The Yellow Glass (25 page)

   
As I drove to HQ, I found myself explaining
to my passenger that I had, in fact, visited it before, although I had no idea
where it actually was.

“I mean, I never intended to go there.
 
They scooped me up with my husband just past
Vauxhall Bridge and I don’t think they actually
knew
they had me until my husband’s boss opened the van door.
 
Hutch.
 
Was he there in your day?”

“Oh, yes.
 
I
know Hutchcraft.”
 
His noble profile gave
nothing away.

“Well, my meeting with
him
was over in the blink of an eye; I spent most of my visit in
the garage, actually, and then we left from there.
 
We went down the slide.”

“Indeed?”

“Did you ever . .?”

“All of it,” he interrupted, “I have seen and done all
of it.”

It was obvious that subject was closed, so I shut up
and we drove to the address in Waterloo that he’d given me, each lost in our
own thoughts.

“Are you sure we’ve come to the right place?”

I remembered a square courtyard, like a university college,
and four imposing walls.
 
Also, a pattern
of herring-bone bricks underfoot that had caused me to stumble in my
heels.
 
I’d been disorientated - in
shock, perhaps - but, even so, the building in front of us looked quite wrong.
This was a narrow place, with a soot-stained façade like an old pawnbrokers
without the balls.
 
Unwashed windows and
yellow nets suggested a building that had been left untenanted for years, where
the landlord was sitting tight and waiting for better things to come.

“I am perfectly sure.
 
The front is a front, if I make myself clear.
 
The genuine entrance is at the back, where
the horses used to go to be stabled in happier times,” Mr Piotrowski said.

I followed the old spy around the corner and noticed
that, although his back was ram-rod straight, he walked with a pronounced limp
in his left leg.
 
Out in broad daylight
and away from the dingy glow of the Polish café, I saw that the back of his
long, black coat was shabby and unpleasantly stained and worn to greasiness at
the elbows.
 
His shoes were so beyond
down at heel that no heel remained.
 
Like
the façade that hid HQ from the world’s gaze, Mr Piotrowski had seen better
days.
 
He might give the appearance of Polish
aristocracy, but, from the back, you’d have taken him for a tramp, in all
honesty.
 
I liked the old gentleman and
suddenly felt rather sorry for him.
 
Did
he
really
want his former colleagues
to see him like that?

I grabbed his arm just before we turned in to HQ.

“Are you sure you want to come in, Mr Piotrowski?”

He swung round and I realised what a fool I’d been,
because one look at that magnificent face and he could have been wearing the
emperor’s new clothes, for all it mattered.
 
Never mind a Count, he looked like a
King
returning to his kingdom; all the time we’d been driving across London he’d
been steeling himself for this moment, I could see that.
 
It struck me that Mr Piotrowski was no spent
force.

“Are you sure
you
want to come in, Mrs Upshott?”
 
He
retorted.

I was quaking in my boots; my plan seemed utterly
ridiculous in that moment, and going into that building was the
last
thing I wanted to do.

“No,”
 
I said,
 
“but don’t try and stop me.”

And we went inside.

 
A uniformed man sprang out of a cubby-hole
and tried to prise my envelope from me before I’d said any of what I’d come to
say.

“No you don’t!
 
I’m afraid I’m not parting from this until I
see . .”

“Sir Godfrey Hutchcraft,
please,” Mr Piotrowski interjected.

“Do you have an
appointment?”

“No, but we
have
met,” I tried, “and . . ”
 

“Then I’m sorry, but Sir
Godfrey can’t see you.
 
He’s far too
busy.”

“Tell him his old friend,
Apoloniusz, has come,” Mr Piotrowski said.

“Apple on what?”

“Apoloniusz.
 
But you can say ‘A’, if you prefer.”

The uniformed man picked up
his receiver and dialled, not taking his eyes from us.

“I have ‘A’ here to see you,
sir,” he announced.
 
“And . . Mrs
Upshott.”

It wasn’t possible to hear
the reaction to this, but it must have gone done fairly well because the man
informed us that Sir Godfrey was on his way down, adding, “In person,” as if he
usually sent a stand-in.
 

I clutched my handbag,
tight, and we waited for the arrival of the chief.
 
We waited and we waited in that small,
airless lobby, and, several times, we had to make way for official types
rushing about on, presumably, top-secret business. It all seemed remarkably
cramped for an intelligence service bent on safe-guarding the secrets of the
nation . . or finding out the secrets of other nations . . or whatever it was
that they got up to in a dull building in the worst part of Waterloo.
 
However, we hadn’t too much longer to wait
before a lift descended, a shiny, brass gate was pulled to one side and there
was Hutch; a rather droopy category of man in a creased, grey suit.
 
He was small-ish and old-ish and when they’d
handed out shoulders he’d been at the back of the queue.
 
I couldn’t think
why
I’d been so nervous.

“Mrs Upshott.
 
How lovely to see you again,” he murmured,
taking my hand in his and hanging on.
 
“I
expect you have concerns about your husband?”

Of course I had many
concerns about my husband, but they certainly weren’t for public consumption
and had nothing, whatsoever, to do with why I was there.

“Let me reassure you that we
are doing everything in our power to find him, Mrs Upshott.”

He didn’t sound terribly
reassuring, but then, luckily, I wasn’t particularly in need of reassurance.

“I’m so glad,” I replied,
“but I expect Tristram can fend for himself.”

“Mmm.
 
That’s the spirit.”
 
He glanced, vaguely, about the lobby, but
didn’t seem to register Mr Piotrowski at all.
 
“I say . . can I tempt you to a small glass of sherry in my office?
 
