The whole place is an absolute bloody death-trap. Giles Holloway has always known that. But he likes the attic, and it’s useful. As far as he knows, from his discreet enquiries, no other top-floor dweller in the block of mansion flats has a secret attic. It was a quirk of the builder, no doubt. The possession of this tucked-away space pleases him.
He knows the place like the back of his hand, but still he falls. He had a bottle of ‘52 Pomerol at dinner. Giles has little interest in wine, but he knows what to order. Afterwards, at home, the usual bottle of Black & White on his desk, and the soda siphon.
Giles works on into the night, feeling rather than hearing the vibration of Big Ben’s chimes through the walls. Suddenly, it is two o’clock. He gets up, stiff-legged, and crosses to the window. He pulls up the blackout blind that for some reason he has never taken down, and stares across the roof-tops. Rain falls steadily. The tiles glisten. He thinks of what it would be like to cling to those tiles, scrabbling for a foothold, sliding inexorably downwards to the gutter. Get a grip, he tells himself.
He is the only one awake to see the wet roof and hear the tick of rain on the tiles. Everybody else is asleep. Giles likes to be the only one on the qui vive. Even more than this, he likes to be awake here, in his eyrie, high up and hidden. Oddly, he thinks, tapping a fingernail on the window-frame, one never feels that there is anything wrong with being alone once it’s past midnight. In fact, one feels more alive, as if one has scored, somehow, over the sleeping world. Earlier in the evening, at dinner, say, it can make Giles uneasy. Not that he is often alone then, unless he chooses to be.
My little room, he thinks sentimentally, glancing back at it under the strong downpour of light from the unshaded bulb. The wood beneath his finger-tips is spongy. The frame is rotting and at some point he’ll have to have the window replaced. But not yet. He’s been putting it off for years. He doesn’t want workmen up here.
The utility desk at which he works was already here when he first bought the flat. Someone must have hauled it up the stairs, God knows how, and decided there was no point in ever trying to get it down again. Giles has added a single bentwood chair and a narrow corner cupboard, like a school stationery cupboard. The floorboards are bare. On the wall behind the desk there is a small painting, no more than eight inches square, and poorly framed. It’s a very early Kandinsky, painted with meticulous realism. Few would recognise it as a Kandinsky at all. There’s a river, a haystack, a long flowing horizon. Giles likes it all very much, just as he likes everything in the room. Soda siphon, bottle of Black & White, Waterford tumbler. There’s a file on the desk, open. If it were closed it would be possible to read the words stamped in red on the cover: ‘Top Secret’.
Giles remembers the days of Most Secret. That phrase was more attractive, somehow. He preferred it to Top Secret, which has always struck him as rather childish. Minox next to the file. Such a perfect little camera for the job; you couldn’t improve on it.
No need to tidy things away, up here. No one else ever comes. Pigeons walk up and down on the windowsill sometimes, crooning noisily on summer evenings. He supposes that they are there all day long, when he’s at work.
No one ever comes, but the attic is not what it once was. Even the bloody pigeons get on his nerves. Watching everything. Winged vermin. Once they laid an egg, just one, exposed on a little pile of rubbish they’d put together. He swept it away.
These last months, he’s been jumpy. He has nailed the window shut. There’s been one too many of those carefully casual, probing conversations. A character called Frith seems to be everywhere these days. Julian calls him ‘Mr Plod’. Frith even had the nerve to drop in to Giles’s office for what he no doubt thought was a ‘discreet chat’ about Giles’s visits to the Nightshade. As if Giles hasn’t been going there for years. It was pure officiousness. What the hell were they playing at? He broached the question with Julian, but you might as well try to have a word with the Cheshire Cat as with Julian when he doesn’t want to be pinned down.
‘You’re not getting nervy, I hope, Giles?’ Julian barely breathed the words, but there was a touch of scorn in them that stung.
He can’t make Frith out. Cool as an oyster, not very bright you’d think, until you caught the oystery gleam behind his glasses. Frith has been dropping in more and more frequently.
‘Try to be a little more discreet, my dear Giles,’ said Julian in passing, at a party.
