Kitabı oxu: «The Harry Palmer Quartet»
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
The Ipcress File first published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton 1962
Horse Under Water first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1963
Funeral in Berlin first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1964
Billion-Dollar Brain first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1966
Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1962, 1963, 1964, 1966
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2009
Cover design and photography © Arnold Schwartzman 2009
E-bundle cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780586026199, 9780586044315, 9780586045800, 9780586044285
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2013 ISBN 9780007531479
Version: 2018-11-27
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Contents
Cover
Copyright
The Ipcress File
Horse Under Water
Funeral in Berlin
Billion Dollar Brain
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
Cover Designer’s Note
The great challenge I faced when asked to produce the covers for new editions of Len Deighton’s books was the existence of the brilliant designs conceived by Ray Hawkey for the original editions.
However, having arrived at a concept, part of the joy I derived in approaching this challenge was the quest to locate the various props which the author had so beautifully detailed in his texts. Deighton has likened a spy story to a game of chess, which led me to transpose the pieces on a chess board with some of the relevant objects specified in each book. I carried this notion throughout the entire quartet of books.
Since smoking was so much part of our culture during the Cold War era, I also set about gathering tobacco-related paraphernalia.
Each chapter of The Ipcress File opens with its Gauloises-smoking protagonist’s horoscope, so discovering an Aquarius cigarette lighter was a great coup. Finding a Gauloises cigarette packet, designed by Marcel Jacno in 1936, became a more difficult proposition. However, after much searching, I eventually found one via the Internet!
Serendipity sometimes plays an important part in the design process. In seeking an appropriate ashtray, to carry through the ‘smoking’ theme, I accidentally came across a unique piece shaped like a hand gun, so I aimed it at a red chess pawn, which represents Ipcress’s ‘Red’ Cold War antagonist.
The image of the gun pays homage to the original Hawkey-designed Ipcress jacket. I further retained the wooden type font logotype originated by him.
One of my long-time hobbies has been collecting cigarette cards. I was fortunate to find some appropriate images among my personal trove to illustrate the back cover, and these are accompanied by examples of military insignia gathered during my National Service days served in Cold War Korea!
Len Deighton and I shared a great affection for London’s Savoy Hotel. My father had served as a waiter there in the 1930s so I have a number of pieces of memorabilia from the Savoy, including the saucer and the cloakroom ticket depicted on the cover.
I was thrilled to locate the ‘Made in GDR’ syringe in Latvia, of all places. Closer to home, I have kept all my past British passports, together with most of my boarding passes and baggage labels. The Chubb key and the CND badge—which today has become a fashion accessory—came from other locations around the UK. The 1960s postage stamp on the spine of the cover commemorates the former Soviet spy, Richard Sorge.
During the 1970s, while designing a supplement series for the London Sunday Times, I needed a set of fingerprints to illustrate a specific article, so I persuaded the duty sergeant at my local police station to take mine, which are here given a new public airing!
I photographed the cover set-up using natural daylight, with my Canon OS 5D digital camera.
Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI
LEN DEIGHTON
The Ipcress File
Epigraph
And now I will unclasp a secret book, And to your quick-conceiving discontents, I’ll read you matter deep and dangerous.
Henry IV
Though it must be said that every species of birds has a manner peculiar to itself, yet there is somewhat in most genera at least that at first sight discriminates them, and enables a judicious observer to pronounce upon them with some certainty.
Gilbert White, 1778
Contents
Cover
Cover Designer’s Note
Title Page
Epigraph
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
Appendix
Introduction
The Ipcress File was my first attempt to write a book. I was a commercial artist, or ‘illustrator’ as we are now called. I had never been a journalist or reporter of any kind so I was unaware of how long writing a book was likely to take. Knowing the size of the task is a deterrent for many professional writers, which is why they defer their ambitions often until it is too late. Being unaware of what’s ahead can be an advantage. It shines a green light for everything from enlisting in the Foreign Legion to getting married.
So I stumbled into writing this book with a happy optimism that ignorance provides. Was it a depiction of myself? Well, who else did I have? After completing two and a half years of military service I had been, for three years, a student at St. Martin’s School of Art in Charing Cross Road. I am a Londoner. I grew up in Marylebone and once art school started I rented a tiny grubby room around the corner from the art school. This cut my travelling time back to five minutes. I grew to know Soho very well indeed. I knew it by day and by night. I was on hello, how are you? terms with the ‘ladies’, the restaurateurs, the gangsters and the bent coppers. When, after some years as an illustrator, I wrote The Ipcress File much of its description of Soho was the observed life of an art student resident there.
After three years postgraduate study at the Royal College of Art I celebrated by impulsively applying for a job as flight attendant with British Overseas Airways. In those days this provided three or four days stop-over at the end of each short leg. I spent enough time in Hong Kong, Cairo, Nairobi, Beirut and Tokyo to make good and lasting friendships there. When I became an author, these background experiences of foreign people and places proved of lasting benefit.
I don’t know why or how I came to writing books. I had always been a dedicated reader; obsessional is perhaps the better word. At school, having proved to be a total dud at any form of sport – and most other things – I read every book in sight. There was no system to my reading, nor even a pattern of selection. I remember reading Plato’s The Republic with the same keen attention and superficial understanding as I read Chandler’s The Big Sleep and H.G. Wells’ The Outline of History and both volumes of The Letters of Gertrude Bell. I filled notebooks as I encountered ideas and opinions that were new to me, and I vividly remember how excited I was to discover that The Oxford Universal Dictionary incorporated thousands of quotations from the greatest of great writers.
So I wasn’t taking myself too seriously when, as a holiday diversion, I took a school exercise book and a fountain pen, and started this story. Knowing no other style I did it as though I was writing a letter to an old, intimate and trusted friend. I immediately fell into the first person style without knowing much about the literary alternatives.
My memory has always been unreliable, as my wife Ysabele regularly points out to me, but I am convinced that this first book was influenced by my time as the art director of an ultra-smart London advertising agency. I spent my days surrounded by highly educated, witty young men who had been at Eton together. We relaxed in leather armchairs in their exclusive Pall Mall clubs. We exchanged barbed compliments and jocular abuse. They were kind to me, and generous, and I enjoyed it immensely. Later, when I created WOOC(P), the intelligence service offices depicted here, I took the social atmosphere of that sleek and shiny agency and inserted it into some ramshackle offices that I once rented in Charlotte Street.
Using the first person narrative enabled me to tell the story in the distorted way that subjective memory provides. The hero does not tell the exact truth; none of the characters tell the exact truth. I don’t mean that they tell the blatant self-serving lies that politicians do, I mean that their memory tilts towards justification and self-regard. What happens in The Ipcress File (and in all my other first-person stories) is found somewhere in the uncertainty of contradiction. In navigation, the triangle where three lines of reference fail to intersect is call a ‘cocked hat’. My stories are intended to offer no more precision than that. I want the books to provoke different reactions from different readers (as even history must do to some extent).
Publication of The Ipcress File coincided with the arrival of the first of the James Bond films. My book was given very generous reviews and more than one of my friends was moved to confide that the critics were using me as a blunt instrument to batter Ian Fleming about the head. Even before publication day, I was taken by Godfrey Smith (a senior figure at The Daily Express newspaper) to lunch at the Savoy Grill. We discussed serial rights. The next day I went in my battered old VW Beetle to Pinewood Film Studios and lunch with the unforgettable and in every way astonishing Harry Saltzman. He had co-produced Dr. No, which was getting widespread publicity, and had decided that The Ipcress File and its unnamed hero could provide a counterweight to the Bond series. On the way to Pinewood my car phone brought a request for an interview with Newsweek and there were similar requests from publications in Paris and New York. It was difficult to believe this was all really happening; illustrators were never treated like this. Never! I was nervously unbelieving, and constantly ready to wake up from this frantic dream. Between meetings and interviews I continued my work as a freelance illustrator. My friends delicately ignored my Jekyll and Hyde life, and so did the clients to whom I delivered my drawings. I didn’t feel like a writer, I felt like an impostor. I didn’t have those intense literary ambitions that writers are supposed to have while they languish in a cobwebbed garret.
Publication proved that I wasn’t the only one surprised by the book’s success. Despite the serialization and the entire hullabaloo, Hodder and Stoughton resolutely restricted their print order to 4,000 books. These were sold out in a couple of days. Reprinting took weeks and much of the value of the publicity and serialization was lost.
There was one question that remained unanswered. Why did I say that the hero was a northerner from Burnley? I truly have no idea. I had seen the destination ‘Burnley’ on parcels I had handled while on a Christmas vacation job at King’s Cross sorting office. I suppose that invention marked one tiny reluctance to depict myself exactly as I was.
Perhaps this spy fellow is not me after all.
Len Deighton, 2009
The Ipcress File
Secret File No. 1
Prologue
They came through on the hot1 line at about half past two in the afternoon. The Minister didn’t quite understand a couple of points in the summary. Perhaps I could see the Minister.
Perhaps.
The Minister’s flat overlooked Trafalgar Square and was furnished like Oliver Messel did it for Oscar Wilde. He sat in the Sheraton, I sat in the Hepplewhite and we peeped at each other through the aspidistra plant.
‘Just tell me the whole story in your own words, old chap. Smoke?’
I was wondering whose words I might otherwise have used as he skimmed the aspidistra with his slim gold cigarette case. I beat him to the draw with a crumpled packet of Gauloises; I didn’t know where to begin.
‘I don’t know where to begin,’ I said. ‘The first document in the dossier …’
The Minister waved me down. ‘Never mind the dossier, my dear chap, just tell me your personal version. Begin with your first meeting with this fellow …’ he looked down to his small morocco-bound notebook, ‘Jay. Tell me about him.’
‘Jay. His code-name is changed to Box Four,’ I said.
‘That’s very confusing,’ said the Minister, and wrote it down in his book.
‘It’s a confusing story,’ I told him. ‘I’m in a very confusing business.’
The Minister said, ‘Quite,’ a couple of times, and I let a quarter inch of ash away towards the blue Kashan rug.
‘I was in Lederer’s about 12.55 on a Tuesday morning the first time I saw Jay,’ I continued.
‘Lederer’s?’ said the Minister. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s going to be very difficult for me if I have to answer questions as I go along,’ I said. ‘If it’s all the same to you, Minister, I’d prefer you to make a note of the questions, and ask me afterwards.’
‘My dear chap, not another word, I promise.’
And throughout the entire explanation he never again interrupted.
1Permanently open line.
1
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) A difficult day. You will face varied problems. Meet friends and make visits. It may help you to be better organized.]
I don’t care what you say, 18,000 pounds (sterling) is a lot of money. The British Government had instructed me to pay it to the man at the corner table who was now using knife and fork to commit ritual murder on a cream pastry.
Jay the Government called this man. He had small piggy eyes, a large moustache and handmade shoes which I knew were size ten. He walked with a slight limp and habitually stroked his eyebrow with his index finger. I knew him as well as I knew anyone, for I had seen film of him in a small, very private cinema in Charlotte Street, every day for a month.
Exactly one month previous I had never heard of Jay. My three weeks’ termination of engagement leave had sped to a close. I had spent it doing little or nothing unless you are prepared to consider sorting through my collection of military history books a job fit for a fully grown male. Not many of my friends were so prepared.
I woke up saying to myself ‘today’s the day’ but I didn’t feel much like getting out of bed just the same. I could hear the rain even before I drew the curtains back. December in London – the soot-covered tree outside was whipping itself into a frenzy. I closed the curtains quickly, danced across the icy-cold lino, scooped up the morning’s post and sat down heavily to wait while the kettle boiled. I struggled into the dark worsted and my only establishment tie – that’s the red and blue silk with the square design – but had to wait forty minutes for a cab. They hate to come south of the Thames you see.
It always had made me feel a little self-conscious saying, ‘War Office’ to cab drivers; at one time I had asked for the pub in Whitehall, or said ‘I’ll tell you when to stop,’ just to avoid having to say it. When I got out the cab had brought me to the Whitehall Place door and I had to walk round the block to the Horseguards Avenue entrance. A Champ vehicle was parked there, a red-necked driver was saying ‘Clout it one’ to an oily corporal in dungarees. The same old army, I thought. The long lavatory-like passages were dark and dirty, and small white cards with precise military writing labelled each green-painted door: GS 3, Major this, Colonel that, Gentlemen, and odd anonymous tea rooms from which bubbly old ladies in spectacles appeared when not practising alchemy within. Room 134 was just like any other; the standard four green filing cabinets, two green metal cupboards, two desks fixed together face to face by the window, a half full one pound bag of Tate and Lyle sugar on the window-sill.
Ross, the man I had come to see, looked up from the writing that had held his undivided attention since three seconds after I had entered the room. Ross said, ‘Well now,’ and coughed nervously. Ross and I had come to an arrangement of some years’ standing – we had decided to hate each other. Being English, this vitriolic relationship manifested itself in oriental politeness.
‘Take a seat. Well now, smoke?’ I had told him ‘No thanks’ for two years at least twice a week. The cheap inlay cigarette box (from Singapore’s change alley market) with the butterflies of wood grain, was wafted across my face.
Ross was a regular officer; that is to say he didn’t drink gin after 7.30 P.M. or hit ladies without first removing his hat. He had a long thin nose, a moustache like flock wallpaper, sparse, carefully combed hair, and the complexion of a Hovis loaf.
The black phone rang. ‘Yes? Oh, it’s you, darling,’ Ross pronouncing each word with exactly the same amount of toneless indifference. ‘To be frank, I was going to.’
For nearly three years I had worked in Military Intelligence. If you listened to certain people you learned that Ross was Military Intelligence. He was a quiet intellect happy to work within the strict departmental limitations imposed upon him. Ross didn’t mind; hitting platform five at Waterloo with rose-bud in the buttonhole and umbrella at the high port was Ross’s beginning to a day of rubber stamp and carbon paper action. At last I was to be freed. Out of the Army, out of Military Intelligence, away from Ross: working as a civilian with civilians in one of the smallest and most important of the Intelligence Units – WOOC(P).
‘Well I’ll phone you if I have to stay Thursday night.’
I heard the voice at the other end say, ‘Are you all right for socks?’
Three typed sheets of carbon copies so bad I couldn’t read them (let alone read them upside down) were kept steady and to hand by the office tea money. Ross finished his call and began to talk to me, and I twitched facial muscles to look like a man paying attention.
He located his black briar pipe after heaping the contents of his rough tweed jacket upon his desk top. He found his tobacco in one of the cupboards. ‘Well now,’ he said. He struck the match I gave him upon his leather elbow patch.
‘So you’ll be with the provisional people.’ He said it with quiet distaste; the Army didn’t like anything provisional, let alone people, and they certainly didn’t like the WOOC(P), and I suppose they didn’t much like me. Ross obviously thought my posting a very fine tentative solution until I could be got out of his life altogether. I won’t tell you all Ross said because most of it was pretty dreary and some of it is still secret and buried somewhere in one of those precisely but innocuously labelled files of his. A lot of the time he was having ignition trouble with his pipe and that meant he was going to start the story all through again.
Most of the people at the War House, especially those on the intelligence fringes as I was, had heard of the WOOC(P) and a man called Dalby. His responsibility was direct to the Cabinet. Envied, criticized and opposed by other intelligence units Dalby was almost as powerful as anyone gets in this business. People posted to him ceased to be in the Army for all practical purposes and they were removed from almost all War Office records. In the few rare cases of men going back to normal duty from WOOC(P) they were enlisted all over afresh and given a new serial number from the batch that is reserved for Civil Servants seconded to military duties. Pay was made by an entirely different scale, and I wondered just how long I would have to make the remnants of this month’s pay last before the new scale began.
After a search for his small metal-rimmed army spectacles, Ross went through the discharge rigmarole with loving attention to detail. We began by destroying the secret compensation contract that Ross and I had signed in this very room almost three years ago and ended by his checking that I had no mess charges unpaid. It had been a pleasure to work with me, Provisional was clever to get me, he was sorry to lose me and Mr Dalby was lucky to have me and would I leave this package in Room 225 on the way out – the messenger seemed to have missed him this morning.
Dalby’s place is in one of those sleazy long streets in the district that would be Soho, if Soho had the strength to cross Oxford Street. There is a new likely-looking office conversion wherein the unwinking blue neon glows even at summer midday, but this isn’t Dalby’s place. Dalby’s department is next door. His is dirtier than average with a genteel profusion of well-worn brass work, telling of the existence of ‘The Ex-Officers’ Employment Bureau. Est 1917’; ‘Acme Films Cutting Rooms’; ‘B. Isaacs. Tailor – Theatricals a Speciality’; ‘Dalby Inquiry Bureau – staffed by ex-Scotland Yard detectives’. A piece of headed note-paper bore the same banner and the biro’d message, ‘Inquiries third floor, please ring.’ Each morning at 9.30 I rang, and avoiding the larger cracks in the lino, began the ascent. Each floor had its own character – ageing paint varying from dark brown to dark green. The third floor was dark white. I passed the scaly old dragon that guarded the entrance to Dalby’s cavern.
I’ll always associate Charlotte Street with the music of the colliery brass bands that I remember from my childhood. The duty drivers and cipher clerks had a little fraternity that sat around in the dispatch office on the second floor. They had a very loud gramophone and they were all brass band fanatics; that’s a pretty esoteric failing in London. Up through the warped and broken floorboards came the gleaming polished music. Fairey Aviation had won the Open Championship again that year and the sound of the test piece reached through to every room in the building. It made Dalby feel he was overlooking Horse Guards Parade; it made me feel I was back in Burnley.
I said ‘Hello, Alice,’ and she nodded and busied herself with a Nescafé tin and a ruinous cup of warm water. I went through to the back office, saw Chico – he’d got a step beyond Alice, his Nescafé was almost dissolved. Chico always looked glad to see me. It made my day; it was his training, I suppose. He’d been to one of those very good schools where you meet kids with influential uncles. I imagine that’s how he got into the Horse Guards and now into WOOC(P) too, it must have been like being at school again. His profusion of long lank yellow hair hung heavily across his head like a Shrove Tuesday mishap. He stood 5ft 11in in his Argyll socks, and had an irritating physical stance, in which his thumbs rested high behind his red braces while he rocked on his hand-lasted Oxfords. He had the advantage of both a good brain and a family rich enough to save him using it.
I walked right through the Dalby Inquiry Bureau and down the back stairs. For this whole house belonged to WOOC(P) even though each business on each floor had its own ‘front’ for our convenience. By 9.40 A.M. each morning I was in the small ramshackle projection room of Acme Films.
The sickly sweet smell of film cement and warm celluloid was so strong that I think they must have sprayed it around. I threw my English B-picture raincoat across a pile of film tins, clean side up, and sank into one of the tip-up cinema seats. As always it was seat twenty-two, the one with the loose bolt, and always by that time I didn’t feel much like moving.
The Rheostat made that horrible squeaking noise. The room lights dimmed tiredly and the little projector clattered into action. A screaming white rectangle flung animated abstract shapes of scratch marks at my eyes, then darkened to a business-like grey flannel suit colour.
