Chapter 62 The Counting House

Hunting a crate across Whitehall turned out to be a discipline with rules, and the first rule was that you did not hunt it yourself. Margaret learned this on Monday morning from Aldous Frazer, the member of Parliament whose career owed its continuation to the newspaper affair, and who received them in a committee room smelling of dust and defeated ambitions. Frazer was a spare, worried man with the gift of looking insignificant in a way that had taken him forty years to perfect, and he listened to the shape of what they wanted — import licences, December, agricultural equipment, machine tools — with his head very still. "You understand," he said at last, turning his pen, "that if I ask these questions in any way that leaves ripples, the answers arrive ahead of me wearing uniforms. So we shall go sideways. Purchasing records are dull. Dullness is the best lockpick in England." He wrote three words on a pad and blotted them. "Give me until Thursday. And Miss Chase — the last time your name crossed my desk, it came attached to a fire. I would prefer the attachment this time to be paperwork." The paperwork, when it came, was beautiful in the way that only other people's bureaucracy can be beautiful. An import licence, granted the eleventh of December, to Hallström & Söner of Göteborg, for consignment to the Directorate of Statistical Research, Air Ministry — nine crates, gross weight noted, contents declared as *agricultural equipment, governor parts*. The delivery address was not Adastral House and not any address that sounded like aeroplanes. It was an annex on a street off Kingsway, three floors of a building that had been a stationer's warehouse before the war and now housed, according to the trade directory, the Directorate of Statistical Research and a wholesale supplier of ledger paper, which combination Margaret found so perfect she read it aloud twice. "The building where the secrets are counted," Brennan said, "literally." They walked past it that evening, separately, in the crowd's ordinary clothes. It was narrower than its neighbours and taller than it looked, with a goods lift tower at the back and a basement area protected by iron gates, and above the ground floor the blinds were drawn in a way that suggested permanent overtime rather than absence. A brass plate bore the directorate's name in lettering too modest to read from the pavement, which was, Margaret suspected, the entire philosophy of the place rendered in metal. The watchman's log came to them on Friday through channels Brennan declined to name, copied in a police hand under the pretext of a routine fire-plate inspection. It recorded, for every Sunday since the fourth of December without one omission, the same entry: 19:00 hours in, 23:00 or after out, visitor's name L. SPROTT, purpose of visit — and here the log's ruled columns earned their keep — *equipment inspection (agricultural)*. "Fourteen Sundays of inspecting farm machinery in a cellar off Kingsway," Margaret said. "Either the ministry has purchased the most dedicated tractor in Europe, or Mr. Sprott's imagination ran out at the top of the form." Sprott himself assembled out of files the way a figure assembles out of dots. Leonard Sprott. Senior Principal Statistical Officer. Joined the directorate in 1938 from a Bristol firm of accountants; no degree listed; no war service; references impeccable and identical in tone, as if written by one careful hand in three instalments. His staff assessments described him as methodical, quiet, and punctual to the minute — the sort of man, Frazer's researcher noted, whose forms were always in order, which Erik would have called the first thing to worry about, because care was the one substance spies could not counterfeit for long, and here was a man marinated in it. Vane's telegram arrived that same evening from the north, four words longer than strictly necessary: *Arriving King's Cross Thursday. Have brought the arithmetic. — V.* And beneath it, forwarded from Helsinki in Edith's small exact hand, a letter that reported the spring honestly: Erik's cough had deepened its register; the wall of names stood photographed by strangers from the eastern legation who had come with gifts of vodka and questions shaped like compliments; the copy survived, because copies were Edith's religion, and the copy always survived the fire. Margaret answered the letter sitting at the kitchen table with the green-shaded lamp lit against the March dusk, and it was while sealing the envelope that she became aware of the silence of her own engine, four miles south in its cellar, keeping its note to itself. She had lived near that hum for a year. Its absence from the room had a texture, like a clock heard through a wall suddenly stopped. They went back to Kingsway once more before Sunday, on foot, in the dead hour after the pubs had shut, and stood in the doorway opposite with the rain fine as sieve-work. The building showed one light, low in the basement, moving occasionally behind frosted glass with the regularity of a man walking a small room. And beneath the street noise — or perhaps beneath only her attention, she was never sure afterward — there was supposed to be a hum. She strained for it until her ears ached and caught nothing, and the nothing frightened her more than a sound would have, because her own engine had taught her what listening machines sounded like, and this one, whatever else it was, was choosing silence. "Tomorrow is Sunday," Brennan said, watching the moving light. "I know," Margaret said. "I have been watching the calendar the way Vane watches weather." She turned her collar up. Somewhere behind the frosted glass the light stopped moving, as though whoever carried it had sat down at a desk that had waited for him all week. "Fourteen Sundays of agricultural inspection. Tomorrow he inspects again. And tomorrow evening, Mr. Sprott, so help me, we find out what it is you grow down there." They crossed the street separately and went home through the rain along different streets, and behind them the light in the basement burned on, steady and low and patient, like a lamp left burning in a window for someone who was already inside.