The Secret Servant

Maxim shook his head slowly. "I don't follow that. Most suicides are despair, hopelessness, things are only going to get worse… I'm assuming Jackaman wasn't a complete moron, so he must have known that account could wreck his whole career. So – did he simply say to himself. Okay, if I'm found out, I'll shoot myself? And if he hadn't decided that, why did he do it? I just can't get hold of it."
George started a slow circuit of the Cabinet table. Since it seated about thirty, that took time. He stopped at the far end and called back: "You aren't, God help us all, trying to turn this into a country house murder mystery?"
"I'm just asking."
"And," Agnes persisted, "why wasn't there a suicide note?"
"Oh blast it, there aren't any rules for committing suicide."
"Yes there are. Look at Japan. And Jackaman was a senior civil servant; paperwork was his daily bread. Minutes, memos, reports, letters, just let me have a draught paper about that, will you, old boy?"
Maxim said: "Perhaps it wasn't anything to do with the bank account, but he just despaired of paperwork."
"Or perhaps," George snapped, "he had a horrible prevision of his life being batted around by you two clowns." He cruised slowly back down the fireplace side of the table, past the PM's chair.
Maxim asked calmly: "Who found his body?"
George stopped and looked at him suspiciously. "His wife. There were only the two of them in the house and it was fairly isolated. She heard a shot but thought it was him having a crack at a pigeon or something, then after a time she went to see and… I read her statement."
"I don't call that very sensitive of him," Agnes said. "He can't have expected to look very palatable."
"He wasn't a very sensitive man, not in an imaginative way. He just had a strong sense of honour and duty."
"Except where money was concerned." Maxim suggested.
George slumped into a chair, took a thin cigar from a case in his top waistcoat pocket and stared moodily at it. He sighed, clipped the end, and lit it with a plain match. He looked defeated.
"He left a note," Agnes said quietly, "and he left the Tyler letter. She suppressed both. I don't know why. Then she let the KGB know that she had it. Again, I don't know why. And we don't know where she is to ask her."
"I rather think," Maxim said, "that I do. But if I do, then so does Greyfriars."
It was past midnight. Whitehall was still brightly lit, still empty. The ministerial palaces on either side wore, for once, a stark blue-rinsed beauty, with fringes of snow on their cornices where they reached up almost out of the light.
"Sometimes this town remembers its past," Agnes said, huddling in her sheepskin and breathing like a dragon. She began to quote: "Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!"
"When I first joined the Army," Maxim said, "most suicides happened in the lavatories. I suppose it was the only place the poor kids could get any real privacy."
She stopped dead and stared at him. "Bloody flaming hell's fire. Did you hear one word of what I said?"
"It's Wordsworth, isn't it? The one about Westminster Bridge."
They walked for a while in silence, then Maxim asked: "D'you want a lift anywhere?"
"No thanks. I'll drop in at one of our offices around the corner. I want to know if they've turned up anything more."
But she wasn't in any hurry, and it was a rare privilege to have the centre of London to yourself. They drifted past Maxim's car and instinctively headed for Westminster Bridge.
"Where do you get a handle like Maxim?" Agnes asked. "Are you descended from the restaurant or the machine-gun?"
"Neither, I'm afraid. But it's supposed to be a French Huguenot name, so perhaps we're all umpteenth cousins."
"I should try and inherit the restaurant; the patents on the gun must have run out years ago. You don't come of an Army family?"
"I'm the first, as far as I know. My father tried to join up in '39, but he was a skilled tool-maker by then, a reserved occupation… I think he's always felt bad about not having Done His Bit. His father had been in the Navy in the First War. No-" he shook his head as she was about to ask something. "He didn't push me into it. He doesn't have a very high opinion of Army officers in peace-time. He'd rather I was doing something useful for exports."
Agnes gave a sympathetic grunt.
They came out of Bridge Street below Big Ben into the blast of Siberian air funnelled up the Thames, and scurried across the road to the bridge.
"And how did a nice girl – and all that?" Maxim asked.
She thought about it. "I don't know if I was pushed or just fell. I was reading Modern Languages at Oxford and I hadn't got much idea of what I wanted to do afterwards, and one of the dons suggested I might pop down to London and have lunch with an old friend of hers.. so you do that, and gradually you begin to realise what they're talking about. It sounded more interesting than translating French comic books for a publisher, so…"
"Why you?"
"My father was a civil servant all his life, mostly at Agriculture or the Home Office. The head-hunters at universities look for sons and daughters of people like him – my sister was at Defence until she married, and my young brother's in the Treasury. We're supposed to have a bred-in sense of duty and patriotism. I suppose we do – for a time."
Maxim scooped crusted snow off the bridge parapet, waited until his bare hands had melted it into a ball, then threw it into the swirling water below. There was no 'glideth' about the Thames tonight.
"What happens after that?" he asked, shoving his hands deep into his coat pockets.
"What happened to you?"
"I asked first."
"So you did." She folded her arms on the parapet and stared down river, against the wind. "I suppose it was because I'd taken the Queen's shilling. And she always seems to want thirteen pence in change. Maybe I should have held out for fourteen pence, like our dearly beloved Rex Masson."
Maxim didn't say anything to that, so she asked: "And what about you, now?"
"I don't know…"
"That's a good start."
He grinned and made a useless attempt to stop his hair blowing in all directions. At least in uniform you wore a hat… "I just wonder now if anybody joins the Army they thought they were joining. A few generals and sergeant-majors, probably, and the odd one like David Stirling or Popski and Tyler. For the rest of us.. there's always enough small issues to keep you busy.
Maybe it's only when you get to Whitehall that you begin to wonder about the big picture – even about whether there is a big picture. Perhaps I let Je-, my wife, do too much of the thinking for me."
"I heard about her." Agnes didn't say any more.
"You weren't married?"
"No." She paused. "I'm not in a nine-to-five job. The big picture is that there's a war on. Or at least you have to believe there is." She swung around and pecked him on the cheek. "G'night, ahr 'Arry."
He watched her walk briskly back across the bridge, then followed more slowly.