The Contract

Percy circled his spoon in the murk of his coffee. 'They're always the ones that go sour.'

'You're a damned pessimist.'

'That's been said before, Mr Mawby. You'll forgive me for saying so but I've also been called a realist. I'm an out of London man. All the plans that I make have to be put directly into operation. You get a bit jaundiced about the infallibility of programmes that descend from Century House.'

'Concern yourself with the autobahn run,' Mawby said acidly.

' I will, don't you worry, Mr Mawby.' Percy gazed back at him over his cup and his cake. Perhaps he should tell Charles Mawby that a sparrow from Wiesbaden had tele- phoned to report that he had let slip to his superior a British interest in Hermann Lentzer. Perhaps he should report to Charles Mawby that his secretary had twice fielded calls from a senior official of BND with the answer that Adam Percy was out of his office.

Perhaps he should say to Charles Mawby that he had pleaded a cold to avoid attendance of a routine liaison meeting at which he would have sat opposite that same senior official.

Just a bloody nuisance, wasn't it? A bloody nuisance but peripheral to their business. And Mawby was paranoid about Lentzer and the autobahn run, Mawby would be heaving into the ceiling if the indiscretion were known to him. Better left unsaid. And it would all be smoothed over, the ruffled German feathers, when Mawby's show was curtained down.

Percy walked with Mawby to the departure gates, shook his hand and summoned a bleak smile and confided that he was sure that all would be well.

When he was back in his car, before starting the engine, Percy wrote in his memory pad a gutting of the instructions that he had been given about the transhipment of firearms and explosives that would be sent from London to Bonn by diplomatic bag, and which he must then arrange for delivery to East Berlin. Not a complicated task for him, the moving of a package to the British Embassy in the DDR's capital, but a wretched chore. All of those years that he had been in West Germany, a working lifetime of commitment, and still there were wet eared young men out from London like Charles Mawby who regarded him as little more than a messenger.

He imagined Mawby back in London, and the quip in Century House,

'Awkward old cuss, that Percy in Bonn, right for retirement time', but he'd seen them off in the past, the youthful and ambitious Assistant Secretaries, he'd survive Charles Mawby.

When Adam Percy was angry his ulcer hurt, and he bit his lower lip as he started the car.

Together the Member for Guildford and the Chief Constable of the county walked around the policeman's garden. Both men had heavy diaries of appointments and a Sunday afternoon provided the opportunity for them to blend their free time.

His wife did all the work, really, the Chief Constable had remarked.

She was the one with the fingers to bring on the flowers and shrubs. He confined himself to keeping the grass cut, and he'd be doing that later, and that was a heavy enough hint that Sir Charles Spottiswoode should explain the reason for his visit.

'In confidence, right, that's understood…?'

'I'm always cautious of confidence. I'm a policeman, not a priest in confessional.' With his pen knife the Chief Constable sliced away the sucker stem from a rose bush.

' I've come to a friend for corroboration, and advice.'

'Try me. We've known each other enough years, we don't have to lay down ground rules.'

They paced the prim paths with the clear cut borders, they admired the blossom of the pear and apple trees, they bent to examine the rhododendron buds, they looked in the greenhouse at the coming tomatoes. And Sir Charles Spottiswoode talked of what Dennis Tweedle had told him at first hand, and what he had heard once removed of the experiences of Annabel Tweedle and Constable Potterton.

The Chief Constable led his guest to the centre of the handkerchief lawn.

'If it wasn't you I was talking to, if it was just your ordinary fellow from the public, then I'd say forget it. But a Member of Parliament doesn't have to forget anything. The incident at the Tweedle house took place, that I know. A young man being brought to the house in a state of distress, the local constable summoned and matching the boy with a missing person we'd been told to raise heaven and hell to find, that's all copper bottom. That end of the county was crawling with spooks and to put it most kindly they were cavalier with my people. I can neither confirm nor deny what was said to Potterton in the Tweedle house, I've made it my business not to find out. I heard separately from Special Branch that the matter was connected with a property at Holmbury. We all know about that place and we leave it to itself… if it caught fire I doubt they'd let the Brigade in. I imagine that everything you say is true, and I don't want to know.'

'I only asked for corroboration.'

'You've had that… and in confidence.'