The Yellow Glass (28 page)

“Anyway.
 
Where was I?”

“Glowing glass.”

“Right.
 
And then a hand came from behind and shoved
me into the shed and locked the door.”

“A hand?
 
No glove?”

“Gosh, no you’re
right!”
 
Sergeant Riley was obviously
brainier than the others who’d been to see me.
 
“So . . he didn’t have his radiation suit on at that point.
 
He put it on before he came back to finish me
off.”

“
If
that was him,” he muttered into his pad.

“If . . ?
 
Do you mean it may have been somebody else in
the radiation suit?
 
That he had an
accomplice?”
 

This had never occurred to
me.

“It’s best to keep an open
mind and not jump to conclusions.
 
Please
describe the contents of the shed to me, Miss Stone.”

I focussed and felt the
click.

“Steel walls, table piled
high with uranium glass, paintbrushes, screwdrivers, nuts and bolts, blowpipes,
pontils, bags of salts, rack of test tubes, blowtorches with the name ‘Sievert’
engraved on their handles, sea charts tied up with raffia and standing in a
basket, row of coat hooks, corpse of Mr B Dexter of Seward Peninsula, Territory
of Alaska, US . .”

“Crikey!
 
How do you do that, Miss Stone?”

I came to and found Sergeant
Riley staring at me intently.

“Do you have a photographic
memory?”

“No, not exactly.
 
I only remember things that I’m interested
in, although, having said that, I’m interested in pretty much
everything
, so . .”

“You’d be a great help in
the force, you know.”

“Mmm, that’s what they
thought at HQ.”
 
I felt a little
sad.
 
“Though, I don’t know what they
think
now
.
 
They’ve dropped me like a hot brick, even
though I put my life on the line for my country.”

“Oh, HQ!
 
Who knows what that outfit think?
 
They’re a law unto themselves.
 
I tell you frankly, we’re on tenterhooks with
this case; always are when we stray into HQ’s territory.”

“Really?”

“Yes.
 
And when the CIA get in on the act, too . .
.”

“The CIA are here?”
 
This was fascinating.
 
“Would that be because Mr Dexter was an
American citizen?”

His face shut down, rather;
I could tell he thought he’d blabbed.

“I’ve signed the Official
Secrets Act of 1939, you know, so there’s no need to worry.”

He had risen and was
returning the chair to its former position by the window, in a meticulous,
policeman-like, fashion.

“Thank you, Miss Stone.
 
That will be all for the moment.”

I was torn between relief
that he hadn’t made me go through the rest of the horrors of that terrible day,
and a slight sense of disappointment that he was leaving, (because he
was
really rather dishy).

“Here’s my card.
 
If you remember anything else that might be
useful, please feel free to give me a call, Miss Stone.”

I watched him go, wondering
whether there was any way the card might be construed as a sign of interest in
me and my pink bedjacket.
 
I picked my
compact up from the bedside cabinet, flicked it open and promptly yelped out
loud at the sight that met me in the mirror.
 
No, sadly not.

 
I’d steeled myself
for a fight the following morning, but none came.
 
On the contrary, I got the strong sense that
Charing Cross were glad to see the back of me.
 
When the usual doctor, accompanied by his troupe of medical students -
like a feudal lord with his vassals - appeared first thing, I was already out
of bed and dressed to go.
 
He seemed a
touch surprised, but no more than that.
 
I brought up the hay fever theory and asked whether he would write me a prescription
for some anti-hiss-something to save my having to visit Dr Knowles, and he was
quite amenable, writing me out a note for the hospital chemist’s, there and
then.

“We don’t expect to see you
here again,” he added, in a distinctly un-gentlemanly way.
 
“The National Health Service is not a
bottomless pit, you know.”

I opened my mouth to answer
back, but then I shut it again.
 
I’d
rather be thought a dreadful time-waster than die of radiation poisoning, after
all.
 
What mattered was that I was fit and
well.
 
So I took the note from him and
thanked him politely for all they’d done for me, before making my getaway.
 
It took a tremendous amount of scouring
identical corridors before I found the chemist’s and, all the time, I was
horribly conscious that the dismal dress that I was wearing would have to go
straight into the scrap-bag the minute I got home.

After getting the
prescription business out of the way, I found the main exit and hung about
outside.
 
I’d telephoned my father as
soon as I’d heard that I was coming out, so I was waiting for his old Crossley
to arrive.
 
