Our Game

How could he ever understand that Emma is my self-imposed security risk, my new openness, my one-girl glasnost? I wish for no stolen knowledge of her, nothing she does not tell me of her own accord. Nevertheless, to my shame, I take the file as he knows I will and jam it angrily beneath my arm. The pull of my old profession is simply too strong for me. Knowledge never kills, I have preached for twenty years to anybody who would listen to me: but ignorance can.

* * *

Setting everything in order for my next visit, I fed my weary body down the winding staircase to the cope cupboard. In the vestry I helped myself to overalls, a broom, a duster, and a floor polisher. Thus equipped, I proceeded to the main aisle, where I paused and faced the altar and, in the shifty manner of us agnostics, offered some clumsy acknowledgement or obeisance to the Maker I could not bring myself to believe in. This done, I went about my cleaning duties, for I was never a man to neglect my cover.

First I dusted the mediaeval pew ends, then I mopped the tiled floor and ran over it with the polisher, to the vexation of a family of bats. Half an hour later, still in my cleaner's overalls and bearing the broom as additional testimony to my labours, I ventured into the daylight. The sun had disappeared behind a blue-black cloud stack. Shadowy bands of rain pressed down on the bare hilltops. My heart stopped dead. I was staring at the hill we call the Beacon. It is the highest of the six. Its outline is pitted with shaped stones and hummocks said to be the remnants of an ancient burial ground. Among these stones, cut black against the seething skyline, stood the silhouette of a man in a long coat or raincoat that seemed to have no buttons down the front, for it flapped and billowed in the gusting wind, though his hands were plunged into its pockets.

His head was turned away from me, as if I had just hit him with a .38 revolver butt. His left foot was pointed outward in the quaintly Napoleonic pose that Larry liked to strike. He wore a flat cap, and though I did not remember ever seeing Larry in a cap, this meant nothing, for he was forever leaving his hats at people's houses and helping himself to others he preferred. I tried to call out, but no sound escaped me. I opened my mouth, wanting to shout "Larry!" but for once my tongue couldn't make the L. Come back, I mutely begged him, come down. Let's begin again; let's be friends, not rivals.

I took a step forward, then another. I think I was intending to charge at him as I had at Priddy, vaulting the stone walls, ignoring the gradient, yelling, "Larry, Larry! Larry, are you all right?" But as Larry was always telling me, I am not much good at spontaneity. So instead I set down my broom and cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted something shy, like "Hullo there, who is that, is it you?"

Or perhaps by then I had realised that for the second time in as many days I was addressing the unlovely person of Andreas Munslow, sometime member of my section and full-time keeper of my passport.

"What the devil do you think you're doing here?" I shouted at him. "How dare you come here snooping on me? Go away. Get out of here."

He was loping down the hill at me, glissading in spidery strides. I had not realised till now what an agile creature he must be.

"Afternoon to you, Tim," he said, with none of the previous day's deference. "Been cleaning up for God?" he asked, eyeing my broom, then me. "Don't you shave these days?"

"What are you doing here?"

"I'm keeping watch over you, Tim. For your safety and comfort. Orders of the Top Floor."

"I don't need keeping watch over. I can keep watch over myself. Get out."

"Jake Merriman thinks you do. He thinks you're messing him around. He's ordered me to tag you. Put a bell up your arse was how he put it. I'm at the Crown, day or night." He shoved a piece of paper at me. "That's my cell phone. Daniel Moore, room three." He stabbed his index finger into my chest. "And screw you, actually, Cranmer. Totally screw you. You gave me one and I owe you one. That's a warning."

* * *

Emma's ghost was waiting for me in the drawing room. She was seated at the Bechstein on her special stool, thinking her notes aloud with that strict posture she has that nips the waist and spreads the hips. She was wearing all her antique jewellery to please me.

"Have you been flirting with Larry again?" she asked above her music.

But I was in no mood to be laughed at, least of all by her.

* * *