Giles stopped taking files home, but not for long. He couldn’t stop for long. He’s always known that. He waits a few weeks, then once again, as evening comes, he puts his briefcase on his desk, and then, leisurely, places into it the file that he requires, before snapping shut the lock. Giles is all serenity at such moments. The art of hiding in plain sight used to be second nature, and now it has become the whole of him. But this file, tonight, is rather different. It ought never to have been on his desk at all. Julian had signed it off earlier today; yesterday, now. He was leaving for Venice at noon, but he had come in to deal with one or two urgent matters. There were his initials: JRC, the last of three sets of initials. The three pairs of eyes that were cleared to see the file. Julian had sauntered into Giles’s office, dropped the thing on his desk and chatted for a few minutes about the prossimo spettacolo at La Fenice. As he insisted on calling it. Julian was no linguist, thought Giles; he ought to stop trying to talk Italian.
‘Get it back to Brenda when you’ve finished with it.’ Brenda was Julian’s secretary. ‘Absolutely trustworthy and discreet,’ was the way Julian described her. Or, more accurately: Deaf, dumb, blind and quick with her hands. And then Julian had buggered off in his tweeds, and there was the file, at which Giles then looked closely for the first time. Christ, he thought. Christ.
Quarter past two. Time for bed. Even so, he watches the rain. It’s not that he couldn’t survive if he had to leave London. But Moscow … Those leaden winter days, those awful clothes and the still more awful perfumes that women wore to cover the fact that bathrooms were in short supply. The monstrous, garish architectural ensembles. Endless ballet. Taking his holidays on the Black Sea and grateful for it. ‘Moscow? It’s like Birmingham, my dears, but without the bright lights.’ Cue gales of laughter. Good old Giles. He speaks frightfully good Russian, you know. After the war he was in Special Intelligence in Berlin, all very hush-hush …
As usual, they’d got it all wrong, but that suited Giles. They flitted around him, filling his glass, talking about I Puritani – they’d absolutely loved it but it was a thought too long, didn’t he agree? – and how they’d adored The Country Girls. Giles said the kind of things he’d always said. Outrageous, that was Giles. Witty, shocking, quotable: Have you heard Giles’s latest? Cue more gales of laughter.
Or did they laugh? He frowns. He seems to remember being alone, in the middle of the party. A joke that didn’t come off. He’d slopped more whisky into his glass – there was never any decent whisky at these parties – and gone out on to the terrace. It was dark and quiet. He looked back into the lit-up room and the party that went on without him. Mouths opened and closed, heads were thrown back in whinnies of laughter, hands were put out to trap an interlocutor. He was losing his touch, but, more than that, he couldn’t care less, even when that booby Firclough raised his eyebrows prissily and turned away. Giles leaned against the stone balustrade. He was cold and sad, as he sometimes was after sex. It was passing from him, that erotic, delicious pleasure of being at the heart of things.
Parties are not what they were, thinks Giles now, looking out at the rain from his attic window. Everyone is so bloody dull these days. Stuffed shirts. He’d once made the mistake of taking Princess Margaret’s elbow to steer her across the room. It was pure courtesy, for God’s sake. There was a crush in the club and he knew a discreet little exit. The way she’d looked at him had sent him three paces backwards. My God. Nicky in Istanbul had told him she was pure poison, her visits the dread of embassies all over Europe. Now he believed it. But she’d liked h
im. She’d leaned forward and laughed at one of his jokes.
To hell with her. To hell with the lot of them. He glances at his desk. The file and the Minox are there as ever. He works so hard, twice as hard as anyone realises, and he gets no credit for it. He’s never cared before. Self-pity: can’t have that. Should be a cold fish like Julian Clowde. You’d never catch Julian feeling sorry for himself.
Giles has always had a strong head, but lately he’s been waking with a jolt of panic, as if something too dark to remember has taken place during the night. Slowly, the day takes care of it. He follows the same routine every morning. He draws a cold bath, takes the chill off it, plunges in and scrubs himself vigorously with Pears Soap and a loofah. He wraps himself in a towel and walks around his flat like a Roman emperor, eating toast and marmalade and whistling songs from the music hall.