Now that you’ve come all this way.
 
The view of the Thames is quite something
from up top.”

I had no desire to drink
sherry with Hutch, but very much wanted to get out of the lobby and proceed
with my plan.

“Thank you . . Hutch.
 
May I call you Hutch?”

“I’d be honoured.
 
Step this way.”

He laid a feather-light, yet
strangely intimate, arm around my waist and directed me into the ornate, little
lift.

“Oh, Hutch,” I said,
stepping as far away from his arm as the tiny dimensions of the lift allowed,
“you remember Mr Piotrowski, don’t you?”

He looked straight through
the old spy, as if he were looking through glass.
 
Mr Piotrowski narrowed his eyes but said
nothing.

“Sorry, old boy,” said
Hutch, pulling the brass gate to as he spoke, “only room for two.”

I was slightly startled by
the offhand way he’d dismissed the old spy and fell silent as we ascended in
the lift, playing the scene over in my head; it being difficult to work out
just how rude Hutch was being when he habitually spoke in such a low-key,
inexpressive fashion (as if he were reading lines and hadn’t made up his mind
how to play them).
 

There was nothing low-key
about his office, however, for he’d feathered his nest in some style.
 
It was the epitome of luxury after what had
gone before; all gleaming parquet and the lingering tang of lavender furniture
polish.
 
The view of the river certainly
did take the eye and the dirty old Thames scrubbed up nicely from that
height.
 
Hungerford railway bridge was
transformed - I had to step closer to the window to prove it
was
Hungerford - because it spanned the
river like a bracelet on a delicate lady’s arm, quite unlike the heap of blackened
ironmongery with which Londoners were familiar.

“This will buck you up.”

He handed me a glass of
sherry - chestnut brown and syrup-sweet, by the look of it - and I slid my
handbag up my arm to take it from him.

“Honestly, Hutch, I’m not
too concerned about my husband.
 
I’m sure
he can find his own way home.
 
No, I’ve
come to see you about an entirely different matter.”

He was standing very close
to me with his sherry and I made a move to sit down, to put the meeting onto a
more professional footing.
 
However,
rather than placing himself behind his impressive, mahogany desk, he pulled a
gilt chair over and sat down beside me.

“I’m not too concerned about
your husband, either,” he said.

“Oh.
 
Well that’s encouraging, I expect.
 
I mean, you’d know whether he was in any
danger, or not.”

“Mmm.
 
Tell me . .”

“What I’ve come to see you
about?
 
Well . .”

“ . . about ‘The Furies from
Venus’.
 
That corset-affair you were
wearing . .” he put his hand on my knee and squeezed, “ . .
 
was damned fetching, if I may say so.”

This was not unfamiliar
territory, but I’d failed to see it coming and was disconcerted.

“Hutch!”
 
I exclaimed, sounding like the ingénue in a
French farce.
 
“I’m a married woman!”

“When the cat’s away and all
that.
 
I’ve always had a soft spot for
you, Kathy.
 
May I call you Kathy?”

“No, you may not and would
you please take your hand off my knee!”

He removed his hand, but
only to take a swig of his sherry.
 
He
seemed, if anything, rather thrilled by the bracing tone of my voice.

“Why such formality,
Kathy?
 
This is our chance to get to know
one another properly.”

I’d stood up and backed
towards the door because I had a sudden sense that this was the type of fool
who might not take no for an answer.
 
And
my instincts proved right because he promptly lunged at me, hands like an
octopus diving underneath the hem of my coat and the skirts of my black
mourning dress.
 
I screamed, but his
mouth came straight at me, scraping at my teeth, while he pressed me into the
back of the door, my scream stifled into a series of gasps.
 
I may have been taller than him, but he was
wiry and surprisingly strong and all over me.
 
I kicked one leg free and stamped on his foot with the heel of my shoe.

“You damned bitch,” he
snarled, hopping up and down, “don’t you come that with me.”
 
(While I wrestled with the doorknob in the
brief moment that I had before he flung himself on me again.)
 
“What I know about you could see you put away
for life,” he spat into my ear.
 
“You
killed a man, don’t you know?
 
Play ball
and we’ll forget it ever happened.
 
Otherwise . .”

I went limp.
 
Yes I knew I’d killed a man; I’d been living
with the guilt of it for weeks and it had been nothing less than a living
death.
 
That
was why I’d come to HQ, you see.
 
That
was my plan.
 
To offer up the envelope in
return for information on the man I’d run over.
 
To see if I could find his family and make some sort of amends for the
terrible thing I’d done.

Hutch seized his
moment.
 
He swooshed my skirts up above
my face and yanked, hard, at my legs, so that I lost my footing and slipped,
flat on my spine, onto the floor, while he began to fumble with his
trousers.
 
I felt no terror; felt
nothing, whatsoever.
 
The guilt was so
all-consuming, you see, that it left room for nothing else at all.
 

When, the door burst open
and Mr Piotrowski jumped over me and barrelled into him, laying hands on his
puny shoulders and slamming him backwards onto his own desk.

“Up to your old tricks, eh,
Hutchcraft?”

He must have had him pinned
against the desk, but all I could see was the back of the old spy’s filthy
coat, shrouding the two of them.
 
(I was
glad of that moment of privacy, because I’d finally caught on; had realised
that the helpless woman, flat on her back on the floor, was me.
 
Shame piled on top of guilt and it was so
overwhelming that, in that second, it crossed my mind I might actually die of it.)
  
I wrapped my coat around me, hiding the
torn, silk skirts of my black dress as best I could and got myself up stiffly,
like an old lady, my shredded stockings pooling around my ankles.