Watchman (novel) Read online

  What was important was that she had substantiated his fragile theory. He had been set up. A man had motioned to her from the door of the hotel and, when she was outside, had given her a description of Miles. Could she describe this man? Tallish, good-looking, a bit suave even, nicely spoken.

  And that was it. She had been paid to talk to Miles, probably to distract his attention ever so slightly. Well, it had worked like a charm. The question now was, who was it? Phillips seemed the obvious choice, but Phillips had been smartly attired, and the man who had approached her had been casually dressed.

  He thought to himself for the hundredth time, so what if there is a conspiracy? Who cares? It’s over, nobody wants to know about it with the possible exception of Richard Mowbray. So why bother? Why not just go back to square one?

  Because, he knew, if he did not solve the mystery, there could be no “going back.” It was as though the first square had been removed from the board.

  “Dad!”

  Jack came loping toward him, a pair of headphones clamped to his head.

  “Where the hell did you spring from?”

  Jack slipped the headphones down around his neck.

  “Oh,” he said, switching off the tape, “I’ve just been wandering about. I was supposed to meet someone for lunch at that little Greek place near the British Museum. They didn’t turn up.”

  “Oh Christ, what time is it?” Miles looked at his Longines, left to him by his father. It was ten past one. “I’m supposed to be meeting Billy at one. Damn.” He turned to Jack. “Would you like to join us?” Miles hoped that his tone would hint that this was politeness only, that Jack would not be welcome. Jack smiled, touching his father on the shoulder.

  “Thanks but no thanks,” he said. “Things to see, people to do. You know how it is.”

  “Well,” said Miles in mitigation, “we must arrange to have lunch together in town before you leave. A proper lunch, just the two of us.”

  “Yes,” agreed Jack, already moving away. And with a wave he was gone, putting distance between them.

  Miles watched him go, then made for a nearby pub, the King and Country. He would telephone Billy at the restaurant. Billy would understand.

  It was two when he arrived, but Billy had contented himself with four or five drinks meantime, and was now in a malleable state.

  “Bloody glad you could make it, Miles.”

  “I’m just sorry I’m late, Billy.”

  A businessman, dripping gold, led a quite stunning young woman to one of the restaurant’s better tables. At once, Billy’s antennae caught the scent, and he stared at the woman even after she had settled down with the menu.

  “Christ, Miles, isn’t that superb?”

  Checking in the mirrored wall behind Billy, Miles was forced to agree.

  “Yes,” said Billy, “I wouldn’t mind, I can tell you.”

  Miles thought again of the longhorn beetle, with its long and sensitive antennae, antennae that could pinpoint a female thousands of yards away. Billy could actually sense when a beautiful woman was nearby. It was quite a talent. At the same time, though, it seemed to Miles that Billy, for all his bravado, was afraid of women, taking lovers the way Mithridates had taken poison: sip by sip to make himself immune against them.

  “So what’s been happening, Miles?”

  “You know bloody well what’s been happening. You’re a magnet for office gossip.”

  “Well, I know some of it, but probably not all. You lost Latchkey?”

  “The very evening I’d been having a drink with you.”

  “Yes, a curious coincidence.”

  The waiter came then, and they ordered, Miles sticking to dishes he knew: minestrone, fettuccine.

  “I take it there has been an inquiry?” said Billy after the waiter had gone.

  Miles fingered his soup spoon, wondering whether to drop it. He decided no, what the hell. Let them listen.

  “Of sorts. It was all very low-key.”

  “Funny,” said Billy as the first course arrived, “I was thinking of Philip Hayton the other day. Do you remember him?”

  “No.”

  “He was one of the older boys. A headhunter. He was on my first interview panel, I recall.”

  “Of course, yes, Philip Hayton. He was killed in an accident, wasn’t he?”

  “Over in Ireland, yes. A boating accident. Except, of course, that there were rumors to the effect that he had been executed.”

  “Oh?”