In crude stick-on letters the film title said JAY. LEEDS. WARREN THREE. (Warren Three was the authority upon which it was filmed.) The picture began. Jay was walking along a crowded pavement. His moustache was gigantic, but cultivated with a care that he gave to everything he did. He limped, but it certainly didn’t impair his progress through the crowd. The camera wobbled and then tracked swiftly away. The van in which the movie camera had been hidden had been forced to move faster than Jay by the speed of the traffic. The screen flashed white and the next short, titled length began. Some of the films showed Jay with a companion, code-named HOUSEMARTIN. He was a six feet tall handsome man in a good-quality camel-hair overcoat. His hair was waved, shiny and a little too perfectly grey at the temples. He wore a handful of gold rings, a gold watch strap and a smile full of jacket crowns. It was an indigestible smile – he was never able to swallow it.
Chico operated the projector with tongue-jutting determination. Once in a while he would slip into the programme one of those crisp Charing Cross Road movies that feature girls in the skin. It was Dalby’s idea to keep his ‘students’ awake during these viewings.
‘Know your enemies,’ was Dalby’s theory. He felt if all his staff knew the low-life of the espionage business visually they would stand a better chance of predicting their thought. ‘Because he had a picture of Rommel over his bed Montgomery won Alamein.’ I don’t necessarily believe this – but this was what Dalby kept saying. (Personally I ascribe a lot of value to those extra 600 tanks.)
Dalby was an elegant languid public school Englishman of a type that can usually reconcile his duty with comfort and luxury. He was a little taller than I am: probably 6ft 1in or 6ft 2in. He had long fine hair, and every now and then would grow a little wispy blond moustache. At present he didn’t have it. He had a clear complexion that sunburnt easily and very small puncture-type scar tissue high on the left cheek to prove he had been to a German University in ’38. It had been a useful experience, and in 1941 enabled him to gain a DSO and bar. A rare event in any Intelligence group but especially in the one he was with. No citations of course.
He was unpublic school enough to wear a small signet ring on his right hand, and whenever he pulled at his face, which was often, he dragged the edge of the ring against the skin. This produced a little red weal due to excessive acidity in the skin. It was fascinating.
He peeped at me over the toes of his suède shoes which rested in the centre of a deskful of important papers, arranged in precise heaps. Spartan furniture (Ministry of Works, contemporary) punctured the cheap lino and a smell of tobacco ash was in the air.
‘You are loving it here of course?’ Dalby asked.
‘I have a clean mind and a pure heart. I get eight hours’ sleep every night. I am a loyal, diligent employee and will attempt every day to be worthy of the trust my paternal employer puts in me.’
‘I’ll make the jokes,’ said Dalby.
‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘I can use a laugh – my eyes have been operating twenty-four frames per second for the last month.’
Dalby tightened a shoe-lace. ‘Think you can handle a tricky little special assignment?’
‘If it doesn’t demand a classical education I might be able to grope around it.’
Dalby said, ‘Surprise me, do it without complaint or sarcasm.’
‘It wouldn’t be the same,’ I said.
Dalby swung his feet to the floor and became deliberate and serious. ‘I’ve been across to the Senior Intelligence Conference this morning. Home Office are worried sick about these disappearances of their top biochemists. Committees, subcommittees – you should have seen them over there, talk about Mother’s Day at the Turkish Bath.’
‘Has there been another then?’ I asked.
‘This morning,’ said Dalby, ‘one left home at 7.45 A.M., never reached the lab.’
‘Defection?’ I asked.
Dalby pulled a face and spoke to Alice over the desk intercom, ‘Alice, open a file and give me a code-name for this morning’s “wandering willie”.’ Dalby made his wishes known by peremptory unequivocal orders; all his staff preferred them to the complex polite chat of most Departments as especially did I as a refugee from the War Office. Alice’s voice came over the intercom like Donald Duck with a head cold. To whatever she said Dalby replied, ‘The hell with what the letter from the Home Office said. Do as I say.’
There was a moment or so of silence then Alice used her displeased voice to say a long file number and the code-name RAVEN. All people under long-term surveillance had bird names.
‘That’s a good girl,’ said Dalby in his most charming voice and even over the squawk-box I could hear the lift in Alice’s voice as she said, ‘Very good, sir.’
Dalby switched off the box and turned back to me. ‘They have put a security blackout on this Raven disappearance but I told them that William Hickey will be carrying a photo of his dog by the midday editions. Look at these.’ Dalby laid five passport photos across his oiled teak desk. Raven was a man in his late forties, thick black hair, bushy eyebrows, bony nose – there were a hundred like him in St James’s at any minute of the day. Dalby said, ‘It makes eight top rank Disappearances in …’ he looked at his desk diary, ‘… six and a half weeks.’
‘Surely Home Office aren’t asking us to help them,’ I said.
‘They certainly are not,’ said Dalby. ‘But if we found Raven I think the Home Secretary would virtually disband his confused little intelligence department. Then we could add their files to ours. Think of that.’
‘Find him?’ I said. ‘How would we start?’
‘How would you start?’ asked Dalby.
‘Haven’t the faintest,’ I said. ‘Go to laboratory, wife doesn’t know what’s got into him lately, discover dark almond-eyed woman. Bank manager wonders where he’s been getting all that money. Fist fight through darkened lab. Glass tubes that would blow the world to shreds. Mad scientist backs to freedom holding phial – flying tackle by me. Up grams Rule Britannia.’
Dalby gave me a look calculated to have me feeling like an employee, he got to his feet and walked across to the big map of Europe that he had had pinned across the wall for the last week. I walked across to him. ‘You think that Jay is master minding it,’ I said. Dalby looked at the map and still staring at it said, ‘Sure of it, absolutely sure of it.’
The map was covered with clear acetate and five small frontier areas from Finland to the Caspian were marked in black greasy pencil. Two places in Syria carried small red flags.
Dalby said, ‘Every important illegal movement across these bits of frontier that I have marked are with Jay’s OK.
‘Important movement. I don’t mean he stands around checking that the eggs have little lions on.’ Dalby tapped the border. ‘Somewhere before they get him as far as this we must …’ Dalby’s voice trailed away lost in thought.
‘Hi-jack him?’ I prompted softly. Dalby’s mind had raced on. ‘It’s January. If only we could do this in January,’ he said. January was the month that the Government estimates were prepared. I began to see what he meant. Dalby suddenly became aware of me again and turned on a big flash of boyish charm.
‘You see,’ said Dalby. ‘It’s not just a case of the defection of one biochemist …’
‘Defection? I thought that Jay’s speciality was a high-quality line in snatch jobs.’
‘Hi-jack! Snatch jobs! all that gangland talk. You read too many newspapers that’s your trouble. You mean they walk him through the customs and immigration with two heavy-jowled men behind him with their right hands in their overcoat pockets? No. No. No,’ he said the three ‘noes’ softly, paused and added two more. ‘… this isn’t a mere emigration of one little chemist,’ (Dalby made him sound like an assistant from Boots) ‘who has probably been selling them stuff for years. In fact given the choice I’m not sure I wouldn’t let him go. It’s those—people at the Home Office. They should know about these things before they occur: not start crying in their beer afterwards.’ He picked two cigarettes out of his case, threw one to me and balanced the other between his fingers. ‘They are all right running the Special Branch, HM prisons and Cruelty to Animal Inspectors but as soon as they get into our business they have trouble touching bottom.’1 Dalby continued to do balancing tricks with the cigarette to which he had been talking. Then he looked up and began to talk to me. ‘Do you honestly believe that given all the Home Office Security files we couldn’t do a thousand times better than they have ever done?’
‘I think we could,’ I said. He was so pleased with my answer that he stopped toying with the cigarette and lit it in a burst of energy. He inhaled the smoke then tried to snort it down his nostrils. He choked. His face went red. ‘Shall I get you a glass of water?’ I asked, and his face went redder. I must have ruined the drama of the moment. Dalby recovered his breath and went on.
‘You can see now that this is something more than an ordinary case, it’s a test case.’
‘I sense impending Jesuitical pleas.’
‘Exactly,’ said Dalby with a malevolent smile. He loved to be cast as the villain, especially if it could be done with schoolboy-scholarship. ‘You remember the Jesuit motto.’ He was always surprised to find I had read any sort of book.
‘When the end is lawful the means are also lawful,’ I answered.
He beamed and pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb. I had made him very happy.
‘If it pleases you that much,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t muster it in dog-Latin.’
‘It’s all right, all right,’ said Dalby. He traversed his cigarette then changed the range and elevation until it had me in its sights. He spoke slowly, carefully articulating each syllable. ‘Go and buy this Raven for me.’
‘From Jay.’
‘From anyone who has him – I’m broadminded.’
‘How much can I spend, Daddy?’
He moved his chair an inch nearer the desk with a loud crash. ‘Look here, every point of entry has the stopper jammed tightly upon it.’ He gave a little bitter laugh. ‘It makes you laugh, doesn’t it. I remember when we asked HO to close the airports for one hour last July. The list of excuses they gave us. But when someone slips through their little butter-fingers and they are going to be asked some awkward questions, anything goes. Anyway, Jay is a bright lad; he’ll know what’s going on; he’ll have this Raven on ice for a week and then move him when all goes quiet. If meanwhile we make him anything like a decent offer …’ Dalby’s voice trailed off as he slipped his mind into over-drive, ‘… say 18,000 quid. We pick him up from anywhere Jay says – no questions asked.’
‘18,000,’ I said.
‘You can go up to twenty-three if you are sure they are on the level. But on our terms. Payment after delivery. Into a Swiss bank. Strictly no cash and I don’t want Raven dead. Or even damaged.’
‘OK,’ I said. I suddenly felt very small and young and called upon to do something that I wasn’t sure I could manage. If this was the run of the mill job at WOOC(P) they deserved their high pay and expense accounts. ‘Shall I start by locating Jay?’ It seemed a foolish thing to say but I felt in dire need of an instruction book.
Dalby flapped a palm. I sat down again. ‘Done,’ he said. He flipped a switch on his squawk-box. Alice’s voice, electronically distorted, spoke from the room downstairs. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
‘What’s Jay doing?’
There was a couple of clicks and Alice’s voice came back to the office again. ‘At 12.10 he was in Lederer’s coffee-house.’
‘Thanks, Alice,’ said Dalby.
‘Cease surveillance, sir?’
‘Not yet, Alice. I’ll tell you when.’ To me he said, ‘There you are then. Off you go.’
I doused my cigarette and stood up. ‘Two other last things,’ said Dalby. ‘I am authorizing you for 1,200 a year expenses. And,’ he paused, ‘don’t contact me if anything goes wrong, because I won’t know what the hell you are talking about.’
1 The Denning report published September, 1963 revealed that the Home Secretary is in control of British Counter Intelligence.
2
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) New business opportunities begin well in unusual surroundings that provide chance of a gamble.]
I walked down Charlotte Street towards Soho. It was that sort of January morning that had enough sunshine to point up the dirt without raising the temperature. I was probably seeking excuses to delay; I bought two packets of Gauloises, sank a quick grappa with Mario and Franco at the Terrazza, bought a Statesman, some Normandy butter and garlic sausage. The girl in the delicatessen was small, dark and rather delicious. We had been flirting across the mozzarella for years. Again we exchanged offers with neither side taking up the option.
In spite of my dawdling I was still in Lederer’s coffee-house by 12.55. Led’s is one of those continental-style coffee-houses where coffee comes in a glass. The customers, who mostly think of themselves as clientele, are those smooth-rugged characters with sun-lamp complexions, half a dozen 10in by 8in glossies, an agent and more time than money on their hands.
Jay was there, skin like polished ivory, small piggy eyes and a luxuriant growth of facial hair. Small talk ricocheted around me as reputations hit the dust.
‘She’s marvellous in small parts,’ an expensive gingery-pink rinse was saying, and people were dropping names, using one-word abbreviations of West End shows and trying to leave without paying for their coffee.
The back of Jay’s large head touched the red flocked wallpaper between the notice that told customers not to expect dairy cream in their pastries and the one that cautioned them against passing betting slips. Jay had seen me, of course. He’d priced my coat and measured the pink-haired girl in the flick of an eyelid. I waited for Jay to stroke his eyebrow with his right index finger and I knew that he would. He did. I’d never seen him before but I knew him from the flick of the finger to the lopsided way he walked downstairs. I knew that he’d paid sixty guineas for each of his suits except the flannel one, which by some quirk of a tailor’s reasoning had cost fifty-eight and a half guineas. I knew all about Jay except how to ask him to sell me a biochemist for £18,000.
I sat down and burnt my raincoat on the bars of the fire. An unassisted thirty-eight with a sneer under contract eased her chair three-sixteenths of an inch to give me more space, and nosed deeper into Variety. She hated me because I was trying to pick her up, or not trying perhaps, but anyway, she had her reasons. On the far side of Jay’s table I saw the handsome face of Housemartin, his costar in the Charlotte Street film library. I lit a Gauloise and blew a smoke ring. The thirty-eight sucked her teeth. I noticed Housemartin lean across to Jay and whisper in his ear while they both looked at me. Then Jay nodded.
The waitress – a young fifty-three with imitation pastry cream on her pinafore – came across to my table. My friend with Variety stretched out a hand, white and lifeless like some animal that had never been exposed to daylight. It touched the glass of cold coffee and dragged it away from the waitress. I ordered Russian tea and apple strudel.
Had it been Chico sitting there he would have been making time with the Minox camera, and dusting the waitress for Jay’s prints, but I knew we had more footage on Jay than MGM have on Ben Hur, so I sat tight and edged into the strudel.
When I had finished my tea and bun I had no further excuse for delay. I searched through my pockets for some visiting cards. There was an engraved one that said ‘Bertram Loess – Assessor and Valuer’, another printed one that said ‘Brian Serck Inter News Press Agency’, and a small imitation leather folder that gave me Right of Entry under the Factories Act because I was a weights and measures inspector. None of those suited the present situation so I went across to Jay’s table, touched a forelock and said the first thing that came into my head – ‘Beamish,’ I said, ‘Stanley Beamish.’ Jay nodded. It was the head of a Buddha coming unsoldered. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ I said. ‘I have a financial proposition to put to you.’ But Jay was not going to be hurried; he took out his thin wallet, produced a white rectangle and passed it to me. I read – ‘Henry Carpenter – Import Export’. I’d always favoured foreign names on the ground that there is nothing more authentically English than a foreign name. Perhaps I should tell Jay. He picked up his card and delicately with his big scarred finger-tips on the points returned it to his crocodile-skin wallet. He consulted a watch with a dial like the control panel of a Boeing 707, and eased himself back in his chair.
‘You shall take me to lunch,’ said Jay, as though he were conferring a favour.
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I have three months’ back pay outstanding and my expense account was only confirmed this morning.’ Jay was thunderstruck at striking this rich vein of honesty. ‘How much,’ said Jay. ‘How much is your expense account?’
‘1,200,’ I said.
‘A year?’ said Jay.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Not enough,’ said Jay, and he jabbed my chest to emphasize it. ‘Ask them for 2,000 at least.’
‘Yes,’ I said obediently. I didn’t think Dalby would stand for it, but there seemed no point in contradicting Jay at this stage of the proceedings.
‘I know somewhere very cheap,’ said Jay. As I saw it, a finer way out of the situation was for Jay to buy me lunch, but I know that this never even occurred to him. We all paid our bills, and I picked up my groceries, and then the three of us trailed out along Wardour Street, Jay in the lead. The lunch hour in Central London – the traffic was thick and most of the pedestrians the same. We walked past grim-faced soldiers in photo-shop windows. Stainless-steel orange squeezers and moron-manipulated pin-tables metronoming away the sunny afternoon in long thin slices of boredom. Through wonderlands of wireless entrails from the little edible condensers to gutted radar receivers for thirty-nine and six. On, shuffling past plastic chop suey, big-bellied naked girls and ‘Luncheon Vouchers Accepted’ notices, until we paused before a wide illustrated doorway – ‘Vicki from Montmartre’ and ‘Striptease in the Snow’ said the freshly-painted signs. ‘Danse de Desir – Non Stop Striptease Revue’ and the little yellow bulbs winked lecherously in the dusty sunlight.
We went inside. Jay was smiling and tapping Housemartin on the nose and the usherette on the bottom at the same time. The manager gave me a close scrutiny but decided I wasn’t from West End Central. I suppose I didn’t look wealthy enough.
I closed my eyes for a moment to accustom myself to the dark. On my left was a room with about sixty seats and a stage as big as a fireplace – it looked a slum in total darkness. I’d hate to see it with a window open.
In the cardboard proscenium a fat girl in black underwear was singing a song with the mad abandon that fitted 2.10 P.M. on a Tuesday afternoon.
‘We’ll wait here,’ said the handsome Housemartin, and Jay went up the staircase near the sign that said – ‘Barbarossa – club members only’ – and an arrow pointing upwards. We waited – you wouldn’t have thought that I was trying to do an £18,000 deal. The garlic sausage, the Statesman, the Normandy butter, had become a malleable shapeless lump. I didn’t think Dalby would wear that on my expenses, so I decided to hang on to it a little longer. Drums rolled, cymbals ‘zinged’, lights and gelatines clicked and clattered. Girls came on and went off. Girls thin, fat, tall and short. Girls in various stages of dress and undress; pink girls and green girls, little girls and old girls, and still more girls, relentlessly. Housemartin seemed to like it.
Finally he went to the gents, excusing himself with one of the less imaginative vulgarisms. A cigarette-girl, clad in a handful of sequins, tried to sell me a souvenir programme. I’d seen better print jobs on winkle bags, but then it was only costing twelve and six, and it was made in England. She offered me a pink felt Pluto, too. I declined gratefully. She sorted through the other things on the tray. ‘I’ll have a packet of Gauloises,’ I said. She smiled a crooked little smile – her lipstick was lopsided – she seemed to have very little skill at putting things on. She dropped her head to grope for the cigarettes. ‘Do you know what the packet looks like?’ she said. I helped her look. While her head was close to mine she said, in her pinched Northumberland accent, ‘Go home. There’s nothing to be gained here.’ She found the cigarettes and gave them to me. I gave her a ten-shilling note. ‘Thanks,’ she said, offering no change.
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ I watched her as she made her journey through the wispy audience of middle-aged tycoons. When she reached the rear of the auditorium she sold something to a plump man at the bar. She moved on out of my range of vision.
I looked around me; no one seemed to be watching. I walked up the stairs. It was all velveteen and tinsel stars. There was only one door on this landing – it was locked. I went up another floor. A notice said, ‘Private – Staff Only’; I pushed through the swing door. There was a long corridor ahead of me. Four doors opened to the right. None to the left. I opened the first door. It was a toilet. It was empty. The next door in the line-up said ‘Manager’; I tapped and opened it. There was a comfortable office: half a dozen bottles of booze, large armchair, a studio couch. A television set said ‘… begin to feel the tummy muscles stretching and relaxing …’
There was no one there. I walked across to the window. In the street below a man with a barrow was arranging the fruit best side forward. I went down the corridor and opened the next door – there was a complex and fleshy array of about twenty semi-nude chorus girls, changing their tiny costumes. A loudspeaker brought the sound of the piano and drums from downstairs. No one screamed, one or two of the girls looked up and then continued with their conversation. I closed the door quietly and went to the last door.
