‘And Kitty Delassus. She’s white.’
‘And Miss Kitty Delassus, please,’ Crabbe added, nervously slurring the final ‘s’; for names, he had found by bitter experience, were a source of unholy offence.
The Ambassadress, in ragged mink, waited benignly at her trestle table behind a motley of gift-wrapped parcels from the Naafi. The wind struck again, venomously; the Ghanaian Chargé, despondent at Crabbe’s side, shuddered and pulled up the fur collar of his overcoat.
‘Disqualify them,’ Cork urged. ‘Give the prizes to the runners up.’
‘I’ll wring his neck,’ Crabbe declared, blinking violently. ‘I’ll wring his bloody neck. Skulking the other side of the river. Whoopsadaisy.’
Janet Cork, heavily pregnant, had located the missing children and added them to the winners’ enclosure.
‘Wait till Monday,’ Crabbe whispered, raising the megaphone to his lips, ‘I’ll tell him a thing or two.’
He wouldn’t though, come to think of it. He wouldn’t tell Leo anything. He’d keep bloody clear of Leo as a matter of fact; keep his head down and wait till it blew over.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen, the Ambassadress will now present the prizes!’
They clapped, but not for Crabbe. The end was in sight. With a perfect insouciance that was as well suited to the launching of a ship as to the acceptance of a hand in marriage, the Ambassadress stepped forward to read her speech. Crabbe listened mindlessly: a family event… equal nations of the Commonwealth… if only the greater rivalries of the world could be resolved in so friendly a fashion… a heartfelt word of thanks to the Sports Committee, Messrs Jackson, Crabbe, Harting, Meadowes…
Lamentably unmoved, a plain clothes policeman, posted against the canvas wall, took a pair of gloves from the pocket of his leather coat and stared blankly at a colleague. Hazel Bradfield, wife of the Head of Chancery, caught Crabbe’s eye and smiled beautifully. Such a bore, she managed to imply, but it will soon be over, and then we might even have a drink. He looked quickly away. The only thing, he told himself fervently, is to know nothing and see nothing. Doggo, that’s the word. Doggo. He glanced at his watch. Just one hour till the sun was over the yardarm. In Greenwich if not in Bonn. He’d have a beer first, just to keep his eye in; and afterwards he would have a little of the hard stuff. Doggo. See nothing and slip out the back way.
‘Here,’ said Cork into his ear, ‘listen. You remember that tip you gave me?’
‘Sorry, old boy?’
‘South African Diamonds. Consols. They’re down six bob.’
‘Hang on to them,’ Crabbe urged with total insincerity, and withdrew prudently to the edge of the marquee. He had barely found the kind of dark, protective crevice which naturally appealed to his submerged nature when a hand seized his shoulder and swung him roughly round on his heel. Recovering from his astonishment he found himself face to face with a plain clothes policeman. ‘What the hell – ‘ he broke out furiously, for he was a small man and hated to be handled. ‘What the hell – ‘ But the policeman was already shaking his head and mumbling an apology. He was sorry, he said, he had mistaken the gentleman for someone else.
Urbane or not, de Lisle was meanwhile growing quite angry. The journey from the Embassy had irritated him considerably. He detested motor-bikes and he detested being escorted, and a noisy combination of the two was almost more than he could bear. And he detested deliberate rudeness, whether he or someone else was the object of it. And deliberate rudeness, he reckoned, was what they were getting. No sooner had they drawn up in the courtyard of the Ministry of the Interior than the doors of the car had been wrenched open by a team of young men in leather coats all shouting at once.
‘Herr Siebkron will see you immediately! Now, please! Yes! Immediately, please!’
‘I shall go at my own pace,’ Bradfield had snapped as they were ushered into the unpainted steel lift. ‘Don’t you dare order me about.’ And to de Lisle, ‘I shall speak to Siebkron. It’s like a trainload of monkeys.’
The upper floors restored them. This was the Bonn they knew: the pale, functional interiors, the pale, functional reproductions on the wall, the pale unpolished teak; the white shirts, the grey ties and faces pale as the moon. They were seven. The two who sat to either side of Siebkron had no names at all, and de Lisle wondered maliciously whether they were clerks brought in to make up the numbers. Lieff, an empty-headed parade horse from Protocol Department, sat on his left; opposite him, on Bradfield’s right, an old Polizeidirektor from Bonn, whom de Lisle instinctively liked: a battle-scarred monument of a man, with white patches like covered bulletholes in the leather of his skin. Cigarettes lay in packets on a plate. A stern girl offered decaffeinated coffee, and they waited until she had withdrawn.