Slow Burner Page 5

  It was perfect.

  Palliser shook hands. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ he invited.

  He came at once to the point. ‘This is an extremely awkward business about the Slow Burner,’ he began.

  ‘Extremely.’

  ‘I had hoped—we had all hoped—that it would give us a head start.’ Gabriel Palliser smiled a little grimly. ‘We could use an advantage,’ he added.

  ‘Precisely.’ Sir Jeremy was waiting for a lead.

  ‘Whereas if somebody has acquired a specimen, somebody capable, as I gather they are, of insulating it properly, then presumably they are also capable of making the best use of it.

  ‘Or from our point of view the worst.’ Palliser paused. ‘Can this stuff be analysed?’ he asked.

  Sir Jeremy was surprised by the question but concealed it. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Or is it purely a question of technique—of the know-how of making it?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ Sir Jeremy said again.

  ‘I think we should find out.’ Sir Jeremy made a note and Palliser waited for him to finish. ‘You will discover no difficulty in doing so?’ he inquired.

  ‘None whatever.’

  ‘I am delighted to hear it.’

  Sir Jeremy had a sensitive ear and something in the Minister’s tone caught it. ‘Why do you ask?’ he inquired.

  ‘Scientists can sometimes be very difficult.’ Palliser was looking at his hands. They were meticulously kept. His quiet Midlothian voice was unemphatic.

  Sir Jeremy relaxed a little. Palliser, he decided, was feeling his way. These Scots, he thought—the perfect generals of material. They would never offer battle at less than a division to a company. He had the impression that what might have been a very dangerous turn in the conversation had been successfully rounded. ‘Personally I find the scientists extremely helpful.’

  ‘Then it is a pity,’ Palliser said, ‘a great pity that you and Nichol do not get along together.’

  Sir Jeremy’s reflexes were too well disciplined, he was too experienced, visibly to flinch, but he had been wounded. The cunning of it, he thought—to feint like that, to get his guard down. He had always known that Palliser must have claws—it was hardly possible to become a Minister without them; but he had not known that he could purr, sheathing them, before pouncing. He considered his reply. Denial would be inept: what was wanted was something correct but at the same time perfectly firm. ‘I should be sorry,’ he said at length, ‘if it were possible to think that any personal differences between myself and Nichol stood in the way of our official relations,’ It sounded too stiff, he thought, and more than a little stilted. But it would have to do until the Minister made the next move.

  But Palliser did not press his advantage: instead he changed the subject. ‘And we shall have to think about the Press,’ he said.

  ‘The Commission is issuing a statement, you will remember.’

  ‘Which is a pack of lies.’

  Sir Jeremy coughed. It was a deprecatory little cough, and Palliser smiled. ‘You misunderstand me, I was only wondering how long the statement would hold.’

  ‘Until the truth is discovered, I hope.’

  ‘Exactly. But which truth? Why Slow Burner rays are coming from this house, or simply that they are? The latter, obviously, isn’t covered by the statement, and the former isn’t covered at all. By anybody.’

  Sir Jeremy was silent. He was thinking that politicians’ brains were very different from civil servants’. But he was thinking too that they could be at least as acute.

  But Gabriel Palliser spared him a direct answer. ‘We haven’t a great deal of time,’ he said. ‘We cannot afford to have somebody outside the Centres picking up these epsilon rays. That is possible, I suppose. Perhaps that is another thing you ought to have a look at. I suppose it isn’t immediately likely, but it would be a scoop for some newspaper if it happened. But I know nothing we can do about that. Nothing, that is, except to get at the reason for ourselves. And first.’

  ‘I have the greatest confidence in Russell,’ Sir Jeremy said. ‘That is excellent. And so have I. And I don’t doubt that you have impressed upon him that time is very short.’ The Minister rose. ‘We shall be discussing it in detail in the Commission,’ he said. ‘On Monday, isn’t it?’

  ‘On Monday. I shall be doing a paper, of course.’

  ‘Thank you. Let us hope that by then Russell will have something definite for us.’ The Minister walked to the door with Sir Jeremy. ‘Au revoir,’ he said, ‘till Monday.’

