Birth of a Spy

by Duncan Swindells

  ‘Yes. Yes it is,’ Wiseman replied cautiously, his voice subtly softening. ‘How did you get this number? This is a private telephone number.’

  ‘Your publishers gave it to me.’

  ‘Did they indeed? Well, they had no bloody right to. I’ve half a mind...’ Hunter could tell that there was a danger Wiseman was about to replace the phone firmly in its cradle. He cut in quickly.

  ‘Could I talk to you about your book, Mr Wiseman?’

  ‘Good Lord, well I suppose so. Which one would you like to talk about?’

  ‘Setting Europe Ablaze?’

  ‘Now where on earth did you uncover a copy of that unholy relic?’

  ‘Trinity College library.’

  ‘Well then, how may I help you, young man?’ Wiseman was positively chatty now so Hunter decided it was time to see just how amenable the author really was.

  ‘The thing is, and I know this is a terrible imposition, but I wondered if I might be able to come and talk to you in person?’

  Silence.

  ‘Mr Wiseman?’

  More silence. Hunter began to worry he had pushed too soon. But now with nothing to lose it was better to press on.

  ‘I have something I should very much like to show you. It’s a bit of a long story and I really can’t explain it over the phone.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘So if I could meet you in person, well, that would be most helpful.’

  ‘I do not receive visitors, as a rule.’

  Hunter’s heart sank. And just when he’d thought he’d been getting somewhere.

  ‘I’d particularly like to talk to you about Enigma.’

  ‘Ah, yes. A fascinating piece of equipment. The Poles were the first to have any success with it you know?’

  Hunter did know.

  ‘Różycki, Zygalski and...’ Wiseman left the sentence dangling invitingly, like a fly before a trout. This was it. This was Hunter’s way in. The old man was testing him, his knowledge of Enigma. Not much of a test admittedly but the implication was clear; No time wasters.

  ‘Rejewski. They were mathematicians. They broke Enigma in the December of 1932.’ Hunter replied trying to hide the triumph in his voice.

  Wiseman’s silence was only broken by an unproductive wet cough.

  ‘Can you be in London tomorrow?’

  ‘Certainly.’ Even as he was agreeing Hunter was frantically trying to recall what his plans were for the following day, or if in fact he had any plans at all. Amy would understand, probably.

  ‘24 Lansdowne Terrace, 12 o’clock. Use the third buzzer down. I should take Gloucester Road tube if I were you, it’s the nearest. And please don’t be late. I abhor tardiness.’

  ‘Thank you Mr Wiseman, I shall see you tomorrow and try my utmost not to keep you waiting.’

  ‘Be sure you do. By the way young man,’ Wiseman rumbled on, ‘you never did tell me your name.’

  ‘Hunter. Scott Hunter.’

  ‘Is it? Well Mr Hunter I shall see you tomorrow at 12 o’clock,’ and with that the line went dead.

  Hunter was admiring Alec’s beer-mat and wondering about train times when Amy entered.

  ‘Who was that on the phone?’

  He hesitated. How much should he tell her?

  ‘I’ve got to go to London. Tomorrow.’

  ‘Job?’ She looked at him hopefully. Hunter was so desperate not to disappoint her.

  ‘Yes, could be. An interview at any rate.’ That was a half truth.

  ‘Oh Scotty! That’s great.’

  ‘Thanks. You couldn’t lend me some money could you?’

  Amy rushed to find her purse and a fresh twenty pound note, leaving Hunter to feel like the lowest kind of con-man. If Wiseman could put him on the right track with this code he vowed he’d pay Amy back the money and take her out somewhere special, perhaps even give the coding a rest for a while and start seriously looking for a job. He greedily took the note from her.

  ‘I’m so proud of you.’

  She pulled him to her and kissed him as she struggled to take off her work jacket. Hunter’s hands slid around her slim waist. He dragged her down onto the bed.

