The Cold, Cold Ground

the living room.”
    I got my water and followed Mr Evans into the living room.
    He had sat himself down on the leather sofa and was examining the copy of The Thin Red Line that I had left there.
    “A good book?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “I was in Burma under Orde Wingate, quite an extraordinaryfellow. Unorthodox.”
    I sat opposite him in the recliner. “You’re MI5, aren’t you?”
    “We don’t like to use that name.”
    “You’ve come here to put the fear of God into me, haven’t you? Have you seen Laura? You better not hurt her.”
    “Oh, there’s no question of that. Oh, my goodness, no. We’re quite sure about you both. We’ve had many conversations about you and Dr Cathcart.”
    “We won’t talk. We get it,” I agreed.
    He smiled. “Yes, we know. I told them that all the way back in June. I said, gentlemen, these two young people are good eggs.”
    The proverbial cold chill. Of course if we hadn’t been good eggs we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We’d be dead.
    Evans sighed and tapped The Thin Red Line .
    “War is so much easier than this business that we’re in. You know who your friends are and, most of the time, who your enemies are. Usually they’re the ones shooting at you.”
    “But you work in the grey area,” I said.
    “Not quite. In my world everything is binary. Black and white. Friend and enemy. Traitor and hero. The problem is that today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy and vice versa. It can be confusing. It can destroy the finest minds. I had a colleague, an American colleague, who rose to the top of a well-known agency but became convinced that everyone working in that agency was a traitor. Everyone was in a conspiracy except for him. The President, the Vice-President, they were all working for the Russians. Poor chap. He couldn’t trust anyone in the end. He used to speak about the ‘wilderness of mirrors’, a line from Eliot I think (not my bag, the modern stuff). Anyway, a wilderness of mirrors where faces were reflections of reflections and nothing was as it seemed.”
    “Would you care for some tea?” I asked.
    “That would be lovely.”
    I made it and brought chocolate biscuits, which Mr Evansseemed inordinately excited about.
    “You’re getting the Queen’s Police Medal,” Evans said.
    “So they tell me.”
    We sipped our tea and I looked through the window at the rag and bone man’s balloon-filled cart making its melancholy way down Coronation Road.
    “What have you come here to talk about, Mr Evans?”
    He laughed. “ Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio , and I wasn’t even very brevis !”
    “Why don’t you just tell me what you want to tell me?”
    He nibbled at his biscuit and smiled. “Three quick things and then we’re done, Sergeant Duffy. Firstly, I want to tell you that we’ve thoroughly examined your psychology assessments and I believe we can trust you and Dr Cathcart completely. So please put any residual uneasiness out of your mind.”
    “I will.”
    “Secondly, the so-called ‘gay serial killer’ case is now closed both officially and unofficially . You do see that, don’t you, Sergeant Duffy?”
    “Yes.”
    “Thirdly, we do not want you going near Stakeknife. We don’t want you going to his office in Belfast, or his house in Straid … or to his home in Italy where he will be until the end of the month.”
    “Italy?”
    “A little town called Campo on the northern shores of Lake Como. Charming place by all accounts. Tells everyone he got it from his grandfather. There’s a little article about it in August’s … in fact, hold on a minute … I just happen to have …”
    He reached into the pocket of his raincoat and placed August’s Architectural Digest on my coffee table.
    I looked at the magazine, looked at him.
    He smiled and got to his feet.
    He pointed at the room.
    “Love the colour scheme. Striking. Such a breath of fresh air after all the usual dreary Sybil Colefax stuff.”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, I suppose I should be jollying along. Just wanted to check in. For a long time everything was so delicate, so finely balanced, but now, well, the hunger strikes are over and we have a new broom as Secretary of State and …”
    “Everything’s changed?”
    “Yes … well … look, it was awfully nice meeting you.”
    He reached out his hand.
    I shook it.
    “I’ll see you out,” I said.
    I opened the front door and he walked onto the porch.
    “When do you return to duty, Sergeant Duffy?”