In the Mouth of the Tiger (124 page)

Malcolm scrabbled for the papers, furious with himself. ‘Blasted draught,' he said pettishly. ‘Caught me by surprise.' He reached under his desk
for an errant page and as he did so the papers he had already collected slipped through his grasp.

‘Here, let me,' Liddell said sharply. He joined Malcolm on the floor, grabbing papers with quick, deft movements and assembling them in the file as he did so.

The two men stood up to face each other across the corner of the desk, the Deputy Director-General cool and composed, Malcolm flushed and sweating. ‘You were after the Elesmere-Elliott papers, sir?' he asked. ‘May I ask why?'

Liddell didn't even look at him. ‘The matter has been killed off,' he said abruptly. ‘Just got the order from Sillitoe. I've got to take custody of every piece of paper to do with the case.' He gestured at the jumbled file in his hands. ‘Is this everything you've got, Malcolm? I need your word.'

‘What do you mean, killed off?' Malcolm demanded. ‘I've been working on this case for months now. I have a perfectly good case against an obvious traitor. It can't be simply . . . killed off.'

‘It can be, and it has been,' Liddell said with a small smile. The tone of his voice and the contemptuous smile were like slaps in the face.

For a second, Malcolm simply stood there. Then rage swept through him and he was suddenly out of control. ‘I won't to let you get away with this,' he snarled, with lips drawn back. For a moment, just a moment, he was tempted to snatch the file from Liddell, run out of Leconfield House with it under his arm, and throw the incriminating evidence onto the busy streets so that the whole world would know what was going on. He restrained himself just in time and jammed his balled fists into his pockets. ‘I am sorry, DD-G,' he said, his voice strained and unconvincing even in his own ears. ‘I take that back, of course. I'm a bit overwrought.'

Liddell was staring at him, eyebrows raised. ‘Are you perfectly well, Bryant?' he asked.

After Liddell had gone, Malcolm sat down at his desk, his head spinning. So it
was
happening after all, he thought. Everything he had feared was coming to pass. The battleships have been brought in, the first salvoes fired.

Evil was about to triumph once again.

There was a lake in grounds of Almer Manor, a small, friendly stretch of water screened by a bank of hazel and shaded by oaks. The children had made it one of their special places, the scene of a dozen naval battles between balsa-wood
warships and the venue for a score of rambunctious lake-side picnics. One Sunday morning, Win Heppenstall spread out an ordnance map on the breakfast table with the little lake circled in red.

‘I have discovered the reason why Almer exists,' she said, as if announcing the discovery of the source of the Nile. ‘It exists because of our little lake.'

We all looked at her blankly. ‘Does Almer have to have a reason to exist?' Denis asked reasonably.

But Win's enthusiasm was not to be dampened. ‘There was a very good reason why Almer was built where it was built – and that reason has something to do with our lake,' she said. ‘Can anyone guess what that reason was?'

The children's interest was sparked by the challenge, and porridge spoons were put down and small faces wrinkled in thought. ‘Has it got anything to do with the Battle of Alma?' Tony ventured.

‘Good try. But the Alma you are thinking about is a river in the Crimea,' Win said. ‘And the Battle of Alma took place less than a hundred years ago. Our Almer was settled more than a thousand years ago. And in those days it was on the edge of the lake.'

Even I was interested now. ‘Don't keep us on tenterhooks, Win,' I pleaded. ‘What is the connection between Almer and the lake? It's a pretty tiny lake, after all – more of an overgrown puddle.'

Win smiled triumphantly. ‘It used to be much, much bigger. In the Neolithic age it was probably ten times its present size. And it was chock full of fresh-water eels! Eels were tremendously prized in those days because they were nutritious, and free to everyone who bothered to catch them. When the Saxons came this way they called the lake Ael-mere, which means Eel Lake, and it gave its name to the village that grew up on its banks. The name was corrupted to Almer in the Middle Ages. And then the lake almost disappeared.'

There was a small silence, and then Frances shivered. ‘Eels! Slimy, scary eels in our lake! Are the eels still there?'

