The High Flyer Read online

  “It made off with Lawrence’s cigarette case. That’s what distresses me.”

  “Can Lawrence not do anything?”

  “He’s unreachable. I’ve been trying to contact him all morning, but he was so determined to miss you.”

  “I know what he must feel, Weena.”

  “When it comes to family, he can’t see beyond. Are you sure you won’t have a sandwich? We could eat it in the garden. You still like gardens, don’t you?” she asked, as if that too might have ceased to be a certainty.

  “Listen, Weena. I need a passport.”

  “A passport?”

  “It was in the bag, with your chocolates. Without a passport I can’t get to Abyla.”

  “When are you expected?”

  “There’s someone meeting me this afternoon.”

  “Oh dear,” she said, and she had to prevent her heart going out to him. “Then it’s not Lawrence you need. It’s his deputy, Giles Hoyter.”

  The Deputy Governor’s office in Convent Place was reached through a side entrance opposite a funeral parlour offering competitive terms for a repayment plan.

  It was a grey building, in the Palladian style and newly fitted throughout in caramel linoleum. It had been used variously by the Board of Sanitary Commissioners, the city council and as a school administered by Loreto nuns.

  Three flights up the staircase, behind a formica desk and beneath the gaze of his twenty-five-year-old sovereign, imperial, beneficent, velvet-robed and rather pretty, Giles Hoyter swivelled in the black plastic chair negotiated from a downstairs office and said, “Who the hell’s Wavery?”

  He listened, running a hand behind his ears through a skirmish of ginger hair. “Can’t you deal – Oh, all right,” he said, “send him up, then.”

  He had been occupied with the collision at sea. At four-twenty that morning, the Lloyd’s signal station had picked up the Admiral Grau’s distress call. The Spanish-registered container ship had swung to port into the Straits at the correct latitude, but at the wrong angle. She was sailing two degrees closer to the African coast than the captain was aware.

  The captain must have seen the fishing boat at the last moment.

  In the panic and confusion, he failed to notice what had happened to his cargo. One of the crates had stove a hole in the hull. Another had upset a crate of turpentine. At some point the liquid had caught fire.

  Eight hours later the Grau was still burning. She had been holed above and beneath water line and had lost six thousand tons of fuel oil. Two crewmen were dead and four wounded. Royal Navy helicopters continued their search for survivors from the fishing boat. Meanwhile, the Merchant Marine office in Madrid had requested fire-fighting tugs to contain the slick. Hoyter was considering their request when the Governor’s wife interrupted him with the first of three hysterical telephone calls.

  As he listened to Lady Edwina, the Deputy Governor looked ahead with longing to the occasion, four months from now, when he would assume his position as Number Two in Tegucigalpa. Were there apes in Honduras? Probably not, he decided eventually.

  Hoyter was a Foreign Office appointment. While not in any way lacking the qualities demanded of officers from the E-stream, he was described in the report supplied by Personnel Department as not a high flyer. As the Governor’s deputy, he did not need to be. His work was methodical, with a particular reverence for the password. The report determined that he was not an unpleasant man, though he might give this impression. Women generally disliked him.

  “It was there, Giles, in our bed. Imagine!”

  “Horrible,” he managed, but he failed to calm the Governor’s wife. She knew, as women do, what he thought of her husband.

  On her behalf, Hoyter had been attempting to reach his governor. The Colonel of the Gibraltar Regiment also wanted to speak with him. He wanted to have the ape put down.

  “Technically, of course, I don’t need his permission,” barked the Colonel who acted as Officer in Charge of Apes. Sharon, the regimental pet, had been named after his daughter – an honour he felt more keenly than his daughter did.

  “But I’d be happier if HE knew what we planned.” The CO paused. In Colonel Jim’s pause – that was another thing about the military, their chumminess – Hoyter heard the unspoken contempt that had been his experience since arriving in Gibraltar: a contempt which spread from the Governor through the disbanding armed forces, to the staff in the Prince of Wales where Linda and Paul were famous for greeting everyone with their warm Welsh welcome, except Giles Hoyter – the contempt the whole of Gibraltar felt for the Diplomatic Service which had negotiated the Straits Tunnel Treaty.