  Sir Jeremy went along the corridor to his own room. That was fair warning, he was thinking. I am on notice.

  He rang the bell upon his desk and to his secretary said shortly: ‘Marshall. I have some urgent work. It must be ready by Monday for the Commission. Keep a typist, please, but go yourself.’

  ‘And your lunch?’ Marshall inquired. ‘Shall I have a tray sent in?’

  ‘No thank you. I shall go out a little later perhaps.’ Sir Jeremy nodded, but with a suspicion of less than his usual severity. ‘That is all, I think, Marshall. But thank you.’

  He took a sheet of foolscap from the desk before him and began to write. The wintry sun sank into a splendid dusk, and Sir Jeremy rose to press a switch. It was the only interruption as the pile of paper before him mounted.

  Chapter 3

  Percival-Smith’s preliminary but thorough reconnaissance mat morning had shown him that the lock upon the door of Number Twenty-Seven was of a well-known make. He had been pleased. By definition well-known and in the result well-studied. It had taken him a second or two under the two minutes to pick it, but rather longer to deal with the bolt and chain. He had known that suburban householders were often inclined to bolts and chains, and though superior persons smiled at them, Percival-Smith did not. Not that bolts and chains were in any way beyond his competence, but they could take a surprising time. A professional, he reflected, would tackle almost anything short of a genuinely first class lock there were only two of those, both much too expensive to be common—almost anything before a solid, old-fashioned bolt and chain. They were the devil to deal with if you weren’t to wake the dead, and any considerable time on the doorstep meant another man to keep look-out for you. An accomplice. Percival-Smith dismissed the thought with distaste, for he had always preferred to work alone. He was very glad to have the bolt and chain behind him.

  He stepped inside the house and stood for a full five minutes, quite still, listening, absorbing the aura, the personality of this entirely commonplace villa in which the Security Executive, in its wisdom and authority, was so surprisingly interested. Presently he began to search the ground floor. He had already tackled the outhouses. He began methodically and with care, but regularly looking at his watch, for it had struck him that, though Mortimer hadn’t seemed to be aware of it, time was going to be a major difficulty. This was to be no affair of finding a valuable or two—they were always in one of three places—and of getting away again. Instead he had to search a seven-roomed house, its outbuildings and its offices, for something defined in apologetically general terms—something with which he was himself unfamiliar. He could not reasonably start before midnight nor continue much after five o’clock. Women living alone, he knew, often woke early. It was a considerable task.

  He quartered the rooms on the ground floor and, satisfied, went upstairs. It took him some time to do so, for at each stair he bent to feel the riser before sliding a foot on to the tread, hard against the wall . . . A pressure on the forward foot. A relaxation. Another pressure. The slightest sound and he would wait before trying elsewhere along the board. The stairs were sound enough, but to climb them took him ten minutes. The first room upstairs, he had been told, was unoccupied, a spare bedroom in necessity but a lumber room now. It was going to be a problem and he had allowed forty minutes for it. He looked again at his watch, relieved that he was within five minutes of his schedule. He searched the lumber room with care, no
ticing that it held some surprisingly nice things: a fur he would not have expected to find discarded, a set of silver in a box, expensive toys. He paused at the door, summarizing his search in a final survey. He was disappointed, for he had had hopes of this lumber room. But he was satisfied that he had missed nothing of significance. He closed the door behind him and moved to the next. He knew that this was Mrs Tarbat’s. She might be awake, which would be unfortunate, but hey was not afraid of waking her if she were .not. He slid inside and waited. The curtains were drawn and the room was a little darker than the last.

  A light switch clicked, and he was blinking at a handsome woman holding what he recognized as an efficient automatic pistol. Her large but shapely breasts were bare. Her generous hair was in a pigtail. ‘Who the devil are you?’ she said.

