The Second Midnight. Andrew Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ minutes after they had entered the house. Mr Kendall always timed their visits with meticulous care. At the end of the twenty minutes, he would stand up and announce they had to be going, usually when his wife was in mid-sentence.

      Mrs Bunnings escorted the children back to the drawing room to say goodbye. Mr Kendall was waiting impatiently by the door. Hugh had often wondered why his father seemed always to be in a hurry to be somewhere else; when he reached the somewhere else, he was always in a hurry to leave there as well.

      For once, Aunt Vida seemed reluctant to let them go. She made Mr Kendall make up the fire for her. She suddenly remembered that she wanted her niece to get her some wool; the commission involved a great deal of explanation, during which Mr Kendall jabbed angrily at the fire with the poker. He consulted his watch.

      ‘We shall miss the train if we don’t hurry.’

      ‘Off you go then.’ Aunt Vida paused. ‘Hugh, come over here. I want a word with you.’

      Alfred Kendall turned in the doorway.

      ‘Hugh can run after you,’ Aunt Vida said firmly, before he could protest. ‘Please close the door behind you.’

      Kendall gnawed his lower lip but said nothing. He shut the door behind him; with a little more force, it would have been a slam.

      Aunt Vida beckoned Hugh towards her. ‘I hear you’ve been in hot water again.’

      Hugh nodded. There was nothing he could say.

      ‘Bring me my handbag. It’s on the bureau.’

      Like his father, Aunt Vida was always giving orders; Hugh found it odd that he wasn’t afraid of her. His parents and Meg were afraid of her – even Stephen was wary of what he said and did in her company. He fetched her the battered black bag and stood patiently while she rummaged in it. He watched her face with fascination: her skin was a maze of wrinkles; there were more cracks than surface.

      Suddenly she glanced up at him. ‘Don’t you know it’s rude to stare at a lady? Hey?’

      Hugh grinned. He heard the front door closing with a bang; Mrs Bunnings was glad to see the back of her visitors.

      Aunt Vida nodded in the direction of the sound. ‘Don’t let it get on top of you,’ she said gruffly. ‘These things pass. Worse things happen at sea, not that that’s much consolation. When your father asks why I kept you, say I was telling you to be a better boy in future. Here, hold out your hand.’

      Hugh looked down. On his palm was a half-crown.

      ‘Kendall?’ Colonel Dansey stared with distaste at his plate; it was difficult to tell whether it was the omelette or the name of Kendall that was responsible for the irritation in his voice. ‘Who the devil’s he?’

      ‘He’s a glass importer, sir.’ Michael Stanhope-Smith sipped his burgundy appreciatively. Early in their acquaintance, he had learned that it was a mistake to deluge Uncle Claude with information; Dansey himself never made that mistake and he expected those who worked for him to be equally sparing.

      Michael glanced over his shoulder to make sure that no one was in earshot of their table. The dining room at the Savoy was still moderately crowded, but it had definitely passed the Sunday lunchtime peak.

      Dansey arranged his knife and fork neatly on his empty plate. He adjusted the dark-rimmed pebble glasses on his large, curved nose. ‘You know that I don’t encourage people to indulge in recruiting off their own bat. Recruit in haste and repent at leisure.’

      Michael flushed. He was twenty-five; he was two stone heavier and six inches taller; but Uncle Claude could still make him feel like a schoolboy who hadn’t washed behind the ears.

      ‘I haven’t actually interviewed him yet. I telephoned him yesterday; we’ve arranged to meet tomorrow.’

      ‘I see. And why this unseemly haste, may I ask?’

      ‘You haven’t heard? Farrar’s dead. Apparently he killed himself – sealed the draughts and turned on the gas in his hotel room. The signal came in from Vienna on Friday night.’

      Dansey said nothing. He appeared to be concentrating on adjusting the red carnation in the buttonhole of his dark blue suit.

      Michael swallowed. ‘William McQueen talked to a waiter at the hotel. He said that Farrar might have had a couple of visitors in his room the evening before he died. Probably Gestapo, though we’ve had no confirmation of that. You know how difficult it is to get hard information out of Austria these days.’

      Dansey gave a scarcely perceptible shrug. ‘It’s immaterial. Farrar couldn’t have told them anything. He hadn’t been briefed.’

      In the pause which followed, Michael sipped his wine to cover his confusion. It was brutally obvious to him that Dansey didn’t care that Farrar had in all likelihood been killed. It was at most an inconvenience. A newly-recruited courier was of little weight in Uncle Claude’s professional scale of values. If this was professionalism, Michael thought bitterly, he wished he was an amateur.

      ‘Do go on,’ Dansey suggested. ‘You were about to explain why you found it necessary to circumvent the standard recruitment procedure.’

      ‘Farrar was due to return to London and then go on to Prague at the end of the week. You said the Prague trip was vital, sir. I would have contacted you, but you were on a train somewhere between Zurich and London. I thought I’d better act on my own initiative.’

      ‘And how did your initiative lead you to this man Kendall?’

      ‘We need someone with a bona fide reason to go to Prague – preferably a commercial one. I thought Prague – Bohemia – glass; and then I remembered Sir Basil Cohen.’

      ‘You know Basil?’ Dansey said sharply. ‘How did that come about?’

      ‘I was at Cambridge with his younger son. I stayed with his people down in Gloucestershire once or twice.’

      ‘I see.’ For once Dansey sounded almost amiable.

      Michael’s mind immediately made a connection. Cohen had been very helpful, right from the start. Dansey had been cultivating the friendship of the wealthy and the powerful for nearly half a century. Many of them were now unobtrusively helping Dansey’s Z Organization in a variety of ways. It was not inconceivable that Cohen was among them. In that case, Sir Basil must have derived a great deal of private amusement from Michael’s claim that he was working for the Foreign Office trade section.

      A muscle twitched in Dansey’s cheek. In a lesser man, it might have been a grin.

      ‘I telephoned him – luckily he was in town. He was dining at White’s, but he said he could spare me a few minutes there after dinner.’ Michael glanced quickly at Dansey and hurriedly continued: ‘I – well – implied I had some sort of FO connection. I said we needed an unofficial trade representative in Prague – someone who made regular trips there and could combine his own work with a little confidential work for us. Sir Basil asked a few questions, of course, but I was as discreet as possible.’

      A waiter moved tentatively towards the table. Dansey waved him away. ‘What do you know about Kendall?’

      ‘He works from СКАЧАТЬ