  “Mmm. By the IRA, I suppose, though there wasn’t much of an IRA back then. Funny business…”

  There was no more talk of the firm until they were sipping nicely bitter espresso coffee and Billy was debating whether he could manage another portion of cheese with his last crumbly biscuit.

  “I was wondering,” he said, “what you thought of this Latchkey business?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, who’s to blame?”

  “I’m to blame, of course.”

  “Oh yes, well, as far as the record goes, but you said yourself that you’ve had your wrists slapped and that’s about it. No retribution, no demotion, nothing.”

  “They want it kept quiet.”

  “So as not to rile the Israelis? Yes, I can imagine.”

  “And I’ve been punished in another sense.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, they’ve sent me to work beside Richard Mowbray.”

  Billy smiled. He knew Mowbray, whom he irritated by insisting on calling him “Mauberley.”

  “The Mauberley Barmy Army, eh? Now there’s a man who has his sights quite firmly fixed on nothing but the top slot. He wants the old boy’s job, and one of these years, God help us, he may just get it.”

  “It’s a frightening prospect.”

  “So you’re working on Harvest, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It looks promising. Are you day watchman or night watchman?”

  “Richard has a roster.”

  “I’ll bet he has. Be careful of Mauberley, Miles. He could drag you down with him. Have you heard his latest one?”

  “About the cousins having a bomb in their Moscow embassy?”

  “No, I’d not heard that. I was referring to his theory that the Belgrano was torpedoed by an American midget submarine.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “In F Branch they have a new name for him: Meltdown Mowbray.”

  Miles, feeling the lightness of the wine inside him, was beginning to laugh at this when a large, well-dressed man approached the table.

  “Billy Monmouth!”

  “Andrew.” Billy rose from his chair, holding on to his napkin with one hand and shaking with the other. “Where have you been hiding?”

  “I’ve been in France. A company-funded shopping trip.” The man called Andrew smiled down on Miles, full of self- satisfaction and wanting others to share in it. Miles wondered why, being so full already, the man needed to eat at all.

  “Andrew, this is Miles Flint, a colleague of mine.”

  They shook hands. Andrew’s hand was warm and slightly damp. He radiated well-being and charm, and could probably afford another Rolex should he lose the one he was wearing.

  “Andrew is a salesman,” explained Billy.

  “That’s right, and a damned good one. What do you do, Miles?”

  “I’m just a civil servant.”

  “Same game as Billy here, eh? Well, don’t think I don’t know who wields the power in this country. I’ve watched Yes, Prime Minister. In fact, I do a lot of dealing with the civil service. Hard but fair, would you agree?”

  “What’s fair about us?” said Billy, causing all three to laugh.

  “Well, I’d better be getting to my table. We must get together for a drink, Billy, really we must. Keep in touch. Nice to have met you, Miles.” And with that the man was off, walking to the corner table and joining his friends. He kissed the beautiful woman on the hand, laying custodial fingers on her neck,
motioning across toward Billy and Miles. The woman smiled at them, then pecked Andrew on the cheek while he picked up a menu.

  Billy, who had smiled back like an addict to his fix, now said from behind his smile, “What a shit,” and decided on another portion of Brie to go with his whiskey.

  “He’s a slight acquaintance,” he said. “We see one another at dinner parties, where we inevitably get drunk and end up promising ourselves this mythical get-together.”

  “He seems nice, though.”

  Billy laughed.

  “Come on, our man Flint, Andrew Gray is a proper little shit and you know it. Your voice may be without irony, my friend, but your eyes betray you.” Billy paused. “You know, Miles, you’re quite cunning in your way. I mean, you sit there all silent, watching, and people tend to forget that you’re there at all, but you are. Oh, you are. I admire that, though I also find it just faintly disturbing.”

  As before, there seemed an unspoken meaning behind Billy’s words. Miles was wondering why Philip Hayton’s name had been brought into play, and remembered that Billy was on his list of suspects. In fact, he was at the top.

  “I suppose I am faintly disturbing, Billy,” said Miles. “It’s one of my most appealing features.”

