The Yellow Room Conspiracy by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online

at languages, and conforming to a stereotype of the British gentleman, then thought likely to impress simple-minded peasant partisans. Again, this is a step that Gerry would not have known how to take for himself.
    I had consulted him, of course, and he wrote to say he had been taken on. Our correspondence ceased, and I heard no more from or of him until late in 1943, when I was in Cairo. Greece and Crete had fallen and the desert campaigns were largely over. We knew by then that the war was won, and my organisation had transmogrified itself yet again, and was now chiefly concerned with building a base of contacts and information which might allow Britain to influence, if not control, events in south-eastern Europe in the aftermath of war. We existed, we believed, as a result of one of Churchill’s momentary whims, expressed in a memo: “We must now he looking forward. Trouble has always brewed from the Balkans. Storms that engulfed Europe began as thunder-clouds in those remote passes. We must know what is going on there. Let me see your proposals.” Well, something like that.
    There were already half-a-dozen feuding agencies, all more or less deluded by their own preoccupations, supporting various partisan groups and running agents and intelligence out of different countries. Our task was to assess and collate what they came up with, and since we were not in immediate conflict with any of them, and since my boss had a genius for dealing with the several types of maniac who ran them, they were for the most part more cooperative than might have been expected. My work was largely files and committees, but from time to time agents would come in to Cairo for what is now called a de-briefing and a rest, and at some point we would talk to them, and I would take them out for an evening on the town, or whatever they regarded as a good time, presenting myself as the junior dogsbody who got landed with that sort of task. Their own organisations let us do this largely because we had funds, and this allowed them to use their own entertainment budgets for other purposes. Some agents wanted drink and a woman, or a boy; some the pyramids by moonlight; some an evening’s bridge. My most exotic achievement was to muster four performers of adequate standard for my then charge to play Schubert and Handel quintets with. The idea was that they should relax with me. I wasn’t there primarily to pump information out of them, but to try to form a judgment of the depth and bias of the information they were bringing in.
    Most agencies concealed the true names of their people, for obvious reasons, so there was no way that I could have known, when summoned by my boss to meet a Major George Gissing, that I was going to be confronted with Gerry Grantworth. We both laughed. My boss watched us unsmiling, the piggy little eyes in his big blank face glancing back and forth.
    â€œLieutenant Ackerley, Major Gissing,” he said. “You have, I gather, met.”
    â€œIn the far show of unbelievable years and shapes that flit, in our own likeness, on the edge of it,” said Gerry.
    The quotation was presumably a fluke, my boss being a Kipling fanatic, but at the same time it seemed an affirmation that Gerry hadn’t changed in his capacity for getting things effortlessly right. My boss nodded.
    â€œIn that case I won’t keep you,” he said. “Thank you for your help, Major Gissing. Have a good time. Let Paul know if there’s anything we can do for you, in any way.”
    We left.
    â€œJust two pips, Paul?” said Gerry. “I’d have thought you’d be running your own show by now.”
    â€œMy rank’s a bit variable,” I said. “How would you like to spend an evening?”
    â€œTalking,” he said at once. “How are you set up here?”
    â€œI’ve got a flat. Is that what you mean?”
    â€œPerfect. If it suits you, that is. Or is there someone else