It was a large room devoid of any furniture; the windows were blocked up. From a loudspeaker came the same piano and drums. In the floor of the room were six panels of armour glass. The light came from the room below. I walked to the nearest glass panel and looked down through it. Below me was a small green baize table with sealed packs of cards, and ashtrays, and four gold-painted chairs. I walked to the centre of the room. The glass panels here were bigger. I looked down upon clean bright yellow and red numbers demarking black rectangles on the green felt. Inset into the table a nice new roulette wheel twinkled merrily. There was no sign of anyone unless you included the pale man in dark jacket and pin-stripe trousers who was lying full length along the gaming table. It looked like, and it just had to be; Raven.
3
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) You may be relying too heavily on other people’s intentions and ideas. A complete change will do you good.]
There was no other door to the room and the windows were blocked. I went back along the corridor and down the stairs. I tried the door again as I had on the way up; I reached the same conclusion. I moved it gently and heard the bolt rattle. I rapped it with my knuckles – it was solid. I went upstairs quickly and back into the observation room. From below the glass would look like mirror, but anyone in this room could see the cards all the players were holding.
I hadn’t yet offered a deal to Jay. If that was Raven I was bound to recover him, seize him, or whatever the terminology is. I went quickly back to the manager’s office. The woman on the TV was saying ‘… down together …’ I lifted his heavy typewriter off his desk and carried it along the corridor. Two girls in scanties came pushing out of the dressing-room and, seeing me, the tall one called through the doorway, ‘Watch your pockets girls, he’s back again,’ and her friend said, ‘He must be a reporter,’ and they both giggled and ran downstairs. I humped the huge typewriter into the observation room in time to see a figure enter the gaming room downstairs. It was Housemartin, and he now had a grease stain on the lapel of his camel-hair coat. He looked as hot and bothered as I felt, and he hadn’t had my troubles with the typewriter or the girls.
Housemartin was a big man. Because he wore suits with shoulders six inches outboard of the shoulder bone didn’t mean that he wasn’t beefy enough already. He picked the limp Raven off the big crème de menthe coloured table like a Queen’s scout with a rucksack, and marched off through the far door. I was groaning under the weight of the Olivetti and now I let go. It went through the big six-foot panel without a ripple. The surface shattered into a white opacity except for a large round hole through which I saw the typewriter hit the roulette wheel dead centre and continue its downward path to the floor – the hole in the gaming table mouthed its circular surprise. I kicked the splintery edges of the broken glass but still tore the seat of my trousers as I slid through the panel and dropped on to the gaming table below. I picked myself up and rubbed the torn place in my trousers. Suddenly the music from the loudspeaker ceased, and I heard one of the strippers running upstairs shouting.
Over the loudspeakers a voice said, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, the police are checking the premises; please remain in your seats …’ By that time I was across the gaming room and through the doorway through which Housemartin and Raven had gone. I went down the stone staircase two steps at a time. There were two doorways, one had ‘emergency exit’ painted on it. I put my weight against the crunch-bars and opened it a couple of inches. I was in a semi-basement. There were four uniformed policemen standing ten feet away along the pavement. I closed the door and tried the other door. It opened. Inside were three middle-aged men in business suits. One was flushing the contents of his pockets down the toilet. One was standing in another toilet helping the third through a very small window. The sight through this window of the point of a blue helmet had me moving back up the stairs again. I had passed a door on the way down. I pushed at it now. It was made of metal, and was very heavy. It moved slowly and I found myself in an alley full of bent dustbins, wet cardboard cartons and crates with ‘No deposit’ stencilled upon them. At the end of the alley was a tall gate with a chain and padlock. Facing me was another metal door. I walked through it into a man in a greasy white jacket shouting ‘Make it spaghetti and chips twice.’ He looked me over suspiciously and said, ‘You want a meal?’
‘Yes,’ I said quickly
‘That’s all right then, sit down. I’m not doing no more coffee except with food.’ I nodded. ‘I take your order in a minute,’ he said.
I sat down and felt in my pocket for cigarettes. I had three and a half packets in one pocket and a quarter of a pound of garlic sausage, and a soft metal foil parcel of butter in the other. It was then that I discovered there a brand new hypodermic syringe in a black cardboard box, and I thought, ‘What did that cigarette-girl mean by “Go home. There is nothing to be gained here”?’
4
I used the emergency number to go through to our secret exchange: Ghost – which was our section of the special Government telephone exchange: Federal.
Ghost switchboard gave the usual eighty seconds of ‘Number unobtainable’ signal – to deter callers who dialled it by accident – then I gave the week’s code-words ‘MICHAEL’S BIRTHDAY’, and was connected to the duty officer. He plugged me in to Dalby who might have been anywhere – half-way across the world, perhaps. I conveyed the situation to him without going into details. He felt it was all his fault, and said how pleased he was that I hadn’t got mixed up with the ‘blue pointed head mob’. ‘You will be doing a job with me next week. It might be very tricky.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘I’ll speak to Alice about it, meanwhile I want you to change your papers.’ He rang off. I went home to a garlic sausage sandwich. ‘1,200,’ I thought. ‘That’s twenty-four pounds a week.’
‘Changing papers’ is a long and dreary process.
It meant photographs, documents, finger-prints and complications. A small roomful of civilian clerks at the War Office are busy the whole year through, doing nothing else. On Thursday I went to the little room at the top of the building to the department run by Mr Nevinson. On the door the small white ticket in its painted frame said, ‘Documents. Personnel Reclassifications and Personnel deceased’. Mr Nevinson and his colleagues have the highest security clearance of anyone in government employ and, as they all know very well, they are under continuous security surveillance. Through these hands at some time or other go papers for every important agent in HM Govt employ.
For example; take the time my picture appeared in The Burnley Daily Gazette in July 1939, when I won the fifth form mathematics prize; the following year the whole of the sixth appeared in a class photograph. If you try to see those issues now at the library, at the offices of The Burnley Daily Gazette, or at Colindale even, you’ll discover the thoroughness of Mr Nevinson. When your papers are changed your whole life is turned over like top-soil; new passport of course, but also new birth-certificate, radio and TV licences, marriage-certificates; and all the old ones are thoroughly destroyed. It takes four days. Today Mr Nevinson was starting on me.
‘Look at the camera, thank you. Sign here, thank you; and here, thank you; and again here, thank you; thumbs together, thank you; fingers together, thank you; now altogether, thank you; now you can wash your hands, thank you. We’ll be in touch. Soap and towel on the filing cabinet!’
5
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Don’t make hasty decisions about a prospect you have in mind. A difference of opinion may provide a chance for a journey.]
Monday I got to Charlotte Street usual time. A little grey rusting Morris 1000 knelt at the kerb, Alice at the controls. I was pretending I hadn’t seen her when she called out to me. I got into the car, the motor revved, away we went. We drove in silence a little way when I said, ‘I can’t find the bag of wet cement to put my feet into.’ She turned and cracked her make-up a little. Encouraged, I asked her where we were going.
‘To bait a Raven trap, I believe,’ she said.
There seemed no answer to that. After a few minutes she spoke again. ‘Look at this,’ she said, handing me a felt toy exactly like the one I had declined to buy in the strip club the week before. ‘There.’ She jabbed a finger while driving, talking and tuning the car radio. I looked at the pink spotted felt dog; some stuffing was coming out of its head. I prodded it around. ‘You’re looking for this?’ Alice had a Minox in her hand. She gave me a sour look, or perhaps I already had one.
‘I was pretty stupid …’ I said.
‘Try not to stay that way,’ she almost smiled. If she went on that way she’d soon have a crackle finish.
In Vauxhall Bridge Road we pulled into the kerb behind a black Rover car. Alice gave me a buff envelope about 10in by 6in and ¾ in thick sealed with wax, and opened the door. I followed her. She ushered me into the rear seat of the Rover. The driver had a short haircut, white shirt, black tie and navy blue DB raincoat. Alice smacked the roof of the car with the flat of her hand; show jumper style. The car pulled away through the ‘back doubles’ of Victoria. I opened the buff envelope. Inside was a new passport, thumbed, bent and back-dated to look old; two keys; a sheet of paper with typing on it; three passport photos, and one of those multi-leaved airline tickets. I was booked BOAC first-class single LON/BEI. The typewritten sheet gave plane times and said, – ‘BA712. LAP 11.25. Beirut International Airport 20.00. Photo Identity: RAVEN. Juke box. Upstairs. BEI Airport. Destroy by burning immediately.’ It gave no date. Attached to one key was a number: ‘025.’ I looked at the man in the photos, then burned the typewritten sheets and the photos, and lit a cigarette.
We turned left out of Beauchamp Place on to the all too lavishly tended stretch of road that connects Maidenhead with Harrods. The driver’s first words were spoken at the Airport. ‘The overnight lockers are across the hall,’ he said.
I left the car and driver, and fitted my key into 025, one of a wall-full of metal twenty-four-hour lockers. It swung open and I left the key in the lock. Inside was a dark leather brief-case and a blue canvas zip bag with bulging side pockets. I took them across the hall to check in for my flight.
‘Is this all your baggage, sir?’ She weighed in my wardrobe case, took my ticket, straightened her strap, fluttered her eyelids and gave me a boarding card.
I took my brief-case, walked to the bookstall, bought New Statesman, Daily Worker and History Today, then took off towards my Exit. A bundle of people surged around kissing and greeting and ‘how lovelying’ their way across from the customs. In a dirty raincoat, hemmed in every-which-way was Ross. I didn’t want to see him, and it was mutual, but for a moment the crowd forced us together like unconnected elements among so many molecular constructions. I beamed at him – I knew this would irritate him most.
Through the big shed-like customs hall.
The BOAC girl called the flight in a resonant metallic voice – ‘BOAC announce the departure of flight BA712 to …’ We walked across the apron. The aeroplane had swarms of white garbed engineers and loaders in blue battledress making like busy past the airport policeman. I clanked up the steps.
There was that smell of blue upholstery and fan-heated ovens. A steward took my name, boarding card and dirty trench coat and I moved up front with my fellow first-class passengers, towards a flurried-looking hostess who’d just done a four-minute mile. Something like the Eton wall game was going on in the narrow gangway. I made towards a petite dark girl looking very much alone, but the only people who get to sit next to girls like that are the men who model the airline adverts. I was next to a thick-necked idiot of about twenty-two stone. He sat down with a hat and overcoat on and wouldn’t give either to the steward. He had boxes and bags and a packet of sandwiches. I strapped in and he looked at me in amazement. ‘Floorn before?’ I gave him the side focus and nodded like I was deep in contemplation. The steward helped him strap in, the steward helped him find his brief-case, he helped him understand that although the plane went to Sydney via Colombo he only need go to Rome. The steward showed him how to fit on, and tie up, his lifejacket, how the light switched itself on in water, where to find the whistle and turn on the compressed air. Told him he couldn’t buy a drink until we were airborne. Showed him where to find his maps and told him how high we were. (We were still on the ground.) When we got to the end of the runway we hung around while an Alitalia DC8 came in, then with a screaming great roar, the brakes were off and we rolled, gaining speed, down the wide runway. Past airport buildings and parked aircraft, a couple of jolts as the machine gained buoyancy and airspeed. The cars on the London Road became smaller and the sun glinted dully on the many sheets of water around the Airport. Strange castles, baronial mansions, that appear only when you are in an aeroplane. One by one I remembered them and again promised myself a journey in search of them some day.
About Guildford the stewardess offered us the free alcohol that together with six extra inches of seat space makes the cost of a first-class ticket worth while, if you are on expenses. Gravel Gertie, of course, wanted something odd – ‘A port and lemon.’ The hostess explained they didn’t have such a thing. He decided to ‘Leave it to you, love, I don’t do much travelling.’
Our drinks arrived. He passed me my glass of sherry and insisted upon bumping our glasses together like mating tortoises, and saying, ‘Cheerio, Chin-chin.’
I nodded coolly as the spilt sherry pioneered its sticky route down my ankle.
‘Over the teeth, over the gums, look out stomach, here she comes,’ he chanted, and was such a helpless roistering jelly of merriment at his own wit that only a small fraction of his drink did in fact complete the journey. I wrote ROUNDELAYS into the crossword. ‘I’m going to Rome,’ said Gertie. ‘Have you ever been there?’
I nodded without looking up.
‘I missed the 9.45 plane. That’s the one I should have been on, but I missed it. This one doesn’t always go to Rome, but that 9.45 goes direct to Rome.’
I crossed out ROUNDELAYS and wrote RONDOLETTO. He kept saying ‘I’ll go no more a-roaming,’ and laughing a little high-pitched laugh, his great floppy face crouching behind his pink-tinted rimless spectacles. I was into the competition page of the Statesman when the stewardess offered me a selection of pieces of toast as large as a penny garnished with smoke salmon and caviare. Fatso said, ‘What are we ’aving to eat, luv, spaghetti?’ A thought that drove him wild with hysterical mirth, in fact he repeated the word to me a couple of times and roared with laughter. A toy dinner came along on a trolley; I declined the fat man’s thick sausage sandwiches. I had frozen chicken, frozen pomme parisienne and frozen peas. I began to envy Fatso his sausage sandwiches. By the time we were crossing the suburbs of Paris the champagne appeared. I felt mollified. I crossed out RONDOLETTO and wrote in DITHYRAMBS which made twenty-one down AWE instead of EWE. It was beginning to shape up.
We skimmed our way into the clouds like a nose into beer froth. ‘We are approaching Rome – Fiumicino Airport. Transit time is forty-five minutes. Please do not leave small valuable articles in the aircraft. Passengers may remain aboard but smoking is not permitted during refuelling. Please remain seated after landing. Light refreshments will be available in the airport restaurant. Thank you.’
I accidentally knocked Fatso’s glasses out of his hand on to the floor, one pane suffered a crack but held together. While we apologized together we came in over the eternal city. The old Roman aqueducts were clearly visible, so was Fatso’s wallet, so I lifted it, offered him my seat – ‘Your first view of Rome.’
‘When in Rome …’ he was saying as I took off to the forward toilet, I heard his high-pitched laugh. ‘Occupied.’ Damn. I stepped into the bright chromium galley. No one there. I leaned into the baggage recess. I flipped through Fatso’s wallet. A wad of fivers, some pressed leaves, two blank postcards with views of Marble Arch, a five-shilling book of stamps, some dirty Italian money and a Diner’s Club card in the name of HARRISON B J D and some photos. I had to be very quick. I saw the stewardess walking slowly down the aisle checking passengers’ seat belts, and the lights were up. ‘NO SMOKING, FASTEN SEAT BELTS.’ She was going to give me the rush. I pulled the photos out – three passport pictures of a dark-haired, smooth stockbroker type, full, profile and three-quarter. The photo was different but the man was my pin-up, too – the mysterious Raven. The other three photos were also passport style – full face, profile and three-quarter positions of a dark-haired, round-faced character; deep sunk eyes with bags under horn-rimmed glasses, chin jutting and cleft. On the back of the photos was written ‘5ft 11in; muscular inclined to overweight. No visible scar tissue; hair dark brown, eyes blue’. I looked at the familiar face again. I knew the eyes were blue, even though the photograph was in black and white. I’d seen the face before; most mornings I shaved it. I realized who Fatso was. He was the fat man sitting at the bar in the strip-club when the cigarette girl told me to ‘Go home.’
I stuffed them back, palmed the wallet, said ‘OK’ to the protesting hostess. I got back to my seat as the flaps went down, the plane shuddered like Gordon Pirie running into a roomful of cotton wool. Fatso was back in his own seat; my cardigan had fallen to the floor over my brief-case. I sat down quickly, strapped in. I could see the Railway Junction now and as we levelled off for the approach the G glued me to the seat springs. I could see the south side of the perimeter as we came in, and beyond the bright yellow Shell Aviation bowsers I noticed a twin-engined shoulder wing Grumman S2F-3. It was painted white and the word ‘NAVY’ was written in square black letters aft of the American insignia.
The tyres touched tarmac. I leaped forward to pick up my mohair cardigan. As I did so I flipped Fatso’s wallet well under his seat. Now I saw the clean knife cut along the back of my new briefcase – still unopened. Not one of those long, amateur sorts of cuts, but a small, professional, ‘poultry-cleaning’ one. Just enough to investigate the contents. I leaned back. Fatso offered me a peppermint. ‘Do as the Romans do,’ he went on, eyes smiling through the cracked lens.
Fiumicino Airport, Rome, is one of those straight-sided ‘Contemporary Economy’ affairs. I went into the main entrance; to the left was the restaurant but up the stairs to the right a post office and money exchange. I was killing a minute with the paperbacks when I heard a soft voice say, ‘Hello, Harry.’
Now my name isn’t Harry, but in this business it’s hard to remember whether it ever had been. I turned to face the speaker – my driver from London. He had a hard bony skull, with hair painted across it in Brylcreem. His eyes were black and counter-sunk deep into his face like gun positions. His chin was blue and hardened by wind, rain and monsoon and forty years of shaving hard against the bone. He wore black tie and white shirt and navy blue raincoat with shoulder straps. If he was a crew member he had removed his shoulder badges and taken care to leave his uniform cap elsewhere. If he wasn’t, it was little wonder that he chose to wear the undress uniform of all the world’s airline crews.
His eyes moved in constant watchfulness over my shoulder. He ran the palm of his right hand hard across the side of his head to press down his already flattened hair. ‘Seat nineteen …’
‘Is trouble,’ I completed it in the phraseology of the department. He looked a little sheepish. ‘Now you tell me,’ I said peevishly. ‘He’s already shivved my hand baggage.’
‘As long as there is still a tin inside,’ he said.
‘There’s a tin inside,’ I told him.
He rubbed the side of his jaw pensively, and finally said, ‘Be last out at Beirut. Leave that,’ we both eyed the case, ‘for me to take through customs.’ He said good-bye then turned to go, but came back to cheer me up. ‘We’re doing seat nineteen’s hold baggage now,’ he said.
As I thanked him I heard the Italian voice on the loudspeaker saying, ‘British Overseas Airways Corporation denunca che departe dela Comet volo BA712 a Beirut, Bahrain, Bombay, Colombo, Singapore, Jakarta, Darwin and Sydney a tutto passagere …’
The Colosseum – Rome’s rotten tooth – sank behind us, white, ghostly and sensational. I slept till Athens. Fatso hadn’t re-embarked. I felt tired and out-gambited. I slept again.
I woke for coffee as we crossed the brown coast of Lebanon. Thin streaks of white crests buffered in from the blue Med. I noticed that there were many tall white buildings built since my first visit here in the days of Medway II.* The circuit over the coast-side airport is generally a bumpy passage, for immediately after the airport the ground rises in blunt green mountains. Everything is hot, foreboding and very old.
Polite soldier-like officials in khaki uniforms did a line of backwards Arabic in immaculate penmanship across my passport and stamped it. I had cleared customs and immigration.
I dumped my wardrobe case into a Mercedes taxi – after letting two cabs go by – then gave the driver some Lebanese pounds and told him to wait. He was a villainous-looking Moslem in brown woollen hat, bright red cardigan and tennis shoes. I hurried upstairs. Having coffee near the juke-box was the ‘driver’. He gave me my brief-case, a heavy brown packet, a heavy brown look, a heavy brown coffee. I dealt with each in silence. He gave me the address of my hotel in town.
