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  Frazer glanced in his mirror again. ‘I think we should,’ he said, voicing our unspoken thoughts, and Ferdy wrote down the registration number in his crocodile-covered note pad. It was a Düsseldorf registration, and even while Ferdy was writing it, the BMW gave a toot and started to overtake.

  Whatever was the extent of his intention, he’d chosen his moment well. The BMW squeezed past us in a spray of powdery snow from the drift on our left, and Frazer’s nervous reaction was to swerve away from the flash of light blue and the hard stare of the bearded man in the passenger seat.

  The road was downhill and the ice was still hard and shiny up here on the top of the Hamish. Frazer fought the wheel as we swung round – as slowly as a boat at anchor – and slid almost broadside down the narrow mountain road.

  We gathered speed. Frazer pumped the brake pedal, trying vainly to snatch at the road. I could see only the sheer drop, down where a clump of firs were waiting to catch us a thousand feet below.

  ‘Bastards, bastards,’ mumbled Frazer. Ferdy, flung off-balance, grabbed at the seat back, the roof and the sun visor, so as not to grab at Frazer and kill us all.

  There was a thump as the rear wheel struck some stones at the road edge, and the tyres for a moment gripped enough to make the differential whine. Frazer was into bottom gear by now, and at the next patch of stones the car whimpered and ceded to his brake pedal enough for him to narrow the angle at which we were sliding. The road was more steeply downhill and the low gear had not slowed us enough to take the steep bend ahead. Frazer hit the horn in two loud blasts before we hit the banked snow that had collected around the edge of the hairpin, like piped icing round a birthday cake. We stopped with a bang of hollow steel, and the car rocked on its suspension.

  ‘My God,’ said Ferdy. For a moment we sat still. Praying, sighing or swearing according to inclination.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to do that every time someone tries to overtake,’ I said.

  ‘Just foreign registrations,’ said Frazer.

  Frazer started the engine again. Gently he let in the clutch and the car waddled out of the drift. He took the middle of the road, and at no more than twenty-five miles an hour we went all the way down to the bridge and up the next climb all the way to The Bonnet.

  He pulled into the yard there. There was a crunch of gravel and a soft splintering of ice. The BMW was already parked but none of us remarked upon the way its driver had nearly killed us.

  ‘I’m not sure I’d enjoy it,’ said Frazer, talking of the voyage but studying our faces as if to see the effect the near-accident had had on us. ‘I’m a destroyer man myself … like to keep my head above water.’

  I would have described Frazer as an office-boy, but if he wanted to play Long John Silver it was all right by me.

  ‘Peace time,’ pronounced Ferdy, ‘a submarine trip north is no different to trailing Russians round the Med in an intelligence trawler.’

  ‘In winter the Med’s a damned site rougher,’ I said.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Ferdy. ‘As sick as a dog, I was, and I could see that Russian cruiser as steady as a rock all the time.’

  ‘Your second trip, wasn’t it?’ asked Frazer.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, you chaps never do more than one a year. It’s over and done with, eh?’

  ‘Are you buying?’ Ferdy Foxwell asked him.

  ‘Then it’ll be small ones,’ said Frazer. The wind bit into us as we stepped from the car but there was a fine view. The hills at the other end of the valley obscured the anchorage, but to each side of the summit I could see the Sound and the mist-shrouded islands that continued all the way to the grey Atlantic breakers. The wind sang in the car aerial and tugged at the chimney smoke. We were high enough to be entangled in the fast moving underside of the storm clouds. Ferdy coughed as the cold wet air entered his lungs.

  ‘All that air-conditioned living,’ said Frazer. ‘You’d better take your briefcase – security and all that, you know.’

  ‘It’s only dirty underwear,’ said Ferdy. He coughed again. Frazer went around the car testing each door-lock and the boot too. For a moment he looked down at his hand to see if it shook. It did, and he pushed it into the pocket of his trench-coat.

  I walked across to the BMW and looked inside it. There was a short oilskin coat, a battered rucksack and a stout walking-stick: a walker’s equipment.

