Legacy (2 page)

Once in the subway and reasonably sure he was out of sight, he broke the rules by looking behind without an obvious reason. None of the figures in the park was hurrying. No puffy, sweaty man or
woman suddenly appeared at the top of the steps. Perhaps they were waiting in Queensgate for Roger, if they were there at all. They might have a long wait.

In Oxford Street he made for C&A, where he bought two pairs of black socks. It was cooler in the store and he loitered a while among the suits, before taking a back street to Marylebone
Station, walking slowly with his jacket over his arm. At the station he bought a day return to Beaconsfield. The newsagent had sold out of
The Times
because the printers had gone on strike
during the night, leaving only the early editions available. There would be time to find one later. He settled for the previous week’s
Economist
.

He knew the forty-minute journey. Whether or not they were following by car, they would have to put at least one watcher on the train with him. If there were any ‘they’. He read
until after Slough, when the approaching Chilterns countryside gave reason for glancing about the carriage. It was tempting to get off at one of the small stations before Beaconsfield to see who
got off with him, but that was cinema stuff. The trick in evading surveillance, they were told, was not only to get away but to give the impression you weren’t looking for surveillance
because you were innocent of anything that would merit it. At Seer Green, the last halt before Beaconsfield, he glimpsed a Ford Escort in the car park with Russian diplomatic number plates. He saw
it too late to get the number but was sure enough of its origin. They were supposed to report all such sightings.

At Beaconsfield a grizzled, grey-haired man wearing jeans and incongruously polished brown shoes got off with him. Charles walked unhurriedly up the station approach, pausing to look in a shop
window at the top. The man crossed the road and became engrossed in an estate agent’s window. Charles continued his walk, turning left towards Old Beaconsfield, with its stockbroker tudor
avenues, neo-Georgian mini-mansions and moguls’ houses of the twenties and thirties, with large unseen gardens and new Jaguars and Rovers in swept gravel drives. The low cloud had thinned
enough to permit weak sunshine.

He strode purposefully into Hughes’s, the Mercedes dealership. The forecourt was lined with polished secondhand saloons described as ‘nearly new’, with their distinctive
vertical headlights and squared-off, no-nonsense styling. Beige seemed the most popular colour, followed by red. To one side was a trio of elegant sports models with their dished roofs and thick,
rounded leather seats. Immediately outside the showroom was a luxurious new S class, gleaming silver and easily the biggest car there. Charles paused by it before entering the showroom and
wandering with what he hoped was critical detachment among the new cars within.

A salesman sat smoking at a desk with a telephone, a notepad, a Mercedes brochure and a copy of
Glass’s Guide
, the trade price list. He had rubbery features and crinkly dark hair.
Charles watched through the window as Brown Shoes crossed the forecourt to the older saloons. His back was to the showroom but he could probably see it in the car windscreens. The salesman took two
long pulls on his cigarette before stubbing it out and slipping
Glass’s Guide
into his desk drawer. He rose and came over to Charles, his features now composed into a rubbery smile.
‘Can I help, sir?’

‘I’m thinking of buying a car.’

‘Just what we like to hear, sir. Mercedes, I take it?’

‘Could be.’

‘Anything you’ll be wanting to trade in?’

‘No, I’ll pay cash.’

He made himself the ideal customer, accepting a cigarette while they discussed models and prices over coffee. The salesman was happy to talk residual values but became vague when asked pointed
questions about trade prices. Brown Shoes studied the sports cars on the forecourt. They walked round the new cars in the showroom, then outside to the one- and two-year olds nearby. Brown Shoes
crossed the forecourt to the older saloons, still with his back to them. Charles gave the impression that cost was less important to him than style and comfort, that he might be inclined to wait
for the new mid-range model, that he would probably look in on Jaguar, BMW and Rover dealerships, with a possible nod in the direction of Volvo. There was the family to think of, and Volvo seemed
to make a great thing about safety, which no one else did. Unless, of course, he allowed himself to be wooed by the new S class. That would presumably be even more solid and long-lasting than a
Volvo and he particularly liked it in silver.

