‘No joke, Peter old boy,’ said Roy, mustering a belated smile. ‘Just surprised to see you, that’s all. We’re used to having this floor to ourselves.’
‘Here’s Bill,’ said Lauder, very pleased to have his prognostication so promptly confirmed. In a strip of light, as he entered it, Guillam noticed the queer colour of Haydon’s cheeks. A blushing red, daubed high on the bones, but deep, made up of tiny broken veins. It gave him, thought Guillam in his heightened state of nervousness, a slightly Dorian Gray look.
His meeting with Lauder Strickland lasted an hour and twenty minutes, Guillam spun it out that long, and throughout it his mind went back to Bland and Esterhase and he wondered what the hell was eating them.
‘Well, I suppose I’d better go and clear all this with the Dolphin,’ he said at last. ‘We all know how she is about Swiss banks.’ The housekeepers lived two doors down from Banking. ‘I’ll leave this here,’ he added and tossed the pass on to Lauder’s desk.
Diana Dolphin’s room smelt of fresh deodorant; her chain-mail handbag lay on the safe beside a copy of the Financial Times. She was one of those groomed Circus brides whom no one ever marries. Yes, he said wearily, the operational papers were already on submission to London Station. Yes, he understood that freewheeling with dirty money was a thing of the past.
‘Then we shall look into it and let you know,’ she announced, which meant she would go and ask Phil Porteous who sat next door.
‘I’ll tell Lauder then,’ said Guillam, and left.
Move, he thought.
In the men’s room he waited thirty seconds at the basins, watching the door in the mirror and listening. A curious quiet had descended over the whole floor. Come on, he thought, you’re getting old, move. He crossed the corridor, stepped boldly into the duty officers’ room, closed the door with a slam and looked round. He reckoned he had ten minutes and he reckoned that a slammed door made less noise in that silence than a door surreptitiously closed. Move.
He had brought the camera but the light was awful. The net-curtained window looked on to a courtyard full of blackened pipes. He couldn’t have risked a brighter bulb even if he’d had one with him, so he used his memory. Nothing much seemed to have changed since the take-over. In the daytime the place was used as a rest-room for girls with the vapours and to judge by the smell of cheap scent it still was. Along one wall lay the Rexine divan which at night made into a rotten bed; beside it the first-aid chest with the red cross peeling off the front, and a clapped-out television. The steel cupboard stood in its same place between the switchboard and the locked telephones and he made a beeline for it. It was an old cupboard and he could have opened it with a tin opener. He had brought his picks and a couple of light alloy tools. Then he remembered that the combination used to be 31-22-11 and he tried it, four and, three clock, two anti, clockwise till she springs. The dial was so jaded it knew the way. When he opened the door dust rolled out of the bottom in a cloud, crawled a distance then slowly lifted towards the dark window. At the same moment he heard what sounded like a single note played on a flute: it came from a car, most likely, braking in the street outside; or the wheel of a file trolley squeaking on linoleum; but for that moment it was one of those long, mournful notes which made up Camilla’s practice scales. She played exactly when she felt like it. At midnight, in the early morning or whenever. She didn’t give a damn about the neighbours; she seemed quite nerveless altogether. He remembered her that first evening: ‘Which is your side of the bed? Where shall I put my clothes?’ He prided himself on his delicate touch in such things but Camilla had no use for it, technique was already a compromise, a compromise with reality, she would say an escape from it. All right, so get me out of this lot.