The Yellow Room Conspiracy by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page B

over before we start on the wine,” he said. “What else do you want to know?”
    â€œNothing specific. Only if you come across anyone who you think is likely to have influence and whom we could in the long term trust.”
    His laugh was a snort.
    â€œSomeone bright enough, you mean, to perceive interests beyond his inherited feuds and alliances, honourable enough to keep his word to us, naïve enough to believe that we will do the same for him?”
    â€œThat’s about it, though it might always be in our interest to keep our word. I see you’ve gone native.”
    There was always a tendency for agents of his kind to see things—their local campaign, of course, but also the war at large and global politics beyond—from the viewpoint of the people with whom they were sharing their lives and dangers. Indeed that was pretty well a precondition of their acceptance among these people. It merely made their individual reports trickier to assess, and skewed the attitudes of the outfits they worked for.
    â€œI must have been born native,” he said. “I find I understand these people a good deal better than I understand my own.”
    â€œNatural enough,” I said. “Did you ever finally get rid of your doppelganger, speaking of the incomprehensible?”
    He was puzzled a moment, then laughed.
    â€œNot utterly,” he said. “An occasional document pursues me from the War Office, so he still has his dusty existence among their files. I have a fantasy that some day I may find him useful. I suppose I should feel uncomfortable to continue to have two existences when others have ceased to have even one. Tommy Havers, I heard.”
    â€œYes. He trod on a mine at Alamein.”
    â€œI’m sorry. I expect you miss him.”
    â€œYes and no. That bit of Kipling you quoted applies. Even a serious friendship becomes somehow less real.”
    â€œI don’t know that I have any serious friends. A couple of my thugs, maybe. Otherwise there are just people I happen to know. Heard anything from Blatchards?”
    As it happened, I had. One of the odder phenomena of the desert war was an ambulance group set up by the formidable wife of a senior general. The medical staff were Free French, the orderlies British conscientious objectors—mostly Quakers of scholarly disposition—and the drivers a group of girls who before the war would have been parading themselves at the posher end of the marriage market. These last used to swirl into Cairo on leave, treating it as an exotic extension of the London Season—dances, dinners, gossip, riding. With their family connections and rarity value they could command almost any escort they chose. A colleague of mine was besotted on one of them, who, on one of her leaves and (I guessed) because some more amusing engagement had fallen through, agreed to dine with him, but to forestall a tête-a-tête told him she was bringing a friend and he must bring one too. I was his, and Harriet Vereker was hers.
    â€œHello,” she’d said at once. “You came with Gerry one Sunday, didn’t you? And didn’t he look dire in that uniform?”
    We’d hit it off rather well, though not in any romantic fashion, my affections being then fully engaged by my Armenian, and later in the evening Harriet had deliberately separated us from the other pair as we were moving off to find somewhere to dance.
    â€œI think he’s rather sweet,” she’d explained. “And Sue’s a greedy little so-and-so. She just wanted a free meal. I think we should give him a chance to get his money’s worth.”
    This, incidentally, was typical of Harriet, a severe judge of character and a great arranger of other people’s lives. My colleague’s evening went well, apparently. He lived in a daze of content for weeks, and was convinced I had arranged the separation for his benefit. Harriet and I had found a