His days appear fixed. The early walk to the Admiralty. His sprawling notoriously untidy desk, his high-handed carelessness, those breakfast cups of scalding tea at regular intervals, the fug of Senior Service that slowly fills his office. He lunches on a bench in Green Park. It’s a well-known Holloway eccentricity: ‘Giles is a fresh-air fiend.’ Sometimes he will meet an acquaintance. Sometimes he will sleep for an hour in the sunshine. He never drinks during the day. Evenings: dinner, the club, then perhaps going on to other little clubs with a quite different clientele. The Nightshade, for instance, or Bobbie’s. Occasionally he’ll bring someone back, but he’s cautious about that. All the boys know one another and are terrible gossips. He doesn’t want the flat to become common currency.
Time for bed, old son, or you’ll be like death warmed up in the morning. Time to do something about those sodding pigeons, too. Rat poison? Would that work? Carefully, Giles tucks the Minox and measuring chain into a drawer and puts tumbler, siphon and whisky bottle on to a tin tray painted with the face of Father Christmas wreathed in holly. He uses this tray year-round. Upstairs and downstairs it goes, with everything that he needs to sustain him through the night shift. He could keep the whole caboodle up here permanently, he supposes, but he can’t be fagged with washing up. He’ll leave it in the kitchen and Ma Clitterold will sort it out in the morning. She never comes up here. He keeps the staircase door locked in case she should take it into her head to explore.
He hooks his foot around the attic door to close it, and that’s when it happens. The bottle slides. His quick reflexes come to his aid and he grabs it before it falls. But the door is in the way. The bottle is now in his hands but the tray tips. As it crashes to the floor Giles loses balance, misses the step, falls backwards on to the landing and thumps down the twisting staircase.
He is at the bottom, huddled into a corner. He sees drugget and a stair rod which is at the wrong angle because somehow Giles is wedged so that he’s looking up at it. A ferocious red pain grips his leg. His right knee is at the centre of it. He knows at once that something is broken. Nausea rushes through him. He is cold, he sweats, he wants to empty his bowels. He groans and his head knocks against the skirting board. He must get out of the staircase. He cannot climb. He’s got to go downwards, out of the corner where he’s somehow got jammed.
There are four stairs beneath him, then a square of drugget and the closed door to the corridor. He can get down those stairs. Once he is in the corridor he can crawl to the telephone. There’s an extension in his bedroom.
He assesses himself; calmly, he thinks. There is blood in his eyes. He reaches up and wipes it away. More blood trickles down. He knows that any wound to the head bleeds profusely, and he’s unconcerned. He has hit his head hard, at the back, but the bleeding is coming from his forehead. He doesn’t remember how he fell. Another curtain of blood comes down over his eyes.
There’s nothing to hold on to, but he can roll over. The pain makes him hiss through his teeth but now he is on his hands and one good knee, pointing upwards, shaking away the blood so that he can see. He’ll let himself down the remaining stairs backwards, he thinks, but then finds he cannot, because of the knee. He rolls farther round, on to his left side, and pushes himself down, using his hands. He thinks he might faint or vomit, but does neither.
At the foot of the stairs he lunges upward and gets the door handle to turn. He pushes hard, and works himself through, using his hands, until he is in the corridor. His bedroom is the next door on the right. He ought to be able to reach the telephone.
It’s not going to work. He feels deadly sick. He huddles himself up on the carpet, shivering. He’s very cold. There’s a strong smell of whisky: the bottle must have smashed and perhaps that’s how he got cut. He can’t get to the phone. He has got to shut and lock the door that leads upstairs, before old Ma Clitterold gets here. She’ll seize her chance. She’ll be up there poking about.
Twankydillo twankydillo dillo dillo dillo
And he played on his merry bagpipes made from the green willow
Green willow green willow green willow green willow
He has the song trapped in his head as he struggles on to his good knee, catches hold of the doorframe and lunges to close the door. The pain is so bad that he can’t see, or maybe it’s the blood. There is the doorknob. His fingers find the key and turn it, then take the key from the lock. As he does this he caves in on himself, weight twisted on to the bad knee. He is down on the carpet, making a noise. He has the key. He feels the key pressing into his hand. Blackness rushes in front of his eyes.