However, a blue Hillman Husky
honked at me from across the hospital car park and Major Dyminge stuck his head
out of the window.
 
I was non-plussed for
a moment; I’d been avoiding the Major and I rather suspected he’d been avoiding
me.

“Over here, Rosa!”
 
He waved a peremptory arm.

“Hello Major.
 
What are
you
doing here?”
 
I went over and leaned down
to speak to him through the car window.
 
“I hope you’re not ill.”

“No.
 
Jerzy sends his apologies, but he has a large
order of Battenberg cake to attend to.
 
Another garden party at the Palace, apparently.
 
So I said I’d come and pick you up.”

I suppressed a snigger and
went round to the passenger seat.
 
The
palace garden parties were a bit of a joke with the Stone family, I’m afraid, because
my father was actually quite anti all that.
 
Deep down, I think he still blamed the Royal Family for his long stay in
an internment camp during the war.
 
Since
that time he had developed a strong distrust of all ideologies, (together with
a penchant for the works of Albert Camus
[44]
– hence the beret).
 
“L’essentiel est de
bien faire son métier,” he would quote from ‘La Peste’, and I think doing his
job well pretty much summed up my father’s attitude to life, (whilst also
allowing him not to bite the hand that fed him by supplying perfect
Battenberg’s to the ‘oh-so-English’ Windsors).

“That was kind of you,” I
got into the front seat.
 
“I could very
well have caught the train.”

“Goodness me, we couldn’t
have you doing that; not in your state of health.”
 

Major Dyminge hunkered down
and negotiated his way out of the car park with immense care, which was how he
always drove.
  
(We assumed this was to
compensate for the fact that he’d never informed the licensing authorities of
his damaged eye.
 
We didn’t know this for
a fact, but how many one-eyed drivers did one see behind the wheel?)

“I’m fine, Major.
 
A touch of hay fever is all I have.”

We sat for a good minute,
maybe more, waiting for a car to emerge from the distant horizon and trundle
past us, before chancing our arm and joining the main road.

“What about the
 
. . ?
 
You know, the . . ?”
 
He was
evidently reluctant to bring the subject up.

“The glass, Major?”
 
I grasped the nettle.
 
“The plain, old glass with nothing more
harmful in it than a touch of yellow dye?
 
I have to say that I think the glass was a bright yellow shaggy
dog.
 
Or even a herring.
 
Of the red variety.”

“A red . . ?
 
Oh, I see.
 
How strange.”
 

He was hunched over the
wheel - as if driving the car required the use of every muscle in his body -
and I couldn’t see his face, but he certainly sounded astonished.
 
“What the devil was it all about, then?
 
I mean, why was the murderer wearing that
radiation suit, Rosa?
 
Tell me that.”

“I don’t know.
 
I’ve thought and thought about that suit and
what it might mean, Major.”

I was genuinely surprised
that Major Dyminge wanted to talk about that day.
 
Surprised, too, that my sinking feeling had
suddenly taken itself off and I’d been seized with a strong desire to make
sense of it all.
  
(My old friend,
curiosity.)
 

“Did Reg Arkonnen want me to
think that the glass was dangerous, so he went and put it on – but why would he
bother
when he was about to kill
me?
 
Or was it, in fact,
not
Reg Arkonnen in the suit, but
somebody else?
 
A policeman brought that
one up, I have to admit . .”

“So . . the somebody
else
 
- a person possibly known to
yourself - wore the suit in a deliberate attempt to hide their face from you,
rather than as protection against poisonous substances?”

“Yes!
 
That’s a brilliant idea, Major!”
 
He was jolly good at all this.

“Hmm . . do you know, when
in doubt, I’ve always thought it best to plump for the most obvious
proposition.
 
And, I can’t say that one
strikes me that way.”

“Oh.”
 
I felt a little crest-fallen.
 
“What
is
the most obvious proposition, would you say?”

“Well . . ”
 

The London traffic was
taking the vast majority of his attention and it was several minutes before he
felt able to finish his sentence.
 
When
he did, though, it was highly impressive.

 
“Well . . I would suggest that the murderer,
Reg Arkonnen, did not know that the glass wasn’t poisonous.
 
That, on the contrary, he was under the
belief that it was
highly
poisonous.
 
Which was why he jumped out
of the window in that office that Tristram had you working in.
 
Moreover . . that if he
were
labouring under this erroneous belief, then somebody else has
been deliberately keeping him in the dark.
 