  And Billy laughed loudly this time, catching the attention of the beautiful woman. He smiled at her, antennae twitching, a hunter intent on the chase.

  NINE

  SHEILA, LISTENING TO MOZART IN the living room, thought of Miles. Although she abhorred physical violence, a pleasant shivery feeling came to her when she remembered the way he had fought for her as a student. He had been wild as a teenager, trying to prove something to himself and to the world. No longer…They had enjoyed themselves back then, but now they had grown so far apart. It was like being married to an amnesiac.

  The base of her neck prickled as the Requiem Mass washed over her, full of its own violence. She had seen the film Amadeus with Moira, and they had fallen out about whether or not it was far-fetched. It never did to fall out with Moira. She was such a good friend, useful for all sorts of things, and she knew so much. Miles liked her, too. Sheila could see that, for all his subtlety. He would risk a glance at Moira whenever he felt safe, taking in her legs with one sweep, maybe her breasts at a later opportunity. His concealed admiration bordered on the perverse. Why didn’t he just come out and say he found her attractive? Sheila wouldn’t mind; she wouldn’t be jealous. One afternoon last week, walking past a building site, a crowd of workmen had whistled at her, and she had smiled back at them rather than giving them her usual snarl. Did she miss praise so much that she had to accept it from strangers?

  Yes, she thought to herself, smiling again.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  She had not heard Jack come in, had not even heard him closing the door. He had been noisy as a youngster, banging doors shut with a healthy disrespect for them. But nowadays he cultivated his father’s habits of stealth and secrecy. She felt the conspiracy ripening between them, unspoken but definitely there.

  “What’s this?” Standing in front of her, Jack shouted this aloud, his thumb held toward the stereo.

  “Mozart,” she said softly, turning the record down. “What are you doing home so early?”

  Jack shrugged, then lifted a peach from the fruit bowl. Once he would have asked for her permission, which she would always have given.

  “What are you doing home?” he mimicked.

  “I took a half day. I’ve got a lot of leave still to take. Have you eaten lunch?”

  “No, actually. I was supposed to meet a friend, but she didn’t show. Then I bumped into Dad, but he had a prior engagement.”

  “Oh?” Sheila thought she could see the slightest chink in Jack’s armor. “I’ve not eaten either,” she said. “Why don’t we have something together?”

  Jack, finishing the peach noisily, looked at her, trying to find some barb, some catch: there was none. So, smiling, nodding, he graciously accepted her invitation, and suggested that they open a bottle of wine for starters.

  Turning into Marlborough Place that evening, Miles wondered how Partridge and the old boy had found out about his use of the computer. Pete Saville must have left something for them to find, something he should not have left. They had probably questioned him, and he would have talked straightaway. He had no defense, after all.

  Whoever it was that had talked to Felicity on that night, he was a goliath beetle. Miles was clear enough about that. Goliath beetles were very fragile indeed, and therefore very hard to collect. They flew through their forest terrain at great height, rarely alighting on the ground, where predators and collectors awaited them. This was the figure of the enemy: hard to catch, soaring above the mundane world, and when captured, brittle as spun sugar.

  He opened the door to his house, wondering again, with slight vertigo, how much it must be worth. Sheila and he had bought it in the sixties, and even then it had been an expensive ruin, albeit an expensive ruin in St. John’s Wood. A fortuitous inheritance on Sheila’s part had ensured that they could buy two floors’ worth, and Sheila had loved it from the first tentative visit. Dry rot in one of the walls a few years ago had cost a thousand pounds to fix, and Miles feared more incursions, more deterioration. It was in the nature of buildings to fall down; all one ever did was shore them up.

  There were voices in the living room, loudly conversational. He listened at the door for a moment.

  “Come in, Miles, for Christ’s sake,” called Sheila. “Why do you always have to skulk at the door? I can always hear you, you know.”

