Read The Spy Game for Free Online Page B

picked up her handbag to take with her - and whenever did a woman take her handbag when she went to stoke the boiler?
     When Superintendent Smith took it from her he found in it an envelope full of codes and rendezvous points and microdots.

G odfrey Lacey swore when he saw the arrest of the Portland spies announced on the News that Monday. I noticed it because usually
     Mr Lacey was not a vehement man. He had the erectness to him of a former soldier but not the authority; his words hesitant,
     his eyes never quite direct, his moustache the most emphatic point on his face. But at this moment the anger in him was visible.
     He swore again, never mind that Susan and I were in the room nor that his wife was trying to get his attention. He took up
     his gin and swallowed, and I saw the chill disgust those of his generation felt for spies and traitors.
    Just as he spoke the second time, Daphne called again from the hall. Though she had a voice that could be piercing, he did
     not seem to hear it. She held her hand over the receiver and called him, then when he did not come she returned to the conversation
     she was having. She was standing at the table in the hall where the telephone was kept. The telephone was for information
     still in those days, not a social instrument, and was kept in the hall without even a chair beside it.
    I remember the simultaneous occurrences: Godfrey swearing, the television, the gin glass taken up from the Burmese side table,
     Daphne on the telephone, Susan and myself playing cards. It was as if some some electrical event had occurred, a charged moment,
     and each random piece of it was crystallised. Yet the meaning of each piece was not initially clear, or if any one were dependent
     upon the others. At first the Portland case, and Godfrey's anger, seemed to be no more than a part of the adult background,
     something to be absorbed vaguely like other news stories, like the Congo, like Algeria, like Macmillan or de Gaulle, so many
     names and places that my father and the Laceys and their friends and my friends' parents turned about.
    It was Peter who made the connection. Peter's fault then. Peter who was so clever but did not know where you divided stories
     from reality.
    A year on. Again, summer. Loose days. Open doors and windows.
    Peter's school broke up before mine did. He was at home for a week, more, on his own. I do not know what he got up to. I suppose
     that he stayed in his room, brooded, read, made models, watched the cricket, went next door for lunch, did what he always
     did at home, and that it did not make much difference to him if anyone else was there or not.
    There was a Test match. When the Test match was on the curtains in the sitting room were drawn when I came home from school
     and there were men in white on the screen and a lull of voices and he sat rapt and might as well have not been there at all.
     Then it was over, or rained off, and he read a book about spies. He had progressed from war to spies.
    'Look at these dates, Anna, in my book.'
    It was a book that he had been given, a big book with a glossy cover and black-and-white photographs in it like those in the
     newspapers.
    'That's just after my birthday.'
    'Not only that.' Peter was so insistent, always getting cross. 'Not just the day, silly. The year as well.'
    'Of course, I know. I knew that all along. It's just before Mummy died, isn't it?' The words were big, when I spoke them.
     I think I may not ever have spoken them before.
    'That's it, exactly, that's the point.'
    I did not see why he was so excited. A day in January, two days before that day, some people arrested, men and women. Snapshots
     of them smiling, looking like anyone else. Like people we might know, not criminals.
    'So what?'
    'Don't you see? The arrests were made on Saturday evening. It wasn't in the news until Monday. She would have found out, seen
     the headlines when she got to Oxford or heard it somewhere on the way. Maybe she heard it on the