Faber crashed into the wheelchair, overturning it. His last thought was that both of them and the chair might end up in the sea below—and then the wrench hit the back of his head and he blacked out.

When he came to, the wheelchair lay beside him, but David was nowhere to be seen. He stood up and looked around in dazed puzzlement.

“Here.”

The voice came from over the cliff. David must have just been able to hit him with the wrench before being flung from the chair and over the edge. Faber crawled to the cliff and looked over.

David had one hand around the stem of a bush that grew just under the lip of the cliff. The other hand was jammed into a small crevice in the rock. He hung suspended, just as Faber had a few minutes earlier. His bravado had gone now.

“Pull me up, for God’s sake,” he called hoarsely.

Faber leaned closer. “How did you know about the film?” he said.

“Help me, please.”

“Tell me about the film.”

“Oh, God.” David made a mighty effort to concentrate. “When you went to Tom’s outhouse you left your jacket drying in the kitchen, Tom went upstairs for more whisky and I went through your pockets and I found the negatives—”

“And that was evidence enough for you to try to kill me?”

“That, and what you did with my wife in my house…no Englishman would behave like that—”

Faber could not help laughing. The man was a boy, after all. “Where are the negatives now?”

“In my pocket…”

“Give them to me, and I’ll pull you up.”

“You’ll have to take them—I can’t let go. Hurry…”

Faber lay flat on his stomach and reached down, under David’s oilskin, to the breast pocket of his jacket. He sighed in relief as his fingers reached the film can and carefully withdrew it. He looked at the films; they all seemed to be there. He put the can in the pocket of his jacket, buttoned the flap, and reached down to David again. No more mistakes.

He took hold of the bush David was clinging to and uprooted it with a savage jerk.

David screamed, “No!” and scrabbled desperately for grip as his other hand slipped inexorably out of the crack in the rock.

“It’s not fair,” he screamed, and then his hand came away from the crevice.

He seemed to hang in midair for a moment, then dropped bouncing twice against the cliff on his way down, until he hit the water with a splash.

Faber watched for a while to make sure he did not come up again. “Not fair? Not fair? Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

He looked down at the sea for some minutes. Once he thought he saw a flash of yellow oilskin on the surface but it was gone before he could focus on it. There was just the sea and the rocks.

Suddenly he felt terribly tired. His injuries penetrated his consciousness one by one: the damaged foot, the bump on his head, the bruises all over his face. David Rose had been something of a fool, also a braggart and a poor husband, and he had died screaming for mercy; but he had been a brave man, and he had died for his country—which had been his contribution.

Faber wondered whether his own death would be as good.

He turned away from the cliff edge and walked back toward the overturned jeep.

28

PERCIVAL GODLIMAN FELT REFRESHED, DETERMINED, even—rare for him—inspired.

When he reflected on it, this made him uncomfortable. Pep talks were for the rank-and-file, and intellectuals believed themselves immune from inspirational speeches. Yet, although he knew that the great man’s performance had been carefully scripted, the crescendos and diminuendos of the speech predetermined like a symphony, nevertheless it had worked on him, as effectively as if he had been the captain of the school cricket team hearing last-minute exhortations from the games master.

He got back to his office itching to do something.

He dropped his umbrella in the umbrella stand, hung up his wet raincoat and looked at himself in the mirror on the inside of the cupboard door. Without doubt something had happened to his face since he became one of England’s spy-catchers. The other day he had come across a photograph of himself taken in 1937, with a group of students at a seminar in Oxford. In those days he actually looked older than he did now: pale skin, wispy hair, the patchy shave and ill-fitting clothes of a retired man. The wispy hair had gone; he was now bald except for a monkish fringe. His clothes were those of a business executive, not a teacher. It seemed to him—he might, he supposed, have been imagining it—that the set of his jaw was firmer, his eyes were brighter, and he took more care shaving.

He sat down behind his desk and lit a cigarette. That innovation was not welcome; he had developed a cough, tried to give it up, and discovered that he had become addicted. But almost everybody smoked in wartime Britain, even some of the women. Well, they were doing men’s jobs—they were entitled to masculine vices. The smoke caught in Godliman’s throat, making him cough. He put the cigarette out in the tin lid he used for an ashtray (crockery was scarce).

The trouble with being inspired to perform the impossible, he reflected, was that the inspiration gave you no clues to the practical means. He recalled his college thesis about the travels of an obscure medieval monk called Thomas of the Tree. Godliman had set himself the minor but difficult task of plotting the monk’s itinerary over a five-year period. There had been a baffling gap of eight months when he had been either in Paris or Canterbury but Godliman had been unable to determine which, and this had threatened the value of the whole project. The records he was using simply did not contain the information. If the monk’s stay had gone unrecorded, then there was no way to find out where he had been, and that was that. With the optimism of youth, young Godliman had refused to believe that the information was just not there, and he had worked on the assumption that somewhere there had to be a record of how Thomas had spent those months—despite the well-known fact that almost everything that happened in the Middle Ages went unrecorded. If Thomas was not in Paris or Canterbury he must have been in transit between the two, Godliman had argued; and then he had found shipping records in an Amsterdam museum that showed that Thomas had boarded a vessel bound for Dover that got blown off course and was eventually wrecked on the Irish coast. This model piece of historical research was what got Godliman his professorship.

He might try applying that kind of thinking to the problem of what had happened to Faber.

It was most likely that Faber had drowned. If he had not, then he was probably in Germany by now. Neither of those possibilities presented any course of action Godliman could follow, so they should be discounted. He must assume that Faber was alive and had reached land somewhere.

He left his office and went down one flight of stairs to the map room. His uncle, Colonel Terry, was there, standing in front of the map of Europe with a cigarette between his lips. Godliman realized that this was a familiar sight in the War Office these days: senior men gazing entranced at maps, silently making their own computations of whether the war would be won or lost. He guessed it was because all the plans had been made, the vast machine had been set in motion, and for those who made the big decisions there was nothing to do but wait and see if they had been right.

Terry saw him come in and said, “How did you get on with the great man?”

“He was drinking whisky,” Godliman said.

“He drinks all day, but it never seems to make any difference to him,” Terry said. “What did he say?”

“He wants Die Nadel’s head on a platter.” Godliman crossed the room to the wall map of Great Britain and put a finger on Aberdeen. “If you were sending a U-boat in to pick up a fugitive spy, what would you think was the nearest the sub could safely come to the coast?”