"Assist in what way, son?" Ockie demands from behind his napoleonic desk. For while officially he trades from the Isle of Wight, his preference in later life is to do business from his Bournemouth hilltop.
"Well, sir," I say awkwardly, "we know you talk to the Ministry of Defence, but we thought you might talk to us as well."
"What about, son?" More irritably yet. "Tell it to us straight. What's the bottom line?"
"The Russians are using Western dealers to supply their covert arms for them," I say.
"Course they are."
"Some of the dealers are business acquaintances of yours," I say, refraining from adding that they are also his partners. "We'd like you to be our listening post, accept questions, talk to us on a regular basis."
A long silence follows.
"Well?" he says.
"Well what?"
"What are you offering, son? What's the sweetener?”
“There isn't one. It's for your country."
"I'll be damned," says Ockie Hedges devoutly.
Nevertheless, after we have taken several walks round the prinked garden, Ockie Hedges, widower, bereaved father, and one of the biggest crooks in the illegal-arms business, decides it is after all time he joined the armies of the righteous.
A tall young man in a blazer marched me across the hall. He had broad shoulders and short hair, which was what Ockie liked his tall young men to have. Two bronze warriors with bows and arrows guarded the double doors to Ockie's panelled study.
"Jason, bring us a nice tray of tea, please," Ockie said, grasping my hand and upper arm at the same time. "And if there's a fatted calf, kill it. Mr. Crammer gets nothing but the best. How are you, son? You'll stay for lunch, I've told them."
He was stocky and powerful and seventy, a pint-sized dictator in a tailor-made brown suit, with a gold watch chain across the flat stomach of his double-breasted waistcoat. When he greeted you he filled his little chest with pride, appointing you his soldier. When he seized your hand, his prizefighter's fist cupped it like a claw. A picture window looked down the gardens to the sea. Around the room lay the polished trophies Ockie valued most: from the cricket club of which he was chairman, and the police club of which he was president for life.
"I've never been more glad to see anyone than what I am you, Tim," Ockie said. He spoke like a British airline steward, oscillating between social classes as if they were wavelengths. "I can't tell you the number of times I nearly picked up that phone there and said, 'Tim. Get yourself up here and let's have some sense.' That young fellow you introduced me to is as much use as a wet weekend. He needs a good barber for a start."
"Oh, come on, Ockie," I said with a laugh. "He's not that bad."
"What do you mean, come on? He's worse than bad. He's a fairy."
We sat down, and I listened dutifully to a recitation of my luckless successor's failings.
"You opened doors for me, Tim, and I did some favours for you. You may not be a Mason, but you behaved like one. And down the corridor of the years a mutuality developed which was beautiful. My only regret was you never met Doris. But this new boy you've landed on me, it's all by the book. It's where did you get this from, and who told who that, and why they said whatever they said, and let's have it down in duplicate. The world's not like that, Tim. The world's fluid. You know it, I know it. So why doesn't he? No time, that's his trouble. Everything's got to be by yesterday. I don't suppose you're going to tell me you're back in harness, are you?"
"Not in the long term," I said cautiously.
"Pity. All right, what's your angle? You never came here without a need that I remember, and I never sent you empty away."
I glanced at the door and lowered my voice. "It's Office but it's not Office, if you follow me."
"No, I don't."
"It's right off the record. Ultradelicate. They want it you and me and no one else. If that's going to bother you, you'd better say so now."
"Bother me? You're joking." He had taken on my tone. "They should check that boy out, if you want my advice. He's a pacifist. Look at those flared trousers he wears."
"I need an update on somebody we used to have an interest in, back in the bad old days."
"Who?"
"He's half a Brit and half a Turk," I said, playing to Ockie's appalling views on race.
"All men are equal, Tim. All religions are paths to the same gate. What's his name?"
"He was cosy with certain people in Dublin and cosier still with certain Russian diplomats in London. He had an interest in a shipment of arms and explosives by trawler out of Cyprus bound for the Irish Sea. You took a piece of it, remember?"
Ockie was already smiling a rather cruel smile. "Via Bergen," he said. "A greasy little carpet seller, name of Aitken Mustafa May."