  Percival-Smith blinked again. He looked at the pistol with attention, for he had experience of women with firearms. What he observed was not reassuring. Mrs Tarbat’s hand was resting on a knee beneath the sheet. She held her weapon without a tremor. He could see that she had not forgotten to release the safety catch. Mrs Tarbat was used to firearms; Mrs Tarbat meant business. ‘Who the devil are you?’ she repeated. She did not move her pistol as she spoke. She was sleeping naked, Percival-Smith could see, under the sheet.

  Percival-Smith considered. ‘I’m a burglar,’ he said at length. It sounded remarkably silly.

  ‘Nonsense.’ Mrs Tarbat displayed an understandable irritation, but still she did not move the pistol. She struck the sheet with her free hand. ‘Idiot! If you knew how ridiculous you sound! I’ve never seen anybody less like a burglar in my life. And I have seen a burglar, you know, only last year. That’s why I keep a pistol.’ She did not look down at it as she spoke. That, and in case any of the . . . I mean in case anybody should get rough,’ she concluded. ‘You never know,’ she added on a note of apology.

  It was difficult to think of Mrs Tarbat as less than mistress of a situation, but for a moment Percival-Smith had the impression that she had been embarrassed. Mrs Tarbat, he had the feeling, Mrs Tarbat, her handsome bosom naked, Mrs Tarbat pointing a pistol at him, was aware that she had narrowly escaped something rather irregular. She recovered herself at once. ‘If that was supposed to be a joke,’ she announced, ‘it was a very feeble one.’ She reflected. ‘Who told you about—about here?’ she asked.

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Then you’re wasting your time. I’m not a tart, you know.’ Mrs Tarbat looked at Percival-Smith coolly and with experience. Her eyes were clear, her skin and hair of a woman in superlative health. She looked, Percival-Smith found himself thinking, rather magnificent. Holding a pistol at him . . . like that. ‘Do you know Johnny Koch?’ she asked. ‘Bluchers, you know.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Lord Ludleigh?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Bobby Peel?’

  ‘Ye-e-s. We met in the war.’

  ‘What was his regiment?’

  ‘The Seventh/Seventeenth.’

  ‘You were in that too? And now you say you’re a burglar?’ Mrs Tarbat was annoyed again, but she put the pistol under the pillow. The movement exposed a slender waist. ‘Look here,’ she said, ‘I don’t understand this. Those are my three young men. If you’re lying and you don’t know any of them I can’t think how you got here, and if one of them did tell you about me I can’t think why you should hide it.’

  Percival-Smith was silent, racking his brains. But Mrs Tarbat was doing the thinking; she was looking steadily at Percival-Smith. ‘Perhaps,’ she said finally, ‘Bobby got tight—he does, you know, he’s a beast really—and told you. So you wouldn’t want to tell me in case I passed it back. He’d think you had taken an advantage of him. You would at that. So you pretended to be a burglar—is that it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Percival-Smith. He said it very quickly indeed. ‘Idiotic—but rather sweet, really. How you men stick together.’ Mrs Tarbat took a cigarette from a box by her bed. ‘Give me a light,’ she said. Percival-Smith hesitated; he looked at Mrs Tarbat again. A little gingerly he gave her a light. She leant, very gracefully, to accept it. ‘Are .you frightened of Bobby Peel?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘Not a bit.’

  ‘Do you owe him money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you’re wasting your time with all this. Bobby isn’t my favourite, as it happens. I could live without him.’ Mrs Tarbat considered again. Finally she seemed satisfied. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘You look all right. It will cost you a pony.’

  ‘I haven’t got a pony on me.’

  ‘If you know Bobby Peel your cheque will probably be all right. I’ll chance it.’

  ‘I haven’t got a cheque book either.’

  ‘Damn it,’ Mrs Tarbat said, ‘what have you got?’

  ‘I’ve got a tenner.’

  Mrs Tarbat hesitated. She looked at Percival-Smith again. ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t think what you’re doing mixed up with Bobby Peel. You look like a man to begin with, and you’ve the nerve of the devil. I like that. Make it up next time if you can, but ring me up decently first instead of breaking in and playing silly burglars. I might have called the police. All right. Just for this once it’s a tenner.’

  His expenses, Percival-Smith reflected—the expenses which Major Mortimer had pressed on him. He was going to be out of pocket on his expenses after all.

