Chapter and Hearse (16 page)

His nephew and niece, after all, had only required him to play pen and paper games with them. As far as more active pastimes were concerned, they were united in being against them, smacking as they did, they insisted, of compulsory games at school. Their doting uncle had ruefully concluded that the children of today were totally opposed to any activity that involved them in making any move that required more physical effort than tearing open a packet of crisps.

His breath recovered, Henry clambered up onto the hotel terrace and acknowledged that the view was memorable. He stood looking south until a more urgent need made itself felt. After all, even Goethe had said that no man could enjoy a view for more than fifteen minutes. As far as Henry was concerned at this moment, the bodily requirement of a long cold drink displaced the soul's drinking in of beauty in less than five.

He made his way inside what must have once served as the ground floor of a rather grand private house and was now a welcoming bar. A Foreign Office man himself, he was naturally interested in architecture. The place must be late Victorian, he decided, but nicely shorn of Victorian excess. There was already the feel of forthcoming Edwardian comfort and amplitude about it.

Henry collected something with which to slake his immediate thirst but resisted pausing overlong at the bar on the illogical grounds that he was too hungry and too thirsty. He'd need to forgo wine with his meal if he was to tackle High Rocks that afternoon.

He climbed a flight of stairs and found himself faced with a choice of rooms in which to eat. There was a dining room on his right set for a formal luncheon which he shied away from like a nervous horse. Formal luncheons were the bane of his working life in the Foreign Office. Some important guest invariably said something very undiplomatic, no matter how much time had been spent on the
placement.
Attempting to retrieve the situation usually spoilt Henry's afternoon and evening.

Beyond that he spotted a small room, ideal for the intimate exchange, but long experience had taught Henry to be as wary of private encounters as of formal luncheons. These were the rooms that were the first to be bugged. They were also the ones whose comings and goings were the first to be noted by interested observers. Moreover, who could say afterwards with any certainty what had or had not been said in a private room? In an uncertain world, civil servants liked certainty.

He moved forward carefully, spotting an inviting table in the window which must enjoy a splendid view, but he stopped when he saw that there was already someone sitting there. In a way this was a help, as his first instinct – being a Foriegn Office man to his fingertips – would have been to avoid such an exposed position. He was just reminding himself that he was off duty and it didn't matter where he sat when the figure at the table turned and said, ‘Hello, Tyler.'

‘Good Lord, Venables … What on earth are you doing here?'

‘You wouldn't believe me if I told you,' said the other man morosely. He was sitting with his shoulders hunched forward, his hands cradling the bowl of a wine glass.

‘Perhaps not,' agreed Henry.

He had some justification for this response. Malcolm Venables was known to work for one of the obscurer branches of what used to be called – before the advent of tabloid newspapers and their investigative journalism – as the secret service.

‘I'm damned if I believe it myself,' said Venables testily. ‘Never thought I'd find myself in Tunbridge Wells of all places.'

‘In the way of work, you mean?' asked Henry cautiously, taking a second look at the man. Downcast was the only way of describing those drooping shoulders and sunken head.

Always alert on behalf of the needs of his own great department of state, Henry Tyler started to run through in his mind the circumstances that might have brought Venables to these parts in such a state of obvious depression.

‘Yes, worse luck,' grumbled Venables.

‘I see,' said Henry. This could be serious. The interaction between the Foreign Office and Malcolm Venables's own particular division of the secret service (which rejoiced in the name of Mercantile and Persuasion) was a very delicate matter indeed; so delicate, in fact, that otherwise honourable – and sometimes even Right Honourable – gentlemen had been known to stand up in high places and declare that no links existed.

Venables indicated the chair opposite him. ‘Are you going to join me, Tyler? I'm alone. Absolutely alone,' he muttered. ‘And likely to be out on a limb into the bargain before very long.'

‘I don't suppose things are as bad as that,' said Henry, with the detachment of a man safely out of reach of his own office. He could see, though, that something had seriously upset Venables this Monday morning.

