I got back to the office about five, and Wilkins, full of disapproval, brought me a cup of tea in which she had deliberately put sugar knowing I didn’t like it.

  * * *

  She handed me an opened letter with a cheque clipped to the corner of it. It was from a firm of City bankers saying that in accordance with instructions from their clients – Agencia Ganero, Panama City – they enclosed a cheque for the first instalment of services. No receipt was necessary. It was for a thousand pounds and I fingered it lovingly, and there was the faint howling of the wolf pack beating a retreat down Northumberland Avenue to the river.

  Wilkins said, ‘Do I get to know about this?’

  I said, ‘I’ll give you a full summary tomorrow – and you can lock it in the safe.’

  ‘To be brought out on your demise?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Have you signed any contract with this Agencia Whatever-it-is?’

  ‘I never sign anything – but it’s all in order. You should try looking pleased.’

  A tiny thundercloud had formed on her brow and the bright blue eyes were flying storm signals.

  ‘You can’t,’ she said, ‘take money from Armstrong and Pepper, and also from someone else?’

  ‘Why not?’

  She frowned. ‘The simplest thing you touch in no time at all becomes too devious for words. In a moment of crisis where would your loyalty rest?’

  ‘In a moment of crisis – with me. Did I ever bilk a client?’

  ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘Ah, but that was when I was young and learning the business – and anyway it was deserved. Look, Arnold Finch I find for old Lancing. What I do in my spare time is my own business. This—’ I tapped the cheque, ‘—is a straightforward commercial job.’

  ‘Really?’ It wasn’t just sarcasm she got into the word, there was a nice lacing of gall and wormwood.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Then it’s odd, isn’t it, that from this morning our office phone has been tapped.’

  I stared at her, surprised.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  She smiled, wintry but triumphant. ‘Because I was told so – officially.’

  I slumped back. ‘Oh God – no. Not again.’

  ‘Oh God, yes – again. So you watch your tiny little steps.’

  She moved to the door, half-opened it, raised her free hand to touch her rusty hair, and then in a warmer voice said, ‘There are times when you make me wonder why I stay here.’

  She went out.

  I reached for a cigarette, unthinkingly, and snapped my lighter at it only to find that I was trying to light the cork-tip end. Well, there was an excuse for it.

  What the hell could they want? Or even, how the hell could they know?

  It was the vellum-faced number from the Ascanti Club who came to my flat at ten minutes past ten that night, the fish fancier, and expert in Chinese musical instruments. I’d treated myself to a whole lobster and a green salad on the kitchen dining flap, lingering over it with the evening papers and a cheap bottle of white wine. I was flopped in my armchair watching television when he came in.

  If I’d wanted any confirmation that he wasn’t police, his entry would have clinched it. The police go for tradition… the heavy tread on the stairs, the double knock which takes the paint off the door panel, and a silence broken by a noisy clearing of the throat. This chap was one of the boys from the shady side of Whitehall.

  I didn’t hear the door open. He was just suddenly there standing a yard from my chair, his feet washed with the pearly light from the television screen.

  I said, ‘Sit down and watch this.’ It was an old Laurel and Hardy film and both comics were on a roof, fixing a radio aerial. He sat down on a footstool. Stan Laurel turned, sideswiped Hardy with the end of a ladder, and the fat man slid off the roof into a lily pool.

  The fish-fancier laughed and I knew then that he was too human to get very high in his profession. Laurel shuffled to the edge of the roof and looked down at Hardy and his foot dislodged a tile that caught Hardy full and square on his bowler.

  I said, ‘I can think of a lot of people I’d like to see this happen to.’

  ‘Sutcliffe wants to see you,’ he said.

  I’d heard that summons before.

  ‘Let him wait,’ I said. ‘And since you seem to be around so much, you’d better put a name to it.’

  ‘Vickers. Edwin.’

  ‘Who else is there?’

  I leaned forward and switched off as the commercial came through with a great steamy shot of sausages and baked beans that made me feel ill.

  ‘Casalis,’ he said. ‘You know him?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Better not keep them waiting.’ He sounded sad.

