart, isolating the pieces, looking for the flaw, the other plan he had for me behind the first. There were a dozen awful possibilities, besides the one of twenty years more inside, and before I slept I was sick of thinking of them, knowing, as McCoy had, that I’d risk anything to live again with alternatives, whatever they were, for that was the world.
3
Alexei Flitlianov — now Timor Gregorian, an Armenian business man from Beirut — looked out from the bedroom window of his hotel just off Marylebone High Street — gazing at the doorway of the apartment building to his right some way down on the other side of the street. It was his third day in London and his second morning’s vigil. The man he was looking for had neither left the building at breakfast time nor returned there in the evening and the lights in the front room in the apartment had never been switched on.
George Graham had disappeared. Perhaps he’d simply left town to say goodbye to a friend or relative in the provinces. But more likely he’d been caught. Flitlianov had always feared that it had been Graham’s voice which their KGB London Resident had originally picked up on the telephone which British security had been tapping. But Flitlianov had no way of finding out now. All he could do was wait and watch until the day Graham had been due to leave for New York and hope that he’d turn up.
Flitlianov started to move away from the window but just as he did so he noticed a very muddy car drawing up at an apartment doorway twenty yards down from the hotel on the same side of the street. There was something official about the large new saloon, he thought vaguely — something institutional in its dark blue paint, its small two-way radio aerial on the roof. Three men got out. And now Flitlianov was sure there was something unusual about the vehicle. For two of the men had the knowing solidity of plain-clothes police everywhere in the world, while the third, a taller, younger man, had all the marks of a prisoner — weak, unsteady, at a loss in the strong light, the noise and bustle of the city. After more than twenty-five years close observation of the clandestine Flitlianov recognised these characteristics almost automatically. The party disappeared into the doorway of the building. It was almost opposite Graham’s block on the corner of the High Street. Was there any connection between them, Flitlianov wondered? He settled down again by the window to wait and see.
4
‘We’ve just three days before your boat goes,’ someone called Harper said to me, with a face like a piece of bad carpentry, looking at me unhopefully. We were in the front room of a third-floor apartment next-door to a hotel just off Marylebone High Street, where I’d been taken direct from Durham that morning. The furniture was covered in dust sheets and there was a faint smell of gas in the rooms. Harper opened a window and I noticed the weather in the south had taken a turn for the better, brisk and cold, and bright — big-city weather with the houses like white cliffs and the sun as sharp as silver paper. Footsteps shot up from the pavement below with a metallic clatter which was quite unreal to me. Now that I was face to face with it I had no conception of people walking freely in a street and felt the need to keep away from the windows, as though crippled with vertigo.
Harper went over to the window. ‘His apartment is there, opposite us on the corner. You’ll be moving in tonight. This meanwhile will be HQ Ops. as it were. We’ve rigged up some data for you next door.’ We walked through into what had been a dining-room but was now cleared of most furniture. Instead there were photographs of Graham and other blow-ups, of his handwriting, letters he’d written and received, and suchlike, fixed onto a row of insulating boards which had been set up about the room. The dining-table had been left and on it were Graham’s personal effects, the last known bits of his life: a tweed jacket, flannels, latchkeys, wallet, a square-faced gold-cased Hamilton watch, an old Mentmore fountain pen, long-stemmed briar pipe, roll of Dutch aromatic tobacco, a catalogue of Warhol’s Graphics from the Mayfair Gallery, some restaurant bills and two paid accounts, one from the Express Dairies and the other from a car-hire service which had taken him to Wimbledon for some reason a week previously. The room was like the remains of a bad accident in which the body had disappeared completely, disintegrated by the force and thrown in pieces to the four winds. Harper bent down, turning on a radiator.
‘Tailor fellow’ll be coming later for any alterations. Bringing shoes too. We don’t seem to have had the shoes. Try the jacket on for size. Just been cleaned. Had any experience of this sort of doubling?’
‘Who has?’
‘No. I suppose not.’ I put the coat on: ‘Not bad. Sleeves could come out an inch. You’re about that much taller than he was.’
‘Was?’
‘To all intents and purposes. Don’t worry. You’re not going to bump into him in the street.’ Harper laughed, ‘Used to do it at school — the dressing-up bit. Every Christmas. Midsummer for us actually in Australia. Lot of horseplay.’