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– with him at Utting. And he must have composed the message at Utting, even though he would be at home now. Angus didn’t know about Utting, but at Rossingham, what with sports and clubs and flexi-prep and the Combined Cadet Force, there wasn’t much time for reading apart from required prep reading and one’s housemaster didn’t like one to stuff one’s drawer with books. What books would Guy have with him? Maybe a school set book? Angus, rather dubiously, tried the code on the first lines of
Julius Caesar, To Kill a Mockingbird,
and though it seemed a bit way out, Daudet’s
Lettres de Mon Moulin.
Nothing worked. He pored over the code, going through books all day Tuesday and most of Wednesday, and on Wednesday evening they all went over to some friends of his parents for supper. The friend had two Siamese cats one of which had injured its leg falling out of a tree.
    â€˜Look at the way that cat walks,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to take her to the vet. I thought she’d be OK but she’s going to have to have that leg seen to.’
    Cat Walk,
thought Angus. Why didn’t I think of that before? That was one book I knew for certain he had at Utting. That’s the book he used. The ridiculous thing was that Angus himself no longer had a copy of it, for he had sent his copy to Guy. He couldn’t buy another, it wouldn’t appear in paperback for nearly a year, and there would be a long waiting list at the library for the hardcover, he knew that from past experience. Next morning he went down to Hatchard’s, a branch of which had just opened in Edge Street.
Cat Walk
was still on the best-seller list and copies of it were prominently displayed. Angus picked one up and opened it. As soon as he had tried the first few letters of the coded message against the first line, he knew he had found the right book.
    Shop assistants looked suspiciously at Angus. He was afraid that one of them, a thin cross-looking girl, was going to come up to him and tell him he wasn’t supposed to read the books without buying them first. But nothing happened. He deciphered the message without having to write it down. He kept it all in his head.
    Guy had written: ‘Great stuff. Why don’t we keep this up? Moscow Centre.’
    That was the signature, Moscow Centre. And somehow, standing there in the Broad Street Hatchard’s, Angus had known exactly what Guy had meant. He wanted to start a spy network. They had talked about doing that in the past. They had wondered if they could set up a sort of MI5 or SIS (or CIA) and somehow use it. But they had never quite been able to decide what they would use it for. And then of course they had nothing to use it against. They were together, they were at the same school. But now they found themselves on opposing sides. Literally so, for like the West and the Soviets they were divided by a barrier which in fact separated east from west, in their case the river that split the city. Utting was on its eastern outskirts in what had once been the village of Utting. Rossingham, on the other hand, lay some twenty miles to the west in (according to the school prospectus) some of the most beautiful arable land in England. They were apart in a not dissimilar way from that in which the Western and Eastern blocs on an international level were apart.
    Angus wanted very much to reply to Guy but he knew he mustn’t. Contact had been made and now there must be no more. In falling in with Guy’s suggestion, Angus realized something else: that in gaining Spookside (the name was invented two days afterwards) he would lose Guy. Oh, they would have the game, the network, the intrigue, the codes, the trappings of the game, but they would never again meet as they had once done. They would meet only as the heads of the SIS and the KGB, say, might meet, at some diplomatic party in Vienna. Their friendship as such would be over.
    The attractions of Spookside