“To a certain extent, yes,” said the voice. “Mostly, though, I’m worried about having a producer who’s as crazy as a jay-bird loose in Dorset. I think it’s probably about time you came home and did “Playschool” for a bit, just till you’re feeling better.”
“Look,” Danny hissed, “you remember our deal, right? About a certain cover-up? I don’t want to have to remind you…”
“Funny you should mention that,” said the voice. “I’ve been chatting to a couple of other people over lunch, and I think you’ll find they remember it rather differently. In fact, they seem to think you had quite a lot to do with that…What did you call it?”
Danny felt his knees weaken. “You
“So have I,” said the voice, casually. “Very good ones, too. I wrote them myself, just now. I think it’s time you came home.”
Suddenly Danny noticed that the hair on the back of his neck was beginning to rise. “Just a moment,” he said. Then his phonecard ran out.
The phonecard revolution, like the French, American and Russian revolutions, is a phased phenomenon. In Phase One, they scrapped all the corn-boxes and replaced them with cardboxes. In Phase Two, whenever that comes about, they will start providing outlets where you can buy phonecards. We may not see it, nor our children, nor yet our children’s children, but that is really beside the point. Every revolution causes some passing inconvenience to the individual. Ask Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
As he wandered through the streets (or rather street) of West Bay in search of an open Post Office, Danny was thinking hard. So there was going to be a cover-up, was there? A cover-up of the original cover-up. But what was this cover-up really covering up for? Not the original cover-up, surely; that was already well and truly covered, and nobody in his right mind would risk blowing the cover for anything so trivial as the cost of a few hours’ helicopter hire. The only possible explanation was that this rather obvious warning to lay off was designed to get him off the story he was on; in other words, it was a sublimated or double-bluff cover-up. Despite his natural feelings of anxiety, Danny couldn’t help licking his lips. It was the sort of situation he had been born to revel in, and revel in it he would, just as soon as he could get somewhere where he could sit down and get all the complications straight in his mind with the aid of a few charts and Venn diagrams. Then he would see about helicopters.
He found the camera crew in the Rockcliffe Inn, which had opened again shortly after Jane and Vanderdecker had left. Soon it would close again.
“Right,” said Danny briskly, “drink up, we’d better get on with it while there’s still some light left.”
They ignored him, but he was used to that. He changed a five-pound note, found the telephone in the corner of the pool room, and called a number in Shepherd’s Bush.
“Dear God,” said the voice at the other end, “not you again. Do you ever do anything besides call people up on the phone?”
“Yes,” Danny replied. “From time to time I make television programmes. That’s when establishment lackeys aren’t trying to muzzle me, that is. Lately, that’s tended to happen rather a lot, which means I have to spend more time telephoning. Cause and effect, really.”
“Are you calling me an establishment lackey?”
“Yes.”
“Another one who gets his vocabulary from the Argos catalogue. Look, I couldn’t care less what you think of me. I get called ruder things on “Points of View”. But if you think I’m going to put up with you wandering round seaside resorts spending the Corporation’s money on your idiotic persecution fantasies, then you’re a bigger fool than I took you for. And that, believe me, would be difficult.”
“Cirencester,” said Danny.
There was a pause. “What did you say?”
“I said Cirencester,” Danny said.
“I thought you said Cirencester,” replied the voice, “I was just giving you a chance to pretend you’d said something else.”
“And what’s wrong with me saying Cirencester?” Danny asked politely.
“Nothing, given the right context,” said the voice smoothly. “In a conversation about Cotswold towns, nothing could be more natural. In the present case, though, a less charitable man than myself might take it as proof that you’ve finally gone completely doolally.”
The pips went, but Danny was ready for them. He shoved in another pound coin. “I said Cirencester because I know you know what it means,” he said.
“Thank you,” said the voice, “that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me. What are you gibbering on about?”
“About the Cirencester Group,” said Danny, trying to sound cool and failing. “About your being a member of it.”
There was another pause. A long one, this time. “So?” said the voice. “What of it?”
