Appearing over the hill to rescue me; and like before I was glad that he had come.

‘You shouldn’t upset him,’ he said looking towards the closed door. ‘He’s like a soldier. A good soldier.’

‘I know. Kilts and trumpets at dawn. You told me before.’

‘It’s quite true,’ Brond said, sounding serious, even indignant, until he spoiled it by beginning to laugh. ‘He went off to fight in Malaya – a mere schoolboy furious with the Communists for trying to subvert the British Empire. The first time he tried to volunteer his father chased after him and fetched him home because he was under-age. He got there though, and did splendidly well.’

Some confused perception of the finality of his contempt – for Primo, for me, for everyone; maybe even for himself? – gave me the courage of anger.

‘If I get out of here—’ Why had I said that? I would get out of there. They weren’t going to kill me. ‘When I get out of here, I’ll talk. Even if you take me back to the police, I’ll tell them.’

Somebody would listen.

‘Tell them what?’ Brond asked. He watched me expectantly, and that puzzling anticipation chilled my anger.

‘About Muldoon,’ I said hesitantly. ‘You can’t do – what you did to him – not in this country.’

‘Nothing else?’ Brond wondered. ‘Isn’t there something else you want to tell them?’ I shook my head in denial. ‘Muldoon’s not really very interesting,’ he went on. ‘We knew about him, of course. His whole family is up to its unwashed neck in Irish Republicanism of one stripe or another. His father was interned during the war and has spent most of the last fifteen years enjoying Her Majesty’s same brand of hospitality. We suspected there might be a bigger fish, but never got near to thinking it was Kennedy. Michael Dart!’ He tasted the name appreciatively. ‘Oh, he was good. He knew that hiding wasn’t a matter of putting on a false moustache. You have to put on a false life. He lied to the world. If he was a sleeper, he was one of the best. There’s a price, though, for living in ambush behind your eyes. That little wife didn’t know who he was. But who is he? He’s her husband Kennedy night and day, and Michael Dart for an hour a month – perhaps not so much. Or he’s not Kennedy at all except as an actor – not even when he’s holding her in his arms. Michael Dart all the time and always pretending. I think that would be hard to do. In the end, who was he? . . . I find that interesting.’

Suddenly, as he finished, he came round the desk towards me. Despite his limp, he moved very rapidly and I shrank away from him in my seat. Bending above me, however, he slid open the file drawer and began to rummage inside. ‘That, yes, interesting,’ he said, as if to himself, groping at the back of the drawer. ‘Muldoon, no. Muldoon now is a dead letter. You’ll have to do better if you want to tell a tale. Isn’t there something else you want to tell?’

I saw a bridge in bright sunlight and a boy scrabbling to draw himself up to the parapet.

‘Eh?’ Brond said, touching me on the shoulder. ‘Something else?’

‘No!’ I cried too emphatically. ‘Just Muldoon. There wasn’t anything else.’

He had taken a box from the drawer and now, turning away from me with a look of disappointment, plucked out a fat white chocolate which he popped into his mouth. Muscles in his plump jowls writhed as he smacked upon it. ‘I almost forgot I’d left these on my last visit. Fresh cream, but it’s cold here and so they keep.’

If he had offered me one, I would have refused it. He didn’t offer. Instead, reaching with the hand that held the chocolate box, he caught up one of the papers scattered on the desk. As it dangled, held between his third and little finger, I saw that it was the newspaper clipping about the trial of the Republicans or radicals or revolutionaries – whatever they were, Scottish certainly.

‘What do you make of this then?’ he asked, flicking it at me. ‘You read it while you were waiting?’ I nodded warily. ‘Trust a student, of course. And?’

What country do you think you’re in? Primo had asked me.

‘Is he— is Primo one of them?’ I gestured at the clipping.

‘Primo,’ he savoured the name, amused again by it. ‘Yes . . . I don’t think he’d refuse that as a description. Modify it perhaps here and there. They always fall into factions, these people.’

How much contempt he had in him; and I remembered that Professor Gracemount had been a spy and that Brond was his friend; and I wondered if a spy always despised his victims. It was an insight I did not want, but the thoughts ran through my mind too fast for me to control. Because I was afraid he would read them in my face, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head: ‘But you said he was a soldier. You said he ran away to be a soldier.’

‘All the way to Malaya,’ Brond said seriously, ‘and did splendidly. Most white men couldn’t stay in the jungle for more than a few weeks, but he had a platoon of blacks – come from Africa to fight the Chinese. I expect they were keen on the Empire too, you see. With his platoon, he would stay in until he couldn’t get to sleep because his bones were sticking into the ground. Then they would include rum in the parachute drops – and he drank that until he could sleep. He really was a hero.’

‘He’s a funny kind of hero now,’ I said, glancing towards the door and thinking of what he had done to Muldoon.

‘A good soldier is an instrument,’ Brond said solemnly. ‘I imagine then he tortured some little yellow men in pyjamas – it’s the kind of thing good soldiers have to do. He is a good man, and he took no pleasure in what he had to do through there. I suppose it’s difficult for your generation to appreciate a sense of duty.’ He paused and I suddenly reheard his last sentence as if it had been some kind of impersonation. Something must have shown in my face for his voice changed. The words were still serious but his voice was different. ‘He is a dedicated man. To lose your only son and in a stupid, pointless accident. That’s cruel.’

He widened his eyes compassionately, but the voice kept that altered, inappropriate note.

‘Tragic,’ he said. ‘And so unnecessary – that’s what is hard. The child was playing on a bridge. And he fell.’

FIFTEEN

‘Yorkshire cock. 9 inches plus.’

I sat on the toilet seat reading the legend on the tiles. I could never remember what the sizes should be – and, of course, the average worrier about such things typically overlooked the phenomenon of foreshortening. Anyway, now we were in Europe was it not time our graffiti went metric?

Below the legend there was a drawing of something that looked like a length of limp hosepipe. Tucked under it were two pendulous moons that to me resembled women’s breasts. I congratulated myself on another proof of my heterosexuality – of such things as much evidence as possible is comforting.

On the hosepipe was printed, ‘Anybody want it?’ And there again – nine inches after all – while the answer might be yes, the practical problems would have to be faced: supposing I did manage to cut it off him, how would I manage to attach it to myself?

The ambience of the occasion engendered reflection in those areas – philosophy, linguistics, symbolic logic, that kind of thing. Why I was there was a different matter and a speculation I had suppressed along with so much else. From the moment Brond had come over the latest hill like the cavalry, I had surrendered myself into his hands. Now – despite flashes of terror like lights thrown into a darkened room – I floated with events as if he were my protector, my best wishes safe at his heart. It was inexplicable, but I rested in my darkened room rather than searching for doors to escape by or a window to see from – the survival instinct had ebbed low, or perhaps that was the way it served me.