  “Jim,” said Hoyter sternly. In the absence of his master he assumed easily his master’s voice. “I’m in favour. Wholly. As HE will be. But is it such a good idea for the Gibraltar Regiment to be putting down its apes at the present time? People can be superstitious, Jim.”

  But the Colonel was not in superstitious mood. There was a wounded ape running loose through the town, looking for a mate. He thought of Sharon. “Send a car if you like,” he said. “If you’re so concerned, I’ll make Sergeant Rossy available. He’ll fill you in.”

  “OK,” said Hoyter. He refrained from asking why the Colonel could not himself send Rossy. He knew it was the Colonel’s way of implementing to the letter the defence cuts ordained by Hoyter and his ilk. Jim’s regiment had witnessed every conflict since the Jacobite rebellion. The contemporary rage for pacificism was achieving what no German or Spaniard had ever accomplished.

  “I’ll send a car.”

  Until six months ago, the ape-keeper had been a tough ex-sapper who could stop hockey balls with his padded head and uttered strange sounds which attracted the Middle Hill pack into a silent circle around him. He had known how to swear in their language and he had sworn at them for twenty years until the death of his dog, an Irish setter which had grown up among the apes and presumably supposing itself one of them had leapt for a branch in a gully behind Windmill Hill. The keeper retired the same day. That was in June, since when Sergeant Rossy had been appointed. He had spent a year on an uninhabited island north of the Shetlands investigating the kleptoparasitic interactions of field mice and another year among the macaques of southern India. The author of a paper on promiscuous brood parasites in Macaca sylvanus, Rossy was the choice of the regiment’s ecological lobby.

  From eleven-thirty until twenty minutes past twelve, he outlined those features of the Middle Hill pack which, in his opinion, had contributed to the deposition of their leader. Hoyter took notes, puffing along behind, but still in sight – until a point was reached where Rossy embarked upon the subject of agonistic buffering, whereat Hoyter abandoned the chase and resigned himself to smiling and nodding.

  His dissertation at an end, Rossy informed Hoyter he would be using a blowpipe, not a rifle. He would send Johnnie away in as humane a manner as possible.

  “Very good, Sergeant,” said Hoyter. He smiled. Who did the man think he was – Tarzan? “I take it you can find your own way back.”

  He was about to dial the Merchant Marine Office when the telephone rang again. He eyed the receiver. Could it be the Governor’s wife?

  “Hoyter,” he barked.

  It was the desk downstairs. There was some gentleman wishing to speak with him.

  “Says he’s a colleague of yours, sir.”

  4

  They shook hands.

  Wavery had asked, “Might it help if you put in a word, Weena?”

  “Not in the least. He’s one of you. We don’t get on at all.”

  “One minute,” said Hoyter, at the same time pointing to a chair which his secretary, a girl with a high forehead, had drawn to the desk.

  He was speaking on the telephone. “Darling? I’ll be home for lunch. Did you go shopping?”

  Wavery sat down. The desk was dominated by a plastic model of a neolithic skull, which Hoyter employed as a paperweight. There was a board on the wall to the right of the desk and
pinned to the board a postcard from Paris, the timetable of flights to London and a motto written in green felt-tip: THE SECRECY OF MY JOB PREVENTS ME FROM KNOWING WHAT I AM DOING.

  “Yes,” said Hoyter. “Just the one of me.”

  The Deputy Governor replaced the receiver. He crossed his ankles. He checked his moustache. He leaned back in his chair.

  “I’m all ears,” he said.

  In the course of his time with the Service it had frequently irritated Hoyter that the British public perceived Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office as existing for the sole purpose of bailing them out of trouble. It was also an inflexible rule among Distressed British Subjects that they should lose their passports on a Friday lunchtime, not a Monday morning.

  As Wavery explained the incident on Middle Hill, Hoyter leaned forward and rested a chin on his hand.