Which rather suggests that Arkonnen - while being a base murderer who killed
one of the best men I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet in a long and eventful
life - is
not
the main architect of
the plot.
 
That there is another hand at
work, Rosa.”

I gasped at his insight and
proceeded to turn over the implications of this for the rest of the - extremely
long - journey back home.
 
Yes, it seemed
many hours later that we were creeping along the coast road, high above the sea
and the South Foreland Lighthouse, Major Dyminge still hugging the wheel and
breaking every time he dared to shift into a different gear.
 

Eventually, however, we ground
to a halt outside Shore House and Coast Cottage, the wheels of the Hillman
Husky crunching on beach pebbles, and we sat walled up in such silence, it was
as if we’d forgotten how to speak.
 
It
went on and on, until I could bear it no longer.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted
out.
 
“
So
sorry.
 
I should never
have said you were a horrible old man, Major Dyminge.
 
You’re not at
all
horrible and it was unforgivable.”

He turned his lop-sided face
to look at me.

“It was just that I thought
I knew best and I wanted to do it all by myself and . .”

“Do you know who you remind
me of, Rosa Stone?
 
You remind me of
myself.”
 
He patted my hand,
lightly.
 
“Now go out there and find
whoever did this and bring them to justice.”

I gawped at him.

“You’re not going to tell me
to keep out of it, like everybody else does?”

“No, I’m not.
 
Not now.
 
Finish it off, Rosa.
 
Finish the
damn thing off.”

“It was a covert operation,” the
old spy said, “in the early years of the war.
 
I could tell you the year.
 
I
could tell you every detail of the case, but I still harbour lingering
loyalties that do not permit it.
 
Even
after all these years.
 
Would you care
for another glass, Kathleen?”

The drink he’d fed me was a tiny
shot of palest green rocket fuel - bison-grass vodka, he’d said it was -
 
and it had cured the shaking in my legs, like
magic.

“Yes, please, Mr Piotrowski.”

“May I offer you a piece of
toast with that?”

He was standing in his dimly-lit
living-room cum kitchen cum bedroom, and he’d taken his shabby coat off to
reveal a grey, woollen cardigan that was more patches and darning wool than
cardigan and a yellow shirt that it was difficult to believe might, once, have
been white.
 
Yet, still he gave off the
impression that his clothes and his surroundings had little to do with
him.
 
I respected that.
 
Because, if his clothes were bad, his
surroundings were worse.
 
Having grown up
in a slum, I recognised one when I saw it.
 
Mr Piotrowski lived in Onslow Dwellings, just round the corner from
South Ken tube, so he qualified for a nice SW3 postage code but, really, his
flat was a slum.
 
Apparently, they’d been
knocking down most of the building to make into decent flats for working-class
people, but they certainly hadn’t got as far as Mr Piotrowski’s piece of
heaven.

The kitchen was in a tiny alcove
and so was the bathroom.
 
In fact, he had
a bit of old board over the bath and was using it as a table.
 
He leant over it to light his single gas ring
with a match and then toasted me a piece of bread on a toasting fork, held well
above the blue flame.

“I’m afraid I don’t have
anything to go on it,” he said.

“That’s fine.
 
Vodka and toast; couldn’t be better.”

I gazed about me in the
semi-darkness - from the vantage point of a bony settee - at the walls that
erupted with brown damp at the corners, at a fine print of Our Lady hanging
over the fireplace, where he’d rushed to bank the small amount of slack and
kindle a fire the minute we’d arrived, still shaken from our trip to HQ.

“The covert operation; was that
where you met him?
 
Hutch?”
 

The name still caught in my
craw; not enough time had elapsed, I supposed.
 
Give me a couple of weeks and it would be ancient history.
 
“You’ll never believe . .”
 
I would laugh, gaily, down the phone to one
or other of my girlfriends, “what a dreadful old lech Tristram’s boss turned
out to be!
  
Nearly had me on the polished
parquet!”
 
I shivered and took another
sip of lovely, green vodka.

“Oh no, we go back much further
than that.
 
We came into the services in
1906, thrown together during our training by our dissimilarity to every other
man there.
 
Not that Hutchcraft and I had
much else in common.
 
He was a boy from
the outskirts of London and I was descended from an old Krakόw family . .
but neither of us, needless to say, had put a foot inside either Eton or
Oxford.
 
