Spy hook: a novel Read Online Free PDF

given them to the children before Christmas but I’d left them there and -tried not to look at them. She’d sent presents on previous Christmases and I’d put them under the tree. The children had read the cards without comment. But this year we’d spent Christmas in our new little home and somehow I didn’t want Fiona to intrude into it. The move had given me a chance to get rid of Fiona’s clothes and personal things. I wanted to start again, but that didn’t make it any easier to confront those two bright boxes waiting for me every time I went into my office. My desk was a mess. My secretary, Brenda, had been covering for two filing clerks who were sick or pregnant or some damned thing, so I tried to sort out a week of muddle that had accumulated on my desk in my absence.
    The first things I came across were the red-labelled “urgent” messages about Prettyman. My God, last Thursday there must have been new messages, requests, assignments and words of advice landing on my desk every half hour. Thank heavens Brenda had enough sense not to forward it all to Washington. Well, now I was back in London, and they could get someone else to go and bully Jim Prettyman into coming back here to be roasted by a committee of time-serving old flower-pots from Central Funding who were desperately looking for some unfortunate upon whom to dump the blame for &heir own inadequacies.
    I was putting it all into the classified waste when I noticed the signature. Billingsly. Billingsly! It was damned odd that Billingsly hadn’t mentioned it to me this morning in Number Two Conference Room. He hadn’t even asked me what happened. His passion, if not to say obsession, for getting Prettyman here had undergone some abrupt traumatic change. That was the way it went with people like Billingsly - and many others in the Department - who alternated displays of panic and amnesia with disconcerting suddenness.
    I threw the notes into the basket and forgot about it. There was no point in stirring trouble for Jim Prettyman. In my opinion he was a fool to suddenly get on his high horse about something so mundane. He could have testified and been the golden boy: he could have declined without upsetting them. But I think he liked confrontation. I decided to smooth things over as much as I could. When it came to writing the report I wouldn’t say he’d refused point-blank: I’d say he was thinking about it. Until they asked for the report, I’d say nothing at all. I didn’t see Gloria until we had lunch together in the restaurant. Her fluent Hungarian had recently brought her a job downstairs: promotion, more pay and much more responsibility . I suppose they thought that it would be enough to make “her forget the promises they’d made about paying her wages while she was at Cambridge. Her new job meant that I saw much less of her and so lunch had become the time when our domestic questions were settled: would it look too pushy to invite the Cruyers over. who had the receipt for dry cleaning ? Why had I opened a new tin of cat-food for Muffin when the last one was still half-full?
    I asked her if anything more had been said about her resignation, secretly hoping, I suppose, that she might have changed her mind. She hadn’t. When I broached the subject over the “mushroom quiche with winter salad” she told me that she’d had an answer from a friend of hers about some comfortable rooms in Cambridge that she could probably rent.
    “What am I going to do with the house?”
    “Not so loud, darling,” she said. We kept up this absurd pretence that our co-workers - or such of them as might be interested - didn’t know we were living together. “I’ll keep paying half the rent. I told you that.”
    “It’s nothing to do with the rent,” I said. “It’s simply that I wouldn’t have taken on a place out in the sticks so I could sit there every night on my own, watching TV and saving up my laundry until I’ve got enough to make a full