  ✽✽✽

  Sir John Alperton sat in The Nightingale just off Berkely Square. He loved the gastro-pub. He might be a Knight of the Realm and have been to university with half the cabinet, but none of that stopped him from being extremely fond of The Nightingale’s steak and kidney pies. The kidneys were never over cooked and the crust was made from suet which soaked up the juices and melted in the mouth. That was why she’d suggested they meet there. She was going to try and squeeze him for some juicy titbit of information. Patricia bloody Hedley-King, god what an appalling specimen. He knew what she was up to. She was trying to soften him up, that was why she’d suggested The Nightingale. It was where she always took him for dinner when there were dark storm clouds gathering. Sir John prepared himself for bad news. She was playing all her winners early tonight though he noted looking at his watch. She’d kept him waiting nearly half an hour so far, bloody civil servant.

  He ran a hand down his tie. Japanese silk. A little present to himself. Another glance at his watch. All part of her silly little power game of course. It hadn’t been entirely bad though he conceded pouring himself a glass of claret. The pub also had a fantastic wine merchants. He’d ordered a Châteauneuf-du-Pape. A tired, old fashioned grenache still trading on past glories, which, being largely out of step with the rest of the wine growing world, reflected his mood rather pleasingly and of course The Home Office would pick up the tab. As he raised his wrist to check the time once more there was a commotion by the door separating the main pub from the rather exclusive dining area at the rear and then in she strode. Christ what a state. The product of some insufferable girl’s school where they bred these witches, he supposed. Her hair was all over the place and she seemed to be wearing some sort of strange woollen garment covered in tassels and beads. Not the faintest attempt at any sense of style. She looked like a bloody lesbian and in keeping with her kind, just dressed however she damn well pleased. They might well both have been pushing sixty, but even after all that time working side-by-side, Sir John could only think of one shared interest. He prepared himself for the worst.

  ‘John, so sorry to keep you waiting,’ Hedley-King offered up a limp hand. Yes, I bet you are he thought, noting her over familiarity.

  ‘Not at all dear lady, not at all. How are you?’

  ‘Couldn’t get an arsing cab.’

  Hedley-King was scraping a chair noisily towards the table before any of the waiters could offer her assistance, whilst simultaneously gesturing for some service.

  ‘I’m fine, really I’m fine. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the fucking minister who is currently down the road having any number of shit fits. I won’t bore you with the details, I’m sure you can imagine. Usual bloody carry on. This latest batch John, really they are so fucking hopeless, I think they may be even worse than the previous lot.’ There at least was one thing upon which they could agree. She instinctively reached into her handbag and without thought withdrew a packet of cigarettes and a cheap plastic lighter. Sir John looked wistfully at the tableaux taking shape before him as the recently arrived waiter continued to hover dejectedly by her shoulder. The years of guilt, associated and real, all summed up by one simple cigarette.

  ‘So,’ she teased it nearer her pursed lips, ‘does he know?’

  Alperton stared at her. What kind of damn fool question was that? Does he know, does he know what? In their line of business information was everything. Nobody really knew anything, that was very much the point. A warning shot across the old girl’s bows to shut her up.

  ‘He’s working it out, yes.’

  ‘With a little help from your good self, no doubt?’

  Sir John contemplated the elegant stalk of his wine glass, turning it slowly in his fingers, pleased to see that not quite everything had become boorish and coarse.

  �
��Turkey?’

  Alperton snorted and turned his attention to the menu. The pies here really were exceptional.

  ‘Turkey? Istanbul?’ Hedley-King asked again more forcefully. ‘Does he know?’

  ‘I said he was bright, not a fucking clairvoyant.’

  ‘Right. Well there’s something I suppose.’

  ‘I had a feeling you might feel like that.’

  The cigarette brushed Hedley-King’s lips. She seemed about to answer, then picked up the lighter which lay next to her side plate and scraped the spark wheel redundantly over its flint. ‘How dare you,’ she hissed.

  ‘Bit of a public place to be washing one’s dirty laundry wouldn’t you say, old thing?’