Henry cast his mind rapidly back over the news items in the papers. There had been nothing in them which had caught his attention today, and in spite of the pen and paper games with his nephew and niece, he had taken care to study the weekend papers as thoroughly as usual.

‘They are,' said Venables, waving to the waiter to bring another glass. ‘And I just must talk to somebody…'

‘Problems?' Henry enquired delicately, taking the proffered chair and pulling it up at the table in the window opposite him.

‘Just the one,' said Venables, taking a long sip from his glass. ‘But it's a big one.'

‘Swans singing before they die?' suggested Henry lightly, since this was an increasing problem in all government departments.

‘No,' said Venables rather shortly. ‘Not that.'

‘Certain persons dying before they've sung?' This, thought Henry from long experience, was less of a worry, but you never knew …

‘It's not a laughing matter, Tyler. This is serious.'

‘Matter of life and death, then?' hazarded Henry a little unfairly. Unfairly, because he already knew that it wouldn't be death that worried the man from the Mercantile and Persuasion Division – an outfit known affectionately throughout the corridors of power as ‘Markets and Perks'. Death was always the least of their troubles in that department – it was a number of other words beginning with ‘D' which were the Four Horsemen of their particular Apocalypse. Henry was all too aware that Disclosure, Débâcle, Dishonour and Double-dealing ranked far higher on the danger list of M and P than mere death.

‘Well, not quite life and death,' admitted Malcolm Venables grudgingly. ‘Not for us, anyway. It might very well be for other people. Who can say?'

‘Tell me what you can,' invited Tyler, mindful of constraints to do with the Official Secrets Act, D Notices, the need-to-know basis and plain common sense. There was, though, behind these the inviolable tradition of their respective services that that which was revealed between the two of them would not be spoken of to others. Ever.

Venables pointed to a row of venerable – if not yet quite antique – wireless receivers arrayed on a shelf above them by way of ornament. ‘Would you say they were safe?'

‘Valves worn out long ago,' said Henry briskly. ‘Not a bug between them, I'm sure. Carry on…'

‘I must say it'll be a relief to talk to somebody sane,' admitted Venables.

Tyler did his best to project sanity.

‘Coming down to Tunbridge Wells has made me realize that there are no sane cryptographers. Did you know that, Tyler?'

‘I've always had doubts about all experts,' said Henry Tyler mildly. ‘Obsessive, conceited, compulsive, opinionated…'

‘Paranoic … Oh, thank you.' This last was to the waiter who had brought more cutlery, a table mat and a napkin for Henry.

‘Monomaniac too, most experts,' added Henry. ‘Only about their own thing, of course.'

‘Exactly,' agreed Venables, slightly more cheerfully. ‘And that's the trouble. By the way, the wine here isn't at all bad…'

As he partook of an excellent white Macon Villages, Henry mentally struck High Rocks off his programme for the afternoon.

‘Another thing about experts, Tyler…'

‘Yes?'

‘They just won't admit defeat.'

‘Now that's your true specialist – totally unrealistic,' said Henry judicially. ‘I've always found them more inclined to worry at problems long after the moment has passed.' Life at the Foreign Office could sometimes move on with surprising speed.

‘They go on like a dog at a bone.' Malcolm Venables nodded and slid a piece of paper out of his pocket and slipped it inside the menu with a skill born of much practice at the ancient art of legerdemain. He handed the menu concealing the paper to Henry and said, ‘What do you make of that, Tyler?'

It was a single sheet on which was written a series of apparently meaningless sentences.

‘Well,' said Henry, after studying the paper for a long moment, ‘I can see that there are – er – very definite overtones of
Alice in Wonderland
there.'

‘That,' groaned Venables, ‘is part of the problem. My boss thinks that my contact – I think we'd better call him my informant, my overseas informant, if you take my meaning – is having me on.'

‘It has been known…'

‘And our cryptographic department says it's one of the most interesting ciphers they've seen in many a long year and would I give them more time.'

‘Which means they can't solve it,' Henry translated without difficulty.