  Colonel Russell drove with Major Mortimer to Colton on Sunday morning. They had started very early, for the dawn had promised a beautiful day and Russell was certain that Nichol would not decline the suggestion of a round of golf if he could arrive in time for it. He had driven fast, and it was not much later than a leisurely Sunday breakfast when he arrived at the first of Nichol’s gates. There were two of them, white-painted, thirty yards apart and linking a modest crescent of drive. This was burgher country and Nichol’s was a burgher’s house. Late in the nineteenth century what to the county had been a foreigner, a man of no attainments discernible but of excellent family, a man from the North, had married the daughter of great wealth. The marriage, the alliance rather, had settled on land around Colton. Promptly it had destroyed the brick and timber manor house which it had found there, and had built in its place a seat, a tangible record of its affluence, in an alien grey stone imported from two counties away. Remorselessly its possessions had extended until, in the nineteen twenties, these childless magnates had been able to walk a dozen miles in most directions without leaving their own land. Their own land in every material meaning, though somehow it had contrived to escape them. Somehow the habits of successful business, the habits of begetting and of feeding a fortune, had defeated them. They had bought out their neighbours as opportunity offered or could be made. Really, they told themselves, land could not efficiently be managed below the economic unit, and that was becoming bigger every year as the techniques of farming improved. Really, she told him, it was ridiculous not to get the best out of what was theirs. Really, he told her, it would be unpatriotic not to produce what was possible with modern methods. There was a war coming, and one’s duty . . .

  So the estate had grown and had been magnificently managed. First the squires and the smaller gentry had been dispossessed, the neighbours and in a sense the competitors; then the tenant farmers, for with the beginnings of mechanization and with centralized direction it was much more efficient to take land in hand whenever it could be contrived. Naturally the two old people had been rather lonely. The youngish technicians, the managers and accountants who filled, two or three to a house, the manors which had been swallowed, were by definition employees. There were parties, of course: house parties of rich and important people from London and of rich and important people from the North; but none of these was a substitute for the squires dispossessed, for the rough and tumble of daily contact with people having common roots in a common soil. Their hunger for land apart, perhaps the loneliness was inevitable; perhaps neither of these formidable but brittle
old people would have felt quite secure in any relationship which assumed a certain equality. Whatever the reason, their empire, its belly distended across the map, isolated them.

  The war had brought them crashing down and their estates with them, and the Colton Vale had filled again with tenant farmers and with smallholders. But its character had been lost for ever. It had been lost even before the Centre, the biggest of the carefully dispersed three, had been sited there. But the old pair in the great house had left one agreeable legacy: it was not difficult to find a small house in any of the villages and market towns which their empire had formerly encompassed. For in its time the chandlers, the merchants of agricultural machinery, the seedsman and the man with a carting business—all the busy middle class of an agricultural economy—had disappeared. They had left in their working lifetimes because they must and their families had gone with them. Nothing survived them but their unassuming but assured little houses. Nothing but these lovely little houses. At Colton itself were acres of modern housing estate, well-built, convenient and as dreary as a judgement in a County Court. But sometimes a scientist or a young executive would decline what was allotted him, taking a house in a neighbouring village. When he did so he spoke, with a careful facetiousness, of living like a gentleman. He was wrong. He was living like a nineteenth-century country burgher.

  Nichol’s house was one of these, a solid red box—four windows in front and a doorcase with a broken pediment. Nichol had stripped from the pinewood the paint of several generations. Twenty yards back from the road behind its curving drive the house sat with an air of knowing precisely its station; prosperous, decent and unemphatic. Built in the eighteen seventies, it was scarcely a survival from a golden age, but the tradition of a provincial elegance was strong in it still. The four sashed windows in its face were correctly proportioned, their height a calculated relation of the hypotenuse upon their base. In the crescent between the gates and the drive was a lawn, and on the lawn an ancient apple tree. There were flowers in the borders on either side of the door, and a coach house with a loft stood a little apart. It was certain that behind the house would be a gravelled terrace, and a garden which a taste too refined had not emasculated.