The silence was broken only once. Lindsay snatched up the telephone, hoping to hear Mary’s voice but it was his mother.
‘Are you all right, Douglas?’
She spoke to him in English for the first time. They had always spoken German in the family. His father was working too hard, his brother had joined the Royal Air Force — ‘Why don’t you ever ring? I’ve heard nothing from the rest of the family but the papers say they’ve bombed Bremen.’ And then there were tears. He was relieved when the call ended.
Rising from the couch, he drifted to the window of his little sitting room. It was half past eleven and St James’s Square was deserted but for a couple kissing in the shadows, entirely caught up in each other. Everything seemed to be falling apart. He shook his head, disgusted with himself for being so full of self-pity. The spooning couple separated and Lindsay watched them amble along the pavement. A black Morris was parked against the kerb opposite and as they passed it he was surprised to see the glowing orange pinprick of a cigarette behind the wheel. He stepped away from the window and drew the heavy blackout curtains. After a moment’s fumbling, he switched on the desk lamp and, reaching for a sheet of paper, wrote a brief note to Mary. If he delivered it now she would be able to read it in the morning, if not before.
The front door swung heavily to behind him and he stood on the pavement outside, catching his breath in the warm, still air. The city was humming restlessly even in the blackout and he could hear drunken voices outside the gentleman’s club on the opposite side of the square. Close by, a car engine grunted. It was the Morris and peering closely at it, he could distinguish the silhouettes of two men. It pulled away quickly from the kerb as he approached. The driver seemed to glance furtively across at him before swinging the car into Charles II Street. Were they spivs conducting a little night-time business? If you knew the right person you could still buy anything in London.
The house in Lord North Street was close-shuttered. Slipping the envelope through the letterbox, Lindsay turned to wander slowly back, glancing over his shoulder in the hope that Mary would find it at once and call after him. He considered returning to ring the bell but it was after midnight and her uncle was probably at home. He spent a long hour brooding, walking he knew not where before turning almost reluctantly for home. On the doorstep, his keys slipped through his fingers. As he bent to pick them up, he glanced through the iron railings to his left. The black Morris was now parked between two other cars in the north-east corner of the square. The driver and his passenger were lost in shadow but Lindsay knew they were there and that they were watching him. The door clunked firmly shut and he turned to lean against the wall in the dark hall, his chest tight with anxiety. They were not black-market wide boys, they were Special Branch policemen, he was sure of it, perhaps the Security Service. He had been identified as a risk. Perhaps they had searched his apartment. He raced up the stairs, his head pounding, giddy with breathlessness. He would ring Fleming, and he picked up the phone, only to slam it back a few seconds later. Collapsing into a chair, he closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on breathing deeply. Two, three, four minutes passed and his pulse began to slow. He must keep calm. They were probably ordinary policemen carrying out some sort of surveillance operation that was nothing to do with him. Lighting a cigarette, he sat in the darkness and smoked it slowly down to a small stub. This had happened before. Something in him snapped and he lost control. Foolish. Without bothering to look out of the window again, he walked through to the bedroom and flopped on to his lumpy old mattress.
That night, he had a dream. He was standing on the pavement below his apartment and the Morris was close by. The driver’s window was open and an arm with a black tattoo of a fouled anchor was resting against the door. ‘Who are you?’ Lindsay shouted. There was no reply. He bent to look inside. A head lunged towards him and he recoiled in disgust. The man’s face was no longer there, as if a giant hand had dashed it without mercy against a jagged rock. Tails of skin were clinging to the top of the skull and from one of these hung a tangled strand of auburn hair. And he knew the auburn hair belonged to a sailor from the Culloden. When he woke in the morning both his hands were hooked tightly around the frame of his bed. The Morris had gone.