  It was a tiny cottage. One bar; a front parlour except for the warped little counter and flap scorched by cigarettes and whittled with the doodles of shepherds’ knives. On the whitewashed walls there was a rusty Highlander’s dirk, an engraving of a ship in full sail, a brightly shone ship’s bell and a piece of German submarine surrendered in May 1945. The landlord was a shaggy-haired giant, complete with kilt and beer-stained shirt.

  There were two customers already drinking, but they had taken the bench near the window so we could stand around the open peat fire and slap our hands together and make self-congratulatory noises about its warmth.

  The beer was good: dark and not too sweet, and not crystal clear like the swill that the brewers extol on TV. The Bonnet’s had flavour, like a slice of wheat loaf. Frazer knew the landlord well but, with the formality that Highland men demand, he called him Mr MacGregor. ‘We’ll have another fall of snow before the day’s through, Mr MacGregor.’

  ‘Is it south you’re heading, Mr Frazer?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘The high road is awful bad already. The oil delivery could not get through that way: he made the journey by the road along the Firth. It never freezes there. It’s a wicked long journey for the boy.’ He prodded the peat fire with a poker and encouraged the smoke to turn to flame.

  ‘You are busy?’ asked Frazer.

  ‘Travellers. People walk, even in winter. I don’t understand it.’ He made no attempt to lower his voice. He nodded impassively at the two customers by the window. They were looking at large-scale walker’s maps, measuring distances with a tiny wheeled instrument that they rolled along the footpaths.

  ‘Travellers, walkers and spies,’ said Frazer. The wind banged on the tiny window panes.

  ‘Ahh, spies,’ said the landlord. He came as near as I’d ever seen him to laughing: the two men in the window seat looked like some inept casting director’s idea of Russian spies. They had black overcoats and dark tweed hats. Both wore coloured silk scarves knotted at their throats and one man had a closely trimmed grizzled beard.

  ‘We’ll have the other half, Landlord,’ said Ferdy.

  With infinite care the landlord drew three more pints of his special. In the silence I heard one of the other men say, ‘In our own good time.’ His voice was soft but his accent had the hard spiky consonants of the English Midlands. In the context of our remarks the sentence hung in the air like the peaty smoke from the fireplace. What in their own good time, I wondered.

  ‘Well, what’s been happening out here in the real world?’ said Ferdy.

  ‘Nothing much,’ said Frazer. ‘Looks like the German reunification talks are going ahead, the papers are full of it. Another car workers’ strike. The Arabs put a bomb in the Tokyo Stock Exchange but it was defused, and Aeroflot has started running its own jumbos into New York.’

  ‘We get all the big news,’ said Ferdy. ‘And American home-town stuff. I could tell you more about the climate, local politics and football scores of the American heartland than any other Englishman you could find. Do you know that a woman in Portland, Maine, has given birth to sextuplets?’

  It had begun to snow. Frazer looked at his watch. ‘We mustn’t miss the plane,’ he said.

  ‘There’s time for one from this man’s stone bottle,’ said Ferdy.

  ‘The stone bottle?’ said MacGregor.

  ‘Come along, you hairy bastard,’ said Ferdy. ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

  MacGregor’s face was unchanging. It would have been easy to believe him deeply offended, but Ferdy knew him better than that. Without ta
king his eyes from Ferdy, MacGregor took a packet of Rothmans from his pocket. He lit one and tossed the packet on to the counter.

  MacGregor went into his back parlour and reappeared with a jar from which he poured a generous measure. ‘You’ve a good palate – for a Sassenach.’

  ‘No one would want the factory stuff after this, Mac,’ said Ferdy. MacGregor and Frazer exchanged glances.

  ‘Aye, I get my hands on a little of the real thing now and again.’

  ‘Come along, MacGregor,’ said Ferdy. ‘You’re among friends. You think we haven’t smelled the barley and the peat fire?’

  MacGregor gave a ghost of a smile but would admit to nothing. Ferdy took his malt whisky and tasted it with care and concentration.

  ‘The same?’ asked MacGregor.

  ‘It’s improved,’ said Ferdy.

