From the same briefcase I now extracted a ring-backed address book with a speckled fawn gazing from the cover. How much had Office routine changed with the move to the Embankment? I wondered. Merriman hadn't changed. Barney Waldon hadn't. And if I knew the police, any procedure that had worked for twenty-five years was likely to be working for the next hundred.
Heart in mouth, I dialled the Office's automated switchboard and, guided by the numbers in the address book, keyed myself into the Whitehall internal network. Five more digits gave me Scotland Yard's intelligence liaison room. A plummy male voice answered. I said I was North House, which used to be the code name for my section. The plummy voice manifested no surprise. I said the reference was Bunbury, which used to be the code name of the section chief. The plummy voice said, "Who do you wish to speak to, Bunbury?" I asked for Mr. Hatt's department. Nobody had ever met Mr. Hatt, but if he existed, he had charge of vehicle information. I heard rock music in the background, then a breezy girl's voice.
"It's Bunbury from North House with a boring one for Mr. Hatt," I said.
"That's all right, Bunbury. Mr. Hatt likes being bored. This is Alice. What can we be doing you for?"
For two decades I had kept track of Larry's cars. I could have recited the number of every wreck he had ever shown up in, plus colour, age, decrepitude, and luckless owner. I gave Alice the number of the blue Toyota. I had barely spoken the final letter before she was reading the computer printout.
"Anderson, Sally, 9A Cambridge Street, off Bellevue Road, Bristol," she announced. "Want the dirt?"
"Yes, please."
She gave it to me: insurance, owner's phone number, car's visible characteristics, first registered, expiry date, no other cars registered in this name.
At the motel desk, a spotty boy in a red dinner jacket gave me a thumbed street map of Bristol City.
I TOOK A cab to Bristol Temple Meads railway station and walked from there. I was in an industrial desert made sumptuous by the night. Heavy lorries tore past me, spewing oily mud and plucking at my raincoat. Yet a tender haze hung over the city valley, moist stars filled the sky, and a languid full moon drew me up the hill. As I walked, lane upon lane of orange-lit railway line opened before me, and I remembered Larry and his season ticket, Bath to Bristol, £71 a month. I tried to imagine him as a commuter. Where was business? Where was home? Anderson, Sally, at 9A Cambridge Street. The lorries had deafened me. I couldn't hear my footsteps.
The road, which had begun as a viaduct, joined itself to the hillside. The summit moved to my right. Directly above me stood a terrace of flat-fronted cottages. A red-brick wall made a battlement round them.
"Is this Cambridge Street? Bellevue Road?"
I smiled, but he didn't smile back. A bearded Druid in a baggy Irish cap stepped a little too carefully out of Robbins Off Licence. He carried a brown paper bag.
"Watch your feet, man," he advised me.
"Why?"
"You want Cambridge Street?"
"Yes."
"You're bloody near standin' on it, man."
Following his instructions, I walked fifty yards and turned right. The cottages were on one side only. On the other lay a platform of grass. Round the grass, in crinkle-crankle pattern, ran the brick parapet with red coping that I had seen from below. Playing the accidental tourist, I placed myself before it. From the station, the discontinued high roads of empire streamed into the darkness.
I turned and surveyed the cottages. Each had two windows upstairs, a flat roof, a chimney stack and television aerial. Each was painted a different pastel shade. Front doors to the left, bay windows to the right. In most, as my eye ran along the line of them, the bay window was lit, or a bedroom was lit, or a television flickered, or a phosphorescent doorbell glistened, and you felt a life behind the curtains. Only the last house stood in darkness, and it was 9A. Had the occupants fled? Had two lovers taken off their wristwatches and fallen asleep in one another's arms?
Deliberately, a person with no secrets, I linked my hands behind my back and, colonial style, prepared to inspect the ranks. I am an architect, a surveyor, a potential purchaser. I am a wine-growing Englishman of a certain class. Parked cars blocked the pavement. I took the centre of the road. No blue Toyota. No Toyota of any kind. I walked slowly, making a show of reading the house numbers. Shall I buy this one, or this one? Or all of them?