‘Exactly and, for reasons which I can't go into, I just can't give them more time…' He twisted in his seat and snatched the menu back as the waiter hove into view.

‘Are you ready to order, gentlemen?' The man hovered, order pad in hand.

‘We'll have the fish,' said Venables swiftly.

‘Two fish…' The waiter melted away again.

‘So urgent,' said Venables, handing the menu back to Henry, ‘that if we fail, the problem'll probably end up on somebody's plate in your department, my friend, and nobody's going to like that.'

Henry, who could take a hint even better than the next man – since hints, rather than plain English, were part of the currency of the Foreign Office – turned his attention back to the paper lurking inside the menu.

Venables leaned across the table and pointed to the words on the sheet. ‘You'll see, Tyler, that each sentence contains a number incorporated in the text…'

‘A written number,' murmured Henry, his eye running along a line which read, ‘Beautiful Soup, so rich and green, Waiting in twelve hot tureens.' ‘By the way, Venables,' he added plaintively, ‘I mightn't have wanted the fish.'

The man from Mercantile and Persuasion ignored this last. ‘What strikes you about those lines?'

Henry, who had been properly educated even at nursery level, searched for a childhood memory. ‘Unless I am mistaken, the original text doesn't mention the exact number of tureens.'

‘Precisely!' In his eagerness, Venables leaned across the table again and tapped the paper inside the menu. ‘Here it says, “Who would not give all else for ten pennyworth only of beautiful soup?”'

‘Soup?' The waiter materialized at their table. ‘Do you want the soup as well?'

‘No,' said Venables sharply.

The waiter put out a practised hand and started to tweak the menu from between Henry's fingers.

‘I'm thinking about the soup,' said Henry with perfect truth, firmly hanging on to the menu.

‘Very well, sir.' The man withdrew.

‘What I'm thinking about the soup,' said Henry, as soon as he had gone, ‘is that in Lewis Carroll's poem “Turtle Soup” it says two pennyworth not ten.'

‘That's why I'm here in Tunbridge Wells,' said Malcolm Venables. ‘I've been getting a world authority on the works of Lewis Carroll to take a look at it.'

‘And?'

‘And he says that while all the contexts on this paper here are textually correct, all the numbers that have been added or changed are meaningless to him.' Venables paused and added thoughtfully, ‘Fancy devoting your working life to studying
Alice in Wonderland
…'

‘No funnier than what you're doing,' said Henry.

‘What do you mean?' responded Venables indignantly. ‘I'm trying to save the nation from its actual and its commercial enemies…'

‘One and the same from our perspective,' said Henry cynically.

‘Could be,' admitted Venables. ‘Well, this coded message is from one of our best men…'

‘So…'

‘And is meant to tell us the exact design of a new uranium-assisted gun hatched up behind the Net Curtain…'

Henry Tyler suddenly sat up very straight.

‘… and moreover, one,' added Malcolm Venables meaningfully, ‘which is remarkably like a new one of ours.'

‘One of ours that no one was supposed to know about?' hazarded Henry intelligently. There, presumably, was the rub.

‘Got it in one,' said Venables, his appetite reviving sufficiently for him to reach for a bread roll.

‘And you need to know not only whether they – whoever they are – have actually got it but who it was that gave it to them, if they did?'

‘Precisely,' said the man from Mercantile and Persuasion, warming under this ready understanding. ‘And preferably without anyone knowing that we know anything about anything at all.'

Henry Tyler was at one with him there. While, when there was cloak and dagger work about, he was quite content to leave the dagger side to the Ministry of Defence, he spent a lot of his own working life concentrating on keeping a number of cloaks tightly wrapped.

‘But what forty-two walruses and seventy-two carpenters have to do with it, I can't begin to say,' the Foreign Office man admitted. Struck by a sudden thought, he said, ‘Wasn't Lewis Carroll a mathematician in his private life?'

‘He was and I've had one of them working on it as well,' said the man from Markets and Perks with a certain melancholy satisfaction, ‘and all he said too was that it was interesting, very interesting.'