  ‘They’re getting you down.’

  ‘I’ve been in it too long. Next year I retire. My brother owns a hotel in Scotland. I’m going to run the bar for him.’

  ‘Nice quiet life.’

  ‘I suppose so. Trouble is we don’t get on very well.’ He stood up and eased towards the door. I reached down and felt for my shoes which I’d taken off.

  I said, ‘You really know about Chinese musical instruments?’

  He shook his head. ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica.’

  ‘What about fish? Those tanichthys albanastes, for instance.’

  ‘Albonubes,’ he corrected. ‘They’re white cloud mountain minnows and they come from China.’ He looked at me, dead pan.

  ‘Why,’ I said, as I stood up, ‘should there be all this steam up on your side of the road about a few diamonds?’

  He still gave me the familiar security look, dead face, dull eyes and a slight turn-down of the mouth. It wasn’t difficult for him because his face was more or less that way naturally.

  It was a black saloon, parked outside Mrs Meld’s front door, and it was driven by a man with a thick neck who took us through the traffic with a sturdy indifference for other people’s rights and the sure knowledge that any policeman who flagged him would get a flea in his ear.

  We swung into Covent Garden at a rate of knots, scattered a few people just coming out of the Royal Opera House, crushed a long string sack of brussels sprouts, and then I was decanted at the door of Sutcliffe’s flat which most people would have taken for the entrance to some seedy publisher’s offices, and the car was gone.

  I’d been there before, several times. Always this flat. They don’t ask you to call at their offices. Sometimes I wondered if they were quite sure where their offices were or even whether they had any. Hackett, Sutcliffe’s manservant, opened the door to me and looked surprised which didn’t fool me. He’d taken a good look at me over the monitor before he’d opened the door.

  He said, ‘Nice to see you, Mr Carver. Putting on a bit of weight?’

  ‘Too many potatoes. Can’t afford meat. If I’m not down in fifteen minutes send up a glass of bicarbonate.’

  He turned down his mouth and said, ‘’E’s in no mood for flippin’ flippancy.’

  He never was. I went up on my own and couldn’t stop myself giving a little tug to my tie before I went in.

  There were two of them there. Casalis and Sutcliffe.

  I caught Casalis’s eye and he winked quickly. I liked him. He was one of Sutcliffe’s Paris men, and I’d worked with him before. They had a habit of hauling me in from time to time and putting the harness on – but only if I had something special to offer them. One way and another, of course, they were as ruthless as I knew Suma could be if it suited them. And this, of course, had to be something to do with Suma. Casalis was a youthful-looking forty, a shade overblown, fair hair, honest brown eyes, and was in a much higher security service bracket than poor old Ed Vickers would ever be. And he still got a kick out of the whole business. Must have appealed to the eternal boy in him.

  ‘Nice to see you, Carver,’ Sutcliffe said.

  ‘You’re the last person I wanted to see,’ I said.

  He grinned. He was lying back in an armchair, a floppy old corduroy dressing-gown wrapped loosely around him, and his neat little feet were up on a small stool. He was a plumpish number, dumpy, and wearing dress clothes under his gown. He had a smoking cap on, and somehow he reminded me of Queen Victoria, latish period.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘And don’t give us any sauce.’

  ‘You usually offer me a whiskey,’ I said.

  ‘Running true to form,’ said Casalis.

  ‘Later,’ said Sutcliffe. ‘If you deserve it.’

  I lit a cigarette and stared at one of the modern paintings on the wall. It looked like a long vegetable marrow with a couple of triangular breasts and a squashed watch for a navel.

  Sutcliffe said, ‘You’ve been to Ireland. Why?’

  ‘On a job,’ I said.

  ‘Specify,’ he said.

  ‘I’m trying to trace a bloke – for Armstrong and Pepper, Solicitors – who doesn’t seem too keen to pick up an inheritance of six thousand pounds. Name of Arnold Finch.’ I knew with him that you had to be careful what you picked to leave out because you never knew what he knew. He seemed satisfied.

  ‘Where in Ireland?’