  Alperton straightened his serviette and sipped at his wine. ‘Try the steak and kidney pie, it really is rather excellent.’

  ‘I don’t eat meat, as I’m sure you damn well know.’

  Jesus, whatever next. No wonder her career had ended up as it had.

  ‘All right John, I’ll keep it simple for you,’ she continued, all smarm and artifice forsaken.

  ‘Oh, would you? How super,’ Alperton replied, rising to the cause. This was his preserve and he was damned if he’d be pushed around by a civil servant, even if it were the redoubtable Patricia Hedley-King. ‘Will you try the asparagus I wonder, or perhaps the crayfish? How are you about crayfish? Do they count?’

  ‘Will he be ready?’

  The waiter at her shoulder, unable to hold his countenance another moment, lent forward. ‘I’m sorry madam,’ he said sheepishly shaking his head at the cigarette. Sir John gave her a look which he hoped expressed his filial camaraderie and not his utter contempt and watched as she rolled her thumb over the sparkwheel once more.

  ‘What do I have to do to get a fucking drink in this place?’ she hissed, taking in a lung full of smoke. John Alperton was really growing to hate these meetings.

  ✽✽✽

  Hunter settled back into his seat on the 9:18 from Cambridge to Liverpool Street. All being well he ought to have just enough time to get around the Circle Line to Gloucester Road and perhaps even grab a cup of tea before turning up to meet George Wiseman at midday. That morning he’d woken early to find an email from Lazarus. He was unable to help and so now the old man was looking like his only real hope.

  The train would take an hour and a half. Hunter would use the time to finish the last few chapters of Setting Europe Ablaze and contemplate what lay ahead. As the Cambridgeshire countryside flashed by he took a propelling pencil from his jacket pocket and with a degree of satisfaction, underlined a spelling mistake in George Wiseman’s book.

  ✽✽✽

  David took the dusty cardboard box downstairs and into the living room. At one end of the room his high end stereo system, a seldom watched television and DVD player. The other corner was where he kept his geriatric computer. At the far end of the lounge, taking up the majority of the room, a large dining table. It hadn’t always been a dining table. David had bought it at auction ten years ago. It had come from one of the many huge snooker halls of the North West. A nine-foot Riley billiard table made in oak with a slate bed and still with its original cushions, their perished rubber now hard and brittle. Whenever David used the table he was reminded of how it had come into his possession, a consequence of the long-abandoned halls, the table sold off without it ever being played on. Now, with its thick round legs and the right chairs, it made the perfect dining table. David didn’t entertain anymore.

  He had paid to have four sturdy interlocking oak panels made which protected the slate bed and created the dining space. These wore a gigantic spread of green baize. The unopened bills and unanswered letters which had littered the table, along with a glass ashtray which David hadn’t used for that purpose in years, had all been piled up and removed. Then he’d covered the baize in old newspapers and laid out the tools he thought he might need in neat, vertical rows, much as a surgeon might. Between the tools he’d left a space at the centre of the table. He placed the box carefully on the paper. Everything was ready. Well, not quite everything. He was not ready. He was not yet ready to open it, this dusty old box which had languished in his attic for the last 18 years, since he had moved out of London to Hertfordshire and the countryside, not yet ready to confront its contents which had quietly haunted him for all of that time. He went to the kitchen, considered splashing his face with cold water but instead returned with a fresh cup of strong, black coffee.

  Slowly he peeled back the cracked, yellowing Sellotape from the box and screwed it into a crispy ball. A quick slug of coffee to steady the nerves and then, finding fresh resolve, he folded back the cardboard and withdrew the contents in one determined, fluid motion. He placed the dusty black plastic bag at the centre of the table, unwound the faded grey masking tape holding it all together and peered inside. Then he sank quietly into his chair and began to cry.

  3

  Hunter emerged from the underground on Gloucester Road and into the stifling mugginess of Central London in the grip of a spring heatwave. Liverpool Street Station had reminded him just how many people there were in the nation’s capital and then there had been the tube journey which had proven both uncomfortable and claustrophobic.