  “I’ve never heard of an ape stealing a passport. A dog, yes.” Most passports were ruined by children scribbling in them or mothers throwing them with the jeans into the washing machine or the sea pulping them.

  “I expect you gave him the stare? I’m told they don’t like that. Lucky it wasn’t a leopard.” He uttered a bitter laugh and telephoned his secretary to ask for two teas and a couple of those biscuits.

  “He’s called Johnnie. If you’re interested.”

  “Who is?” asked Wavery.

  “The ape who stole your bag.” Hoyter looked down at his notes. “He was listed as a female until he took over the pack. In those days he answered to Margaret. They’re named after VIPs.”

  “He wasn’t with a pack.”

  “No,” said Hoyter patiently. “He’s been peripheralised. They don’t like the term rogue male here, but that’s what he is. He’s been kicked out by a younger man. Break up, join up, break up. That’s how it goes in these fission-fusion societies.” He waited to see if the words had sunk in before returning to his notes. “It’s the start of the mating season and his sex life is more or less ruined.”

  “I see,” said Wavery.

  “Lucky he didn’t bite. They can give you Herpes B.”

  The girl with the high forehead entered.

  “Thanks, Gill,” said Hoyter when she had gone. He lifted a stainless steel lid and stirred the contents with his pencil. “You can’t hurry tea. Biscuit?”

  “Probably not,” said Wavery.

  “You weren’t feeding it, were you? That’s illegal, unless you do it at Queen’s Gate.” According to Sergeant Rossy the Queen’s Gate pack were so obese they had stopped breeding. “They just sit on their backsides eating Smarties,” said Hoyter, thinking of his Governor. “They say the syndrome is not dissimilar to that of humans who have everything done for them. But you don’t want to hear this,” he realised. “You want a passport.” He poured the tea.

  Thomas Wavery. A faint bell was tinkling.

  “En route to Abyla, you say. I believe that’s where the apes came from originally.” Hoyter rapped the skull on his desk. “Which means us too, I suppose.”

  “I’m expected today,” said Wavery.

  “Been there before?” asked Hoyter. He and Mrs Hoyter had passed through on their way to Morocco and hated every moment. The dust, the flies, the Arabs themselves. They had stayed long enough to buy a video recorder – which was discovered afterwards to have a problem with its pause button – and a piece of amethyst sold to them by a child at the Moroccan border.

  “Put it down to experience,” said Mrs Hoyter when the purple came off on her hands.

  Wavery said, “No. I’ve not been.”

  “It’s a nice place. How long’s the posting?”

  “Until the Royal Visit.”

  “Your last post?”

  Wavery nodded. “My last post.”

  Hoyter looked at him over his cup. The tea tasted of pencil. “Personnel told me nothing of this,” he went on cautiously.

  “But the Governor must have warned you?”

  “I don’t suppose the Governor had the least idea you were coming.”

  “Mr Hoyter,” said Wavery, “Sir Lawrence not only happens to be my brother-in-law, but I spoke to him two weeks ago.”

  “Dear sir,” flustered Hoyter. “People come in here the whole time saying they’re the Governor’s brother-in-law. What was it you wanted with Sir Lawrence exactly?”

  “I had a lunch appointment with him. But he cancelled.”

  “Cancelled his own brother-in-law?” Hoyter’s smile was almost playful.

  “Apparently he’s playing golf,” said Wavery.

  “There’s a competition on top of the Rock. The idea is to see how far you can drive towards Africa. He’s been hitting balls into the sea all morning. I’ve been wanting to get hold of him myself.”

  “I think he would vouch for me if he was here.”

  Hoyter placed his cup on the desk. He said, “I suppose we could stamp a temporary passport.” In the circumstances there was something impressive, even dignified about the man sitting opposite. He dialled a number. “Gill? Get me Personnel Department, will you?” He exchanged a glance with Wavery. “In case you aren’t who you say you are. After all,” he said reasonably, “you could be pulling the wool over my eyes. You could be anyone.” He issued another bitter little laugh. He recalled the last time he had rung Personnel Department over a matter concerning his own future. They had no idea who he was either.