Payment to AM, Macclesfield, I was thinking as I dutifully congratulated Ockie on his prodigious memory.
"We need your ear to the tracks," I was saying. "His private addresses, trade addresses, the name of his Siamese cat if he's got one."
There was a well-trodden ritual about Ockie putting his ear to the tracks. Each time he did it, I had a vision of a terrible inner England that we poor spies can only guess at, with insiders' signals being flashed over secret computer lines, and secret covenants being called in. First he summoned Miss Pullen, a stone-faced woman in a grey twin set, who took dictation standing up. Her other concern was the autobiography with which Ockie was planning to instruct a waiting world.
"Oh, and take a discreet sampling on a firm called Hardwear up north somewhere, will you, a Mr. May, Aitken M. May?" he said, in a lugubriously throwaway voice, after he had given her a list of other commissions to conceal his purpose. "We had a side deal with them way back, but they're not the same people anymore. I'll want credit rating, company accounts, stockholders, current trading interests, principals listed, private addresses, home phone numbers, the usual."
Ten minutes later Miss Pullen returned with a typed sheet, and Ockie retired to a side room and closed the door and made telephone calls that I could only faintly hear.
"Your Mr. May is on a shopping spree," he announced when he returned.
"Who for?"
"The mafia."
I played my part for him: "The Italian mafia?" I cried. "But, Ockie, they've got all the guns in the world!"
"You're being stupid deliberately. The Russian mafia. Don't you read the newspapers?"
"But Russia's awash with guns and everything else. The military's been selling them off to all corners for years."
"There's mafias and mafias over there. Maybe there's mafias that want something special and don't want the neighbours looking over their shoulders while they buy it. Maybe there's mafias with hard currency who'd like to pay for a little superiority." He studied Miss Pullen's fact sheet, then his notes. "He's a middleman, your Mr. May. A shyster. If he owns more than one demonstration model of anything, I'd be surprised."
"But which mafia, Ockie? There are dozens."
"That's all I know. Mafias. Officially his client is a major nation that wishes to remain below the skyline, so his nominal end-user is Jordan. Unofficially it's mafia, and he's in over his head."
"why?"
"Because what he's buying is too big for his boots, that's why. He's a scrap dealer is what he is, a greasy scrap dealer. Now all of a sudden he's out there with Stingers, heavy machine guns, antitank, heavy mortars, ammunition like there's no tomorrow, night vision. Where he ships it all to is another story. One says northern Turkey, another Georgia. He's cocky. Dined a friend of mine at Claridges the other night, if you can believe it. I'm surprised they let him in. Here you are. Never trust a man with a lot of addresses."
He shoved a sheaf of papers at me, and I stored them in my briefcase. Ushered by Jason to the dining room, we lunched at a twenty-foot oak table and drank barley water while Ockie Hedges successively dismissed intellectuals, Jews, blacks, the Yellow Peril, and homosexuals with a benign and universal hatred. And Tim Cranmer, he just smiled his rent-a-drool smile and munched his fish, because that was what he had been doing for Ockie Hedges these fifteen years: stroking his little man's vanity, riding out his insults, turning a deaf ear to his bigotries, and paying court to his disgusting calling, in the service of a safer, wiser England.
"Flawed from birth is my view. Subhuman. I'm surprised you boys don't have them shot."
"There'd be no one left, that's the trouble, Ockie."
"Yes, there would. There'd be us. And that's all that's needed."
And after lunch there was the garden to admire, not a petal out of place. There were the latest additions to his collection of antique weaponry, which was kept, like fine wine, in a temperature-controlled cellar reached by a lift designed as a portcullis. So it was after four o'clock by the time he stood on his porch with his arms folded, just another childless old tyrant on a hilltop, glowering after me as I climbed into my humble Ford, with the Union Jack behind him sulking on its flagpole.
"That the best your country can do for you, is it?" he demanded, poking his chin at me.
"It's the New Era, Ockie. No big expense accounts, no nice shiny cars."
"Come more often, I might buy you one myself," he said.