The Mercedes touched seventy-five as we passed the dense wood of tall umbrella pines along the wide modern road to the town. Further away on the mountain slopes the cedar trees stood, national symbol and steady export for over 5,000 years. ‘Hew me cedar trees out of Lebanon,’ Solomon had commanded and from them built his temple. But my driver didn’t care.
6
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Someone else’s forethought may enable you to surprise a rival.]
Peering between the slats of the wide venetian blind, the yellow and orange stucco buildings conspired to hide the sea. In the warmth of midday I see a black moustachioed villain hitting the horn of a pink Caddie; the cause of his annoyance a child leading a camel with a predilection for acacia trees. Across the road two fat men sit on rusty folding chairs drinking arak and laughing; a foot or so above their heads a coloured litho Nasser is not amused. In economy-sized cafés behind doors artfully contrived to preserve a décor of absolute darkness they are serving economy-sized coffees of similar darkness with exotic pastries of honeysmothered nuts and seeds. Clients – young Turks, Greeks dressed like left bank intellectuals – find their seats by the light of a juke-box inside which Yves Montand and Sarah Vaughan are crowded. Outside in the blinding sunlight, antiquated trams spew out agile targets for the Mercedes taxis. Dark-skinned young men with long black hair parade along the water’s edge in bikinis almost big enough to conceal a comb. Below me in the street two young men on rusty cycles balancing a long tray of unleavened bread between them, are nearly brought down by a frenetic dog which yelps its fear and anger. In the souks men from the desert pass among money-changers – the carpet men and the sellers of saddles for horse, camel and bicycle. In Room 624 bars of sunlight lay heavily across the carpet. The hotel intercom hummed with old tapes of Sinatra, but he was losing a battle with the noise of the air-conditioning. Room 624, which the department had booked for me, came complete with private bath, private refrigerator, scales, magnifying mirrors, softened water, phones by bed, phones by bath. I poured another large cup of black coffee and decided to investigate my baggage. The blue wardrobe bag unzipped to reveal – a light-weight blue worsted suit, a seersucker jacket, a used overall with zip front and more pockets than I knew how to use. In the bag’s side pockets were some new white and plain-coloured cotton shirts, a couple of plain ties, one wool, one silk, a belt, a slim leather and Italian, and a pair of red braces; didn’t miss a trick that Alice. I was going to like working for WOOC(P). In the briefcase was a heavy tin. I looked at the label. It read ‘WD 310/213. Bomb. Sticky’. The heavy packet that the man in the blue raincoat had given me was an envelope inside which was a waterproof-lined brown bag. It was the sort of thing you would find in the pocket of your seat when looking for matches on an aeroplane. It is also the sort of thing that aircrews, loaders, and engineers from Rangoon to Rio use for transporting their little ‘finds’. Cakes, chicken, ball-point pens, packs of cards, butter – the jetsam of the airlines. Inside this one was a hammerless Smith and Wesson, safety catch built into the grip, six chambers crowded with bullets. I tried to remember the rules about unfamiliar* pistols. In an accompanying box were twenty-five rounds, two spare chambers (greased to hold the shells in tight), and a cutaway holster. It covered little more than the barrel, having a small spring clip for rigidity. I strapped the belt across my shoulder. It fitted very well. I played with this in front of the mirror, making like Wagon Train, then drank the rest of my cold coffee. Orders would come soon enough: Orders for a last attempt to grab Raven the biochemist before he disappeared beyond our reach.
The road inland from Beirut winds up into the mountains; gritty little villages hold on tight to the olive trees. The red earth gives way to rock, and far below to the north lies St George’s Bay, where the dragon got his, way back, that was. Up here where the snow hangs around six months of the year the ground is dotted with little Alpine flowers and yellow broom, in some places wild liquorice grows. Once the heights are crossed the road drops suddenly and there is a route across the valley before the crossing of the next range – the Anti Lebanon, behind which lies 500 miles of nothing but sand till Persia. Much nearer than that, though, just along the road in fact, is Syria.
At many places the roadway cuts corners, and a shelf hangs almost over the road. A full grown man can, if he keeps very still, perch between two pieces of rock at one place I know. If while in this position he looks east he can see the road for over a hundred yards; if he looks towards Beirut he can see even farther – about three hundred yards, and what’s more, he can, through night glasses, watch the road crossing the mountain. If he has friends up the road in either direction and a small transreceiver he can talk to them. Although he shouldn’t do so indiscriminately in case the police radio accidentally monitors the call. Along about 3.30 A.M. a man in this position will have counted the stars, almost fallen off the rock easing his back-ache and be seeing double through the night glasses. The metal of the trans-receiver will be sending pains of cold through hand and ear, and he will have begun to compile a list of friends prepared to help him in the matter of finding some other type of employment, and I won’t blame him. It was 3.32 A.M. when I saw the headlights coming down the mountain road. Through the night glasses I could see it was wide and rolled like an American car. I switched in my set and saw the movement up the road as the radio man gave it to Dalby. ‘One motor, over a thousand yards. No traffic. Out.’ Dalby grunted.
I read off the ranges army style until finally the large grey Pontiac slid under me, headlights probing the soft sides of the road. The beams were way above Dalby’s head. I could imagine him, crouching there, perfectly still. In these sorts of situation Dalby sat back and let his subconscious take over; he didn’t have to think – he was a natural hooligan. The car had slowed as Dalby knew it must, and as it neared him he stood up and posed, like the statue of the discus thrower, aimed – then lobbed his parcel of trouble. It was a sticky bomb about as big as two cans of soup end to end; on impact its very small explosive charge spread a sort of napalm through tank visors. Burnt cars and contents don’t worry policemen the way blown-up shot-up ones do. The charge exploded. Dalby dropped almost flat, some flaming pieces of horror narrowly missed him, but mostly they hit radiator and tyre. The car hadn’t slackened speed, and now Dalby was on his feet and running behind it. We’d parked the old car from Beirut obliquely across the path; the man driving our target must have been dead from the first impact, for he made no attempt to collide side to side in sheer, but just ploughed into the old Simca carrying it about eight feet. By now Dalby was alongside. He had the door open and I heard pistol shots as he groped into the rear seat. My transreceiver made a click as someone switched in and said in a panicky voice, which forgot procedure, ‘What you doing, what you doing?’ For a fraction of a second I thought he was asking Dalby; then I saw it.
Below me on the road was another car. Maybe he had been following all the time with lights off, or perhaps he’d come down the other valley road from Baalbek and Homs. I looked down on this stretch of road which was as light as day now; the figures frozen like a photo in the intense light of the white hot flames. I could see Dalby’s radio man from the Embassy standing there in an anorak like a scoutmaster on holiday, his white horse-like face staring thunderstruck at me. Dalby’s feet were visible under the open door and I noticed that Simon was standing behind him instead of going around the other side of the car to help. In this second of time I so badly wanted it to be the duty of someone else to do it. Someone else for blaming when this little Nash turned round and roared away. But I had let it approach unseen, I had volunteered for the look-out so as not to do what Dalby was doing – lying on his belly over a red hot petrol tank among people with no reason to be friendly. So I did what I had to do. I did it quickly and I didn’t watch. I needn’t have used two sticky bombs; it had a flimsy roof.
Simon had got Dalby’s car out on to the roadway by the time I had scrambled down. In the back the radio man was sitting guarding our one captive – the smooth stockbroker whose picture both Fatso and I had carried. The man I had seen lying unconscious upon the gaming table. Dalby had gone to look at the Nash while I vomited as inconspicuously as possible. The heavy smell hung across the roadway and was worse than a brewed-up tank ever made. This smell was a special smell, an evil smell, and my lungs were heavy with it. The two burnt out cars still flickered and spat flames as something dripped on to the red glowing metal. We each of us had removed our overalls and thrown them into the flames. It was Simon’s job to make sure they burnt enough to be unrecognizable. I remember wondering if the zips would melt, but I said nothing.
The sky had begun to lighten in the east, and the silence had turned brittle in the way it does when night gives way to dawn. The hills had grown lighter, too, and I thought I could discern a goat here and there. Soon the villages would be awake in the land that St Paul walked, and men would be milking by day where we had been killing by night.
Dalby came back out of earshot and said, ‘Nobody likes it.’
I said, ‘At first.’
‘Not ever, if they work with me.’
Dalby got into the rear seat next to Raven, and the radio man sat watching them with his pistol cocked.
I heard Dalby say, ‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ in a firm flat voice, and then he produced one of those tiny toothpaste tubes with the needle that were in wartime first-aid kits. Drawing back the man’s sleeve Dalby stabbed it into him. He made no attempt to say or do anything. He sat there in a state of shock. Dalby put the used morphia syrette tube into a matchbox, and the car pulled away, past the whitened twisted wrecks of the three cars; the melted rubber was dribbling and flaring in the road. We turned off the Beirut road at Shtora and headed north up the valley through Baalbek. The pagan and Roman ruins were strategically placed to guard the valley. The six gigantic pillars of the Great Temple were visible through the poplar trees in the streaky dawn light, as they had stood each dawn since the standards of Imperial Rome stood alongside them. I felt Dalby lean forward across my seat-back; he was passing me a rose-tinted pair of spectacles. ‘They came from the Nash.’ I saw that one pane was cracked. I turned them over in my hand. If there’s anything more pathetic than a dead man’s dog, it’s a dead man’s spectacles. Every bend and shine belonged to its wearer and to no one else, nor would ever.
Dalby said, ‘ONI.1 Both of them. US Embassy car; probably there to do what we did. Serve the nosy – right. They should tell us what they are doing.’ He caught my glance at Raven. ‘Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s way out.’
I remembered the US Navy’s white S2F-3 ‘Tracker’ at Rome, and another at Beirut that was the same one.
1 ONI – Office of Naval Intelligence US Navy.
7
I saw Dalby butting his head back, his long fair hair flashing in the hot sunshine. He shouted something I couldn’t hear, and disappeared behind one of the gigantic smooth-sided Corinthian columns. In scale with him the ruins of Baalbek’s temple were vast against the clear desert sky. I jumped down the broken steps and a couple of lizards twinkled out of sight. Dalby had caught the sun this morning and I could feel the tightening of my skin across my nose and forehead. A little scatter of sand blew across my feet as a draught of wind flicked a finger along the valley floor. As Dalby came nearer I saw that he’d found a piece of tile that had cleverly eluded two millennia of tourists. On the far side of the site beyond the little round temple of Venus a group of American girls in red blazers were standing in a semicircle listening to an old white-bearded Arab. I could tell that he’d got to the bit about the sex orgies and the Rites of the God Moloch even though the wind carried his voice away. Dalby had caught up to me now.
‘OK for lunch?’ he asked, and in his proprietorial manner led the way towards it without waiting for a reply.
We had all slept late that morning in the rather grand villa out there on the Baalbek road. Simon was a Lt-Col in the RAMC and some sort of specialist. He had never been involved in a stunt like last night’s before. I felt a little guilty at my unspoken criticism. He was back there now, keeping an eye on the man who had held centre stage last night. The villa was discreetly situated and under the quiet control of an elderly Armenian couple who accepted our arrival last night without surprise. The house stood in the middle of a vast acreage of terraced garden. Azaleas, cyclamen and olive trees all but hid the building which was ‘U’ shaped in plan. Behind the house across the open end, an irregular-shaped pool was cut into the natural rock. Under the clear blue water at one end a Roman statue was transfixed in athletic pose, and there were no changing-rooms, beach-chairs, parasols or diving-boards to mar the pool’s natural appearance. The walls of the house facing inwards were glass from floor to ceiling, with bright plain curtains which moved on electrically propelled runners. At night when the lights were on throughout the house and the curtains fully open, and when the coloured lights illuminated the Roman statue, the paved central loggia made a perfect helicopter landing space, while the double-glazed windows kept the worst of the sound out.
Here at the temple the air was clear and clean and soft and because morning gives a dimension of magic to any place it was soft and sharp at the same time. The fluted columns had been burnished by the centuries of wind but under the hand the surface was as rough as pumice and as pitted as a honeycomb. A dirty child with torn trousers and a pair of American canvas shoes drove three goats clanking along the road to the north. ‘Cigarette,’ he called to Dalby, and Dalby gave him two.
Dalby was especially relaxed and expansive; it seemed a good chance to find out more about the opposition that we had just outwitted. I asked him about Jay – ‘But what’s his cover story – what’s his angle, his business?’
‘He runs, or more accurately he pays someone to run a research unit in Aargau.’ He stopped, and I nodded. ‘You know where it is?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Where?’ asked Dalby.
‘Forgive me if my lack of ignorance is an embarrassment to you. The Canton of Aargau is in the north of Switzerland, the river Aar joins the Rhine there.’
‘Oh, yes, forgive me, the finance king is bound to know Switzerland.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Now let’s take it from there – what sort of research unit?’
‘Well they have sociologists and psychiatrists and statistics people and they have money from various industrial foundations to investigate what they call “synthesized environment”.’
I said, ‘You’ve lost me now – without trying.’
‘Not surprisingly, for they hardly know what they are doing themselves, but the idea is this. Take German industry for an example. German industry has been short of labour for ages and they have imported workmen from almost every European country – with excellent results. That is to say – put an unskilled labourer from one of the Greek islands, who has never seen a machine before, in the German factory, he learns how to operate it just as quickly as a worker from Düsseldorf.’ Dalby looked up. ‘You are receiving me?’
‘Loud and clear,’ I said. ‘So what’s the problem – peachy for the West Germans.’
‘In that sort of situation – no problems, but if a West German builds a factory in Greece and employs local labour they can’t even teach them to switch on the lights in some cases.
‘Therefore, these boffins in Aargau feel that to be in an environment where everyone knows what they are doing, and attach no difficulty to doing it, means that the new arrival will adopt the same attitude. If on the other hand the individual finds himself among people lacking confidence, he will raise barriers to ever mastering his job – and so will the others. This is what “synthesized environment” means. It could be very important to industry, especially to industries being formed in countries with a rural population.’
‘It could be important from our point of view, too.’
‘We have a file on it,’ said Dalby dryly.
That’s about all that Dalby volunteered on the subject of Jay, but I had lots of other chatty topics of discussion ready as we walked back to the villa. I asked him about his new IBM machine, about the Chester Committee Report on the Intelligence Services, and how it was likely to affect us, and about my arrears of pay (now approaching four months) and whether I couldn’t have the whole of my expenses available to me in cash against petty cash vouchers instead of submitting accounts and settling down to a long wait as I did now.
It was Dalby’s day for proving that he could be one of the boys. He wore his short-sleeved shirt outside his denim trousers and an old pair of suède shoes, against which he kicked every small movable object we encountered. I asked him about Mr Adem, our host, and about him he was more forthcoming than he had ever been about pay and expenses.
Dalby had got him from Ross, who had got him from the US Anti-Narcotics Bureau (Mediterranean Div). He had run Indian hemp* across the Syrian border as a section of a chain to New York. The Americans had done a deal with him in 1951 and, although the pay wasn’t up to drug traffic rates, he had been happy to avoid a spell up the river. In the NATO Intelligence Service regroupings of ’53 Adem had come into British service. He was about in his mid-sixties; gentle and humorous with a face like an apple that’s been stored through the winter. He was a fine judge of horses, wines and heroin, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of an area stretching from Northern Turkey to Jerusalem. If you trod on a beetle for miles around you’d find he had it under contract. His role was a giver of information and understanding this, he had, or showed, no curiosity about the affairs of his employers. His salary was virtually unlimited, with one proviso – no cash. As Dalby put it, ‘We pay any reasonable bill he runs up, but he never handles a pound himself.’
‘It’s going to be difficult for him to retire,’ I said.
‘It will be damn well impossible if I have anything to do with it,’ said Dalby. ‘He’s hooked, we need him.’
‘You mean he never tries to re-channel some of his debts into cash?’ I asked, just to be provocative.
Dalby’s face cracked open in one of those big boyish laughs he gave out when he felt proud of his even teeth. ‘He does!
‘When we first gave him the Sud Aviation Jet helicopter,’ Dalby went on, ‘I told him to jazz it around somewhat. “Live it up and be proud of it,” I said. “Give a few of the big Government boys a ride around.” I wanted him to be seen up and down the shore line, occasionally riding out to sea. With a Lebanese big-wig aboard, inquiries were not going to be encouraged.’
We’d reached the sloping driveway, and beyond the lemon trees I could just see the light green Cadillac in which Adem had met us a few kilometres along the road in the small hours.
‘So?’ I said. ‘It worked?’
‘Worked?’ Dalby tilted his head, pulled his earlobe and smiled in admiration as he thought about it. ‘He brought twenty kilos of heroin across from Syria within seven days of getting his licence. Twenty kilos,’ Dalby said, his thin lips forming the words yet again in tacit joy at the sheer ambition of the old man.
‘At five shillings a dose that’s a lot of green,’ I agreed.
‘It was a big improvement on Indian hemp. The sort of ruffians he knows can get 100,000 doses from a kilo, and five shillings is the Beirut price, in London it’s going to be more like ten. A couple of runs like that and he could buy Cyprus as a weekend place. It gave me a problem, but I told him I’d break his head if he did it again, and in the long run it was beneficial. When the news of the shipment leaked out – it’s bound to in a place like this – well, people never trust a completely honest individual.’
The smell of Dgaj Muhshy (chicken stuffed with nutmeg, thyme, pine nuts, lamb and rice, and cooked with celery) taunted the nostrils. The old man was dressed in a shirt of bright yellow locally-made silk and was poking away among his vegetable garden as we got to the front door.
‘Hello,’ muttered Dalby. ‘The old swine is probably growing his own.’
The soft wind blew across the high-ceilinged dining-room. The décor, except for two beautiful gold thread brocades of very old Persian design, reflected Adem’s peasant origin more than his present-day affluence. The scrubbed woodwork, the small-patterned cloths, an enormous dresser, crowded with plates, saucers, jugs and cups. The rugs on the wall of simple dark-toned peasant weaves. All this provided a background against which a food opera was played out. First sambousiks (small pastries containing curried meat served freshly baked) were served. I looked at old Adem as he stood at the end of the table; under his bulbous nose hung an enormous grey moustache which, because of his thinning hair, gave one the curious feeling that his face was upside down. His skin was hard and tanned in such a way that when his face was relaxed and serious, the wrinkles around the mouth and eyes were white; but he was seldom serious.
He divided up the huge joint of lamb with a well-worn horn-sided folding knife that came from his pocket and was used in every operation from vegetable gardening to changing a tyre. I had watched him do both with the same smooth enjoyable efficiency. His mouth contorted with the effort of his hands, and each slice was delivered with a great flashing smile of his brown uneven teeth.
‘It’s good?’ he asked me.
I told him to be careful or he’d have a guest for life. It was the right thing to say. He was a born host and, as Dalby said, I am a born guest.
That afternoon as the sun reached its apogee Adem and I sat talking and drinking under the trees. Adem did the talking, I did the drinking. He told me of his uncle who had killed a lion single-handed with only a spear in 1928. ‘A challenge. He went to this lion in challenge. In his right hand he had a spear.’ Adem raised his right hand, fingers clenched. ‘This arm,’ he raised his left arm, ‘is tied with clothes and bandage for guarding.’ Adem demonstrated guarding. ‘After this lion die he is called “Hamid the lion-killer”; he never work again.’