  ‘Hotel in Kenmare and—’

  ‘Don’t be a buffoon!’ Cold steel whistled through the air, each word double-edged.

  ‘Did I say something wrong?’

  Sutcliffe shifted his feet on the stool, and began to pack a pipe.

  He said, ‘I want the full story.’

  ‘So do I,’ I said. ‘I want to find Arnold Finch and collect a fifty quid fee.’

  ‘Where did you go in Ireland?’

  ‘Kenmare,’ I said. ‘I had a lot of money running on my horse and I wanted to protect it.’

  Sutcliffe smiled, and said, ‘And did you enjoy your midnight swim?’

  The bastard. He always had one up his sleeve. I put a good face on it, grinned, and said, ‘So Harry is one of your boys. Well, he fooled me, be Jasus.’ Just below my feet was a lot of deep water, but I made up my mind then that I wasn’t going to jump. I would have to be pushed.

  Sutcliffe said, ‘If the Chinese People’s Republic keep a country house in Ireland – which they are quite entitled to do – we like to have someone handy. Now give us your story, straight. By the way, I think I should tell you that we know you visited a certain flat in Hallam Street today, and that you also called on a Miss Suma Tung at the Savoy. And I’ll be honest – at the moment I have no idea why. But I’m going to know, of course. One way or the other.’

  And I knew what that meant. If it wasn’t one way – then it was the other down in the basement with Hackett performing and the bright lights going. Thank God, I’d so far only known about this by hearsay.

  I said, ‘I want to see my lawyer.’

  They both smiled, and Sutcliffe said to Casalis, ‘Give him a whiskey.’

  Casalis took his time, and everyone relished the silence except me. The whiskey, as always, was Glen Livet. I took it gratefully, sipped and thought. Trade, I decided, was the best solution.

  I said, trying to make it dignified, ‘You’ve got your ethics, and I’ve got mine. If you want a confidence from me – then I’m entitled to one from you.’

  ‘You’re entitled to nothing,’ said Sutcliffe.

  I twiddled my thumbs and looked mute of malice. Casalis said, ‘Perhaps a little give and take?’

  Sutcliffe cocked an eye at him. ‘You think so?’

  Casalis nodded. ‘He knows how to keep his mouth shut and I’ve found in the past that he responds to kindness.’

  ‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘And when have I ever let you down?’

  ‘Not recently,’ said Sutcliffe. He looked at Casalis and said, ‘Fill him in.’

  Casalis lit a cigarette and scratched the top of his head.

  ‘Suma and Lian Tung are Chinese agents. They’ve been around a long time. Efficient – and both poison. They’re listed in most countries’ intelligence files.’

  ‘Nice act they’ve got, too.’

  ‘So Vickers says. They also confine themselves mostly to one branch of work.’

  ‘Which,’ said Sutcliffe, ‘I’m sure that even you, bastard as you are, wouldn’t approve of.’

  ‘Shock me,’ I said. I couldn’t see that illicit diamond buying would.

  But he shocked me all right.

  ‘Chinese chief product,’ said Sutcliffe.

  ‘After rice,’ said Casalis. ‘Opium, heroin, snow, horse, dream stuff, poppy juice.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We shocked him,’ said Sutcliffe.

  And, by God, they had. I had a quick picture of all the junkies and the hopheads, and the teenagers just hooked and stealing to buy a shot… a kind of Hieronymus Bosch nightmare, of the whole twitching, lying, fornicating, murdering, do-anything-to-get-it thousands all over the place.

  ‘They’re the European end,’ said Casalis. ‘For the last two years the stuff has been coming in faster than ever before. So much so that it isn’t just any Bureau of Narcotics job alone. It’s security. These two nice little Chinese misses with their sing-songey banjo and tinkle-tinkle lute are the top operators. It makes a fat currency haul for the Chinese Government – and they need foreign currency because, for reasons that need not bother you, they’re buying gold like hell…’

  ‘He looks a bit sick,’ said Sutcliffe.

  I finished my whiskey in one go.

