The Parrot Cage, page 32
‘About what?’ At the sight of her face he hurriedly added to his simple question: ‘I’m not being disingenuous, Gerry, really. But I am not sure what it is exactly that you’re asking.’
‘How much did you know about Peter’s operation that culminated last night in his agent’s ending up in hospital?’
‘Not very much. But I knew it was on.’
She looked into his face, and saw that it was as white and strained as it had so often been in the past before his brother had been killed while trying to escape from his prison camp.
‘And did you know who the agent was?’
The tightness about his mouth dissolved as she watched and part of her own tension relaxed. If Mike had not known, then there must have been less evidence than she had thought and she had not been quite so criminally careless as she had assumed. He shook his head and then asked his own question.
‘Why do you need to know?’
‘I just wondered if I was the only one who hadn’t been told. What about you, Tony?’
‘Yes, I knew,’ he said. There was no self-defence in his soft voice.
‘But couldn’t you have warned me?’
‘Of course not. How could I, Gerry?’
She put up a hand to cover her eyes for a moment and he said, slowly and with far less of an accent that she was used to hearing:
‘Is she all right?’
‘Just.’
‘I see. And have you quarrelled with the Chief about it?’
‘Not in words. But otherwise, yes.’
‘That wasn’t fair.’ Gerry walked across the stained carpet to look out of the windows across the park. She felt as though she had been drained suddenly of half her anger and it was in an almost meditative tone that she said:
‘If you could have seen her face when they’d been at it, you might have taken a different line.’
‘She must have been a volunteer. They all are.’
‘I know. But don’t we all know how he’d have made her offer herself?’ After she had said that she regretted the form of words, but it was too late to alter them.
‘Would one of you perhaps care to enlighten me?’ interrupted Mike. Tony stood silently, waiting for Gerry to begin.
‘Peter Suvarov, our esteemed chief, has just sent my eighteen-year-old sister to France for something – what, I still don’t know – and at some point on her journey back here she was picked up by some of our target people in this country. They seem to have had a lovely time beating up my poor little Ming before we …’ Her voice wobbled and she knew that she could not say any more without breaking down.
It was Mike who reached her side first and as he put both arms around Gerry, he jerked his head in dismissal at Eynsham, who after a surprised pause, obeyed and left them in the empty room.
Mike said nothing and did not try to pet or soothe her. He just held her against him, occasionally stroking her fair hair, until she herself straightened up. Then he moved back, taking away his hands.
‘Thank you, Mikey. It was what I needed.’
‘Gerry …’ He stopped on her name and just looked at her. Something about the way she seemed to have disintegrated behind her neat exterior gave him a certain courage and he went on. ‘Gerry, first of all, how exactly is your sister?’
‘Well, when we left the hospital they said that her injuries were in fact quite slight: some bad bruising to her face and one or two small cuts and a nosebleed. That’s all. But I am afraid for her. Can’t you just imagine the sort of nightmares and terrors that must be biting at her?’
‘Yes, I can. And if there is anything at all that I can do to help – you will tell me, won’t you?’
‘You’re a dear, Mike. But the chief seems set on dealing with all the immediate things; he’s whisking her off to stay with his wife and sister-in-law this evening. Conscience, I suppose.’ The bitterness in her voice surprised Mike, but he tried not to show it.
‘Gerry,’ he said, ‘Why don’t you come out for a walk? It’s nearly lunchtime.’
She thought for a while, even looked up as though she could see through the ceiling to her chief, and then shrugged.
‘D’you know, Mike, I’d love that.’
‘Good. Got a coat?’
‘Yes, but it’s upstairs, with my hat and gas mask.’
‘I’ll get them for you,’ he said, correctly interpreting her expression. ‘Go downstairs and wait for me in the hall.’
He joined her breathlessly about seven minutes later and helped her into her old-fashioned woollen coat. Then she slung the canvas gas-mask holder over her shoulder and pulled on an unbecoming but comfortable felt hat and preceded him out of the door and across the road into the park.
They walked in silence until they had completed an entire circuit of the lake and then he took hold of her hand and began to talk.
‘Gerry, I know that you must be tormented for what your sister has suffered – and may still suffer – but that’s not all, is it? Tell me. You know that you can trust me.’
She squeezed his gloved hand with her own.
‘Yesterday I’d have said, “Of course I trust you, Mike”, but today that’s all gone,’ she said sadly.
‘It shouldn’t have.’
‘I feel such a fool.’ Mike didn’t answer, but he did not let go of her either and in the end she answered the question she had wanted him to ask. ‘I assumed that I could judge people by the way that they made me feel, which is of course the most stupid, ridiculous, childish, dangerous fallacy in the world.’
‘Go on.’
‘I despised my husband because he bored and irritated me, and I trusted and liked and wanted Suvarov because … And I suppose I trust you and that’s why I’m telling you all this because I like you and because you appear to have trusted me.’
