“Don’t swear at me! I should be swearing at you and your beastly Department! I said you were doing something secret; you’d had to go abroad for the Department—John, I don’t even know its name!—that you’d been rung in the night and you’d gone away. I said it was about a courier called Taylor.”
“You’re mad,” Avery shouted, “you’re absolutely mad! I told you never to say!”
“But John, they were policemen! There can’t be any harm in telling them.” She was crying, he could hear the tears in her voice. “John, please come back. I’m so frightened. You’ve got to get out of this, go back to publishing; I don’t care what you do but—”
“I can’t. It’s terribly big. More important than you can possibly understand. I’m sorry, Sarah, I just can’t leave the office.” He added savagely, a useful lie, “You may have wrecked the whole thing.”
There was a very long silence.
“Sarah, I’ll have to sort this out. I’ll ring you later.”
When at last she answered he detected in her voice the same flat resignation with which she had sent him to pack his things. “You took the checkbook. I’ve no money.”
He told her he would send it around. “We’ve got a car,” he added, “specially for this thing, chauffeur driven.” As he rang off he heard her say, “I thought you’d got lots of cars.”
He ran into Leclerc’s room. Haldane was standing behind the desk; his coat still wet from the rain. They were bent over a file. The pages were faded and torn.
“Taylor’s body!” he blurted out. “It’s at London Airport. You’ve messed the whole thing up. They’ve been on to Sarah! In the middle of the night!”
“Wait!” It was Haldane who spoke. “You have no business to come running in here,” he declared furiously. “Just wait.” He did not care for Avery.
He returned to the file, ignoring him. “None at all,” he muttered, adding to Leclerc: “Woodford has already had some success, I gather. Unarmed combat’s all right; he’s heard of a wireless operator, one of the best. I remember him. The garage is called the King of Hearts; it is clearly prosperous. We inquired at the bank; they were quite helpful, if not specific. He’s unmarried. He has a reputation for women; the usual Polish style. No political interests, no known hobbies, no debts, no complaints. He seems to be something of a nonentity. They say he’s a good mechanic. As for character—” He shrugged. “What do we know about anybody?”
“But what did they say? Good heavens, you can’t be fifteen years in a community without leaving some impression. There was a grocer wasn’t there—Smethwick?—he lived with them after the war.”
Haldane allowed himself a smile. “They said he was a good worker and very polite. Everyone says he’s polite. They remember one thing only: he has a passion for hitting a tennis ball round their back yard.”
“Did you take a look at the garage?”
“Certainly not. I didn’t go near it. I propose to call there this evening. I don’t see that we have any other choice. After all, the man’s been on our cards for twenty years.”
“Is there nothing more you can find out?”
“We would have to do the rest through the Circus.”
“Then let John Avery clear up the details.” Leclerc seemed to have forgotten Avery was in the room. “As for the Circus, I’ll deal with them myself.” His interest had been arrested by a new map on the wall, a town plan of Kalkstadt showing the church and railway station. Beside it hung an older map of eastern Europe. Rocket bases whose existence had already been confirmed were here related to the putative site south of Rostock. Supply routes and chains of command, the order of battle of supporting arms, were indicated with lines of thin wool stretched between pins. A number of these led to Kalkstadt.
“It’s good, isn’t it? Sandford put it together last night,” Leclerc said. “He does that kind of thing rather well.”
On his desk lay a new whitewood pointer like a giant bodkin threaded with a loop of barrister’s ribbon. He had a new telephone, green, smarter than Avery’s, with a notice on it saying speech on this telephone is NOT secure. For a time Haldane and Leclerc studied the map, referring now and then to a file of telegrams which Leclerc held open in both hands as a choirboy holds a psalter.