Win shook her head. ‘There haven't been eels in the lake for hundreds of years now. It shrank and shrank, and became too small to sustain anything except frogs.'

‘Why
is
the lake so small now?' Tony asked.

‘That's a puzzle we will try and solve,' Win said. ‘In fact, that's our next project, children. We are going to solve the mystery of the disappearing lake. It will mean looking up some history to find out
when
it shrank, some geology
to find out
why
it shrank, and then we'll do some arithmetic to work out just how much water there is in it now.'

Denis winked at me over his coffee cup and I smiled back. Dear Win. She was a born teacher and I often look back and wonder at just how lucky we were to have her. By rights she should have been running a school, where her enthusiasm would have inspired one hundred children rather than just our lucky three. Why she was content to stay with us I do not know. Perhaps it was because she was a mother at heart even more than she was a teacher, and three children can be a surrogate family but one hundred cannot.

They started on their project straight after breakfast, setting out in gumboots and overcoats to measure the current size of the lake in order to work out how much it had shrunk over the centuries. I peeked at them from one of the upstairs rooms, little figures pacing the edges of the lake with tape measures, their calls like the chirping of distant birds.

I went down and confronted Denis in his warm study, and he sighed. ‘You want to join in the hunt for a disappearing Saxon lake, I gather?' he said.

The memory of that morning is so vivid. Walking across the frosty winter grass, our footsteps making dark smudges in the whiteness. Coming through a tangle of hazel bushes to the pale blue water. Watching the images of clouds sailing on the glassy surface of the lake. Imagining Stone Age men in animal-hide coracles splashing in the shallows, calling out excitedly as they harvested the bounty provided by their gods.

History all around us, just waiting to be touched.

‘There might even be Saxon fish traps under the silt,' Win said when we joined her. ‘One day, we might do a little poking around. If there are fish traps, there may be artefacts about as well – buckles and brooches and so on. Just looking would introduce the children to archaeology.'

As she spoke I caught sight of movement on the other side of the water. There was a man over there, partly screened by the spindly trunks of the hazel trees, and as soon as I spotted him he began moving backwards, away from us and towards the Wareham road.

‘Who on earth is that?' I asked.

Win peered towards the receding figure, almost invisible now that he had reached the road and the shadow of the wall that surrounded Charborough Park. ‘No idea,' she said. ‘But he was looking at the Manor through binoculars. A bit cheeky, I thought. I think we surprised him – he was over there by the oak tree, and he ducked out of sight when we arrived.'

Denis joined us and followed our gaze. ‘Some blighter been trespassing?' he asked.

‘He was watching the Manor through binoculars,' I said, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth Denis was off, sprinting around the small lake to intercept the retreating figure. The man must have seen Denis coming because he too began to run. He ran with frantic, discordant steps and with his head turned awkwardly towards us, as if desperate to keep us all in sight. At one stage he stumbled and almost fell, but still kept his face towards us. There was something curiously, almost frighteningly, familiar about him but I couldn't for the life of me work out what it was. And then he was out of sight, disappearing into a small green sedan parked on the side of the road. There was the rattle of a starter motor, and then the car was off in a cloud of exhaust just as Denis reached the roadway twenty yards behind it.

‘Cheeky devil,' Denis puffed as he returned to us. He said it with a cheerful smile but I could see concern in his eyes.

That night, I dreamed about the running man. I was alone on the jungle road at Kuala Rau, and he came into sight around a bend, running hard towards me. At first I was terrified, certain it was some stranger bent on harm, but as he came closer I saw that it was Malcolm Bryant. He pulled up in front of me, puffing and smiling just as Denis had the previous morning. ‘Don't forget I'm your Guardian Angel,' he had said and I felt a wave of relief. But then I saw that his smile was over-bright, and that his eyes held an awful intensity, and a great fear gripped my heart.

‘What have you done to Denis?' I screamed, and woke up trembling to find myself in the comfort of Denis's arms.

Malcolm Bryant had been called to Sir Percy Sillitoe's office about a week after he had been thrown in the Thames. He had known the summons would come, and had tried to contemplate it with calm acceptance. But nevertheless he felt perspiration breaking out on his forehead and under his arms as he tapped on the Director-General's door. He had been through all this before, and knew just how awful the humiliation would be.

