London Match by Len Deighton

Author:Len Deighton [Deighton, Len]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780007387205
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-04-22T15:58:15+00:00

15

‘Why did you get yourself into this crock?’ I asked Ted Riley for what must have been the hundredth time. For the hundredth time he failed to give me any proper explanation. He was in no hurry. He was drinking Powers Irish whiskey, and it was having an effect upon him, for when he spoke his voice had the lilt of Kerry, a brogue that makes everything into a song. I remembered that voice from my childhood, and it brought back to me all Ted’s stories.

There was the one about his grandfather piling his freshly cut peat into ‘stooks’ and how, ‘in the soft pink light of each and every morning’, he found that some of his peat had been stolen. The thefts continued for years until one day Grandfather Riley tucked gunpowder into the turf and a neighbour’s cottage burned to the ground. It was to avoid the violent retribution threatened by the injured man’s relatives that the Rileys moved to County Kerry where Ted was born. How many of Ted’s stories were true, how many embroidered, and how many invented just to amuse a wide-eyed little boy, I’ll never know. But Ted was a part of my childhood, like climbing Berlin’s rubble piles and ice skating on the Muggelsee.

‘Ahhhh.’ Ted’s yawn was a symptom of anxiety. For all God’s creatures, fear brings a drowsiness, a self-preserving urge to snuggle down somewhere out of sight and go to sleep.

We were sitting in the sort of room in which I seem to have spent half my adult life. It was a hotel room in Cambridge, but this was not the Cambridge of Gothic spires or cloistered dons, this was a shopping street on the wrong side of town, a shabby hotel with cracked lino on the floor, a bathroom a long way down the hall, and a sink where a dripping tap had resisted all my efforts to silence it.

It was late evening, but we’d kept the room lights switched off. The curtain remained open and the room’s only light came from the street lamps, the bilious yellow sodium glow reflected from the rain-wet road to make patterns on the ceiling. I could make out the shape of Ted Riley slumped on the bed, still wearing his damp raincoat. His hat was pulled down to cover his face. He only moved it back when he drank.

I was standing near the window, looking through the net curtain at the premises across the street. It was an old fourstorey building, its fascia stained and in places broken. According to the brass plates alongside the front door, it housed a firm of architects and an industrial designer as well as the solicitor’s office we were to break into. On the top floor was the flat for the caretaker, but tonight according to Ted’s research the caretaker was away visiting his son’s family in London. The whole building was dark.

‘Ah, now…! You know…!’ Ted said, and raised his glass to me. That was supposed to answer all my questions.

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