Free Talking to Strange Men by Ruth Rendell Page A

once or twice he had caught Angus’s eye.
    Now his father said, ‘It must be the game element that keeps it all going. No rational person can see any sense in it. It’s of no positive benefit to the world. Rather the reverse. I sometimes think it’s actively dangerous. I mean, without this insanity would we even have the high level of tension that exists between East and West?’
    â€˜Probably not, darling,’ said Lucy.
    Mungo excused himself. They had been eating one of Lucy’s junk-food – what she called herscratch-as-scratch-can – teas: baps and mustard pickles and German sausage out of packets, all sitting in armchairs up in the den. Only Lucy had the sofa. A woman of her size needed exclusive possession of the sofa, she said. There had been pineapple juice to drink and a bottle of white wine. Mungo couldn’t understand why his father offered him a glass of wine and gave him such a searching look when he refused it. He always did refuse it, after all.
    In the next hour or so he had to get down to the flyover drop and see if there was anything for him. He was expecting to hear from his agent Nicholas Ralston (or Unicorn) that he had solved the problem, that he had found a way of eliciting from Blake his decision over the surgery planning permission. And if Unicorn’s efforts failed, he was keeping Charles Mabledene (or Dragon) in reserve. Dragon, Mungo thought, was by far his best agent, the best agent he had ever had, better than any of Stern’s Stars.
    Charles Mabledene had been his first defector, come over to him before he had assumed the headship of London Central, when he was still Angus’s right-hand man. It was in the summer term, when Angus was thinking of giving up, was schooling Mungo to take his place, only no one knew that, it was still a dead secret between them. Mungo had been up in his study, doing flexi-prep, and Angus was still in town, according to his entry in the house book. It was policy at Rossingham to put brothers in the same house unless they or their parents specifically asked for this not to be done. The O’Neills, for instance, had requested that Keith and Graham be kept apart on account of Graham being so much brighter. But when Mungo started at Rossingham he was put into Pitt with Angus. Ian had left by then but he too had been in Pitt, though Fergus all those years before had for some reason been in Gladstone.
    There was a phone in the house common room. There was a television set too which you were at liberty to watch once your prep was done. But use of the phone was very much restricted. Once you were in the Sixth Form you could do practically anything you wanted anyway, or things were a whole lot less constrained, but even then you weren’t supposed to receive calls on that phone. It was strictly formaking essential outgoing calls, such as if one of your parents was ill or you had to cancel their weekend visit to you, something like that. And it was a pay phone too which made it unlikely it would be used unnecessarily.
    To the outside world the number of that phone was unknown. It appeared in no directory. Even parents didn’t know it. If they needed to phone up and inquire about something they were supposed to call the headmaster or one’s housemaster on the private phone in his flat. Angus told Mungo afterwards that in all his three years at Rossingham in Pitt House he had never heard that phone ring or been told that it had rung. And there was Mungo, on that evening in June last year, sitting up in his study doing his biology with his best friend and second-in-command Graham O’Neill (or Medusa) sitting beside him doing his history, when he heard a bell ring downstairs. They didn’t know what it was, they thought it must have been Mr Lindsay’s phone ringing in the flat, that maybe he or Mrs Lindsay had left the door open.
    It was someone he didn’t know all that well, not one of his agents, who came