‘Never works again?’
‘Never. A man who kills a lion, everyone gives him money and food, everything; never work again.’
‘I can see the attraction,’ I said. ‘Are there lions about here now?’
‘Not here. To the north perhaps; many times I go. Many animal; many gazelle, many leopard, ibex … bears. But they become less each year. Many people hunt.’
‘Like your Uncle Hamid.’
Adem looked serious, then he laughed a big laugh. ‘Not like him. People with guns. I do not like this.’
‘You go north hunting?’ Now I was doing it.
‘Not the hunt. I go to look. I stay very still, very, very still, near water, and I watch them come.’
‘You never photograph them?’
‘No, I watch. It is just for me, not for pictures. Just for me and the animal.’
I imagined Adem holed up overnight in the bleak brown area to the north watching and sniffing the night air and never taking a film or a bullet. I told him of Xenophon’s men who chased the ostrich and wild ass. He liked that part of the story but found the effort of imagining a greater period of time than two generations very difficult. As far as Adem was concerned, Xenophon was a contempary of A. W. Kinglake. Adem told me of the attempts to conserve the wild life farther north, and of the money they needed. When I told Dalby he said that the old man would do anything to get his hands on cash, but I’m simple enough to believe the old man.
Soon only the higher parts of the landscape were catching the horizontal sunlight and a lone blackcap had sung his song from all the little lemon trees. From inside the house the crick-crack of freshly ignited fruit-tree wood proclaimed the approach of dinner-time.
Totem poles of lamb, aubergine, onion and green pepper were being skewered, seasoned and readied on the big open hearth. As Adem finished speaking a radio somewhere within the house pierced the grey velvet twilight with a needle of sound.
The polished opening notes of the second movement of the Jupiter. It seemed that every living thing across the vast desert spaces heard the disturbing, chilling sound. For those few minutes of time as the wire edge modulated to a minor key and as the rhythm and syncopation caught, slipped and re-engaged like a trio on a trapeze, there was only me and Adem and Mozart alive in that cruel, dead, lonely place.
We were three days with the old man of the mountains, then John reappeared from Beirut with a vast radio set. It took him nearly three hours, but finally he made contact with a Battle-class RN destroyer that was NATOing down the Lebanese coastline.
Simon, the army quack, whose name was Painter, as far as anyone’s name is anything in this business, seldom came out of the upstairs room. But when they had fixed a rendezous time with the destroyer, Painter decided that the captive could eat dinner with us. Raven. He was well code-named this captive Raven. He was thinner and weaker than he’d looked even two days previously when Dalby had dragged him out of the Pontiac, but he was good-humoured in a different sort of way. His white shirt had grown a little dirty, and in his baggy pin-stripe trousers and a new dark linen jacket he looked like the manager of a Bingo saloon. His eyeballs, deep and darkly sunken, moved quickly and nervously, and I noticed that he repeatedly glanced towards Painter. As they reached the bottom of the stairs our guest paused. He seemed to sense our curiosity and interest in the role he played. Our chatter ceased, and the only sound came from an upstairs radio tuned to the ‘Voice of the Arab’; its strange polyphonic discord set the eerie background to the curious scene. His voice was the clear, carefully articulated tones of English management.
‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said flatly. ‘Good evening and er, thank you.’ He came through like a whisky ad. Dalby strode across to him in a paternal way, and led him to the table like guest night at Boodles. ‘Most kind, Dalby, most kind,’ he said.
All through the meal little was said that didn’t touch on the weather or the garden or horses, mostly horses, and old Adem finished quickly and went up to catch the forecast. The destroyer was making good time down the coast in the gathering twilight; visual contact wouldn’t be the simplest thing, although with fuel for over three hundred miles the helicopter had a safe enough margin of search.
They sat inside the big plexiglass dome of the SE-3130 Alouette 2 like goldfish expecting food. Simon Painter sat on one side of the azoic Raven on the folding seats in the rear. Dalby sat in the front left side observer’s seat as he received the final few words of Adem’s short lecture on the use of the Decca navigation equipment. Adem’s face was more serious now as he fingered the joystick-like cyclic pitch control, and worried about how to bring this Alouette down on the temporary landing platform that wouldn’t be much bigger than the forward gun turret upon which it was being erected at that minute. On the bodywork I could read the notices: ‘Danger Rotors’ and a serial number, and inside the cabin a small plastic panel and engraved upon it the procedure in case of fire. The words shuddered as the motor started. Like a back-fire in Trafalgar Square it was followed by the sound of a thousand wings beating the air, clattering across the valley and echoing back to us again. The 400-horse-power Turbomeca power unit was alive, and above my head the thirty-foot rotor-blades shaved the face of the night. The controls reflected little pimples of yellow light into Adem’s spectacles, and our distinguished visitor waved a limp hand airily towards us in kingly fashion. ‘Farewell troublesome Raven,’ I thought.
Adem’s left hand pulled the collective lever, twisting the throttle gently as he did so. The limp blades were flung horizontal by the centrifugal surge of the motor, and the rev counter moved slowly around the dial. The big rotors twisted in response to Adem’s movement of the ‘collective’, and hammered the heavy evening air down upon our ears. Like a clumsy Billy Bunter the machine heaved itself hand over hand into the sky. A touch of rudder had the tail rotor slip it sideways, and, silhouetted against the five-o’clock-shadowed chin of twilight, they hedge-hopped in 100 mph gallops towards the sea. Adem the horseman took the cedar tree jumps in fine form.
Walking back towards the house, I decided to try DITHYRAMBE with a final E. This would make ten down EAT, not SAT or OAT. I really was getting it now.
8
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Keep an open mind. You will get to know an old friend better. Avoid business gatherings and concentrate on financial affairs. Above all don’t make impulsive decisions.]
April is a hell of a month to be in London, and on the Tuesday I had to go to Sheffield to see some of our people there. It was a long meeting and little was settled about the co-relation of filing systems, but they would let us use their staff on our phone and cable lines. Thursday I was busy working back over a back-log of new information on the Jay operation, when Dalby came in. I hadn’t seen him since his helicopter trip. He was tanned and handsome looking, and was wearing the dark grey suit, white shirt and St Paul’s tie that was part of his equipment for dealing with Defence Ministers’ private secretaries. He asked me how things were. It was strictly rhetorical stuff, but I told him that I was still two months behind with pay and three with allowances, that I still hadn’t settled the business of dating my new substantive rank and a claim for £35 in overseas special pay is overdue by ten and a half months.
‘OK,’ said Dalby. ‘In lieu of all you claim I’ll take you for lunch.’
Dalby didn’t fool around with expenses; we went into Wiltons and settled for the best of everything. The iced Israeli melon was sweet, tender and cold like the blonde waitress. Corrugated iron manufacturers and chinless advertising men shared the joys of our expense-account society with zombie-like debs with Eton-tied uncles. It was a nice change from the sandwich bar in Charlotte Street, where I played a sort of rugby scrum each lunchtime with only two PhD’s, three physicists and a medical research specialist for company, standing up to toasted bacon sandwich and a cup of stuff that resembles coffee in no aspect but price.
Over the lobster Dalby asked me how things were going in the work on Jay. I told him that it was going just great and I hope someone will tell me what I’m doing some day. I wouldn’t have remembered Thursday at all, apart from the fine lobster salad and carefully-made mayonnaise, if it hadn’t been for what Dalby then said. He poured me a little more champagne and crunching it back into the ice bucket, said, ‘You’re working with the same information that I am. Unless I’m wrong we are moving in from opposite ends to the same conclusion.’ Then he changed the subject.
However, my complaint about working in the dark must have had some effect, for on Friday they started to tell me things.
That Friday morning my post brought me an electricity bill for over £12, and a snotty printed form that said it is understood that the above-named article of War Department property has been retained by you contrary to section something or other of the Army Act. It should be returned to officer i.c. special issue room – War Office, London. The word ‘returned’ was crossed through and ‘delivered personally’ written instead; across the top there was scrawled ‘officer’s sidearm Colt .45 pistol’. The message ended, ‘You will be informed in due course whether further action will be taken.’ I carefully posted that into the garbage bin under the sink and poured a strong clear bowl of Blue Mountain coffee. I stood there on that cold April morning, hot coffee-bowl cupped between my hands, and gazed blankly out across the chimneys, crippled and hump-backed, the shiny sloping roofs, backyards of burgeoning trees and flowering sheets and shirts. I weighed the desirability of pulling the still-warm bedding over my still-unawakened body. Reluctantly I turned on the shower.
About eleven A.M. Alice entered my office with a rose-decorated cracked cup of Nescafé, a basilisk look and a new green-laced file. She gave me all three, picked up the fountain pen I had borrowed the week before, and marched out. I put aside the paper-clip chain I was working on, and started flipping through the file. It had the usual employment bureau rubber stamp and 14143/6/C written in large flomaster lettering. Typewritten on light-green paper, it was yet another file on the man we called Jay. I had never seen a green file before but it had a much higher security clearance than the ordinary white ones. I read of his university progress and his training in Jungian psychology (discontinued after two years) and his unsuccessful excursion into the timber business. It had the usual outline of Jay’s career up to June 1942, then instead of the gap in the story I read of Jay, then Christian Stakowski, being recruited into Polish Army Intelligence based in London. He made two very hazardous trips into southern Poland, the second time his air pick-up failing to contact. His next emergence from the unknown was when he appeared in Cairo reporting back to the Polish Army, who gave him the VM,1 in December ’42. He was sent back to England and did the eight-month course at the place they had in Horsham. By this time the chain of cells he worked with in Poland had been decimated and a photostat in the file shows that Polish Army counter-intelligence had the possibility that he had done a deal with the Germans added to his papers. Another letter dated May ’43 points this possibility up by showing that the arrests along his chain were all by the same department of German Investigation.
The Polish Underground had many different political origins – Jay, finding himself a member of the National Armed Forces (a Right-wing extremist group), probably did a deal with the German Abwehr. In so doing he was regarded as a hero by the Communist-dominated AL (or people’s army) for reducing fascist power. A massive treble-cross!
There is a gap then, and next in September ’45, Stakowski, now with the papers of a Polish sergeant WOWC is filtered back into Poland among soldiers released from German POW camps. In Warsaw he obtains a lowly secretarial job with the new Communist Government, and reports back to an Intelligence outfit financed by the Board of Trade of all people! His reports concern industrial espionage especially the movement of German reparation production into Russia. In 1947 his reporting languishes and a note says that he was probably working for the US Central Intelligence Agency, who recruited a lot of agents in Europe at that time on the ‘8 year system’, an offer whereby agents after eight years in the field would be paid a small pension, shipped to the US and settle down to listen to the grass grow. It was received enthusiastically in the US-oriented Europe of ’47, although there is no record from 1955 onwards of any pay-offs. In 1950, WOWC, with little or no promotion in his Government job, tenth secretary in a timber bureau, on the pretext of being under suspicion flees to England on a passport that his job enabled him to wangle. In England he sinks as happily into the Right-wing Polish community as he had into the Communist Government.
The file ends with about twenty intercepted US Embassy phone calls to him concerned mostly with the activities of London merchant banks. The Embassy are especially interested in the finances of the Common Market. I sipped my coffee and came to the most interesting part of all. The last item is on notepaper with a discreet coat of arms. It is headed Combined Services Information Clearing House C-SICH, through which all information available in Great Britain is shared to appropriate branches. The many large commercial concerns, which have industrial espionage teams spying on competitors, must submit monthly reports to C-SICH. It is one of these that is quoted as saying that WOWC or Jay is positively not in receipt of regular sums of money from the Russian Government. His income is ‘very large but from diverse sources and irregular amounts’. Alice thoughtread me ending the file, came in, took the closed file out of my hands, checked the binding for tears and riffled quickly through the page corners, her eagle eye checking the page numbers for omission. Satisfied, she straightened up my blotter and brushed an eyebrow with her moistened little finger, and collected my empty rose coffee-cup. In hasty little pinched steps she walked across the narrow room.
I cleared my throat. ‘Alice,’ I said. She turned and watched me blankly. She paused a moment, then raised an eyebrow. She had her tight-fitting tweed two-piece on today, and her hair had been slightly intimidated in a high-class coiffeur joint.
‘Your seams are crooked.’
If I thought I’d make her angry or happy I couldn’t have been more wrong. She nodded her head deferentially like a Chinese mandarin and went on her way.
1 VIRTUTI MILITARI, The Polish VC.
9
Dalby had buzzed me for a meeting at three o’clock. It was in the board-room downstairs. The large red-brown shiny oval table reflected the grey windows with the rain dribbling downward. The electric light shone from a gaunt chandelier-type thing of thin poor-quality glass. Dalby stood with his Bedford-cord behind in front of a puny, one-bar electric fire that looked and felt diminutive in the large Victorian fire-place in which the brass shovel and poker were kept polished. Above his head a vast portrait of a man in frock-coat and beard had almost entirely relapsed into the brown gloom of the coach varnish. Uncomfortable upright chairs unused by dint of their discomfort stood at attention like family retainers along the dead-flower-print wallpaper. High up on the wall above the picture rail a large clock tick-tocked away the sparse daylight hours. A minute or so before three, Painter, the doctor, came in. Dalby continued screening his face with the Guardian, so we nodded to each other. Chico was sitting down already. I had no particular reason to speak to Chico. He was in one of those moods where he kept saying things like, ‘What about old Davenport then – do you know old “Coca-Cola” Davenport?’ Then if not stopped immediately he’d tell me how he got his nickname. ‘You must know “Bumble-bee” Tracy then …’ No, no more, Chico for the present.
I sat down in one of the large chairs and began, while looking official, thinking of dates at random and trying to remember what happened. ‘1200 – fifteen years before Mongols’ I wrote, ‘end of Romanesque arch. Four years before fourth Crusade. Battle of Hattin means Europe is defeated in East.’ I was really getting into it now. ‘Magna Carta …’
‘D’you mind?’ It was Dalby. Everyone was seated and ready to go. Dalby hated me concentrating. ‘Going into one of your trances,’ he called it. Dalby began now. I looked around. Painter, about forty, a thin rat-faced character, was on my right. He was wearing a good-quality blue blazer, white shirt, soft collar, and a plain dark crimson tie. From his cuffs his links shone dull genuine gold, and a handkerchief peeped coyly. His hands were long and supple and had the dry whiteness that doctors’ hands get from being washed too much.
Opposite me across the table was an army type. Gentle in disposition, his gold spectacle frames glinted among hair whitened by Indian sun. He wore a cheap, dark ready-made suit with a regimental tie. I guessed him to be a Captain or a Major of fifty-three, past any chance of further promotion. His eyes were grey and moved slowly, taking in his surroundings with care and awe. His large hairy hands held on to his brief-case before him on the table, as though even here there was a danger of it being stolen before he could reveal his strange mysteries. Captain Carswell, for so I discovered was his name, had come from H.38 to us with some interesting statistics, Dalby was saying.
The clock tick-tocked on, adding a second or so to its seventy years of tick.
‘If you are in H.38 you must know “Rice-Mould” Billingsby,’ Chico was saying to Carswell, who looked at him, almost surprised to find an imbecile in the room.
‘Yes,’ he said slowly. His voice had a clear firm ring of outdoor authority. ‘There is a Major-General Billingsby in the department.’
‘Yes, uncle of a fren,’ said Chico brightly, rather like he might have said, ‘Checkmate’ at the Moscow World Chess Championships.
Then Carswell began his story with a lot of officialese like he was compiling a report, but soon got into the swing of it. After the Burgess and Maclean affair his department had been given the job of doing a statistical analysis in conjunction with the registry of missing persons at the Yard. Carswell had asked permission to process the figures first then to look for patterns afterwards, instead of looking for anything in particular. He then started to do breakdowns just anyway it occurred to him. He gave a lot of credit to the sergeant clerk he worked with, but I think it was Carswell who found in the job a sort of musical freedom working in purely abstract terms. Anyway, whoever is to be credited, some very interesting patterns grew out of it. Finding some strange characteristics, they left the ‘missing persons figures’ in favour of any combinations among the top-grade security clearances. With no particular purpose they fired cards through sorting machines to look for any common feature.
He explained, ‘Although there were few resemblances in any one group from an occupational or geographical point of view, there were resemblances across those groups. For instance …’
It was a long explanation that Carswell gave us and he loved every tedious minute of it. It was a long time later that I understood how important was the work he was doing.
He produced his delicately drawn graphs and talked of S.1’s (Security Grade Ones) – important chemists, physicists, electronics engineers, political advisers, etc, people essential to the running of the country. Carswell had noticed that groups of these S.1’s were found together in certain parts of England which were neither holiday centres nor conference places.
The kidnapping of an S.1 (if he was valuable) was easy to understand. Raven was an important S.1 and Jay had kidnapped him and come within an ace of delivering him over the border before we had grabbed him back, with our pocket-sized commando attack. But, so far, there had been no more kidnappings, and these meetings in Britain were different; something none of us understood.
10
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Once again you will need tact and discretion, but persistence and hard work will bear fruit in the long run. An old friend will smooth out a difficulty.]
Dalby seconded Carswell to work with me. I got him a little private office just big enough for him and the sergeant – Murray – to work in, a promotion to temporary Major and a suit that fitted him. I took him round to my tailor and we decided that a dull grey-green soft tweed, with dark brown waistcoat, gave him the country squire look right for an unemployed officer. Sgt Murray went for a check jacket with grey flannels. They worked each day diligently from 9 A.M. to 6 P.M., then returned to their wives in Fulham and Bromley. I had my own work to do but I dropped into Carswell now and again. By now he was concentrating on the S.1’s (S.2’s being too numerous and g-k’s (cabinet ministers, etc) being too few to get conclusive results from. Carswell was a statistician but even to him it was evident that unless other common factors could be found the concentrations were meaningless. Carswell and Murray turned up common factors like owning two cars, long holidays, visits to America, holidays in North Africa, etc, but then, of course, these things were bound to form patterns in a group where age-groups, income and education were markedly similar. Other behaviour patterns were less easy to explain. Among the groups concentrating at one place (which Carswell called the ‘concens’), among the ‘concens’ there was an above-average number who had been members of a political or quasi-political group, all but one having Right-wing aims. I asked Carswell to write a description of a concen and a description of an S.1 from the figures he had.
Quite a few had had a serious illness within the last five years, many being fevers, none of the concens were left-handed, they had a great number of bachelors, and a slightly greater number of decorations for valour. Public schools and divorced parents were absolutely at average level. I wrote all this down on a sheet of 10in by 8in writing paper and pinned it above my table. I was still looking at it when Dalby came in. He was affecting a silver-topped umbrella of late. He followed his usual debating tactics, waving a sheet of paper covered with my writing.
‘Look here – I’ll be damned if I’m passing this. Damned if I will.’ Dalby moved one half-eaten egg and anchovy sandwich, toasted. A speciality of Wally’s delicatessen downstairs in Charlotte Street. He then moved the SARS to SORC volume of the Britannica and Barnes’ History of the Regiments, a Leica 3 with the 13.5 cm and a bottle of Carbon Tetrachloride, and was able to sit down on the desk. He waved the sheet of paper under my nose, still cursing away. He read, ‘Eight poplin shirts, white, for Sgt Murray; two dozen Irish linen handkerchiefs for Major Carswell; four pairs of hand-stitched hide shoes, including cost of last.’