‘You look every inch a Mercedes man, if I may say so, sir,’ the salesman said as they shook hands and Charles pocketed his card. ‘Love to see you in one.’

Clutching his brochures, Charles carried on towards Old Beaconsfield. He had provided anyone watching with a reason for his visit and himself evidence, in the event of questioning, as to what he
had been doing. He had ensured that the man in the dealership would remember him. He had also created time and space to spot surveillance.

It was not far but few walked the busy road. They might have a team of cars on him but, Brown Shoes having remained on the forecourt, he was sure he was the only walker. In an Old Beaconsfield
tea shop he lingered over more coffee and ate shortbread, reading his magazine and listening to the conversation of two mothers with children at the same school. They were discussing a third whose
marriage had broken up, whose mother was dying and whose child was ill.

‘I didn’t like to ask too much,’ said one. ‘She looked so awful, as if she might burst into tears at any moment. White as a sheet.’

The other nodded. ‘Dreadful for her. Of course, those highlights she has don’t help.’ No one else came in. Surveillance would have been briefed to identify anyone with whom he
had even an apparently accidental encounter. They would have had to put someone, most likely a couple, in the shop with him. He ruled out the mothers, who had been there for some time. Had it not
been for Brown Shoes, he’d have been pretty sure he’d left them – if they were on him at all – in London.

Charles was approaching thirty, a supposedly vigorous age; the year in which a man might feel he entered full estate, experienced but forward-looking, fecund and purposeful. Instead, he spent
more time musing upon the past than anticipating or shaping his future. This was partly why he had chosen Beaconsfield for what they called his dry-cleaning run. He had been brought up not many
miles away and had spent a short time there on an army methods-of-instruction course in a former prisoner-of-war camp. His memories of that period were vivid. He was fitter then, going for hard
daily runs through the beechwoods after hours in the classroom. It was a cold autumn with woodland carpets of crisp red, yellow and golden leaves and lungfuls of frosty air. He was keen, always
running in army boots, pack and webbing, drawing a rifle from the armoury to make it harder. He wasn’t sure now why he’d done it so intensively. The approved military purpose –
fitness – was part of it, but there was always something else – a craving for solitude amidst the very public life of the army, an escape from daily occupations, or from thought.
Whatever he was running for or from, he felt better for putting himself through it. He didn’t run so much now, nor so hard.

Old Beaconsfield was much as he remembered, little more than a single main street with some quaint shop fronts, oppressed by traffic but still, beneath lowered eyelids, possessed of a reserved
charm. It had been in that very tea shop that he and Janet, his then girlfriend, had agreed to part. Theirs had been an affair in which tea shops featured prominently. It had started in one in
Oxford before he joined the army and had begun to come apart in another in Belfast, where she had visited him during his single afternoon off in four months. He wouldn’t have been surprised
to hear that she now owned one. It was what she often said she most wanted to do, as she became a solicitor.

As lunchtime approached more customers came in and Charles ordered soup and bread. There was still no hurry and he was reluctant to break his semi-trance. As Roger said, secret service beat
working for a living, so far. Roger, he imagined, would by now have made himself at home in some London drinking club, pouring drinks down a sequined cleavage and thinking to hell with
surveillance. Unless the cleavage was the surveillance.

The journey back to London showed no further sign of surveillance. He took the now-functioning tube to Trafalgar Square and walked along the Strand to the short road that led down to the Savoy.
He was fifteen minutes early. ‘If you’re on time, you’re late,’ he remembered their trainer, Gerry, saying as he glanced up at the Upstairs restaurant overlooking the main
entrance where the cars turned. Someone had said it was good after a play or film, and not too expensive. He would recce it later.

An hour later he lowered his bone china tea-cup to its bone china saucer, using his left hand and without taking his eyes from the early edition
Times
he had picked up in Beaconsfield. If
he had not found it he would have had to root through dustbins for an old one, since the instructions were that he had to be reading
The Times
. He lowered the cup as precisely as possible,
appearing to read but concentrating entirely on the movement. One of his father’s eccentricities had been to practise using his left hand in anticipation of the stroke he claimed was his
destiny, and which was statistically most likely to paralyse his right side. In fact, death, when it came so prematurely, took both sides at once, in a heart attack, while he slept.

