footpath with six fixed benches placed twenty feet apart, three a side. Each bench is twelve feet long. Sergei has sent photographs of them to Moscow, numbered one to six.
The park also boasts a well-liked self-service café which can be approached either by way of an iron man-gate from the street side or from the park itself. Today the café is under temporary new management, the regular staff having received a full day’s pay in lieu, which as Percy says ruefully is where your costs come in. There are sixteen indoor tables and twenty-four outdoor. Outdoor tables have permanent umbrellas against rain or sun. For food and drink there is the indoor self-service counter. On hot days an outdoor ice-cream bar is marked by the sign of a happy cow licking at a double vanilla cone. Attached to the rear premises are public toilets with facilities for baby changing and the disabled. Plastic bags and green waste bins are provided for dog walkers. All this Sergei has dutifully reported in lavish under-texts to his insatiable Danish heart-throb, the perfectionist Anette.
At Moscow’s behest we have also supplied photographs of the café, inside and out, and of the approaches to it. Having twice eaten there at his controller’s bidding, once inside, once outside, on both occasions between seven and eight p.m., and reported to Moscow on the density of diners, Sergei is under orders not to show his face there until further notice. He will remain in his semi-basement and wait on an event yet to be advised.
‘I will be all things, Peter. I will be one-half safe house keeper and one-half counter-surveillance.’
He says half because it transpires that he and his old school friend Tadzio will be sharing operational duties. Should they bump into one another by accident they will ignore each other.
I am scanning the crowd on the off-chance of a familiar face. During her sojourn in Trieste and again on the Adriatic coast, Arkady’s Valentina had been comprehensively filmed and photographed as a Moscow Centre emissary and potential double agent. But a woman of regular features can do pretty well anything she wishes with her looks over twenty years. The imagery section has produced a range of possible likenesses. Any one of them could be the new Valentina alias Anette alias you name it. I keep an open mind as a handful of women of mixed age alight at the bus stop, but not one of them advances on the man-gate leading to the café and the open spaces of the park. Percy’s cameras settle on an elderly bearded priest with a mauve surplice and dog collar.
‘Anyone to do with you at all, Nat?’ he calls over my earpiece.
‘No, Percy, nothing to do with me, thank you.’
Ripples of laughter. We settle again. A different, shaky camera pans along the benches beside the tarmacadam path. I guess it is attached to our friendly bobby as he acknowledges the smiles of members of the public either side of him. We linger on a middle-aged woman in a tweed skirt and sensible brown brogue shoes reading her free copy of the Evening Standard. She wears a wide straw hat and has a shopping bag beside her on the bench. Perhaps she is a member of a ladies’ bowling club. Perhaps she is Valentina waiting to be recognized. Perhaps she is just another mature English spinster who doesn’t mind the heat.
‘Could be, Nat?’ Percy enquires.
‘Could be, Percy.’
We are in the open-air section of the café. The camera looks down on two ample bosoms and a swaying tea tray. On the tea tray, one teapot small, one cup and saucer, one plastic teaspoon, one sachet of milk. And a cellophane-wrapped slice of Genoa fruitcake on a paper plate. Legs, feet, umbrellas, hands and pieces of face jostle as we pass by with our burden. We pull up. A woman’s voice, homely, friendly, Percy-trained, blurts into a neck microphone:
‘Excuse me, dear. Is anybody sitting in that chair?’
The freckled, cheeky face of Tadzio is looking up at us. He speaks straight into camera. His perfect English is exactly that. If there is a cadence to it, it is German, or – with Zurich University in mind – Swiss:
‘This one’s taken, I’m afraid. Lady just went to get herself a cup of tea. I promised to keep it for her.’
The camera shifts to the empty seat next to him. It has a denim jacket slung over it, the same jacket Tadzio wore for his encounter with Sergei