  He opened a drawer from which he produced a white form and, after more ferreting, a book with a torn cover. He opened the book. “Dewsnap . . . Pulleyblank . . . Queesal . . . Wavery . . . Here we go. Wavery, Thomas. Deputy Head of Mission, Lima.” He wrote down the name. “Place of birth?”

  “Mathon, Herefordshire,” said Wavery. Hoyter nodded. “Number of passport?”

  Wavery could not remember.

  “Date and place of issue?”

  “London. But I’ve forgotten the date.”

  “If it’s London I can probably speak to the records unit in Hayes,” said Hoyter. “Someone who knows you locally? Let’s leave that, shall we. Visible peculiarities?” The pencil hovered. “Mole? Scar? Tattoo?” he added helpfully.

  “No.”

  “Height? Let’s say about six foot. Occupation? We know that, I think. Also conditions of loss.” He chuckled. His concentration reverted to the Diplomatic Service Handbook. “Might I ask what your other posts were?”

  Wavery listed them.

  “Lima must have been nice.”

  “It was horrible.”

  Trapped in the six lines of Wavery’s life, Hoyter had no alternative but to press on. He reached for the second biscuit. “University?”

  “Cambridge.”

  “Where you read?”

  “Classics.”

  “Your wife’s name?”

  “Penelope.”

  “How many children do you have?”

  “None.”

  Hoyter bit into the biscuit. His nod was approving. “And how long have you been married?”

  “Thirty-five years. But we’re getting divorced.”

  Suddenly Hoyter knew who it was. It came back to him that the man across the desk might now be serving as Ambassador to Portugal had he not been discovered by the Permanent Under Secretary in the embrace of a woman not his wife.

  He closed the book and relaxed. Then he thought of something else. “Of course, this is an HMSO publication. You could have boned up on it –”

  The telephone rang.

  “Hoyter.” He listened. He nodded. He looked across at Wavery and raised his thumb. “Personnel,” he whispered, winking. “How do you spell it?” He spelled out Wavery’s name. “Has he taken over from someone? Have you? No. He says he hasn’t.” His eyes returned to the desk. “You want me to describe him . . . ” A note of embarrassment crept into Hoyter’s voice. “Are you sure?”

  His face went hot and red. He squinted at Wavery.

  “How old is the photograph?”

  Chapter Three

  1

  THE BAH
IA DE Abyla sailed out of Algeciras at five. It was the last ferry of the day. Wavery carried his suitcase to the upper deck. He had removed his tie and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up. The deck was empty. He lifted his bag onto a seat and walked to the rail. He had forgotten to wash his hands. His fingers tingled with dried earth. Gripping the rail, he inhaled.

  The air smelled of grease from the lifeboat cables and engine oil from the funnel. Most of all, it smelled of the bay which rose and fell in the wind, a short fetch between the waves. Over the shuddering deck Wavery heard the waves fizzing into tangled veils of foam. He followed the wake to Gibraltar.

  Gibraltar had been everything he hated about England. He hated the Union Jack T-shirts and the early Christmas decorations. He hated the chips and the beer, and he hated Hoyter who was all he had hoped to avoid and a reminder of the man he had become.

  He watched the battered hat of rock until the haze claimed it. When he could no longer see Gibraltar, he crossed the deck and looked into the grimy horizon for Africa.

  2

  “Now I know who you are,” Hoyter had said conversationally, accepting Wavery’s two specimen signatures. “You were earmarked for Lisbon, weren’t you? Anyway, Abyla’s nice.”

  But Wavery had not requested Abyla on his “Post Preference” form. For nine years he had written down one preference only: the Portuguese capital. In their inimitable, roundabout way Personnel Department had informed him the post would be his.

  There was a time when Lisbon had been the least of his ambitions. He might have hoped for Paris or an important governorship. He had been going a long way then. The future held out promise of a knighthood and Wavery Commissions into an assortment of vexed issues. Once upon a time he had been a high flyer.