  ‘I thought he was tough,’ said Casalis. ‘But there’s always something that gets the toughest of us.’

  He was right. I was sick. I had had a friend once who just never could get to level off until he took an automatic to himself.

  Sutcliffe said, ‘They’ve got this all organised very sweetly. A few lines of entry we know. So now, tell us why you take a midnight swim out to Gowduff Island?’

  I got up and helped myself to another whiskey. Neither of them said anything. Everything was very still so that the soda hissing into the glass sounded like Niagara.

  I stood there, looking down at the bubbles of soda winking out, and I was telling myself that the odd step or two over the white line was one thing, that just now and then you could harness up a couple of half-truths to a rickety wagon and drive home with a harvest load you’d done nothing to sow or work. Now and again… yes. But not always. Like the good book says, there’s a time for everything and, although it was against my nature normally, I decided that this was a time for truth – and, if necessary, to kiss the cash goodbye.

  I went over and sat down, and still they said nothing. Sutcliffe blew a cloud of pipe smoke and disappeared behind it like a squid.

  I said, stupidly, ‘You’re dead certain of this?’

  Casalis nodded.

  ‘All right, I’ll give you everything.’

  ‘Everything?’ It was Sutcliffe.

  ‘Yes.’

  So I did. I gave them the whole thing from the moment Wilkins had dropped The Times on my desk until the moment that afternoon when she had told me that our telephone was tapped, and they heard me out without interruption.

  I finished, ‘I guessed you were coming into this when Wilkins said she’d been informed the phone was tapped. Why’d you do that?’

  ‘We had an idea you might be useful to us. If you know your phone is tapped you don’t waste your time handing out lies to us. We don’t like wasted time.’ It was Sutcliffe.

  I said, ‘Do you think Billings is at the top of this pile?’

  Sutcliffe said, ‘We don’t know. This is a new angle. I’ll have to speak to the Yard about it. But one thing is clear – the Chinese people aren’t going to waste currency buying industrials. They’ll do a straight trade for drugs of equivalent value.’

  ‘But what about me?’ I was recovering a little. You have to if you want to go on enjoying life. ‘Do I walk out of here with a nice big thank you, or is someone going to make out a temporary employment card for me in some Ministry?’

  Sutcliffe smiled. ‘You ought to be slung in clink for accepting employment from Suma Tung. But that’s a detail. Sometime in the future those drugs – if we’re right about that – have to be exchanged for the diamonds. We’d like to be there. You’re already persona grata with Miss Tung, and she says she’s got something else up her sleeve for you. So you carry on.’

  ‘What about terms?’

  Casalis said, ‘He recovers from shock fast.’

  With a touch of anger, I said, ‘Get this straight – I’d like to bitch this thing up, too. But I’m a working man. I haven’t stuck any insurance stamps on Wilkins’s card for months.’

  Sutcliffe stood up.

  He said, ‘You get the usual fees from us. You get whatever you manage to get out of Miss Tung. And if the diamonds are recovered you get your percentage of the reward – which means that you’ll be arguing with the loss adjusters, or whoever they are, for months. Casalis is assigned to you. He or someone else will be right on your tail all the time.’

  I said, ‘And how far do I go?’

  ‘As far as you can. Make yourself useful to Suma Tung. She’s taken a fancy to you, hasn’t she?’

  Casalis said, ‘You’ll have him blushing in a minute.’

  Sutcliffe said comfortingly, ‘You’ll get your instructions when to bail out.’

  I said, ‘Once every two years you do this to me.’

  ‘Once every two or three years—’ he said, without concern, ‘—you do it to yourself.’

  I said, ‘Horace carries water-colour paints and a rather old-fashioned automatic. I have hand luggage, too. Do we get a clearance on that if we have to travel?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘And if I’m up against a wall in a bad light with something dark making for me?’

  ‘You get a clearance for that, too. Naturally. But try and avoid it. You want a list of the other things to avoid?’

  ‘It’s a long time since you went over them.’

  ‘Avoid temptation – money, women and fast dealing.’

  Chapter Seven

  Dressed to Kill