‘H.E. will be leaving in a minute; I should make yourself scarce if I were you,’ he said with chilling ease. ‘He’s not awfully keen on you people.’
In most of the corridors it was daytime. Commercial Section was celebrating Scottish week. A mauve grouse moor, draped in Campbell tartan, hung beside a photograph of the Queen in highland dress. Miniatures of Scotch whisky were mounted in a collage with dancers and bagpipes, and framed in plywood battens. In the Open Plan, under radiant exhortations to buy from the North, pale-faced clerks struck doggedly at machines for adding and subtracting. Deadline Brussels! a placard warned them, but the machines seemed unimpressed. He climbed a floor and was in Whitehall with the Service Attachés, each with his tiny Ministry and his stencilled title on the door.
‘What the hell are you up to?’ a sergeant clerk demanded, and Turner told him to keep a civil tongue in his head. Somewhere a military voice wrestled gallantly with dictation. In the Typing Pool, the girls sat forlornly in schoolroom lines: two juniors in green overalls gently nursed a mammoth duplicator while a third laid out the coloured telegrams as if they were fine linen for going away. Raised above them all, the Head Girl, blue haired and fully sixty, sat on a separate dais checking stencils. She alone, scenting the enemy, looked up sharply, nose towards the wind. The walls behind here were lined with Christmas cards from Head Girls in other missions. Some depicted camels, others the royal crest.
‘I’m going over the locks,’ he muttered, and her look said, ‘Go over what you like, but not my girls.’
Christ, I could do with one, I’m telling you. Surely you could spare just one for a quick drop into paradise? Harting, you thief.
It was ten o’clock. He had visited every room to which Harting had acquired access; he had gained nothing but a headache for his trouble. Whatever Harting wanted was no longer there, or else so hidden as to require weeks of searching; or so obvious as to be invisible. He felt the sickness which follows tension and his mind was racing with uncoordinated recollections. Christ: one single day. From enthusiasm to frustration in one day. From an aeroplane to the dayroom desk, all the clues and none; I’ve lived a whole bloody life and it’s only Monday. He stared at the blank foolscap pages of the telegram form, wondering what the hell to write. Cork was asleep and the robots were silent. The keys lay in a heap before him. One by one he began threading them back on to the ring. Put together, he thought; construct. You will not go to bed until you are at least aware of the trail you must follow. The task of an intellectual, his fart-arsed tutor brayed, is to make order out of chaos. Define anarchy. It is a mind without a system. Please, teacher, what is a system without a mind? Taking a pencil he lazily drew a chart of the days of the week and divided each day into panels of one hour. He opened the blue diary. Re-form the fragments, make of all the pieces one piece. You’ll find him and Shawn won’t. Harting Leo, Claims and Consular, thief and hunter, will hunt you down.
‘You don’t know anything about shares by any chance?’ Cork enquired, waking with a start.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘My query is, you see,’ he continued, rubbing his pink eyes, ‘if there’s a slump on Wall Street and a slump in Frankfurt and we don’t make the Market on this run, how will it affect Swedish steel?’
‘If I were you,’ Turner said, ‘I’d put the whole lot on red and forget it.’
‘Only I have this firm intention,’ Cork explained. ‘We’ve got a bit of land lined up in the Caribbean-‘
‘Shut up.’
Construct. Put your ideas on a blackboard and then see what happens to them. Come on, Turner, you’re a philosopher, tell us how the world goes round. What little absolute will we put into Harting’s mouth, for instance? Facts. Construct. Did you not, after all, my dear Turner, abandon the contemplative life of the academic in favour of the junctional life of the civil servant? Construct; put your theories to work and de Lisle will call you a real person.