A rather remarkable fellow, long
gone now, had charge of HQ in those years and I believe that we were an
experiment.
 
(For myself, I had studied
languages at Krakόw University and my senior tutor had connections, but I
cannot say how he acquired Godfrey Hutchcraft.
 
Perhaps Hutchcraft accosted him on a dark backstreet; I have no way of
knowing.)
 
I have cut your toast into
soldiers - I believe you English enjoy it that way?”

“How comforting!”
 
I took the plate from him and he settled at
the far end of the settee, placing an ashtray between us.

“In those days Hutchcraft looked
like a half-starved, clerical assistant, but he soon shed his accent, along
with his cloth cap, and began to excel in the dark art of shadowing.
  
While I showed a modicum of artistic
ability, on top of my languages, and found a niche in funny papers.”

“Funny papers?”
 
I imagined him drawing cartoons and penning
comic skits.

“Forgery, my dear.”

“Ah.

He leant forward to nudge the
fire with a poker.

“In later years Hutchcraft
re-invented himself as a somewhat vague, even amiable, character.
 
People thought him rather a duffer.
 
But that was not the man that I knew.
  
So sharp and clever, such a marvellous
ability to turn events the way that he desired.
 
There
were
rumours in those
early days, but it seemed that nobody cared . . . We both became agents and
were operating from the lobby of the Savoy Hotel one evening, when I had occasion
to witness a particularly ugly episode involving a young lady and felt it my
duty to report it to our case officer.
 
Yet, nothing came of it.
 
Until,
that is, I heard that the young lady’s father, an eminent surgeon, had
also
complained, and Hutchcraft was
forced to act.
 
He had begun to establish
his own network of young shadows - the youngest, most impressionable boys, over
whom he exerted the power of a Svengali - and two of them swore on the graves
of their mothers that it was not Hutchcraft, but myself, who had committed this
crime.
 
My superiors might have dismissed
the boys’ story, if it had not been for an odd development.
 
For the young lady, herself, declared the
culprit to be me.”
  

“No!”
 
I gasped.
 
“The bastard!
 
Did he have
something on her?
 
Something he could
blackmail her with?”

“Undoubtedly.
 
He had been watching her in the lobby for
some days, while I pursued more official business, and I believe that he may
have identified a man with whom she took tea.
 
I can say no more.”

“So what happened, Mr
Piotrowski?
 
Did they try to drum you out
of the service?”

“Oh, no.
 
No, it was all hushed up.
 
Money may have changed hands and so
forth.
 
But the stain on my character
remained for the rest of my career and, while Hutchcraft leapt up to the topmost
pinnacle, I remained a lowly birdwatcher on the ground.”
 

Mr Piotrowski poured us both
another shot of vodka and tossed his back in one go.

“However, I kept my sights
trained upon Godfrey Hutchcraft . . and, in many ways, I have to say that he
impressed me greatly.
 
The smooth way in
which he operated.
 
The sheer gall of the
man.
 
He possessed the skills of a superb
magician.”

“Magician?
 
Hutch?”

“Mmm.
 
Sleight of hand, you know.”
 
Mr Piotrowski mimicked a conjurer shooting
delicate fingers beneath his cuffs.
 
Spreading an invisible hand of cards and then magicking them into thin
air.
 
“He’d make you look the wrong
way.
 
Or lull you into not looking at
all!”
 
He laughed.
 
“Excellent for a spy,
 
but . . not for a gentleman.
 
But I do not need to tell you that.
 
I think you met the genuine article today,
Kathleen.”

I peered into the fire; I wasn’t
ready to talk about it.

“The covert operation,” I
said.
 
“Tell me more about that.”

He went very still.
 
Then he shrugged his shoulders and began.

“I lost touch with Hutchcraft
for some years.
 
The town of my birth,
Krakόw, underwent a renaissance in the years after 1918 and the
establishment of the Second Polish Republic.
 
It blossomed into a vibrant, intellectual and ideological centre and
Poland’s position - bound on all sides by neighbours of every political
persuasion - made it an ideal place for HQ to establish a humble birdwatcher,
like myself.
 
I had contacts at the
University and . . it was fruitful.”
 

He set light to one of his thin,
black cigars and lay back on the uncomfortable settee, as if it were cushioned
in eider and satin.

“Then, I was sent to the Kingdom
of Romania for a while and . . so on and so on.
 
