regarded her thoughtfully. ‘I think there’s something you’re not telling us, Mrs Hansen.’
‘Well, it’s something about Meyrick. I was with him quite a lot during the last few weeks and he gave me the impression of being something of a womanizer – perhaps even a sexual athlete.’
A chuckle escaped from McCready. ‘Did he proposition you?’
‘He had as many arms as an octopus,’ she said. ‘I thought I wasn’t going to last out this operation without being raped. I think he’d go for anything on two legs that wore skirts, with the possible exception of Scotsmen – and I wouldn’t be too sure of that.’
‘Well, well,’ said Carey. ‘How little we know of our fellow men.’
Denison said, ‘He was divorced twice.’
‘So you think this note was to set up an assignation.’
‘Yes,’ said Diana.
‘But Meyrick wouldn’t have fallen for that, no matter how horny he was,’ said Carey. ‘He was too intelligent a man. When you and he went to Drammen last week he checked with me according to instructions. Since you were going with him I gave him the okay.’
‘Did Meyrick know Diana was working for you?’ asked Denison.
Carey shook his head. ‘No – we like to play loose. But Meyrick didn’t find the note.’ He pointed his pipe stem at Denison. ‘You did – and you went to the Spiralen. Tell me, did the men who attacked you give the impression that they wanted to capture or to kill you?’
‘I didn’t stop to ask them,’ said Denison acidly.
‘Um,’ said Carey, and lapsed into thought, his pipe working overtime. After a while he stirred, and said, ‘All right, Mrs Hansen; I think that’s all.’
She nodded briefly and left the room, and Carey glanced at McCready. ‘I suppose we must tell him about Meyrick.’
McCready grinned. ‘I don’t see how you can get out of it.’
‘I have to know,’ said Denison, ‘if I’m going to carry on with this impersonation.’
‘I trust Mrs Hansen and she doesn’t know,’ said Carey. ‘Not the whole story. I work on the “need to know” principle.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose you need to know, so here goes. The first thing to know about Meyrick is that he’s a Finn.’
‘With a name like that?’
‘Oddly enough, it’s his own name. In 1609 the English sent a diplomat to the court of Michael, the first Romanov Czar, to negotiate a trade treaty and to open up the fur trade. The courtiers of James I had to get their bloody ermine somewhere. The name of the diplomat was John Merick – or Meyrick – and he was highly philoprogenitive. He left by-blows all over the Baltic and Harry Meyrick is the end result of that.’
‘It seems that Harry takes after his ancestor,’ commented McCready.
Carey ignored him. ‘Of course, Meyrick’s name was a bit different in Finnish, but when he went to England he reverted to the family name. But that’s by the way.’ He laid down his pipe. ‘More to the point, Meyrick is a Karelian Finn; to be pedantic, if he’d stayed at home in the town where he was born he’d now be a Russian. How good is your modern history?’
‘Average I suppose,’ said Denison.
‘And that means bloody awful,’ observed Carey. ‘All right; in 1939 Russia attacked Finland and the Finns held them off in what was known as the Winter War. In 1941 Germany attacked Russia and the Finns thought it a good opportunity to have another go at the Russkies, which was a pity because that put them on the losing side. Still, it’s difficult to see what else they could have done.
‘At the end of this war, which the Finns know as the Continuation War, there was a peace treaty and the frontier was withdrawn. The old frontier was too close, to Leningrad, which had the Russians edgy. An artilleryman could stand in Finland and lob shells right into the middle of Leningrad, so the Russians took over the whole of the Karelian Isthmus, together with a few other bits and pieces. This put Meyrick’s home town, Enso, on the Russian side, and the Russians renamed it Svetogorsk.’
Carey sucked on his pipe which had gone out. It gurgled unpleasantly. ‘Am I making myself clear?’
‘You’re clear enough,’ said Denison. ‘But I want more than a history lesson.’
‘We’re getting there,’ said Carey. ‘Meyrick was seventeen at the end of the war. Finland was in a hell of a mess; all the Karelian Finns cleared out of the isthmus because they didn’t want to live under the Russians and this put the pressure on the rest of Finland because there was nowhere for them to go. The Finns had to work so bloody hard producing the reparations the Russians demanded that there was no money or men or time left over to build housing. So they turned to the Swedes and asked calmly if they’d take 100,000 immigrants.’ Carey snapped his fingers. ‘Just like that – and the Swedes agreed.’
Denison said, ‘Noble of them.’
Carey nodded. ‘So young Meyrick went to Sweden. He didn’t stay long because he came here, to Oslo, where he lived until he was twenty-four. Then he went to England. He was quite alone all this time – his family had been killed during the war – but as soon as he arrived in England he married his first wife. She had what he needed, which was money.’
‘Who doesn’t need money?’ asked McCready cynically.
‘We’ll get on faster if you stop asking silly questions,’ said Carey. ‘The second thing you have to know about Meyrick is that he’s a bright boy. He has a flair for invention, particularly in electronics, and he has something else which the run-of-the-mill inventor doesn’t have – the ability to turn his inventions into money. The first Mrs Meyrick had a few thousand quid which was all he needed to get started. When they got divorced he’d turned her into a millionairess and he’d made as much for himself. And he went on making it.’
Carey struck a match and applied it to his pipe. ‘By this time he was a big boy as well as a bright boy. He owned a couple of factories and was deep in defence contracts. There’s a lot of his electronics in the Anglo-French Jaguar fighter as well as in Concorde. He also did some bits and pieces for the Chieftain main battle tank. He’s now at the stage where he heads special committees on technical matters concerning defence, and the Prime Minister has pulled him into a Think Tank. He’s a hell of a big boy but the man-in-the-street knows nothing about him. Got the picture?’
‘I think so,’ said Denison. ‘But it doesn’t help me a damn.’
Carey blew a plume of smoke into the air. ‘I think Meyrick inherited his brains from his father, so let’s take a look at the old boy.’
Denison sighed. ‘Must we?’
‘It’s relevant,’ said Carey flatly. ‘Hannu Merikken was a physicist and, by all accounts, a good one. The way the story runs is that if he hadn’t been killed during the war he’d have been in line for the Nobel Prize. The war put a stop to his immediate researches and he went to work for the Finnish government in Viipuri, which was then the second biggest city in Finland. But it’s in Karelia and it’s now a Russian city and the Russians call it Vyborg.’