‘And needed you very much, Gerry. I’m not sure how I’d have coped after I got the news that Simon had been shot, if I’d not had you to talk to. When Simon was killed, I felt that the world was breaking up around me: almost as though anything I stepped on might disintegrate under my feet. No, that’s not quite right, but I felt insecure, useless, unhappy – and desperately afraid.’ He stopped and turned to face her, speaking quietly but with an intensity that she had not heard from him before. ‘You were the only thing in life that I could be certain of.’
‘Oh, Mike,’ she said inadequately. He saw that she was not in a fit state to think about anyone else’s feelings and so he changed the subject.
‘By the way, have I met your husband?’
The abrupt change of tone seemed to bring Gerry up short and jerk her mind into a different gear.
‘Not quite. But he saw us once ages ago, in almost these circumstances, and that evening accused me of having an affair with you.’ She even laughed a little.
‘Pity he wasn’t right, isn’t it?’ It took a little time for the sense of that comment to percolate into Gerry’s brain.
‘I think I take that as a compliment, Mike,’ she said at last. ‘And a very sweet one.’
He touched her face briefly, but she was too deeply embroiled in her anxieties to respond. He let his hand drop, started to speak, thought better of it, and then shrugged before saying, almost as though he were joking:
‘I might have been tempted to try if you hadn’t so obviously belonged to the chief.’
At that she turned quickly away from him and walked rather fast down to the bridge. He ran after her.
‘I didn’t mean to offend you, Gerry. It just was very clear from almost the first day that he and you were … somehow involved. I don’t mean that in the crude, physical sense. But it was obvious that there was a tremendous charge between you.’
‘Well, we’ve fused it now, if there ever was.’
‘Broken fuses can be mended.’
‘Not this one. Look, there’s too much work to do for us to be slopping around here telling the darkest secrets of our souls. We ought to eat and then get back.’
‘As you choose.’ He sounded almost hurt, but Gerry did not have any spare emotion to spend on Mike just then.
Two hours later Flixe was sitting on one of the hard green benches at the Round Pond, waiting in increasing anxiety for Suvarov. He came, very late and clearly irritable, and sat down beside her.
‘There’s a frantic flap on today. I haven’t much time. What is it? If you want to tell me what a murderer I am to have sent your sister to France, don’t bother. I’ve had plenty from Gerry, and there’s probably more to come.’
Flixe put her elbows on her knees and rested her chin in her hands, feeling that her head was too leaden to support itself.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘But there are so many things I need to know. What did you send her for?’
‘Evidence. You know Jean-Pierre’s group was sabotaging our missions over here. We could get no proof from this end. Your information helped, but there was nothing conclusive: you know that. But I’ve had a man working over there for months – ever since Ming agreed to go to France for me. He got the proof and hung on to it all until she was ready to fetch it. Because we didn’t know where they’d infiltrated, we couldn’t trust the message to any of the usual channels and I had to choose someone in whom I had absolute faith.’
‘How did you know your agent had got it if it was too sensitive to send?’ Flixe asked, her professional interest surfacing for a moment.
Suvarov looked at her as though debating whether or not to answer her questions. His face softened slightly and he gave her a reply of a sort.
‘We’d agreed to an apparently innocuous message which could be added to his radio operator’s normal report – we couldn’t have coded the entire report like that because there was far too much of it. But I did use the same method to send back the instruction to sit on the information until Ming was safely trained.’
‘And then you let her get kidnapped … All wasted and for nothing.’
‘No, we got the message. She handed it over at Southampton.’
Flixe’s righteous anger began to heat up again and overtake the other, less comfortable, emotions that had been wearing her out all morning.
‘And so she had nothing to give them when they were roughing her up. Poor little bitch. You really are a bastard, Suvarov: you make certain that your message is safe, but Ming – flesh, blood and shivering nerve ends – is just left out there with no kind of protection.’ She slid her heavy head further down between her arms until her hands were clasping the back of her neck.
‘Is that it?’ His voice was quite without colour or any kind of emotion. ‘Because if so I have to get to the hospital to collect her.’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ sighed Flixe, lifting her head and sitting upright once more. ‘No, not really. Have you arrested Jean-Pierre or did he get out?’
‘I have no power to arrest people. But to answer your question: no, he has not been caught. He got out as you elegantly put it. Somebody tipped him off a little while before we – you – discovered what had happened to Ming.’
This time there was emotion in his voice, such tightly compressed emotion that she turned on the seat to look into his face.
‘You can’t think it was me,’ she said in horror.
He looked at her for a long time, his eyes critical and his lips set.
‘No, I don’t. For a short time I wondered. But Ming did tell them where she had come from in France. And just after she let it out one of them made a telephone call. It is possible that that was enough to alert him, if as you said he was already planning to go.’
‘Thank you,’ Flixe said, and then in case he thought that was a sign that she had forgiven him, she added: ‘How long will you be keeping Ming incarcerated?’
‘Don’t, Flixe,’ he protested. ‘She needs rest, a good doctor, care and peace. She’ll get all that with Connie and Diana. And then perhaps you and Gerry could go one weekend soon to stay there with them.’
‘Why couldn’t you have let me keep my anger?’ she said in quiet misery. ‘Go on. Go and get her, and give her my love.’