  Frazer came away from the fireplace and took his seat at the counter. MacGregor moved the malt whisky towards him. ‘It will help you endure the cruel blows of the west wind,’ he said.

  So he must have rationalized many such drinks up here on the bare slopes of the Grampians’ very end. A desolate place: in summer the heather grew bright with flowers, and so tall that a hill walker needed a long blade to clear a lane through it. I turned an inch or two. The strangers in the corner no longer spoke together. Their faces were turned to watch the snow falling but I had a feeling that they were watching us.

  MacGregor took three more thimble-sized glasses, and, with more care than was necessary, filled each to the brim. While we watched him I saw Frazer reach out for the packet of cigarettes that the landlord had left on the counter. He helped himself. There was an intimacy to such a liberty.

  ‘Can I buy a bottle?’ asked Ferdy.

  ‘You can not,’ said MacGregor.

  I sipped it. It was a soft smoky flavour of the sort that one smelled as much as tasted.

  Frazer poured his whisky into the beer and drank it down. ‘You damned heathen,’ said the landlord. ‘And I’m giving you the twelve-year-old malt too.’

  ‘It all ends up in the same place, Mr MacGregor.’

  ‘You damned barbarian,’ he growled, relishing the r’s rasp. ‘You’ve ruined my ale and my whisky too.’

  I realized it was a joke between them, one that they had shared before. I knew that Lieutenant Frazer was from RN security. I wondered if the landlord was a part of it too. It would be a fine place from which to keep an eye on strangers who came to look at the atomic submarines at the anchorage.

  And then I was sure that this was so, for Frazer picked up the packet of cigarettes from which he’d been helping himself. The change of ownership had been a gradual one but I was sure that something more than cigarettes was changing hands.

  2

  In games where the random chance programme is not used, and in the event of two opposing units, of exactly equal strength and identical qualities, occupying same hex (or unit of space), the first unit to occupy the space will predominate.

  RULES. ‘TACWARGAME’. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON

  The London flight was delayed.

  Ferdy bought a newspaper and I read the departures board four times. Then we drifted through that perfumed limbo of stale air that is ruled by yawning girls with Cartier watches, and naval officers with plastic briefcases. We tried to recognize melodies amongst the rhythms that are specially designed to be without melody, and we tried to recognize words among the announcements, until finally the miracle of heavier-than-air flight was once again mastered.

  As we climbed into the grey cotton wool, we had this big brother voice saying he was our captain and on account of how late we were there was no catering aboard but we could buy cigarette lighters with the name of the airline on them, and if we looked down to our left side we could have seen Birmingham, if it hadn’t been covered in cloud.

  It was early evening by the time I got to London. The sky looked bruised and the cloud no higher than the high-rise offices where all the lights burned. The drivers were ill-tempered and the rain unceasing.

  We arrived at the Studies Centre in Hampstead just as the day staff were due to leave. The tapes had come on a military flight and were waiting for me. There is a security seal when tapes are due, so we unloaded to the disapproving stares of the clock-watchers in the Evaluation Block. It was tempting to use the overnight facilities at the Centre: the bathwater always ran and the kitchen could always find a hot meal, but Marjorie was waiting. I signed out directly.

  I should have had more sense than to expect my car to sit in the open through six weeks of London winter and be ready to start when I needed it. It groaned miserably as it heaved at the thick cold oil and coughed at the puny spark. I pummelled the starter until the air was choked with fumes, and then counted to one hundred in an attempt to keep my hands off her long enough to dry the points. At the third bout she fired. I hit the pedal and there was a staccato of backfire and judder of one-sided torque from the oldest plugs. Finally they too joined the song and I nudged her slowly out into the evening traffic of Frognal.

  If the traffic had been moving faster I would probably have reached home without difficulty, but the sort of jams you get on a wet winter’s evening in London gives the coup de grâce to old bangers like mine. I was just a block away from my old place in Earl’s Court when she died. I opened her up and tried to decide where to put the Band-aid, but all I saw were raindrops sizzling on the hot block. Soon the raindrops no longer sizzled and I became aware of the passing traffic. Big expensive all-weather tyres were filling my shoes with dirty water. I got back into the car and stared at an old packet of cigarettes, but I’d given them up for six weeks and this time I was determined to make it stick. I buttoned up and walked down the street as far as the phone box. Someone had cut the hand-piece off and taken it home. Not one empty cab had passed in half an hour. I tried to decide between walking the rest of the way home and lying down in the middle of the road. It was then that I remembered that I still had the door-key of the old flat.

