The Secret Servant

 
16
"He said we were going on just a short trip to Vienna and the service had said I could go. I've been on these things before. It's something about a couple looking less suspicious than a single person. That's right, isn't it, Agnes?"
"That's right." Agnes spoke very gently.
"He said he wouldn't have time to get home, it had all been arranged at the last minute and that I should pack for both of us. He told me some special things he wanted." She was lying flat on her bed, staring at the ceiling. The room was darkening as evening crept in, but nobody moved to turn on a light. Maxim had found her a drink and Agnes had rummaged out a packet of tranquilisers from the bottom of her vast handbag, and Inspector Ferris had been chased back to his mouseholing. Now they just listened.
Barbara Masson had a very English elegance and the face you see in society magazines: lean, high cheekbones, a slightly large mouth and very good teeth. That sort ages well, and the silver in her long fair hair suited her. She could have worn pearls to hose out the pig-sty and not look overdressed.
"What special things?" Agnes prompted.
"Oh, two of his newest suits and his favourite ties – quite a lot of them, I thought, and his new shoes and to be sure to bring his best cuff-links. And he wanted the two little cameras. It all sounded rather grand for a two-day jaunt, but I didn't suspect anything." Her voice was a Knightsbridge flute that frequently hit awoid fortissimo.
"Two cameras?" Agnes asked. But of course Masson would need two, no professional dared trust only one. And he had certainly been a professional photographer.
"Yes, one of them was mine, he gave me it. But I never really liked it. It was too small and fiddly. He borrowed it sometimes."
"So you took both."
"That's right. Well, when I got to Heathrow, he gave me a new passport. It had my picture in it, I don't know where he got that, and it said I was Margaret Franklin. I'd never seen it before, of course, but it had quite a lot of stamps and visas in it as if I'd got to all these places." She lifted her head to stare at Agnes. "I thought it was the service who'd done it, but it must have really been them? "
"They're good at their job."
"Yes." It was a sigh. Mrs Masson let her head fall back. "Actually, I was quite excited, being somebody else, somebody unreal. A bit like taking over from Sarah Bernhardt and making an absolute wow of it." She giggled and waved an arm in a gesture slightly unstrung by vermouth and tranquilisers and probably lack of sleep. An empty glass thumped onto the carpet but didn't break. Nobody moved.
"We put up at a hotel down in the old city, but it was a modern hotel. We didn't get there until after dinner but it didn't really matter because we'd had one of those ucky airline meals. You have to eat them because there's nothing else to do on an aeroplane except get sloshed. Rex said he had to go out just to make a contact. He was gone, oh, about three-quarters of an hour when he came back he said he'd arranged a chauffeur-driven car for us to go sight-seeing the next morning. I thought that was a bit odd because Vienna was full of snow so heaven knows what it would be like outside. But at least we wouldn't be doing the driving and the service was paying, so… In the morning he told me."
"Before you got in the car?"
"This was before the car even came. He told me to pack, and then he said we weren't going back to Britain, not ever again. We were going to Moscow instead. I just didn't believe him. I thought he was making some terrible joke. Then I realised we were only about thirty miles from Moscow – if you see what I mean."
Agnes nodded. "The Czech frontier at Bratislava. That's probably where you'd have gone over. Did he say.. why you were going?"
"He talked about half-baked socialism mixed with half-baked capitalism and governments that didn't dare take any decisions so that Britain was run by the civil service and the unions. I must say it's funny he was blaming the unions and here we were on our way to Moscow." Her voice was suddenly strained and bitter.
Agnes said softly: "They don't have strikes in Moscow, Barbara."
"I suppose not… But I wasn't really listening. It was all as if he'd said he'd been sleeping with somebody else for years… No, I really think it was worse. If he'd been sleeping around there would have been just part of him I hadn't understood. But this was all of him."
Treachery, Maxim thought, is a balloon. It has to be complete or it's nothing.
"And what did you do?" Agnes asked.
"It's quite terrible how you fall back on clichйs. I just said: 'I'm leaving you, Rex. Good-bye.' And I picked up my bags and I walked out."
"He didn't try to stop you?"
"No. Nobody did. But why do you think he didn't wait until we were actually in the car before he told me where we were going?"
"Maybe," Maxim said, "that after all the years when you didn't have a choice, he owed you one at the end."
Mrs Masson lifted herself on one elbow and peered through the gloom at him. "Yes. Yes, I suppose you could be right. He wasn't an unkind man."
Agnes said: "Also you couldn't have been dragged unwillingly through the Austrian frontier post. And so you flew back home?"
"It wasn't that easy," Mrs Masson said reproachfully. "This is yesterday I'm talking about." She had done a slow frightening journey quite alone – more alone than she'd ever been before – and now, perhaps, she wanted to blunt the memory by doing it again in company.
When she reached the airport, she realised she hadn't even any Austrian money for the taxi and had to overpay heavily in sterling. And then there wasn't a flight to Britain for another three hours. She began to worry.
Rex might have let her go, but that didn't mean his new masters concurred. And there she'd be, sitting in the most obvious place, for three hours…
She pulled herself together, changed the rest of her pounds into schillings and took a taxi back to the city, to the railway station. Which station? She hadn't realised there were two. Then where did she want to go? She didn't know that, either, but then remembered that Germany was to the west, away from the Iron Curtain. Then she must go to the Westbahnhof.
"How were you going to manage for tickets and a passport?" Agnes asked.
"Oh, I had my Diner's Club card, thank heavens. I'd only taken it out two years ago. And I actually had my real passport. You see, Rex hadn't told me not to bring it when he rang, I suppose that would have sounded odd, so I just naturally did. But he'd taken back the Margaret Franklin one."
There was a stopping train to Munich, and as she watched the white countryside rumble by, the terrors began again. For over twenty. years of marriage she had been aware of the KGB as a giant enemy, but a distant, misty one. Now the giant was aware of her, knew she was scuttling around somewhere on the floor of Europe, would be leaning down to look closer.. At every stop, anybody getting on could be an agent, and most of them looked like it. She reached Munich almost in hysterics.
She staved them off until Munich airport – and by then the snow had hit London, catching Heathrow with its boots off, as usual. Flights to London were backing up all over Europe, nobody knew when… at that, she hauled her case into the lavatory and sat down and burst into tears. Her whole life had fallen in on her, and she was still trapped in the rubble.
At least German lavatories are clean enough for a good long cry. And after that, she remembered the duty-free bottle of Scotch in her airline bag, a rare and expensive brand that Rex had insisted on – and she now knew why. She didn't much like Scotch, especially neat, but a few cautious gulps made the giant seem smaller, and shorter-sighted. She took a taxi back to the station and bought a ticket to Frankfurt, remembering vaguely that the airport there had more flights than anywhere in Germany, and anyway, she wanted to keep moving.