He is still for a long time, and empty. He’s not feeling so sick now. He needs to give himself a few minutes and then try for the bedroom. He sees again the surface of his desk, and the file. Ma Clitterold won’t go up there now. He’s safe. But then it flashes over him, as if he’s opened the door of a room on fire: he took Julian’s file home overnight, as he did with all of them. He’s always in early, no matter how late the night before. He slides the files he’s been working on back into the chaos of his desk. But this file has got to go back to Julian’s office. Those initials. Christ. He can’t pass this one off.
He could have done it easily. Taken the file along as a sandwich filling between a couple of duffers. Brenda would have dealt with it.
Not now. He won’t be in early tomorrow. Today. He must get that file back before Frith comes looking for it.
He can still do it. Get to the phone. Ring Julian.
Fuck it. He must have hit his head harder than he thought. Julian’s in Venice. Christ, Holloway, think.
It’s got to be someone who’ll do it but not grasp what he’s doing. Someone who’ll do it for him, Giles Holloway. Someone who knows the office, and Brenda, and won’t be noticed—
He knows. Of course he does. Another qualm of sickness goes through him as he knows who it is.
3
Nil By Mouth
Giles is in a bed at last, in a private room, wearing a hospital gown. His own bed, blessedly flat and white after the ambulance’s red blankets and the slippery lurch of the trolleys that have carted him from one department to the next. The hospital porters whistled like coal-men heaving sacks on to their shoulders. They braced themselves as they lifted him: ‘Got your end, Ron? Here we go. One, two, three, upsidaisy.’
‘Is there someone whom we could telephone?’ the Sister asks.
He gives her Ma Clitterold’s name, and his own number. ‘My housekeeper comes in at nine.’
All night, it seems, he has been wheeled from one desolate room to another. He has been X-rayed, prodded, bled. Porters wheeled him down corridors and backed his trolley expertly into lifts. They slid him on and off examination couches.
Now the nurses refuse to give him a cup of tea: he is NIL BY MOUTH. He has concussion, it seems, but his skull is not fractured. They are going to operate on his leg.
‘There is someone whom I must telephone urgently,’ he says, but the Sister only nods. He will be going into theatre at eleven. Mr Anstruther is coming in specially, she announces, as if this is a rare privilege.
‘Surely there’s a telephone you can
bring to me?’
‘I want you to lie perfectly still. You have concussion.’
They are running a tank over his head. Pain comes in regular, complete pulses. He turns aside and vomits into a kidney dish held by a student nurse. He smells whisky. She takes away the bowl. Now the Sister is back. She won’t let him drink but she wipes his mouth. ‘I want you to lie quite still,’ she says.
It’s Simon he has got to see. He struggles to raise himself on his pillow so that he can look at his watch, but his watch has gone. Simon Callington. He said the name aloud, he thinks, but it doesn’t matter. ‘What time is it?’
‘It’s five to ten, Mr Holloway. You’ll be going down to theatre in an hour. Just keep nice and quiet for me.’
They’ll wonder where he is. He’s never ill. Never even has a hangover, no matter how much – His desk at the office will be just as he left it, with a worm of cigarette ash on top of the pile of papers. So carelessly, carefully dropped there. Files shoved in anyhow, or so it appears. Giles has his own system.
Ma Clitterold will ring the office, full of the drama of his accident. The secretaries will pass on the message. Frith will hear it, and whoever Frith’s working for. Quietly and without any fuss, they’ll take advantage of his absence.
Frith will pop in. He’ll stand over Giles’s desk, oyster eyes gleaming behind his glasses. Giles pictures the slow smile spreading over Frith’s features. He can’t remember ever seeing him smile.
Those carefully casual, probing conversations over the past few months were a warning, and meant to be taken as such. But they don’t want to push him too far, not yet. They don’t want him to panic and fly off. They want him to lead them to Julian Clowde, even though Giles very much doubts that they even know it’s Julian they’ll find at the end of their long trail a-winding. But if he gets the file back … Once Brenda’s got it, they won’t be able to prove anything …