‘Where the devil’s Harting?’ Bradfield asked, but one glance at Crabbe’s expression told him that his question was wasted. Slipping out into the road, he hastened a short way up the hill and opened a small iron gate leading to the vestry, which he entered without knocking.
‘Harting’s failed to appear,’ he said curtly. ‘Who else plays the organ?’
The Chaplain, who found the Embassy a challenge but believed he was making headway, was a Low Church man with a wife and four children in Wales. No one knew why they would not join him.
‘He’s never missed before. Never.’
‘Who else can play?’
‘Perhaps the ferry isn’t running. There’s a lot of trouble about, I hear.’
‘He could come the long way by the bridge. He’s done it often enough. Can no one stand in for him?’
‘Not that I know,’ said the Chaplain, fingering the tip of his golden stole, his thoughts far away. ‘But there’s never been occasion to enquire, not really.’
‘Then what are you going to do?’
‘Perhaps someone could give a note,’ the Chaplain suggested doubtfully, but his gaze had fixed on a baptismal postcard that was tucked behind a calendar. ‘Maybe that would be the answer. Johnny Gaunt has a nice tenor, being Welsh.’
‘Very well, the choir must lead. You’d better tell them at once.’
‘Trouble is, you see, they don’t know the hymns, Mr Bradfield,’ the Chaplain said. ‘He wasn’t at Friday’s choir practice either, you see. He didn’t come, not really. We had to scrap it, see.’
Stepping back into the fresh air, Bradfield found himself face to face with Meadowes, who had quietly left his place beside his daughter and followed him to the back of the church.
‘He’s vanished,’ Meadowes said, dreadfully quietly. ‘I’ve checked everywhere. Sick list, the doctor; I’ve been to his house. His car’s in the garage; he’s not used his milk. No one’s seen or heard of him since Friday. He didn’t come to Exiles. It was a special occasion for my daughter’s birthday, but he didn’t come to that either. He’d got engagements but he was going to look in. He’d promised her a hair-dryer as a present; it’s not like him, Mr Bradfield, it’s not his way at all.’ For one moment, just for one moment, Bradfield’s composure seemed to desert him. He stared furiously at Meadowes, then back at the church, as if undecided which to destroy; as if either in anger or despair he would rush down the path and burst open the doors and cry out the news to those who waited so complacently within.
‘Come with me.’
Even as they entered the main gates of the Embassy and long before the police check cleared them, they could recognise the signs of crisis. Two army motorcycles were parked on the front lawn. Cork, the cypher clerk on call, was waiting on the steps, an Everyman guide to investments still in his hand. A green German police van, its blue light flashing, had stationed itself beside the canteen, and they could hear the crackle of its radio.
‘Thank the Lord you’ve come, sir,’ said Macmullen the Head Guard, ‘I sent the duty driver down; he must have passed you on the carriageway.’
All over the building bells were ringing.
‘There’s a message in from Hanover, sir, from the Consulate General; I didn’t hear too well. The rally’s gone mad, sir; all hell’s broken loose. They’re storming the library and they’re going to march on the Consulate; I don’t know what the world’s coming to; worse than Grosvenor Square. I could hear their screaming on the telephone, sir.’
Meadowes followed Bradfield hastily up the stairs.
‘You said a hair-dryer? He was giving your daughter a hair-dryer?’
It was a moment of deliberate inconsequence, of deliberate slowness perhaps, a nervous gesture before battle was joined. Meadowes at least construed it thus.
‘He’s ordered it specially,’ he said.
‘Never mind,’ said Bradfield, and was about to enter the cypher room when Meadowes addressed him once more.
‘The file’s gone,’ he whispered. ‘The Green File for the special minutes. It’s been gone since Friday.’
CHAPTER THREE
Alan Turner
It was a day to be nearly free; a day to stay in London and dream of the country. In St James’s Park, the premature summer was entering its third week. Along the lake, girls lay like cut flowers in the unnatural heat of a Sunday afternoon in May. An attendant had lit an improbable bonfire and the smell of burnt grass drifted with the echoes of the traffic. Only the pelicans, hobbling fussily round their island pavilion, seemed disposed to move; only Alan Turner, his big shoes crunching on the gravel, had anywhere to go; for once, not even the girls could distract him.