But I had returned to London and was working in codes and ciphers, when
Hitler invaded.
  
(Poland’s geographical
position making it as vulnerable to invasion as it had been to
birdwatching.)
 
I was not a young man by
that time, but my nationality and my skills with cryptography persuaded them to
use me in the field.
 
My case officer was
one Godfrey Hutchcraft.”

Mr Piotrowski crossed his
elegant legs to reveal ankles bare of socks.
 
The end of an ugly scar - blue-white and wrinkled at the edges - peeped
from beneath his left trouser-leg.
 
I
looked away, hurriedly.

“As I said earlier, I cannot
divulge too much detail.
 
Besides . .” he
gave a wry laugh, “it would be excessively boring for you, Kathleen, and I am
sure I have bored you enough for one evening.
 
However . . an old man can never resist telling his story.
 
Let me assure you that I will keep it
brief.”
 

“They parachuted me into the
occupied area of Poland, at the heart of which sat my Krakόw, the new
capital of Germany’s General Government.
 
I went with my own, Polish, passport and a mission to re-establish my old
contacts at the University.
 
This I
attempted to do.”

“My parents were long dead by
this time, and my sister and her husband had been living in the family house in
the Las Wolski Forest; a beautiful place, Kathleen – you cannot imagine!
 
Such a beautiful house, too.
  
The French would call that house a
‘chateau’, a word I find infinitely preferable to ‘castle’.
 
However, those days had gone, by then . . .
The Nazis had taken the house by force and my sister and her husband were now
living in a completely different situation.
 
For Zuza’s husband, an academic at the University, was one of the many,
many Jews of Krakow.
 
And I am sure that
you know what happened to them.”

“The Nazis had already built the
ghetto on the opposite side of the Vistula River from the Kazimierz - the
Jewish Quarter - but the deportations had not yet begun.
 
Zuza and Gregor were held captive inside the
walls of the ghetto and it had become impossible to reach them.
 
Everything had changed.
 
The University, too, was quite different from
what it had once been, for so many academics had been removed from their posts,
or fled, or been sent to the ghetto, that the halls were silent.
 
However, I did manage to find one old contact
- I shall call him Jarek - an ambitious man who had been high up in the
administration of the University and was now hand in glove with the Nazis.”

“Jarek had become a very busy
fellow.
 
I had never trusted this man, so
I shadowed him and soon discovered what was keeping him so very busy.
 
The University of Krakόw had owned many
old treasures and, just before the invasion, there had been clumsy, panicked
attempts to conceal them.
 
Jarek had
known of this.
 
Of course, the Nazis were
no different from any on the long list of history’s barbarians - they looted
whatever they could find - and Jarek had his nose to the ground, like a pig
sniffing out truffles for his new masters.
 
This I conveyed to my handlers in London through a system of code that I
had invented and which - although I hesitate to boast - is, I believe, still
widely employed.”

“Now Hutchcraft had no interest
in saving Poland’s precious heritage, but he saw that the stolen treasures
might be used to our advantage and enable us to infiltrate the General
Government.
 
To that end, he decided to
use my background, as the scion of an old and venerable Krakόw
family.
 
(Incidentally, I believe that
the difference in our backgrounds had always rankled with him, but no
matter.)
 
I was to approach Jarek with
the promise of a magnificent hoard of Medieval glassware from Lesser Poland,
that had been buried in various locations in Las Wolski forest, and which had
belonged to the Piotrowski family.
 
In
return for this, I was to receive a share of Jarek’s increasingly profitable
business and an introduction to his Nazi contacts.
 
The Medieval glass was a fiction, you
understand.
 
Not that there was
no
glass; deliveries arrived, by
parachute, of glass which had been manufactured by an English glassmaker of
such talent that it might be mistaken for the real thing.”

“By this time I had made contact
with the local Resistance and there were four of us at work, taking delivery at
night under the most dangerous of circumstances and burying the glass in the
forest, all set to be found.
 
Not in one,
or even two sites, but three, four, five!
 
The sheer
detail
of the
operation astounded me . . but that was Hutchcraft’s forté.
 
He worked in layers, you see, Kathleen.
 
He would pile layer upon layer, as if
painting a watercolour.
 
Moles and
shadows, allies and enemies, truth and lies. So
many
details seemed superfluous until one realised the point of the
obfuscation; that only
one
man could
see the whole picture.
 
Only one man
ever
held that power.
 
Hutchcraft.”