Madrigal for Charlie Muffin Read Free

she had managed to get a taxi. The two who had pretended to be lovers arrived as she was ordering the drinks. They went straight to a vacant table, waiting for her to carry the glasses across.
    ‘Good health,’ said the man, lifting the beer mug. His fingernails were bitten and he had chipped teeth; his breath smelled and the girl in the exaggerated high heels was glad she hadn’t been selected to be his partner.
    ‘Cheers,’ she said. Beneath the table she slipped off the shoes and began kneading her feet. ‘I actually thought he was going to approach me tonight.’
    ‘What would you have done?’ asked the man.
    Knowing the answer would upset him, she said, ‘Gone with him, of course.’
    ‘It’s been a year,’ protested the other woman. ‘It’s stupid.’ Crossing the bridge, her partner had touched her breast, twice, pretending it was an accident but she knew it hadn’t been. She knew there was no objection she could make either. Dirty bastard.
    ‘Difficult to imagine that he was once so good, isn’t it?’ said the man reflectively.
    ‘I don’t think he ever was,’ said the girl in the prostitute’s disguise. ‘I think it’s some typical bureaucratic mistake in Moscow; the sort of thing they do all the time.’
    The man shook his head positively. ‘Not this one. Charlie Muffin is important, for some reason.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’d better get back to the embassy.’
    The two women looked at each other, irritated. It was the third night in succession he’d avoided buying any drinks and they were sure he was charging more on his expenses than they were.
    ‘This is a shitty job,’ complained the girl who had been fondled. ‘Really shitty.’
    By the time they got back, the telephone conversation between Charlie and Rupert Willoughby had already been reported to Moscow. And Kalenin knew the protection he had evolved was possible. The priority cables were already arriving from Dzerzhinsky Square.
    ‘I’m bored.’
    Rupert Willoughby didn’t bother to look up from his book at Clarissa’s protest. ‘As usual,’ he said.
    ‘Amuse me then.’
    ‘I’m your husband, not your jester.’
    ‘And fuck all good at either.’
    ‘You really shouldn’t swear,’ said Willoughby. ‘You always sound as if you’re reading the words from a prompt card.’
    ‘Fuck!’ she said defiantly.
    ‘Still not right,’ said Willoughby, knowing the condescension would irritate her even more. He lowered the book to look at her. She was moving listlessly around the apartment, lifting and replacing ornaments and running her hand along the top of the furniture.
    ‘Jocelyn and Arabella have taken the yacht to Menton,’ she said.
    ‘I know.’
    ‘They’ve invited me down.’
    ‘They usually do.’
    ‘I thought I’d go.’
    ‘Why not?’ Intent on her reaction, he said, ‘I’m seeing Charlie Muffin tomorrow.’
    ‘Charlie!’ She stopped. The brightness was immediate. ‘I’d love to see him again.’
    She’d tried hard enough after New York. Which is what had planted the idea in Willoughby’s mind after the man’s telephone call and the yacht invitation.
    ‘I’ll ask him to dinner,’ he promised.

2
    The office of the intelligence director was on the Waterloo side of the Thames. Sir Alistair Wilson asked the driver for the cross-over route through Parliament Square; purposely early for the meeting with the Permanent Under Secretary responsible for liaison between the department and the government, he’d heard the displays were particularly good this year and he wanted to see for himself.
    The rose beds in St James’s Park were by the lake, bursts of Ophelia and Pascali and Rose Gaujard. He leaned forward, studying with an expert’s eye the colour lustre and feeling the texture of the leaves. Growing roses was Wilson’s hobby and he liked to see a naturalness about their arrangement, not this patterned rigidity, as if they were sections of some jigsaw puzzle. But over-arranged or not,