Sillitoe was flanked by Roger Hollis and a stranger, as he had known he would be. Hollis because he was Malcolm's superior, the stranger because there always was a psychiatrist at meetings of this kind.

‘I'm afraid this is going to be awkward, Bryant,' Sillitoe said after the
introductions. ‘We've had a report from Scotland Yard about what happened last Friday.'

Malcolm looked at the D-G blankly. He was supposed to get upset at this stage, but was damned if he was going to give the man that pleasure. ‘About what happened last Friday, sir?' he asked blandly. ‘Do you mean the incident when a group of ham-fisted D Branch novices chucked me into the Thames?'

Sillitoe moved uncomfortably. ‘I don't know anything about that,' he said, flashing a glance at the psychiatrist. ‘But I have seen a police report about an incident that has caused us all some concern. Apparently there is some suggestion that you might have intended to commit suicide by jumping off the Thames Embankment. The police found a suicide note in your home.'

Malcolm tried to lean back with a casual smile but the manoeuvre went wrong and he only managed to look awkward, with a tight rictus across his lips. ‘I saw the so-called suicide note, D-G,' he said. ‘I didn't write the thing, I promise you. I know it was supposed to have been signed by me but it wasn't. Have you had the signature checked by our handwriting people?'

‘It really doesn't help trying to deny these things,' the psychiatrist broke in. He had been introduced as Dr McKenzie, and seemed to Malcolm to be one of the worst of his kind. A narrow, self-assured man who automatically assumed that anyone sitting in the patient's chair must be stark, staring mad.

‘Look,' Malcolm said, a little more forcefully than he had intended, ‘I was assaulted in my flat and thrown into the Thames. I was rescued and actually directed to the nearest police station, with a coat thoughtfully provided to make sure I didn't catch cold. Exactly why these things were done to me I don't know. But I can speculate. I think the whole point was to make me look like a suicidal maniac.'

‘Why would anyone go to the bother?' McKenzie asked. It was a dangerous question to ask: Malcolm could see that in the way Hollis and Sillitoe exchanged quick glances.

‘There
is
a reason why someone might go to the bother,' Malcolm said, looking directly at McKenzie. ‘You see, doctor, I have spent the better part of a year investigating serious allegations against a colleague in the Security Services. I found treachery proved, and the bill of indictment was due to go to the DPP
this week
. But the case was dropped, just like that, without any reason whatsoever. At the same time I'm made out to look like a mental case. The result is that if I protest too vigorously against the dropping of the bill,
MI5 can have me locked away as a nut case. That's why you're here, doctor – to give the whole business some respectability. Can't you see that you are being used?'

McKenzie looked startled, and for a moment Malcolm's heart leapt with hope. Perhaps, just perhaps, MI5 had overplayed its hand in bringing in an outsider. It happened sometimes: ‘tame' specialists had been known to refuse to play ball in the past.

‘Is there any substance in all this, Sir Percy?' McKenzie asked. Malcolm opened his mouth to speak but Sillitoe forestalled him.

‘I'm going to have to order you to forget what you've just heard, doctor,' he said sharply. ‘It was quite wrong of Bryant to talk about operational matters in front of you. In fact, it is a breach of the Official Secrets Act.' He turned to Malcolm with a cold smile. ‘This little chat is about your state of health, Malcolm. Not about your work.'

Malcolm exploded. Perhaps it was the contemptuous way Sillitoe had destroyed the hope McKenzie would listen to him that proved to be the last straw. Whatever the reason, he could no longer contain the pain and frustration that had been building up inside him. ‘You bastard!' he said hoarsely, leaning forward over Sillitoe's desk. ‘You contemptible bastard! Don't you feel ashamed of yourself? You're supposed to be in charge of counter-espionage in this country and yet you sit there covering up for a traitor and a proven spy! Is someone paying you, or are you too damned scared to do your duty?' He was trembling now, and began to shout despite himself. ‘You're a puppet, Sillitoe! A puppet! Appointed by a Communist-dominated government to help the Russians get away with treason!'