‘Cost of last,’ said Dalby again. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘Last,’ I said. ‘Last – what the cobbler threw at his wife, you know.’
Dalby continued reading from my expense account for the month. ‘Then this item: “To entertainment, drinks and dinner: Mirabelle Restaurant twenty-three pounds.” What is this, you, Chico, Carswell and Murray at the –’ he paused, and mouthed the words incredulously and slowly, ‘– Mirabelle Restaurant!! You’re supposed to spend £103 per month. This lot comes to £191 18s 6d. How’s that?’
It seemed he expected an answer. ‘I’m keeping a few items over till next month,’ I said.
That went down like a lead balloon. Dalby had stopped joking now, he began looking really annoyed, he scratched the side of his face nervously and kept waving my expense sheet so that it made crackling noises in the air.
‘Ross said you were an impertinent—. You’ll impertinent your way right out of here before long. You’ll see.’ His rage had gone suddenly, but it seemed a shame to leave it like that.
‘In all those expensive clothes,’ I asked plaintively, ‘do you expect us to eat in a Wimpy Bar?’ Dalby rolled with the punch, he didn’t even know what a Wimpy Bar was; he just couldn’t bear the thought of a sergeant brushing waiters with him at the Mirabelle. That’s why I continually did it, and why I itemized it in the most unequivocal way I knew. Dalby at this stage executed a famous military manoeuvre known as the ‘War Office two-step’, generally used for withdrawing intact when out-ranked. He started explaining that there was no need for Carswell and Murray to buy things off my expense sheet. Carswell can have his own. I didn’t particularly want Murray to have an expense sheet but I was interested to see whether I could angle Dalby into having to give him one.
‘Accounts will never in a million years let you give a sergeant with less than two years’ provisional service a sheet of money.’
I followed up, ‘You know that’s the sort of thing they are dead fussy about; – no, you might get away with giving him free use of Carswell’s petty cash, but what they says goes when it comes to money sheets.’
Dalby sat there with a sardonic look clamped across his head like a pair of earphones. ‘When you have quite finished, for reasons known only to yourself, getting Sergeant Murray an expense sheet, let me say that I have considered the matter carefully and both of them can have one.’ Dalby leaned back and put his suède ankle boots on the back of the only comfortable chair in the office. He picked up the two books that lay on the top of the old brief-case that I intended to lose and replace from expenses at the earliest possible moment. He read the spines aloud, ‘Experimental Induction of Psychoneuroses in Personality and Behaviour Disorders, Vol 1, by Liddell, and Shorvon’s Abreactions. I saw them on your desk this morning but I don’t think it will get us closer to Jay.
‘Now I know you are a little miffed at working with what you consider inadequate information, but we’ll settle all that.’ He paused for a long time, as though thinking carefully before committing himself by what he was about to say, as indeed I’m sure he was doing. ‘I’m letting you take over this whole department,’ he said at last. ‘Now don’t get all excited, it’s only going to be for about three months, in fact less if I’m lucky. You are a bit stupid, and you haven’t had the advantage of a classical education.’
Dalby was having a little genteel fun with me. ‘But I am sure you will be able to overcome your disadvantages.’
‘Why think so? You never overcame your advantages.’
It followed the usual pattern of our preliminaries. We got down to business. The handing-over ceremony consisted of Dalby and Alice showing me how to work the IBM. I had a feeling that a certain amount of the documentation had been removed, but perhaps that’s just me being paranoiac. He was moving out the next day and he wasn’t telling me what he was doing. I asked him in particular about Jay. Dalby said, ‘It’s all in the documents. Read it up.’
‘I’d rather hear it from you, get the hang of the way you’re thinking.’ Of course, I really wanted to avoid reading all that damn bumf.
Anyway, Dalby gave me an outline. ‘When Jay settled in London in ’50 he was working on small-time espionage for the Americans. We didn’t want him, in fact, doing just economic and industrial work, it wasn’t really our decision. He had an office in Praed Street and seemed to be doing OK apart from his homework for the Yanks. The first time we got interested in him was the Burgess and Maclean business. We had a memo in saying we mustn’t pull him for it. We didn’t have any idea of doing so, but it started us off thinking.’
I interrupted, ‘Who sent the memo?’
‘It wasn’t written or recorded. I wasn’t in charge then. If you ever find out let me know. It’s one of my big unsolved mysteries. But he has friends upstairs.’
There was only one level that Dalby called upstairs.
‘The Government?’ I said.
‘The Cabinet,’ said Dalby. ‘Mind you, don’t quote me, we have no evidence at all, not one thing that connects him with any illegal dealings since ’50. We checked Jay’s movements during the Burgess and Maclean business. They definitely correlate. When Maclean was Head of Chancery at the British Embassy Cairo, Jay was in Cairo twice. Although we have no trace of him visiting or phoning Tatsfield where Maclean lived, they did cross paths.
‘On the 25th May ’51, Maclean drove with Burgess in a hired car to Southampton. At twelve the Falaise cross-Channel packet left on a round trip to St Malo and the Channel Islands with Burgess and Maclean and Jay aboard. Of the three people, only Jay returned to England.
‘When, a lot later, two bank drafts arrived each for £1,000 and both for Mrs—1 (Maclean’s mother-in-law) and drawn on Swiss Bank Corporation and Union Bank of Switzerland respectively, another bank draft followed, this time for £25,000. It was drawn on the Swiss Bank Corporation and paid into the London and S. Hellenic Bank to the account of Mr Aristo. I need hardly tell you that Mr Aristo is Jay, or there’s nothing illegal in receiving twenty-five thousand quid. I think Jay is in the import and export business as his cards say, but he finally found that the second most valuable commodity today is information.’
‘And?’
‘The most valuable?’
‘People with information,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, that’s what I think, but you’ll not get me to say so at this stage in the game.’
‘Was that fellow Raven we grabbed at Baalbek part of this scene?’
‘He was the chemical warfare biochemist from the Research place at Porton. But the number of people they take are very small. Naturally the Press Department (Security) keep any names out of the papers. We’re not having another Burgess and Maclean shindy, questions in the House and all that.’
‘You think the work Carswell is doing has Jay involved?’
‘No, I think that although the money Jay gets for a B & M operation is vast, he is smart enough to realize that to continue that is to live on borrowed time. I think he grabs an S.1 now and again when he needs some mad money but certainly not on the sort of scale that Carswell is talking of. He’d have to run coaches and advertise in the Observer. I’d leave Carswell right out of your calculations until he starts getting something a little more concrete. You’ll look an absolute clown talking to the Permanent Under-secretary about …’ He turned to the list I’d pinned up ‘… right-handed “concens” with fever.’ He eased his weight off my desk and bent his knees, quickly sweeping his hand under my desk top. He switched off the miniature tape recorder I had had going. He walked to the door, then came back. ‘Just one more small thing, you secret service man, you, try and have a haircut while I’m away and I’ll use my influence about your back pay!’
I heard him clumping down the back stairs shouting to Chico to prepare the film he wanted to see before leaving. I collected up my history books, cameras and my sugar, and moved into Dalby’s office.
It was easily the lightest room in the building, and if you didn’t move more than a couple of feet from the window you could see to read a newspaper.
There were plenty of newspapers. It all had that brown veneered respectable look; on the wall were a couple of well-framed military prints of soldiers in red coats and shakos, sitting on horses. Under the windows was Dalby’s latest toy – a low, grey IBM machine. Dalby was a young ambitious man, active and aggressive and one of the best bosses I ever had, but no one could suggest that he had ever had an original idea in his whole life and he’d never missed them. He recognized one when he saw one – he fought for it, utilized it, and what’s more, gave its originator all the credit.
This IBM machine was the key to WOOC(P)’s reputation, for it enabled us to have files of information around which no one could correlate except with the machine set the correct way. For instance, a list of three hundred names meant nothing, a list of three hundred house numbers meant nothing, a list of three hundred street names, cities, and a pile of photos meant nothing. On the machine and suddenly – each photo had an address. On the machine again and thirty cards were rejected, and only Dalby knew whether those thirty were left-handed pistol shots, Young Conservatives, or bricklayers fluent in Mandarin. Dalby liked it, it was quick, more efficient than humans, and it made Dalby one of the most powerful men in England.
Sunday I went along to the office about ten-thirty. I didn’t normally go in on Sunday but there was a book in the information room I wanted. I got there about ten-thirty and wandered into Dalby’s office. The Sunday papers were there in place on top of Saturday’s. The cover was off the IBM machine, and I could hear Alice fiddling about making coffee. I sat down behind Dalby’s magnificent oiled teak desk. Its smooth light-brown top had the sensual colour of the beach at Nice, when it is covered with girls, you understand. Inlaid with old English craftsmanship into the Danish teak desk top were four metal switches and coloured lights, BLUE, GREEN, RED and WHITE. The BLUE switch put any calls being made in the building to tap into the phone here. GREEN made a tape of what was being said. WHITE switched any calls made in Dalby’s absence into the tape so that he could play it back next morning. RED was to call every phone in this building simultaneously – no one can remember it being used except once when Dalby shouted for some ink over it.
I looked up. Alice was standing in the doorway, holding two willow-pattern cups. She wore a floral print dress of the sort favoured by Mrs Khrushchev, heavy nylons and strap shoes. Her hair was almost feminine today but that did nothing to offset the sourness of her white regular features.
‘Coffee,’ she said. I didn’t contradict her, but Alice’s fusion of milk, warm water and the coffee powder was like something flushed from a radiator.
‘That’s nice of you, Alice,’ I said. ‘You really don’t have to work Sundays, too, do you?’
Her face screwed into a smile like an old gardening glove. ‘It’s quieter on Sundays, sir – I seem to get more done.’ She set the cups down and looked around the room. It was untidy again and she tutted and straightened up a pile of newspapers, took my raincoat off the chair and hung it behind the door. ‘You’re managing to work the machine now?’ she asked.
‘After a fashion,’ I told her. ‘There are still a few things I don’t understand. The selector for the photos for instance.’ I passed her a package of photos with the strip of perforated paper along one side. Alice took the bundle without looking at it, her eyes were level with mine. She said, ‘You are an awful lot too honest for this work. You’d better learn who to confide your weaknesses to before it’s too late.’
I said nothing, so she said, ‘I’ll go and get my glasses and see if I can make the photo-selector work.’
Old Alice was getting quite mellow. I wondered if I could ask her to sew up the trousers I had torn at the Barbarossa Club.
Carswell had spent about a week on S.1’s who had suffered from housebreaking or burglary with an eye to espionage by this means. He was getting very interested in the patterns and needed Murray to help him tie it down. Murray was a bit reluctant to leave his ‘concens’, but they were now finding smaller concens throughout the whole period. What had looked most mysterious in terms of one high point per year could now be seen as a wavy line of varying height. It was just a matter of how far above average was abnormal. As Carswell had most reluctantly agreed, there are also geographical areas which at any one time are abnormally low in S.1’s. He had drawn this up, marking the areas in varying shades of green crosshatched mapping pen lines according to percentage below average. The areas were called evacuations, and the individual S.1’s temporarily out of the areas called ‘evacs’. I am not a statistician but it all struck me as being pretty damn foolish. Carswell wasn’t the type for a legpull, but he was the only person in the building from whom I could take the idea of ‘evacs’ without getting the needle. We had done pretty well by the old man. I just wasn’t sure whether he wasn’t trying to dig himself a niche in the time-honoured army way. I was getting pretty fed up with his housebreaking stats, too, and began to feel that those two were taking me for a ride. I think Carswell could see I was getting fed up with it. On Tuesday I had Carswell in for a drink in the office. He seemed a bit depressed. He had three beers in quick succession and then began to tell me of his childhood in India. His father had insisted upon Carswell going into the regiment. The polo, the pig-sticking, the punitive actions against the tribesmen who enjoyed the fighting as much as the young English aristocrats did, the sun, horses galloping in the open hill country, drinks and mess dinners, the other young subalterns wrecking the mess in horseplay. All these things were things of his father’s life, and when his father died he immediately asked for a posting to another unit. He chose a unit as diametrically opposed to his father’s as he could think of; Indian Army Statistical Office, Calcutta. He had no interest or aptitude for the work. He did it as quiet rebellion against his life until then.
‘For perhaps two years the work was pure drudgery; especially since, for a brain as inactive as mine was, the elementary calculations were slow and tedious. But after a little while I got used to the tedium, understanding that these parts of my work were as essential to the arabesques of the final pattern as the rest bars are to a symphony.’
He was telling me not to be bull-headed in a nice sort of way. Carswell must have been the only officer in the entire British army who had deliberately thrown away a commission in a crack cavalry regiment in exchange for a dreary office job that had left him nudging sixty, a substantive captain, with little or no prospect of a move past substantive major, if that.
I think we had both been overdoing it from a work point of view. We decided to go home. Through the window I could see the delicatessen crowded with people in wet raincoats. I phoned down for Murray, and asked him if he would like to come up for a drink. My red emergency phone rang before I’d put the internal one down. The operator with the Scotch accent said, ‘CRO calling you, sir. Class four, priority. Please scramble.’
I pushed the scrambler button and switched in the green switch of the recording apparatus. I heard the operator tell them they were through to me.
A high-pitched falsetto voice that I had spoken with before said, ‘Hello, Criminal Records Office, Scotland Yard. Military Liaison Officer Captain Keightley speaking.’
I said, ‘Yes, Keightley?’ I knew my evening by the coal fire with a history book had gone bang.
1 Name withdrawn from MS.
11
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Don’t be surprised if trips to other people’s houses bring whispers of insincerity for you will also discover a new friendship.]
‘We’ve had a call from Shoreditch Police Station, sir. Frightfully funny business really.’ All Keightley’s ‘r’s were pronounced like a ‘w’. ‘They have a fellow there. Traffic accident. His car scraped a traffic signal I believe.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So?’
‘Well sir, the constable asked him for his licence and so on …’
‘Keightley, get to the point please.’
‘Well, sir, this johnny in the car. We’ve no record here at the CRO, not a white card that is, but there is a green card for him. You know it’s for suspected persons without a criminal record.’
‘Yes, I know that. Tell me, how did you locate his card? Did he give his name?’
‘No, sir. That’s just it. You see, this johnny is dressed up in a Metropolitan Police, Chief Inspector’s uniform. Luckily the constable had worked in CRO for a year, recognized him and remembered the face. He thought we had a white card but we only have a green one. It’s endorsed to your department, with one of those star marks for top priority. So I phoned you. What we want to know, sir, is, shall we tell Shoreditch that there is a green card? There may be an Interpol card of course. Do you want him? That’s what I want to know, sir.’
‘Listen, Keightley. Tell Shoreditch I want this man held. In fact I want him stripped. I want them to be most careful. Watch for cyanide pills. This could be very important. Tell the chief there that I’m holding him personally responsible for the prisoner’s safety. I want him under lock and key from the minute you finish talking to them, and he’s to be kept under constant observation. Oh, yes, and make sure the constable that brought him in is available – they should make that copper a sergeant on the spot. Pulling in an inspector, indeed: some nerve; and tell them I’m leaving right away. I’ll be there before 7.30.’
‘Yes, sir, right away, sir.’
‘Oh, and Keightley.’
‘Sir?’
‘You did right to tell me immediately, whatever the outcome.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
I buzzed my controller on the big exchange and they had a black Jaguar at the ready. I locked the IBM and the recorder, I pressed the white button that set the phone to automatic recording. Murray still hadn’t finished his drink and asked me if he could come for the ride. I don’t have fixed rules about that sort of thing so I said OK. Carswell decided to call it a day. We walked across to Tottenham Court Road and within an instant of reaching the corner the car swept us in. The driver was one of the civilians the police let us have just after the war so he needed no guidance to Shoreditch Police Station. We moved across into the New Oxford Street traffic and up Theobalds Road. I let the driver use the bell and he pulled over to the offside of Clerkenwell Road and shot the speedometer up to seventy.
We were half-way across City Road when a yellow newspaper van coming north from Moorgate realized that we weren’t stopping either. The van wheels locked as the driver hit the brake pedal. Our driver pushed the accelerator even harder, which gave the van an inch or so of clearance as it slid across behind us with white hot brakes and the driver’s face to match. The last thing I wanted at this stage was that sort of complication.
‘Careful,’ I said, in what I considered masterful restraint.
‘That’s all right, sir,’ said the driver, mistaking vexation for nervousness. ‘They’ve got rubber mudguards on those paper vans.’
I realized why the police had let us have him.
It had really begun to rain in earnest now and the streets were a kaleidoscope of reflected taillights and neon. As we drew up in front of the Police Station three policemen were standing in the doorway. I’m glad they weren’t fooling about as far as security was concerned. The driver left the car and came into the station with us. He probably thought he’d see someone he knew. Murray and I were greeted by the sergeant that Keightley had spoken to.
‘All absolutely under control, sir,’ he said proudly. ‘No sooner said than done. Your other two people are parking their car. They needn’t have troubled …’
‘Other two people?’ I said. A cold colicky pain kneaded my stomach. I knew that I needn’t have troubled either. When we got to him he was naked, horizontal and very dead. I turned the body over. He was a strong, good-looking man of about thirty-five. He looked older close to than when I’d seen him before. We could cross Housemartin off our files. Just as Jay’s people were crossing him off theirs right now. It was 7.33. His uniform gave clues – a packet of cigarettes, some money – £3 15s 0d, a handkerchief. I sent immediately for the police constable who had pulled him in. I asked him everything that had happened.
PC Viney came in with a half-written report and a small stub of pencil. He was almost bald, a thick-set man, perhaps an ex-army athlete, a little towards the plump side, he even now would make a formidable opponent. His thin hair, white at the temples, framed his very small ears set well back; a large nose was red from the night air; and his lower jaw was carried well forward in the way that guardsmen and policemen cope with chin straps that don’t fit under the jaw. Under his open tunic he wore a badly knitted red pullover with blue braces over the top. His attitude was relaxed and shrewd, as could be expected from someone who had pulled in a man dressed as an inspector.
The sergeant behind me was leaning in the cell door saying, ‘In thirty-five years of service …’ loud enough for me to hear, and worrying himself sick about his pension.
I turned back to the constable. He told me that he had suspected Housemartin’s demeanour right from first sight, but would never have come to close enough quarters to recognize him if he hadn’t hit the traffic light. Did he think that the man had come from any of the nearby houses? He thought he might have been pulling out into traffic.
‘Now don’t worry about law court stuff, constable,’ I told him. ‘I’d sooner you told me something that’s a flimsy guess than hesitate because we can’t prove it. Now just let’s suppose that this man did pull away from the kerb and that he had come from one of the houses in that street. Think carefully of that row of houses. Do you know it well?’
‘Yes, sir, fairly well. They all have their peculiarities. Quite a few of the houses have front rooms where the curtains are never pulled back or changed, but that’s the English front room, isn’t it, sir?’
‘The sort of house I’d be interested in is one where new tenants have moved in during the last six months. A house where new people have been seen going in and out. People not of the neighbourhood, that is. Is there a house that is particularly secluded? It would have a garage and the driver might be able to enter the house direct from the garage.’