  Inside, Sheila lay along the sofa, a glass of tawny wine in one hand. From the tawniness, he guessed that one of his better clarets had been opened. But, to his dismay, he saw on the floor not one but two empty bottles: the last of his ‘70. Sheila smiled toward him with catlike superiority. Jack, legs dangling over the arm of his chair, let a long-stemmed glass play between his fingers. It was empty.

  “Good evening, Miles,” said Sheila. “Is it that time already? It seems like only half an hour since we finished lunch, doesn’t it, Jack?”

  Jack merely nodded, enough of his wits left to know that to speak would be to betray his all-too-evident condition.

  “Mind if I join you?” Miles made to sit on the sofa, and Sheila shifted her legs helpfully. Clearly, she thought that some kind of victory had been won over Miles, and that she could now claim Jack as an ally in her struggle. They had eaten lunch together. Miles could see the whole sequence unfold, compounded by his own earlier rejection of his son.

  He felt sick to his stomach. It was impossible these days when there were three of them in the house. He wondered why Jack bothered to come home at all. There could be no halfway house, no no-man’s-land. Always it had to be two against one.

  “Oh, by the way,” said Sheila, “Jack thinks there’s wet rot in the larder.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” said Sheila. Lying half along the sofa, her legs curved toward the floor, she was like an insect, her body divided into abdomen, thorax and head. The aroma of her drunkenness was all around, cutting Jack off from him, bringing the conspiracy to fruition.

  “Maybe we should sell the place then.”

  Sheila shook her head loosely.

  “House values continue to rise,” she said with absolute clarity, “at a higher rate in areas like this than anywhere else in Britain. If we wait just a few more years, Miles, we can sell up and buy a palace elsewhere. We’ve been through all this.”

  Jack laughed, as Miles had hoped he would.

  “What are you laughing at?” asked Sheila, annoyed.

  “Listen to you,” said Jack. “The best part of three bottles of wine, and you can still spout economics like Milton Keynes.”

  “That should be Milton Friedman,” corrected Miles. “Or do you mean Maynard Keynes?”

  Jack looked at him, a little puzzled. “Why?” he asked. “What did I say?”

  “You said Milton Keynes,” said Sh
eila, bursting into laughter and throwing herself forward.

  “Is there any wine left?” Miles asked now, sure that his wife and son were less of a combined force than he had at first feared. Sheila was still laughing, and Jack studied her in stilted horror.

  “Loads,” said Sheila. “Get another bottle. And watch out for that rising damp.”

  “Wet rot,” Jack corrected quickly, his voice stabbing the air.

  “Well, whatever,” mumbled Sheila, all laughter gone.

  “Right,” said Miles, examining the quietened room, “let’s have ourselves a little party, shall we?”

  But the room remained silent after he left. The party had already finished.

  He wondered whether Sheila could really always hear him outside the door. Until recently, he had thought himself infallible. Now he knew differently.

  He brought another bottle of wine into the room. Sheila was reading, while Jack still played with his empty glass.

  “Here we are then. You could well be right, Jack. There does seem to be a patch of rot in the floor timbers. We’ll have it inspected.”

  He opened the bottle and poured three generous glasses, then set his own aside for the moment, allowing the young wine at least a slender chance to breathe. Jack gulped his own down without tasting it.

  “Sorry about lunch, Jack. I had to see Billy Monmouth. It was all shoptalk.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “What was Billy saying, then?” Sheila turned the page of her book.

  “You know Billy. Gossip mainly.”

  “We haven’t had him round for a while, have we?”

  The fact was, they had no one round these days. Their friends—the married couples—had disintegrated like old houses.

  “No, we haven’t,” said Miles, and the conversation stopped there. Dead.

  TEN

  HE WAS BEING FOLLOWED, AND none too subtly. Already in a bookshop a man had approached him asking for a light, though no smoking was allowed. Then another man—different face, same eyes—had asked him the time. So Pete Saville was moving now, weaving through the narrow streets of the city, trying to lose the men. He didn’t want the streets to get too narrow though, or too quiet, for that would be asking for trouble. He had enough trouble as it was.