‘Never trust these schoolteacher fellows, can you?’ Harper said to himself, running his eye down the paper. ‘Always something whacky there.’ He paused. ‘But of course that was your stamping-ground, wasn’t it? I forgot. Anyway, as regards his “career”, we’ve got quite a few papers on that. And there’s bound to be more in his flat and his luggage. You can bone up on it on the boat.’
‘What about his flat?’
‘He’s packed nearly everything. What he isn’t taking is being stored. Pickfords are coming tomorrow. The only people you should be meeting. You’re off the day after.’
‘The keys and so on. The rent?’
‘All paid up. Keys go back to the Traherne estate office in Welbeck Street. It’s not a service flat. No porter.’
‘And what about all his friends?’
‘Think he left last week. Didn’t McCoy tell you?’
‘They may write to him. Or visiting firemen. They know he’s gone to the UN.’
‘Have to make sure you don’t give them a bed then.’
‘Relations?’
‘Really only his mother. In Durban. He typed most of his few letters to her and you’ll have his signature off pat when you start.’
‘And nobody else?’
‘Yes, his father’s family. Scottish, from outside Aberdeen. An uncle and cousins. The uncle comes down every second year to London for the Calcutta Cup. So you’re all right there. Two years to go till the next one.’
‘Must have been someone he was closer to. At the office.’
‘Oh yes. He had a lot of friends. But he was British, you know — colleagues, you understand. Kept his distance. Gave a drinks party for them all before he left. They’ll have forgotten all about him in a week.’
‘And no women. You really think that’s likely?’
‘Not no women, Marlow. I didn’t say that. None we’ve traced, that’s all. You may be luckier — what with all these new singles bars I hear about in New York. The point is, Marlow, this fellow didn’t cultivate close friendships. For the job in New York he had to keep himself as clean as a whistle. Then he could start living. Now let’s see the film and the recordings.’ Harper drew the curtains and started to fiddle incompetently with a projector at the end of the table. ‘Give you some idea of the living man.’
They were all street shots, mostly in the Marylebone area: coming out of his apartment, going into restaurants, walking in the little park behind the ugly Kellogg building in Baker Street, where the film car couldn’t follow him. He disappeared among a crowd of old pensioners sitting in the sun on benches and one could just see his head bobbing away behind the shelter in the middle. Another sequence followed him down the High Street in a shower. A girl came towards him, trying vainly to open an umbrella. They nearly collided. Then he helped her with it.
‘Gallant,’ Harper said. ‘Thought she might have been a contact.’
Once Graham seemed to look straight into the camera for a long moment, standing at the kerb, about to cross.
‘They always do that some time or other. Can’t see a thing of course. Gives you the creeps though. Notice the way he walks?’
‘How?’
‘He doesn’t hang about — looking for green stamps, bargains in the windows and so on. Not even in the antique shops. Always seems to know exactly where he’s going.’
‘Unusual?’
‘It can be. We thought at first he knew he was being followed. You don’t slow down then.’ Harper was depressed at the man’s decisiveness. ‘It’s as if he’d mapped every pace down to the last foot before he left home.’
‘Why not? You said he was out to enjoy himself. Why waste time?’
There was another shot of him now, coming out of a Sicilian restaurant in Frith Street.
‘Mafia I suppose. He’s with the mob, not the KGB.’
Harper was disgusted. ‘I don’t know what they were paying him for.’
‘Not your typical rat, is he? — crawling along alleyways in dark glasses with a ․38, moseying round Wimbledon Common looking for letter drops. It’s upsetting.’
They’d collected some of Graham’s radio tapes and documentary films from the COI and, more daringly, a recording of him ordering dinner in Chez Victor.
The voice wasn’t like his walk. I was surprised. There was no speech hesitancy, but it ambled rather, tended to double back; it seemed intentionally oblique and diffident, rushing into high notes over the contents of an hors d’oeuvre; slumbering, almost dead, in its comments on a beef casserole. I wondered what gave it this vivid yet indecisive character before deciding that Graham had all the varied tones and rhythms of a natural actor who yet loathed self-advertisement.
One felt, in his accents, some huge sense of excitement within him which he wished to restrain, as a liability in dull times and as a danger to his work. The little dramas in his voice had been put there as an eccentric diversion, which, because they so nearly mirrored his obsessive taste for life, would all the more certainly put people off the track of this, his real nature. Graham’s mild histrionics were a role indeed, covering all his real history. He knew what he wanted on the menu all right, but he wasn’t going to let anyone know of his enthusiasm.
‘So?’ Harper drew back the curtains.
‘He’s nothing much like me.’
‘Apart from all his Mid-East experience. And being a teacher and a Reports Officer — like you. And the coat, Marlow. If the coat fits … And it fits you pretty well.’
I stood up. I had forgotten I was still wearing it.
‘There’s food in the kitchen. And the bed’s in the usual place. The others will be here in the evening.’
Harper went out and locked the door. I watched him from the window, crossing the road, going down towards Oxford Street. He stopped and talked to a man on the opposite pavement.
McCoy arrived with a small man called Croxley just after six o’clock. McCoy was impatient. The small man behaved as if he’d been sniffing gas leaks and looking round such dust-covered apartments all his life.
‘Had a good run through with Harper?’ McCoy’s dramatics were so thin.