‘I will. Goodbye, Flixe.’
An hour after that he was driving slowly through the mess of south-east London with the third Alderbrook sister beside him. Of them all, only Ming did not blame him for what had happened to her. And to her alone he had apologised for it. She sat relaxed in the dark-green leather bucket seat beside him in the Morgan, smoothing her left hand, with her right.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Peter. If I hadn’t stopped being afraid it would never have happened.’
‘What happened?’ Peter asked, not letting his eyes look away from the road ahead. ‘I don’t mean the sequence of events, but what happened to the fear?’
He heard Ming laugh, a lovely sound that eased some of his bitter regrets.
‘Well, Peter, as I expected – and you warned – I was more frightened in France than I ever remember being before; then, when I was back in England and had handed over the message, I let go. For practically the first rime in my life I was not afraid of anything: I had done what you asked and so I wasn’t afraid of you—’
‘Were you ever?’ Suvarov asked, interrupting her without apology. There was a pause as though Ming had to work to remember.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘No, I don’t think I was ever afraid of you. But if I had failed, I might have been. For once I was not afraid that I had got on the wrong train; or that I would have lost my ticket and be berated by a furious guard; or that something unspecified, un-imagined, but dreadful would happen to me. And because of that, because I had let go of all my fear, I was easy prey.’ She broke off and turned her head sideways to look at him. Catching sight of the movement out of the corner of his eye, he risked a quick glance away from the traffic and saw her poor, bruised lips smiling at him. Feeling extraordinarily humbled, he waited for what she was going to say next.
‘And so now I understand at last. There’s isn’t any need to be ashamed of being afraid. And you gave me that, Peter.’
He felt ready to weep. That anyone who had been through what she had in the past weeks should be trying to comfort the man who had sent her to it was astonishing enough, but that someone as young and sensitive as Ming should do it moved him immensely.
‘Your sisters can’t forgive me for sending you,’ he said when he could speak again.
‘They don’t understand, Peter. Don’t let them hurt you.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Flixe spent the next few days alone in a state of introspection and self-doubt quite foreign to her character. She told the secretary of the architecture committee that she would not be able to go in to work for some time and so she had nothing to do but think. At one moment she scribbled a note of apology to Suvarov and posted it before she could change her mind. She wrote several letters to Ming at Etchingham, and even one to her mother trying yet again to atone for the hurt she had caused when she had lashed out during the weekend she had spent at home. But suddenly one Friday evening, she knew that she had to talk to someone in the flesh or she would fret herself into real trouble, but it was hard to know to whom she should go.
Gerry had her own troubles, and in any case Flixe needed someone a little outside the circle of which Suvarov was the centre. Trying to analyse just what it was she did want, she thought of Anna Kingsley. Cleared now of all suspicion, Anna appeared to Flixe in the light in which Gerry had always seen her; a disinterested but affectionate intelligence to whom any appeal could be made. It might be turned down, but it would never be mocked or used against the appellant in any way. The prospect of talking to someone like that made Flixe move decisively at last.
She got up off the low chair and flung off her dressing gown to dress in a jersey and skirt. The sound of the rain against her windows was loud enough to remind her to find her Aquascutum in spite of the turmoil in her mind, and with her umbrella in her hand she let herself out of the flat.
Down in the street the wind seemed to blow all the rain directly into her face however she held the umbrella and so she rolled it up. It cost far more effort to hold it up than its protection was worth. As she was fiddling with the catch to make it hold shut she was aware of a hair-lifting sensation; it felt as though there were someone very close behind her. She strained to hear any betraying sound; but there was nothing to hear except the relentless wet patter of the rain and the occasional distant swishing noise as a vehicle a few streets away drove its nearside wheels through the gutters. Suddenly terrified, she could not think what to do: to look round would seem to invite disaster if there were anyone there, and yet to do nothing would be mad. She finished clipping the umbrella shut and then began to walk forward again, hoping that she had invented the presence she could still sense looming up behind her.
Sickeningly she felt a pair of strong hands gripping her shoulders. There was no mistaking the hands for those of a friend. This was an attack, shattering, and coming with no real warning on a perfectly ordinary wet London night, so near the flat in which she had always felt safe. Fear paralysed all her faculties. A stray thought became recognisable amid the terror: well at least I won’t have to agonise over it all any more. Then, as though the very act of thinking had reawakened her, Flixe began to struggle. The man dragged her into an alley behind the block of flats and pressed her up against the wet brick wall, his hands shifting to her throat.
‘This will teach you to interfere, salope,’ he said in a voice whose accent betrayed its nationality as firmly as the obscenity. It galvanised Flixe into action at last. Superimposed on the voice of her attacker was that of the ex-colonial policeman at the requisitioned house near Bristol: ‘You’ve no need of revolvers, or garrottes or suchlike if you’ve an umbrella in your hands.’
Without even thinking, Flixe stopped trying to hit the man’s face. Standing still at last, feeling his hands tighten around her throat, she calmly reversed the umbrella, brought it point upwards between them and before the man could discover what she was doing put both hands on the shaft and with all her strength drove it up under his chin.
