Letters for a Spy Read Online Free PDF Page B

mother’s—and rested my trilby near the handle.
    The woman who answered my summons had greying hair pulled back in a bun. She wished me good morning and asked if she might help.
    “Yes. Thank you. I’m wondering if you have a Mr J.G. Martin staying with you at present?”
    On the way, of course, I had worked out what line I would follow if she answered yes.
    “No, I’m afraid we haven’t. Nor are we expecting anyone of that name.”
    I smiled. “Well, I recognized it as a long shot. But he stayed with you last month, you see, and therefore I was hoping…” My query petered out when I noticed her expression.
    “Really?”
    Before this, I had been tired, aware of how very little sleep I had procured either on the plane or in the garden of remembrance.
    But now—suddenly—I was awake.
    “Excuse me?”
    “I think, sir, you’re mistaken. I don’t recall any Mr Martin staying with us last month.”
    Just then, not even the Admiral at his most mistrustful could have considered me too articulate.
    She added: “This isn’t a large hotel and I’m thought to have a good memory.”
    “But I mean…”
    She waited.
    “I mean, it just never occurred to me. I felt so certain that…”
    “You’re sure it was the Black Lion?”
    “Yes. Quite sure. Positive.”
    The hotel register lay on the counter. I watched her run her finger down the two appropriate pages. Even at such a time as this, it struck me that her pink nail polish seemed at variance with her scraped-back bun and with her lack of make-up.
    “No,” she said. “No, I’m afraid not. Nothing.”
    Naturally I had facsimiles of the two letters Mr Martin had written. Facsimiles of the facsimiles. I reached through my raincoat and extracted these from a pocket of my suit. The woman studied them.
    “Yes, this stationery is certainly ours. And April 10 th , April 13 th —there’s no mistaking the dates. But just the same … I really don’t understand it.”
    “Perhaps you could take a look through March? Maybe he simply got the month wrong? Wrote April when he meant March.”
    “What—and did it twice? With a gap of three days in between? I’ve never done that. Have you?”
    “No.”
    “And in any case,” she repeated, “I should be certain to remember him; we’re not quite the size of Claridge’s, you know.”Nevertheless—though with a faintly disapproving air—she did turn back a further page.
    “You don’t suppose, do you, he might have been travelling incognito?”
    She answered me in the same dry tone. “Well, if he was, one can only hope his ration book was also travelling incognito.”
    I bit my lip; abandoned all flippancy.
    “But there’s another thing. He’s clearly stayed here in the past.” I read out the sentence about the hotel’s being less comfortable than he remembered it from pre-war days. “I’m sorry about that,” I said.
    “No need to be. The same must be true of almost anywhere.”
    “May I ask: were you here in pre-war days?”
    “Yes, I’ve been here since ’thirty-two.” Frowningly, she absently scratched at some imperceptible mark on the counter before she looked up. “You know, there’s bound to be a very simple solution to all of this. Do you mind waiting here a moment?”
    Thereupon she went into an adjacent office to check through the hotel’s filing system. On her return she enquired whether I actually knew the person we were searching for.
    I slowly shook my head. “Why?”
    “I was only wondering if you might have misread the signature … is there any chance of that, do you think?” There was a note of apology in her tone which further belied her appearance of severity. “We have a Mr Barton who visits us regularly—also a Mr and Mrs J.Wharton. And on several occasions we’ve had a Miss Martin staying here.”
    But when I again handed her the Gwatkin letter she smilingly conceded the surname couldn’t be anything other than Martin; and that the initials J.G. couldn’t really be