Cup reached saucer dead centre with a faint chink. The tearoom, quiet when he arrived, was beginning to bustle. He was now the only solitary, the others having been joined by their guests. He
had considered ordering for two but his instructions – to await a contact who had his description and would give the password – did not indicate whether there was to be a meeting, with
a discussion, or just a message quickly passed. He studied the faded opulence of the room, with its golds, blues and reds, the sumptuous but tired sofas and armchairs, the table legs that had been
knocked a few times too many. In the middle was a grand piano and a harp. A man wearing a white jacket and an auburn-haired woman in a long black dress had arranged music sheets and sat at both as
if about to play, then disappeared without a note. The tea-takers, mostly female, had paid no attention.

He folded the paper and looked around, transferring it from one hand to the other. The self-consciousness involved in deliberately appearing to be about to do what he was about to do made every
action feel unconvincing. No one in the room looked a likely contact, not even the stocky, energetic man who so resembled the man who had first interviewed him for the service that Charles was
tempted to ask him to take off his jacket to see whether he was wearing the same gold armbands. He certainly wore a similar spotted bow-tie. Charles wondered whether he would ever himself attempt a
bow-tie. Perhaps you had to be forty to get away with it. It would help to be florid.

A waiter was working his way round, pausing now at a table of two women and two smartly dressed little girls who giggled amidst jokes and cake-crumbs on the sofa. One of the women was paying.
Charles would soon have to decide finally whether to pay and go, or order more, or just go on sitting. The woman who was not paying got up and headed for the Ladies’. Charles took out his
wallet and waited. He would pay, take one more swing through all the public rooms, recce the Upstairs restaurant, then go. Since he had not been briefed on what was to be conveyed, a missed meeting
seemed no big deal.

‘Excuse me, but you’re not a friend of David Carter’s, are you?’

He stood too abruptly. ‘Not exactly. I’m his cousin.’

It was one of the women with the children, the blonde one he had seen make for the Ladies’. She stood before him, smiling with a mixture of shyness and determination. Her diction was
perfect but her accent foreign. ‘Perhaps you were at his wedding in France?’

‘I was, but I don’t think we met.’ The recognition phrases over, it was now up to him to direct the meeting. ‘Won’t you sit down?’

‘I really haven’t time since we are just leaving. But perhaps you could quickly tell me if you’ve heard from them.’

As they sat Charles shook his head at the approaching waiter.

She was smiling at him again. ‘I think you must have spilt something.’

He looked down at his trousers. ‘My tea, a while ago. Stupid of me. I hadn’t noticed. I was experimenting.’

‘Experimenting?’

He smiled back. ‘Another time. Have you a message for me?’

The hum of the tea-room was sufficient to make overhearing difficult but not enough to compel raised voices. With two fingers pressed coquettishly against her cheek, she glanced at the ceiling
as if trying to recall a date, or a name, or a shade of colour. Her eyes were grey-green, her skin slightly olive and her eyebrows well-defined and dark, despite her apparently genuine
blondeness.

The waiter was still nearby. ‘Now let me see, I think it was’ – she paused until the waiter had moved on – ‘the message is for Eric.’

Charles nodded and leaned forward. He could not be seen to take notes.

‘Please tell Eric that Leonid could not make the meeting on the 27th because the committee has been in continuous session about new developments in the project. Following the last
experiment it was decided to reinforce the tubes and further delay ignition. Eric will know what this means.’ She laughed and pushed back her hair, as if they were engaged in social
chit-chat. Her mannerisms and tone were middle-class southern English; her accent and careful diction, he suspected, were Eastern European. He remembered that he would have to describe her clothes:
calf-length dark skirt – called a midi? – shaped around her hips, looser at the bottom; polished brown boots, square-toed; cream roll-necked jersey, tight fitting. All a little warm,
perhaps, for a muggy day, but in autumn you never knew. He was looking again at the way her eyebrows lifted slightly at the corners when their eyes met, briefly. She looked away and went on.