I drove again, and for a while the movement dulled my fears. Sometimes a roadhouse offered, but the thought of more stale cigarette smoke and another candlewick coverlet discouraged me, and I kept driving until I was all in. Rain came on, a dark sky lay ahead of me. Suddenly, like Emma, I needed comfort, if only in the form of a decent dinner. The first village provided me with what I was looking for: an old coaching inn with a framed menu and a cobbled yard. The receptionist was a fresh-faced country girl. I smelled roasting beef and wood smoke. I was blessed.
"On the quiet side of the house, if possible, please," I told her while she examined her list of bookings.
And that was when my eye fell on the sheet of printed numbers that lay upside down at her bare elbow. I have little memory for figures as a rule, but I have a nose for danger. There were no names, just groups like groups on a code pad, each group four digits and each line four groups. The heading on the page read WATCHLIST, the source was the credit card company of which Colin Bairstow was a long-standing member.
Not any longer, however. The number of my Bairstow credit card was printed in the bottom right-hand column of the sheet, beneath the word CURRENT in capitals.
"How would you be wishing to pay your bill, sir?" the receptionist asked.
"Cash," I said, and with a fairly steady hand invented a new name for her book of registered guests: Henry Porter, 3 The Maltings, Shoreham, Kent.
I sat in my room. The car, I thought. Ditch the car. Take off the number plates. I willed myself to calm down. If the Ford was hot, then the Ford was a liability. But how hot was it? How hot was I? How hot could Pew-Merriman allow me to be without blowing their interest to the police? Sometimes, I used to tell my joes, you have to take a deep breath, close your eyes, and jump.
I bathed and shaved and put on a clean shirt. I went down to the dining room and ordered a bottle of the best claret. I lay in bed listening to the sibyl voices: Don't go north, Misha. Misha, take heed, please.... If he has started his journey, he should please discontinue it.
But the journey was not of my choosing. I was being con- veyed, never mind whether The Forest, or the whole valley of the shadow, was watching me pass through.
The hill was steep, and the house a stern old lady with her feet firmly planted amid elderly friends. She had a Sunday school face and a stained-glass porch that glowed like heaven in the morning sun. She had pious lace curtains and a hint of grief, and boxed hedges and a bird table and a chestnut tree that was shedding gold leaves. The hill's gorse summit rose behind her like the green hill in the hymn, and behind the hill lay several different heavens: blue for sunshine, black for judgment, and the clear white sky of the north.
I pressed the doorbell and heard the drumming of strong young feet on the stairs. The time was 9:25. The door flew open, and I stood face-to-face with a pretty young woman in jeans, bare feet, and a checked shirt. She was smiling, but her smile faded when she realised I wasn't whoever she'd hoped I was.
"Oh, sorry," she said awkwardly. "We thought you were my friend, giving us a nice surprise. Didn't we, Ali? We thought it was Daddy." Her voice was antipodean but soft. I guessed New Zealand. A barefoot half-Asian boy peered from behind her waist.
"Mrs. May?" I said.
Her smiled returned. "Well, near enough."
"Sorry to be a bit early. I've got a date with Aitken.”
“With Aitken? Here at the house?"
"My name's Pete Bradbury. I'm a buyer. Aitken and I deal a lot together. We have an appointment here at nine-thirty." My tone still brisk but kindly: just two people chatting on a doorstep on a sunny autumn morning.
"But he never has buyers to the house," she objected, as her smile became supplicatory, and slightly disbelieving. "Everyone goes to the store. Don't they, Ali? That's the rule. Daddy never brings his business home, does he, pet?" The boy took her hand and swung from it, trying to draw her back into the house.
"Well, I'm a pretty substantial customer of his, actually.
We've been trading some while. I know he likes to be private as a rule, but he said he had something a bit special for me to look at."
She was impressed. "Are you the big, big buyer? The one that's going to make us all mountainously rich?"
"Well, I hope so. I hope he'll make me rich too." Her confusion increased.
"He can't have forgotten," she said. "Not Aitken. He thinks about your deal day and night. He must be on his way." Her doubts returned. "And you really, really don't think you've made a mistake and you should be at the store? I mean he could easily have driven straight there from the airport. He keeps weird times."
"I've never been to the store. We've always met in London. I wouldn't even know where to find the store."