  The Studies Centre was turning my lease over the following month. Possibly the phone was still connected. It was two minutes’ walk.

  I rang the doorbell. There was no answer. I gave it an extra couple of minutes, remembering how often I’d failed to hear it from the kitchen at the back. Then I used the old key and let myself in. The lights still worked. I’d always liked number eighteen. In some ways it’s more to my taste than the oil-fired slab of speculator’s bad taste that I’d exchanged it for, but I’m not the sort of fellow who gives aesthetics precedence over wall-to-wall synthetic wool and Georgian-style double-glazing.

  The flat wasn’t the way I’d left it. I mean, the floor wasn’t covered with Private Eye and Rolling Stone, with strategically placed carrier bags brimming with garbage. It was exactly the way it was when the lady next door came in to clean it three times a week. The furniture wasn’t bad, not bad for a furnished place, I mean. I sat down in the best armchair and used the phone. It worked. I dialled the number of the local mini-cab company and was put up for auction. ‘Anyone do a Gloucester Road to Fulham?’ Then, ‘Will anyone do a Gloucester Road to Fulham with twenty-five pence on the clock?’ Finally some knight of the road deigned to do a Gloucester Road to Fulham with seventy-five pence on the clock if I’d wait half an hour. I knew that meant forty-five minutes. I said yes and wondered if I’d still be a non-smoker had I slipped that pack into my overcoat.

  If I hadn’t been so tired I would have noticed what was funny about the place the moment I walked in. But I was tired. I could hardly keep my eyes open. I’d been sitting in the armchair for five minutes or more when I noticed the photo. At first there was nothing strange about it, except how I came to leave it behind. It was only when I got my mind functioning that I realized that it wasn’t my photo. The frame was the same as the one I’d bought in Selfridges Christmas Sale in 1967. Inside was almost the same photo: me in tweed jacket, machine washable at number five trousers, cor-blimey hat and two-tone shoes, one of them resting
on the chromium of an Alfa Spider convertible. But it wasn’t me. Everything else was the same – right down to the number plates – but the man was older than me and heavier. Mind you, I had to peer closely. We both had no moustache, no beard, no sideboards and an out-of-focus face, but it wasn’t me, I swear it.

  I didn’t get alarmed about it. You know how crazy things can sound, and then along comes a logical, rational explanation – usually supplied by a woman very close to you. So I didn’t suddenly panic, I just started to turn the whole place over systematically. And then I could scream and panic in my own good, leisurely, non-neurotic way.

  What was this bastard doing with all the same clothes that I had? Different sizes and some slight changes, but I’m telling you my entire wardrobe. And a photo of Mr Nothing and Mason: that creepy kid who does the weather print-outs for the war-games. Now I was alarmed. It was the same with everything in the flat. My neck-ties. My chinaware. My bottled Guinness. My Leak hi-fi, and my Mozart piano concertos played by my Ingrid Haebler. And by his bed – covered with the same dark green Witney that I have on my bed – in a silver frame: my Mum and Dad. My Mum and Dad in the garden. The photo I took at their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.

  I sat myself down on my sofa and gave myself a talking-to. Look, I said to myself, you know what this is, it’s one of those complicated jokes that rich people play on each other in TV plays for which writers can think of no ending. But I haven’t got any friends rich and stupid enough to want to print me in duplicate just to puzzle me. I mean, I puzzle pretty easily, I don’t need this kind of hoop-la.

  I went into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe to go through the clothes again. I told myself that these were not my clothes, for I couldn’t be positive they were. I mean, I don’t have the sort of clothes that I can be quite sure that no one else has, but the combination of Brooks Brothers, Marks and Sparks and Turnbull and Asser can’t be in everyone’s wardrobe. Especially when they are five years out of fashion.