Viney said, ‘All the houses there stand back from the street, but one in particular is secluded because the owner has bought the undeveloped site on each side of the house. Of course, the houses either side of it are also secluded, but only on one side. Number 40 is one side, that’s all flats – young married couples mostly. Mrs Grant owns that. On the other side 44 is a very low building; the husband there is a waiter in the West End. I see him about two to two-thirty on the night beat. I know that Mr Edwards at the Car Mart made an offer for one of the sites. We kept pinching him for obstruction. He left his cars in the road. After we’d had him every day nearly for about a week, he came up to see the sergeant. I think really he told us about buying the site to show he was trying. But anyway, they wouldn’t sell. When I think of it, that’s the only house that I can’t remember any of the occupiers from. They had a lot of building done. Conversion into flats I imagine. About February. But there are no “to let” signs up. Not that you need ’em, word of mouth is enough.’
‘You’ve hit it, constable. I’ll buy your big secluded house with alterations.’
Keightley had phoned up the station and got them all in a rare state when he heard what had happened. Murray had heard Keightley’s high-pitched little voice saying, ‘Murder? Murder? Murder in a police station?’ Coming as Keightley’s voice did from CRO it worried them far more than anything I might say.
I had them do all the unit checks for fingerprints and Identikit descriptions of the two men – but knowing Jay’s set-up it was unlikely they would have a record of any sort, or leave prints. The constable recognizing Housemartin from a photo he’d seen once at CRO1 was the sort of fluke that happens only very rarely. I turned to PC Viney who had brought me a cup of tea from the canteen. He stood, his uniform jacket undone, waiting and appraising my next action. I said to him, ‘Show me on the map, would you? And then I will want to use a phone in private – a scrambled line if possible.’
The information room at Scotland Yard came through in seconds. ‘Shoreditch Police Station. I want to speak with an officer of 3H Security Clearance or above; my authority is WOOC(P).’
‘Hold the line, sir.’
The unshaded light made bright reflections in the shiny-cream paintwork. Faintly through the closed door I could hear the canteen radio singing ‘There’s a Small Hotel’. My tea sat on the worn desk and I fiddled nervously with an old shell case made into a pen-and-ink stand. Finally the phone made clicking sounds and the information room came back on the line.
‘Chief Inspector Banbury, CID here.’
Luckily I knew ‘Cuff-links’ Banbury from the old days. It saved a lot of preliminary checking with code words. Or rather it would have done, except that ‘Cuff-links’ insisted on going through it all. I wanted thirty officers, at least five of them armed, and four vehicles without police identification.
‘All the plain-finish vehicles are in the Richmond garage,’ Cuff-links said.
‘Then borrow private cars from your coppers. Try West End Central, they’ve got big cars there.’ My sarcasm was lost on Cuff-links; he just carried on being smooth and efficient. ‘I want one car to have radio link. I shall be briefing them en route. Include a couple of hook ladders and a jemmy. Tell your press office that I want “complete blackout”, and put someone on the radio link that won’t shoot his mouth. That’s all, chief. Phone me back when they are on the road – say thirty minutes.’
‘No, about an hour.’
‘No good, chief, this is a 3H Security. If you can’t do better than that I’ll get authority to use my soldiers.’
‘Well, I’ll try for forty minutes.’
‘Thanks, chief. See you.’ It was 7.58.
I went upstairs. Murray was leaning over a big scrubbed table with the elderly constable, a sergeant and an inspector with a neatly trimmed moustache. I asked the sergeant who the inspector was. It didn’t make any of them madly happy, but ‘twice bitten could get to be a habit’. Murray had worked out a sensible way of hitting 42 Acacia Drive. He had dug out a photo of the street and had drawn a diagram showing heights of garden walls and deploying twenty-five men. Murray had also implied by unknown subtle means that his rank was considerably higher than sergeant. The inspector was deferring to his suggestions and the police sergeant was saying, ‘Yes sir, good sir, very good, sir.’ I told the policemen that they could come along if they wished, but explained that since I had put ‘complete blackout’ on the operation, any leakage would be actionable under the Official Secrets Act.
Murray used a propelling pencil with changeable coloured leads to mark in the extra five men; then we stood around drinking another cup of sweet tea. By now the canteen was organized for the top brass. I had a swallow-pattern cup with a saucer to match and a spoon. Murray decided that this was a good time to ask about his living-out allowance. It was nearly three months behind. I said I’d do what I could.
At 8.21, after a knock at the door, a constable said a military police vehicle had just driven into the courtyard, the driver asking for ‘Mr’ Murray. Murray said he thought a Champ vehicle with radio equipment ‘might be useful’. He’d asked for it to drive in instead of parking conspicuously. Murray and I went downstairs to see if the radio could get the Scotland Yard wavelength. He told me that by having a Provost vehicle we automatically got a revolver and ammunition and what he described as ‘other useful things’. Murray was proving so unlike what I imagined that I decided to recheck his security clearance the next day.
1 Criminal Records Office.
12
Acacia Drive was a wide wet street in one of those districts where the suburbs creep stealthily in towards Central London. The soot-caked hedges loomed almost as high as the puny trees encased in their iron cages. Here and there a dirty net curtain let a glimmer from a 40-watt bulb escape to join the feeble street lighting.
We waited while the last two men got into position. A door opened somewhere down the street, firing a yellow shaft of light into the gloom. A man in a cloth cap pulled a silver fabric cover from a shrouded car. It proved to be not the one he was looking for. He lifted the silver skirt of the next car. The third one had the right number plate. He drove it off down the street which now became a dark and silent car mortuary once more.
No. 42 had two gates joined by a semicircular driveway of crunchy gravel. On the top floor one very small window showed a light. The Champ vehicle was nearer to the house than any of the private cars the police had used. In the back seat the military policeman was listening to the radio sets of the plainclothes men positioning themselves in the back garden. He gave us the high sign with thumb touching forefinger. Murray and I decided to force a window at the side of the house. The MP was to talk out a description of signals we gave him by torch. Murray had the jemmy and I had a sheet of brown paper covered with police canteen golden syrup.
The gravel crunched underfoot and an aeroplane winking coloured lights vibrated against the cloud. It had almost stopped raining, but the house shone wetly. The grounds were extensive and once across the path we plunged into the kitchen garden that lay alongside the house. The soles of my feet began to squelch as the soaked long grass sprinkled my legs, trousers and socks. We paused alongside the greenhouse through which the moon played shadow games, making mythical monsters of pots and beans and flowers. Every few seconds the house changed character, at one time menacing and sinister, and again the innocent abode of law-abiding citizens about to be attacked by my private army. The luminous watch said 9.11. Over the far side of the grounds I saw a movement by one of the policemen. The wind had dropped and now the aircraft had passed over it seemed very quiet and still. In the distance I heard a train. I stood there unhappily, my feet were wet and made little sucking sounds. I felt Murray touch my elbow with the cold metal jemmy. Looking round I found him pretending it was an accident. I took the hint. The side window was higher than it had looked from the road. Reaching up with the sticky brown paper I smoothed it across the glass and a little syrup ran down my wrist. Murray stuck the jemmy into the woodwork, but it was locked right enough. The window to the left was barred, so he hit the brown-paper-covered pane with the iron. A muffled syrupy crunch and then the broken glass fell inwards hinged on the brown paper. Murray was groping for the fastenings as we did a Charleston in slow motion on the flower-bed. The window swung open and Murray dived head first through. I saw the soles of his hand-made shoes (eighteen guineas) with a small sticky rectangular price tab still affixed under the instep. I passed the army pistol into his hand and followed.
The moonlight poked a finger into a small lounge; the furniture old and comfortable; the fireplace held an electric fire with plastic logs; and scattered across the sofa was some clothing. Suddenly a clock chimed loudly. Murray was out in the hallway. Down the staircase someone had dropped sheets of blue lined writing paper. I knew that the house was empty, but we continued to creep around until 9.28.
Except for a couple to look after the house, the policemen had all been packed off in the cars. The gambling party, we told them, had been cancelled at the last minute. Murray and I went down the road for a cup of ‘coffee’ in one of the Espresso palaces – rubber plants and buns to match. A sour-faced young waitress flung a smelly dishcloth around the table, said ‘Two cappercheeny,’ then went back to the three young men in black imitation-leather jackets and jeans, with genuine rivets, for a conversation about motor cycles.
13
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Pay special attention to insurance arrangements. Romance may be expected to delay social commitments.]
I talked to Murray about everything except the job. Murray was a tall and large-muscled man who, had he been a few years younger, would have made a John Osborne hero. His face was large, square and bony, and it would be equally easy to imagine him as an RSM or the leader of a wildcat strike.
He was efficient and responsive to orders in a way that more than faintly criticized his superiors by its very efficacy. It reminded me of those NCOs who drilled officer cadets. His hair was tightly arranged across his lumpy skull. His eyes, thin slits, as though he constantly peered into brightness, would wrinkle and smile without provocation. Unlike Chico, Murray’s smile wasn’t motivated by a desire to join other men – it separated him quite deliberately from them. We talked about Bertold Brecht and the 1937 Firearms Act, and it amused Murray that I was probing around amongst his acquisition of knowledge. He’d not liked the peacetime army and it was understandable, there was no place in it for a man with a paperback edition of Kierkegaard in his pocket. The sergeants tried to talk like officers and the officers like gentlemen, he said. The mess was full of men who’d sit in a cinema all the weekend and come back with stories about house-parties on the river.
‘Georgian houses,’ Murray said, and he had a great love for beautiful buildings. ‘The only Georgian houses they’d ever been to were George the Fifth ones along the by-pass.’
By the time we had got back to 42 the fingerprint men and photographers had done their stuff and Chico and Ross had arrived. Ross resented my sudden rise to power and had got his department into the act probably via Keightley. Chico was wearing his short tweed overcoat with the gigantic pattern and looking like a bookies’ clerk. I noticed his chin had got those pimples again that I called ‘caviare rash’. He and Ross were poking about in the greenhouse when we arrived. I heard Ross say, ‘Mine aren’t coming on at all, I think it was the early frost.’ Chico countered this with a quote from his gardener, then we all started on 42.
You couldn’t find a house more normal than that one, as far as the rooms on the ground floor and first floor were concerned. Old wounded furniture, balding carpets and sullen wallpaper. The ultra-modern kitchen was well stocked with food, both fresh and tinned, and a machine that minced up waste and sluiced it away. The bathroom upstairs was unusually well-fitted for England – shower, scales, pink mirror and extensive indirect lighting. One room on the ground floor was equipped as an office and had in one corner a wooden phone-booth with glass panels and a little gadget that fitted into the phone dial which, when locked, prevented it being used.
A few books remained on the shelves, a Roget, a business directory, a thick blue-bound volume, the French edition of Plans of the Great Cities of the World showing Principal Roads and Exits, the AA Road Book, ABC Railway Guide, and a Chambers’s Dictionary.
The filing cases were so new that the paint squeaked. A couple of hundred blank file cards lay inside. I walked into the rose-wallpapered hall and upstairs. The staircase between the first and second floor had been removed. A cheap, unpainted wooden ladder poked its top into a dimly lit rectangle in the ceiling. Murray and Chico deferred to me in the matter of ascending. Ross was downstairs still checking the phone books for underlinings, finger-marks and page removals. I climbed the splintery ladder. As my head rose past the second-floor level I saw what the police cameraman had been talking about. The light from several unshaded 25-watt bulbs fell across the uneven wooden floor. Here and there plaster walls had been badly damaged and revealed brickwork inadequately distempered over. I hoisted my fourteen stone through the hatchway and augmented the dull glow with my torch. I looked into each of the little wooden rooms. Some of them had windows facing down into the cobbled centre courtyard – the central feature of the house built as a hollow square. The outward-facing windows were completely bricked up. Chico came up to me, bright-eyed; he’d found a pair of plimsolls, blue and white, size ten, in one room, and had a theory about the whole thing.
‘A small private zoo, sir. My cousin’s aunt, the Duchess of Winchester, let him build one, sir. Frightfully interesting. This would be for food, sir, this room. Those scrubbed buckets, sir, everything terribly clean. I helped him many weekends, sir. Then one time we had a stunning house-party there. I wish you had been there, I’m sure you would have been interested, sir.’ Chico’s adam’s apple had become more and more prominent as his voice pitch rose.
I was trying to do the most difficult job I’d ever heard about. To help me I had a rose-cultivator downstairs, and a refugee from the Royal Enclosure. A fine team to pit against half the world in arms.
‘It’s just like my friend’s zoo, sir.’
There was certainly a lot to support Chico’s observation. The gaunt cell-like room in which we were standing had a little coke-burning stove with the stove pipe leading out through the wall. Piled in a corner were some old army-style cooking pans. The floorboards were scrubbed white. I looked through the little unwashed window into the shiny little courtyard, at the rough plastered walls, pitted and broken and at the metal guarded wall-light.
‘It’s exactly like my friend’s, sir.’ Anybody with Chico for a friend didn’t need an enemy. I nodded.
The rain dabbed spasmodically at the glass pane, and another plane ground its way across a damp skyful of cloud. I tried to see it but the window-frame confined my view to a downward slant. I walked along the corridor, through the heavy wooden door and into the strangest room of all.
It was one of the largest rooms – about 20ft by 25ft. In the centre of the floor stood a heavy metal water tank 8ft by 8ft and 5ft high. There was four feet of water in it. Waterproof cloth had been roughly tacked to the floor. ‘There’s something in there,’ Chico shouted. He was poking around in the water tank with a stick he had found in the garden. It took the police nearly an hour to get all the pieces of the tape recorder, and a harness from the floor of the tank.
The movie camera men from Charlotte Street and two CID men from the forensic lab were in the hallway downstairs, and I decided to leave the place to them for a few hours.
The birds had awakened and a thin streak of wet dawn could be seen as I poured myself a cup of Blue Mountain coffee with cream, and went to bed with a backlog of memoranda from Alice, and still found time to send a fiver to Adem for his fauna preservation. The way I looked at it, I was fauna too.
I was still tired when I showered the next morning. I picked a suitable dark grey striped wool and nylon, with a white shirt, and handkerchief, plain brown tie, and brown shoes to add a touch of rebellion. I must get those brown trousers mended.
I read my copy of The Stage in the cab. We put in a regular classified advert to let Dalby know what was going on. It said:
‘Touring SOLO talent. Girl dancers (military number) very tall man for panto parts for certain Midland towns. Send photo details. Central London novelty act now complete. Scripts badly needed. Phone Miss Varley. Dalby casting.’
Alice was handling contact with Dalby in the field, but even without the master code-book it seemed pretty clear that she was having a go at me. My cab turned into Scotland Yard. The Commissioner has a very large corner room. His leather chairs were old and shiny but the finish was bright and tasteful. An expensively framed Stubbs print of a man and horse dominated one wall; below it the open fire crackled and flared with damp coal. Through the multi-paned window I could see the traffic creeping over Westminster Bridge. A stubby black tug dragged a train of dirt-filled barges against the oily water flow, and below me on the embankment a short man in a torn wet raincoat was trying to get a bent bicycle into the back of a taxicab. The Commissioner was going on about the house business. He had that Commanding Officer manner from which it was hard to tell exactly which element caused him distress, or indeed, if any aspect did. He started for the third time going through the injustice – the word sounded ironic coming from him – of Charlotte Street being given unlimited funds. I’d told him twice that my office could fit under his kneehole desk, and my view commanded a flyblown delicatessen. This time I let him run through the whole thing without interruption for the duration of two cigarettes. He was slowing down now he had got to the use we made of the Criminal Records Office and the Forensic Science Laboratory without cost, and the right of search, and how little I knew about it. If the old man knew half the things Dalby got up to he would flip his lid. I made a firm and immediate decision to curtail Chico’s participation as far as our illegal activities were concerned; he was easily the most loquacious and not the most tactful. The Commissioner broke through my reverie.
‘That fellow with you, dark chap, good talker.’
I went cold.
‘Murray?’ I said, hoping. ‘Sergeant Murray – statistics expert. He was at the house last night.’
‘No! No! No! Young feller-me-lad, er, now, er …’
I said, in a dull voice, ‘Chillcott-Oakes, Phillip Chillcott-Oakes.’
‘Yes, a charming chap, absolute charmer – that’s him.’ He smiled for the first time and leaned across to me in a conspiratorial gesture. ‘At school with my youngest!’ he said.
The pub across the road had just opened. I downed a couple of Dubonnet and bitter lemons. What chance did I stand between the Communists on the one side and the Establishment on the other – they were both out-thinking me at every move.
14
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Let your head rule your heart. Steer well clear of controversy both at home and at work.]
Tuesday was a big echoing summer’s day. I could hear the neighbour’s black Airedale dog, and they could hear my FM. I sorted the letters from the mat; Times magazine subscription dept said I was missing the chance of a lifetime. My mother’s eldest sister wished I was in Geneva; so did I, except that my aunt was there. A War Office letter confirmed my discharge from the Army and told me that I was not subject to reserve training commitments, but was subject to the Official Secrets Act in respect of information and documents. The dairy said to order cream early for the holiday and had I tried Chokko, the new chocolate drink that everyone was raving about.
At the office I started going through the documents in my locked ‘In tray’. Some stuff about chemical warfare documents on microfilm. The US Defense Dept seemed pretty sure that a BOAC engineer was handling them. I marked it for Special Branch LAP. The Public Information Officer at Scotland Yard was being very nice about the house business but said the press was getting a line on it. Alice said he’d been on the phone twice, what should she say. ‘Tell him to tell the newspapers that a high court judge, a Cabinet Minister and two press barons were watching a blue film, but that if they play their cards right we won’t give the story to ITN.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Alice.
The FSO sent a report on the house. I read quickly through: ‘Road dust, stains on floorboard; could be blood, very old; possibly from wartime bombing.’
Finger-prints – there were a lot, mostly mine, and unidentified; they were going through the single print collection and ‘scenes of crime’ (where other unidentified prints were filed under the place in which they were found).
I had to see Ross at three. Now that I had taken over from Dalby it was one of my weekly ordeals. I sent out for sandwiches – cream cheese with pineapple, and ham with mango chutney. The delicatessen sent them with rye bread. I spent ten minutes throwing caraway seeds into the ashtray until Chico appeared, then I downed the last round, seeds and all. He put a reel of 16mm film on the desk and hung around to make conversation. I gave him the rich-man-with-ulcers-type grunt and nod, and he finally went away.
I sat for a long time staring into my Nescafé, but no particular line of action occurred. The opposition may have fumbled the pass but I hadn’t detected a gap in the defence, unless any of the documents in front of me now meant anything. It didn’t seem much to me. There was nothing to make me sure it was a matter for us to deal with even, let alone to connect it with Jay. It’s only writers who expect every lead the hero meddles in to turn out to be threads of the same case. Here in the office were about 600 file numbers; if all the villains were brought to justice simultaneously it would make Auschwitz look like the last scene of Hamlet.
