The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker Read Free Book Online Page B

whether there was anybody else who ought to be killed and she replied, ‘Yes, the other George, that poncing old git in the Palace, he’d not be missed.’
    I then asked her whether this was all talk or whether some plan was afoot. She replied, ‘Can I trust you?’ I think I said something to the effect that she was in a pretty pickle if she could not. She then said that she knew where to get curare and that Walton Heath Golf-course would be a good place to get Mr Lloyd George with an air-gun. She said she knew three good lads in London who would do the job. She then asked me if I wanted to be in on it and I considered it my duty to reply in the affirmative in order to procure further information. 1 passed that night at Mrs Roper’s house, and the following morning I reported back to Major Lode’s department in code.
    Spragge was a big, fleshy, floridly handsome man, with thick brows and startling blue-green eyes that slanted down at the outer corners. His neck and jowls had thickened, and rose from his broad shoulders in a single column. Hair sprouted from his ears, his nostrils, the cuffs of his shirt. He was as unmistakably and crudely potent as a goat. Beattie would have gone for him, Prior thought, as he stood up to shake hands. He wondered how he knew that, and why he should mind as much as he did.
    ‘I asked you to come in,’ Prior said, after Spragge had settled into his chair, ‘because we’re thinking of employing you again.’ He watched the flare of hope. Spragge was less well turned out than he appeared to be at first sight. His suit was shiny with wear, his shirt cuffs frayed. ‘You’ll have gathered from the papers there’s a lot ofunrest in the munitions industry at the moment. Particularly in the north, where you spent a good deal of time, didn’t you? In’16.’
    ‘Yes, I —’
    ‘With MacDowell. Who’d just come out of a detention centre, I believe?’
    ‘Yes, he’s a deserter. Conchie. You should see the size of him, for God’s sake. Built like a brick shithouse. See some of the scraggy little buggers that get sent to France.’ Spragge was looking distinctly nervous. ‘I don’t think I could approach him again. I mean, he knows me.’
    ‘He knows you from the Roper case, doesn’t he?’
    ‘Before that.’
    ‘You might be able to give advice, though. Obviously we’d need to keep you away from the areas you were working in before.’
    Spragge looked relieved.
    ‘You met MacDowell in the summer of ‘16? In Sheffield?’
    ‘Yes, I was making inquiries into the shop stewards’ movement.’
    Prior made a show of consulting his notes. ‘You stayed with Edward Carpenter?’
    ‘I did.’ Spragge leant forward, his florid face shining with sweat, and said in a sinister whisper, ‘Carpenter is of the homogenic persuasion.’
    ‘So I believe.’ That phrase again. It had stuck in Beattie’s memory, and no wonder. It was transparently obvious that Spragge’s natural turn of phrase would have been something like ‘fucking brown ‘atter’. ‘Of the homogenic persuasion’ was Major Lode. Who had once told Prior in, of all places, the Cafe Royal, ‘This country is being brought to its knees. Not by Germany’ — here he’d thumped the table so hard that plates and cutlery had leaptinto the air – ‘NOT BY GERMANY, but by an unholy alliance of socialists, sodomites and shop stewards.’ Prior had felt scarcely able to comment, never having been a shop steward. ‘Do you think that’s relevant?’
    ‘It was relevant to me . There was no lock on the door.’
    ‘He is eighty, isn’t he?’ said Prior.
    Spragge shifted inside his jacket. ‘A vigorous eighty.’
    ‘You went to a meeting, next day? Addressed by Carpenter.’
    ‘I went with Carpenter.’
    ‘And in the course of his speech he quoted a number of… well, what would you call them? Songs? Poems? In praise of homogenic love.’
    ‘He did. In public.’
    ‘Well, it was a public meeting, wasn’t it? And then