Barclay wondered why. He wondered what had spurred Elder on, why had the mere idea of Witch gripped him in the first place? He got the feeling Elder knew more than he was saying. Flipping through the file for a second time, he caught a single mention of Operation Silverfish. It was noted in passing, no more. Operation Silverfish. No clue as to what it was, just that it had occurred two years before. The year, in fact, that Elder had “retired” from the department. The year, too, that Barclay had joined: they’d missed one another by a little over five weeks. A slender gap between the old and the new. He would ask someone about Silverfish when he got back. Joyce Parry perhaps, or Elder. It might be that he could access the operation file without prior consent anyway. He’d be back tomorrow, back to the reality of technology, back to his role as Intelligence Technician.
His phone buzzed. This in itself was surprising: the apparatus looked too old to be functional. He picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Barclay? It’s Dominic Elder. I said I’d be in touch.”
“How did you get my...?”
“Joyce passed it along. I’m in London now. Anything to report?”
“Nothing Special Branch hasn’t already found.”
“Flagging already, eh?”
Barclay bristled. “Not at all.”
“Good. Listen, Special Branch are policemen, they’ve got policemen’s minds. Don’t get stuck in their rut.”
Barclay smiled at the image, remembering his retreaded tire. “You’d advise lateral thinking, then?”
“No, just deep thinking. Follow every idea through. All right?”
“All right.”
“I’ll call again tomorrow. And listen, don’t tell Mrs. Parry. It would only get us both into trouble.”
“I thought you said she’d given you this number?”
“Well, she told me which hotel you were in. I found the number for myself.”
Barclay smiled again. Then he remembered something. “I’ve been reading the file, I wanted to ask you about Operation Silver—”
“Talk to you soon, then. Bye.”
The connection was dead. It was as though Elder simply hadn’t heard him. Barclay put the receiver back. He was quite getting to like Dominic Elder.
He had brought a couple of paperbacks with him, expecting to have time to kill. He’d been struggling with one of them for weeks, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. A computer buff friend had recommended it. He’d unpacked the book and left it on the bedside cabinet, beside his French grammar and travel alarm. He picked up the book now. He still had an hour before wandering off in search of dinner. Maybe he could pick up the thread of Pynchon.
He opened it where his leather bookmark rested. Jesus, was he really only up to page forty-nine? He read halfway down the page, sure that he’d read this before. He was much farther on... page sixty-five or seventy at least. What was the bookmark doing left at a page he’d read before? He thought for a couple of minutes. Then he examined the corners of the book. There was a slight dent to the bottom right-hand corner of the cover, and to a few of the pages after it. The book had been bought new, pristine. The dent was the kind made by dropping a book. Picking it up to flip through it... dropping it... the bookmark falling out... replaced at random...
“Jesus,” he said, for the second time in an hour.
Dressed for dinner, in a lightweight cream suit and brown brogues, white shirt and red paisley tie, Barclay opened the door to the bar. It was busier, five men leaning against the bar itself and deep in discussion with the hotelier, who filled glasses as he spoke. Barclay smiled and nodded towards him, then made for a table. There was only one other person seated, the young woman from the landing. He pulled out a chair from opposite her and sat down.
“Do you mind if I join you?” he asked.
“Comment? Vous êtes anglais, monsieur?”
“Anglais, oui.” He stared at her without blinking. “Are you staying here, mademoiselle? Restez-vous ici?”
She appeared not to understand. The hotelier had come to the table to take Barclay’s order. “Une pression, s’il vous plaît.” Barclay’s eyes were still on her. “Would you like another?” She had an empty glass in front of her. She shook her head. The hotelier moved back to the bar.
“So,” said Barclay quietly, “did you find anything interesting in my room?”
A tinge of red came to her cheekbones and stayed there. She found that she could speak English after all. “I did not mean to... I thought I would wait there for you. Then I changed my mind.”
“But we bumped into each other on the stairs. Why not introduce yourself then?”
She shrugged. “It did not seem the right moment.”
He nodded. “Because I would know you’d been to my room?”
“It was the book, yes?” She needed no affirmation. “Yes, the book was stupid. I thought it would... pass time.”
“It was clumsy certainly.” His beer arrived. He waited till the hotelier had returned once again to the bar before asking, “How much did you give him?”
“Nothing.” She dug into the pocket of her blouson. “I had only to show him some identification.” She handed him a small laminated card, carrying a photograph of her with her hair longer and permed into tight curls. Her name was Dominique Herault. As she handed the card to him, he checked her fingers. She wore four ornate but cheap-looking rings; there was no ring on her wedding finger.
“DST,” he read from the card, and nodded to himself. Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French equivalent of MI5, the defensive security intelligence agency. Parry had warned him that once DST knew a British agent was on his way to France (and she would have to inform them — it was a matter of protocol), they would almost certainly send one of their agents to “assist” him. He handed back her card. “You’re not quite what I had in mind,” he said.
“You were expecting perhaps Peter Sellers?”
He smiled. “No, no, I was just expecting someone more... mature.” She raised an eyebrow. “I mean,” he went on, “someone older.”
“Ah,” she said. “No, Mr. Barclay, you are not senior enough to merit someone... older.”
“Touché,” he murmured, raising his glass to his lips.
Now it was Dominique Herault’s turn to smile.
“So,” he went on, having swallowed the ice-cold beer, “now that you’ve ransacked my room, I suppose that puts us on a footing of mutual trust and cooperation.”
“I was only —”
“Waiting for me. Yes, you said. Forgive me, but in Britain we normally wait outside a person’s room. We don’t break and enter.”
“Break? Nothing was broken. Besides, MI5 is famous for its breaking and entering, isn’t it so?”
“Once upon a time,” Barclay replied coolly. “But we draw the line at sinking Greenpeace ships.”
“That was the DGSE, not the DST,” she said, rather too quickly. “And it, too, was a long time ago. What do you say... water under the bridge?”
“Ironic under the circumstances, but yes, that’s what we say. Your English is good.”
“Better than your French, I think. I saw the grammar book in your room. It is for children, no?”
He shifted a little, saying nothing.
Her finger drew a circle on the tabletop. “And do you think,” she said, “you can find anything in Calais which we might have overlooked ourselves?”