Should I continue to fool with the leads in the house business? What leads? I decided to sound out Ross. I’d see whether his department were going on with it. I took a cab down to a sleazy drinking club off Jermyn Street. It was a couple of rooms on the first floor. Red plush everywhere, and not a chink of daylight. Beyond the highly polished baby grand piano, and a vast basket of too perfect flowers, sat a balding man with spectacles and a regimental tie. It was Ross. He was at least half an hour early. I sat down next to him. Our weekly meetings usually took about ten minutes and consisted of agreeing to the Army Intelligence Memoranda sheet for the Cabinet, and an inter-change of certain financing arrangements for which our two departments overlapped. The waiter brought me a Tio Pepe and Ross ordered another pink gin. He looked like he’d had a few already. His big domed frontal area was wrinkled and pale. Why did he like this place?
He asked me for a cigarette. This wasn’t like Ross, but I flicked him a couple of inches of Gauloise. I ignited it. The match lit the interior like a magnesium flare. Sammy Davis sang, ‘Love in Bloom’ and a gentle firm Parker-like sax vibrato made the plastic flowers quiver. The barman – a tall ex-pug with a tan out of a bottle, and a tie-knot the size of a large garden pea, was rubbing an old duster around spotless unused ashtrays and taking sly sips at a half-pint of Guinness. Ross began to talk.
‘To be frank, the memorandum isn’t quite ready yet; my girl is typing it this afternoon.’
I was determined not to say ‘That’s OK.’ The odd couple of times I had been late with my data Ross had ‘hurumped’ for half an hour. Ross looked at me for a minute and tugged his battered black pipe out of his pocket. He still had my Gauloise only half-finished. Ross was in a nervous state today. I wanted to know if he intended to have his people continue to work on the ‘haunted house’ as someone had christened it. I also knew that with Ross the direct approach was fatal.
‘You’ve never been down to my little place, have you?’ It was pretty rhetorical. The idea of Ross and I having an overlapping social life was hilarious. ‘It’s quite pretty now; at the bottom of the garden there are three lovely old chestnut trees. Laid out between them Anna Olivier, Caroline Testout and Mrs John Laing. When the yellow catkins are on the trees in June, with Gustave Nabonnand and Dorothy Perkins, why you could be in the heart of the countryside. Except for the house next door of course. Those chestnuts when I bought the place in 1935, no, tell a lie, end of ’34, the builders would have cleared the site bald. It was country then, not a house for miles – behind us, I mean; next door was there. Didn’t have a bus service, nothing. Mind you, didn’t affect me much. I was in Aden by the summer of ’35. My wife, you’re not married, but my wife, a wonderful woman, at that time the garden – well, it was nothing. Hard work, that’s all. I was only a lieutenant then.’
‘Ross,’ I said, ‘Mrs Laing and Dorothy Perkins are roses, aren’t they?’
‘Of course they are,’ said Ross. ‘What did you think they are?’
I tilted my forehead at the inquiring look of the barman, and a Tio Pepe and pink gin arrived very promptly. He paused long enough to give our ashtray a rebore. Ross had paused in his house agent but he soon went into it again.
‘I was at the SCRUBS in ’39,* gave me a chance to get the garden going. That’s when I put the acacias in. It’s a picture now. A three-bedroom one only seven doors away, not a patch on ours, not a patch, went for six-and-a-half thousand. I said to the wife at the time, “Then ours must be worth eight.” And we’d get it too. It’s fantastic the prices detached ones go for.’ Ross swallowed a gulp of pink gin and said, ‘But the truth is –’
I wondered what the truth was and how long it would take to get round to it.
‘The truth is with the boy at school, and at a critical time – couldn’t possibly cut back on the boy now, he’ll be at university in eighteen months; well, truth is it’s been a frightful expense. You’ve always been a bit of a, well I might almost say a protégé of mine. Last year when you first started hinting about a transfer, well, I can’t tell you the hoo-ha there was in the C5 subcommittee. You remember O’Brien, why, he even said it to you. But I just thought you were the sort worth sticking by. And well, I was right, and you’ve turned up trumps.’
This cant from Ross was more than I could stand – all this ‘sticking by you’. What did he want – money, a transfer, Dalby’s job? It was way out of character except in that it was badly done. Everything Ross handled had that in common. Did he want a fiver? Five hundred? Did he have the imagination to ask for much more? I wasn’t enjoying seeing Ross crawl but he’d given me so many toffee-nosed dressing downs that I didn’t feel inclined to soften the way for his application. But now he was changing his line.
‘With Dalby away and you running the show, well, it’s been mentioned, the Minister’s private secretary was most pleased with the Swiss Bank stuff. You have someone inside?’ He paused. It was a question, but not one I felt like answering. ‘Will he go on with giving us names and code-numbers?’ He paused again, and I remembered all the difficulties he’d made for me when I did the deal with the bank. ‘Oh, I see I really shouldn’t ask. But the important thing is you are getting known. To be frank, it means that you won’t be stuck in a cul-de-sac the way I have since Joe One.’1
I muttered something about it being an important cul-de-sac.
‘Yes, you think so, but not everyone does, you see. Frankly I’m walled in, financially. Now take the case of the Al Gumhuria file.’
I knew the Al Gumhuria work; it was one of Ross’s favourites. Al Gumhuria was Nasser’s house organ, the official news outlet. Ross had got through to someone working on it. Later on, when Al Akhbar (The News), Cairo’s best-known newspaper, and Al Ahram (The Pyramids) were nationalized, his contact had even more sway.
From his agent there Ross had built up a complete picture of the Russian military aid throughout the Near East.
Ross’s people still had a few strings to pull even in Nasser’s government, and his boy there never looked back. But as his standard of living rose, so, he thought, should the payments for his extra-curricular activity. I could see Ross felt badly about losing one of the best contacts he’d ever made, just for the sake of a few thousand quid, and I’d heard from devious sources that his agent was beginning to dry up. Probably doing a deal with the Americans for ten times what Ross was paying. If his contact moved on, you could bet the Onassis yacht to a warm snowball that Ross would finally lose the whole network.
‘You could do great things there, great things, but I just haven’t got the money, or department to do it. I can see the sort of report you’d do. It would go to minister level without a doubt. Minister level.’
He sat and thought about minister level like he’d been asked to write the eleventh commandment.
I nudged his reverie. ‘But I don’t even have a file number on it. You’ve got it.’
‘Precisely, old boy. Now we’re getting down to tin tacks. Now if I were a stranger, you’d have the funds to buy a dossier, wouldn’t you?’ He rushed on without pausing. ‘You have more leeway in these things than I have, or we have, I should say. Well, for a fair sum it’s all yours.’ He sat back but he didn’t relax.
At first I thought I had trouble understanding him, so I played it back at half speed.
‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that my department should buy this file from your department?’
He tapped his pipe against the table leg.
‘It sounds strange, I know, but this is a pretty irregular business, old man. It’s not like a nine to five job. Not that I’d offer it to anyone else, like the …’
‘Russians?’ I said.
His face had become more and more static over the last few minutes, but now it froze stiff like a Notre-Dame gargoyle, his mouth set to gush rainwater. ‘I was going to say “Navy”, but since you’ve chosen to be so bloody impertinent … Your friend Dalby wouldn’t have been so “boy-scoutish” about an offer like this; perhaps I’ll have a word with him.’
He’d chosen his words well; he made me feel like a cad for mentioning the Russians; brought Dalby into the conversation, gently reminding me that I was only acting in his stead anyway, and finally calling me ‘boy-scoutish’ which he knew would hit me where it hurt. Me, the slick modern intelligence agent. Six months with the CIA and two button-down shirts to prove it.
‘Look Ross,’ I said. ‘Let’s clear it up. You need some money urgently for some reason I can only guess at. You’re prepared to sell information. But you won’t sell it to anyone who really wants it, like the Russians or the Chinese, ’cos that would be unsporting, like pinching knives and forks from the mess. So you look around for someone on your side but without your genteel education, without your feeling for social niceties about who it’s nice to sell information to. You look for someone like me, an outsider whom you’ve never liked anyway, and give my heart-strings a tug and then my purse-strings. You don’t care what I do with the dossier. For all you care I could get a knighthood on the strength of it, or chuck it over the back wall of the Russian Embassy. You’ve got the nerve to sell something that doesn’t belong to you to someone you don’t like. Well, you’re right. That is the sort of business we’re in, and it’s the sort of business that a lot of people that got those reports for you wish they were still in. But they’re not, they’re good and dead in some dirty back alley somewhere, and they aren’t going to be around for your share-out. We’ve got 600 open files in my office, that’s no secret, and my only interest at the moment is making it five hundred and ninety-nine even if I don’t get the Minister’s certificate of Good Housekeeping doing it.’ I gulped down my Tio Pepe and almost choked on it – it would have spoiled the effect. I chucked a pound note into the spilt drink and left without looking back. Lee Konitz moved into ‘Autumn in New York’, and as I went downstairs I heard Ross blowing into his briar pipe.
1 The first Russian Hydrogen bomb. Summer 1949. See Appendix
15
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Entertainment of various kinds will help to enliven routines of family and business.]
Outside in Bury Street, the dirty old London air smelt clean. People like Ross just always gave me a bad time. If I was pally with them I hated myself; when I rowed with them I felt guilty for enjoying it.
In Trafalgar Square the sun was nourishing a mixed collection of tourists, with bags of pigeon food and cameras. I avoided a couple of down-at-heel street photographers and caught a bus outside the National Gallery to Goodge Street.
When I got into the office Alice was guarding the portals. ‘Keightley has been ringing,’ she said. If she’d just do something about her hair and put on some make-up Alice could be quite attractive. She followed me into Dalby’s room. ‘And I said you’d be at the War Office cinema at five. There’s something special on there.’
I said OK, and that Ross’s memoranda sheet would be over later, and would she deal with it. She said that her clearance wasn’t high enough but when I didn’t reply, she said she’d check it and add our stuff. Alice couldn’t hold a conversation with me without constantly arranging the pens, pencils, trays and notebooks on my desk. She lined them up, sighted down them and took away each pencil and sharpened it.
‘One of these days I’ll come in and find my desk set white-washed.’
Alice looked up with one of those pained expressions with which she always greeted sarcasm. It beat me why she didn’t ever tell me that it was the lowest form of wit. I could see the words forming a couple of times.
‘Look, Alice, surely with your vast knowledge of the screened personnel available to us you must be able to locate a sexy little dark number to do these things of everyday for me. Unless you’re getting a crush on me. Alice, is that it?’
She gave me the ‘turn-to-stone’ look.
‘No kidding, Alice, rank has its privileges. I don’t ask for much out of this life but I need someone to précis the intelligence memoranda, watch my calorie count, and sew up tears in my trousers.’
Just to show I wasn’t kidding I typed out a requisition of the sort for ‘Goods to the value of £700 or over,’ and wrote, ‘Additional Personnel. One female assistant to temp. OC as discussed. Earliest.’ I gave it to Alice, who read it without her expression changing. She picked up a couple of files from my ‘Out’ tray and marched to the door. She turned to face me and said, ‘Don’t use military nomenclature on civilian stationery, and don’t leave your trays unlocked.’
‘Your seams are crooked, Alice,’ I said. She went out.
As you go into the basement at the War Office the décor of drab light-green and cream paint is enlivened by the big square sectioned air-conditioning plant, painted a wild bolshie red. I turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs to find a dour Scots sergeant of military police standing outside the cinema. Talking in the corner were Carswell, Murray and Ross. With them was a heavily built civilian with long black hair combed straight back. He wore a Guards Armoured Div tie, and a white handkerchief folded as a rectangle in his top pocket. His complexion was ruddy, almost unnaturally so, and given the slightest opportunity, he threw back his head to reveal his very even, perfect, white teeth. Nearer to the handkerchief-sized screen was Chico, his bright eyes anxiously darting about to detect a joke coming so he could laugh, and thereby prove he had a sense of humour. He was conversing with a slim elderly major who had half a dozen strands of hair artistically arranged across his head. If they had to have a major here to project the film it might be worth watching.
Ross seemed to be running the show, and when I arrived nodded as though I hadn’t seen him for weeks. He addressed the nine of us (two of Ross’s people had just arrived):
‘There’s no more information on this one, chaps, but any recognition, of location even, would be much appreciated.’ He leaned through the door. ‘That’s the lot, sergeant. No one else now.’
‘Sir!’ I heard the sergeant growl.
‘Oh,’ said Ross, turning back to his audience, ‘and I’m sorry, chaps, no smoking as of last week.’
The lights dimmed down and we had a few hundred feet of unedited 16mm silent cine-film.
Some of the shots were out of focus and some were under-exposed. They mostly showed men indoors. The ages ran from about thirty to fifty. The men were well-dressed and in the main clean shaven. It was hard to be quite sure if they were filmed with or without the subjects knowing. The lights came on. We all looked at each other blankly. I called to Ross, ‘Where did it come from? I mean, what’s it about?’
‘To be frank,’ said Ross – I waited for the lie – ‘we are not quite sure for the time being. It’s possible there is more to come.’ The thickset character nodded satisfaction. Anyone who found that explanation satisfactory was easy to please. I felt sure he belonged to Ross and I hoped Carswell and Murray hadn’t been indiscreet. I didn’t want to join in with Ross’s idiot game of cloak and dagger stuff between departments, but in view of Ross’s most recent move the less he was told the better.
‘Any other questions?’ Ross said, just like he’d answered the first one. There was another silence and I stifled the impulse to clap. The jolly fat doorman said, ‘Good day, sir,’ as I left the Horse-guards Avenue entrance, and walked down Whitehall to Keightley at Scotland Yard.
Inside the entrance an elderly policeman was speaking into a phone. ‘Room 284?’ he said. ‘Hello Room 284? I’m trying to locate the tea trolley.’
I saw Keightley in the hallway. He always looked out of place among all those policemen. His slick hair and deeply lined pale, freckled face, and white moustache gave a first impression of greater age than was really the case. He had a pair of heavy black spectacles of the sort with straight side bars. These latter facilitated his pulling his glasses half off his face just before telling or showing you something, then snapping them back on his nose to lend emphasis to what he was saying. His timing and execution were perfect. I’d never seen him miss his face yet. He came down to collect me. In his hand he had a film tin about eight inches across.
‘I think you’ll agree,’ he had his glasses well off his face now, and was peering over them, ‘your journey was well worth while.’ They snapped into place, little images of the doorway reflected in the lenses. He rattled the tin heavily and led the way to his office. It was cramped for space, as are so many of the offices at the Yard. I closed the door behind me. Keightley began to remove the heap of papers, files and maps from the knee-hole desk that used up most of the floor space.
An old crone appeared from nowhere with a cup of muddy coffee on a wet tin tray. I wanted to tell her that there was a call out for her, but I resisted the impulse. Keightley got an old black crusty pipe going and finally, after we’d been through the niceties of British meetings, he leaned back and began to let me have it.
‘The haunted house,’ he began, and smiled, while rubbing the stem of his pipe along his moustache. ‘These people,’ Keightley always referred to the Metropolitan Police as ‘these people’, ‘did a very thorough job for you. “Finger-prints”. Normally we only do a check going back five years, except for murder or treason cases; for them and you we did the whole eighteen-year collection.’ He paused. ‘Then they did all the special collections; the “scenes of crime” collections; the Indian seamen collection …’ Keightley poked a match into the bowl of his pipe and sucked his cheeks inwards … ‘Of men jumping ship, and the sacrilege collection.’ He paused again. ‘Nothing anywhere. Forensic Science,’ he tapped his second finger. ‘We did the usual tests. The old bloodstains were Group “O”, but then forty-two per cent of the country is Group “O”.’
‘Keightley,’ I interrupted. ‘Your time is valuable, so is mine, I know all this. Just tell me what you sent the message about.’
‘Procedure: house exterior,’ he tapped his next finger. I knew it was no good. I’d have to go through the whole thing. Getting Keightley to tell one punch line immediately was like trying to get an aspirin without first removing the cotton wool. He gave me all the stuff – digging down to eighteen inches in the kitchen garden. Using a mine detector over floors and lath and plaster walls and in the garden. He listed the books they’d found and the oxygen cylinders, the tinned food and the complicated safety harness bolted to the tank. ‘It wasn’t till then, sir, that we found the film tin. I don’t think it was hidden at all. In fact, at first we thought it must be something the FS1 boys had brought with them.’
By now I guessed that it was the tin Keightley was talking about. I held out my hand hoping that he’d pass it to me. But no such luck. Keightley had a captive audience and wasn’t letting go.
‘We checked all the equipment, then I decided that if they were carrying things out to cars in the drive and in a big hurry – and doubtless they were in a big hurry.’ I nodded. Keightley was on his feet, acting the whole thing out for me. ‘Coming out with huge armfuls of stuff.’
‘What sort of stuff?’ I asked. I was interested in Keightley’s fantasy life; anything would be a relief in a day like this was turning out to be.
‘Ah,’ Keightley laid his head on one side and looked at me. ‘Ah,’ he said again. He looked like the wine waiter at the Tour d’Argent being asked for a bottle of Tizer. ‘That’s what you’ll have to tell me, sir, what sort of stuff.’
‘Then let’s for a minute say “Ships in bottles”,’ I said.
‘Warships, sir?’
‘Yes, nuclear submarines, sea-borne missile platforms, floating Coca-Cola depot boats, Life magazine colour-section printing-machine barges, thinking men’s filter replacement transports, psychological-obsolescence tankers, and deep-frozen do-nut supply ships.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Keightley pretended that his pipe had gone out and clamped a match-box over the bowl to make a great show of fanning it back to red sparking life. His cheeks popped in and out. He looked up, smiled weakly and said, ‘You’d probably like to hear it, sir.’ He opened the film tin and removed a reel of ¼ in recording tape.
‘Remember though, sir, I’m not saying they did originate from the occupiers.’
‘They?’ I stared insolently. ‘You mean this tape and the film you sent Ross at the War House?’
It wrecked Keightley. Mind you, I don’t blame him. He was just trying to keep everyone happy; but not blaming him and not preventing a future incident of the same kind is a different thing again. Keightley’s loosely captive eyeballs circuited their red bloodshot linings. We sat silently for perhaps thirty seconds, then I said, ‘Listen, Keightley, Ross’s department is all military. Anything that passes your eyeballs or eardrums and has even a sniff of civilian in it comes to Dalby, or as the situation is at present, to me, or failing that, Alice. If I ever have cause to think that you are funnelling information of any sort at all, Keightley, any sort at all, into unauthorized channels, you’ll find yourself lance-corporal in charge of restricted documents in the officers’ mess, Aden. Unless I can think of something worse. I won’t ever repeat this threat, Keightley, but don’t imagine it’s not going to be forever hanging over your bonce like Damocles’ chopper. Now let’s see what you found at the bottom of the garden. And don’t start tapping your bloody finger-tips again.’
He played the tape through on the big grey Ferrograph. The sound was of an abstract quality. It was like a Rowton House production of the ‘Messiah’ heard through a wall and played at half speed.
‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?’ I asked.
‘Human voices, these people say.’
I listened to the undulating and horrisonous mewl, to the bleating, braying, yelping howl, and found it as difficult to listen to as it was to label. I nodded. ‘It doesn’t do a thing for me,’ I told him, ‘but I’ll take it away and think about it. It might grow on me.’
Keightley gave me the reel and the tin, and a quiet good-bye.
1 Forensic Science.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