  With little time to spare he dived into a coffee shop, and consulted his A to Z. He should head along Queen’s Gate, past the Natural History Museum and on and up towards The Albert Hall. Consulates and foreign embassies appeared around every corner. Bumptious doormen in green and gold top hats posed for photos with Japanese tourists outside swanky four storey hotels, their window boxes trailing petunias and gasping fuchsias. Cambridge’s omnipresent bicycles replaced by Mercedes 4x4s, Porsches and Jaguars, and all of them sporting the most recent plates.

  The further he walked from the tube and the Cromwell Road the more Hunter noticed the subtle changes in the people around him. There were fewer of the vaping hipsters and tourists who flocked to Harrods and the museums and more students, presumably attending Imperial College, but others carrying violins or strangely shaped cases containing French horns or trumpets. They could have been performing at The Albert Hall, but judging by their age were probably studying at the Royal College of Music directly opposite. Hunter followed a girl as she wheeled a cello along the busy pavement. Perhaps she was on her way to practise some Bach or rehearse a Beethoven quartet, maybe perform the Brahms Double to a packed concert hall. He’d heard a recording of that once at the professor’s. To Hunter it had sounded as though the soloists had never met before, but then Sinclair had assured him they were two of the world’s finest. At a zebra crossing the girl manhandled her instrument over the road and the debate was settled.

  Hunter consulted his A to Z for what he hoped would be the last time, checked the clock on his phone and turned into Lansdowne Terrace, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, W8, a prepossessing, narrow, tree lined row barely wide enough for a car. Rich, verdant branches overhung the road, the white washed walls of the flats and town houses starkly offsetting their dark green foliage. Hunter assumed that, behind their wrought iron security doors and close circuit televisions, many of the houses did not have access to a garden, and so had instead chosen to display lines of beautifully maintained planters with magnolias, hydrangeas and even a surprisingly healthy olive tree. Then he reached a house which must have had a roof garden and was drenched in sweet smelling wisteria. Along the pavement freshly painted black bollards and presiding over the whole spectacle a succession of the most extraordinarily ornate chimney pots Hunter had ever seen, each one a unique work of art and each worthy of its own place in the V&A just a few streets away. Nearest the main road, on its corner and at one end of a short parade of pet salons, extravagant florists and beauty parlours, a small and exclusive looking patisserie and café with a selection of Kensington’s most exclusive ladies doing lunch and smoking long and exclusive cigarettes, whilst successful men with delicate dogs confidently clip-clopped past them on their way to rule the world.
To Hunter the women might all have been opera singers or baronesses, by their feet expensive paper bags containing expensive little treats. None of this of course was helping him feel any more at ease. He was acutely aware of his student clothing and his almost total lack of local knowledge. He pulled his jacket over his New Order t-shirt and tried to calm the butterflies in his stomach and appease the encroaching waves of nausea brought on by a mixture of social anxiety, an absence of any proper breakfast and the unpleasant tea he had forced down at Gloucester Road.

  Added to which Hunter realised all too late that finding number 24 was not going to be quite as straight forward as he had initially assumed. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to any of the house numbers and he quickly resigned himself to looking at each property in turn, whilst keeping one eye trained on his phone as it counted down to midday.

  At three minutes past twelve he found it. He took the dozen steps up to the entry buzzers two at a time before scanning down the list of opulent names. The third buzzer, that was what Wiseman had said. But there was no name in the polished brass fitting. No strip of paper, no card. He checked again. This was number 24 and that was the third buzzer down, but then Wiseman had never said his name would be up there in flashing lights. Consistent Hunter supposed, with a man who did not approve of a publisher giving out his telephone number. He pressed the button. As he waited and praying the old man would still see him, Hunter looked back down the elegant row towards the café. There certainly was some money around here. There was the latest Bentley, behind that an Audi and a brand new Daimler and just a little further along, partially obscured by a tree, a blacked out BMW 6 series. Suddenly the curtains at the window next to him moved to one side and then just as quickly fell back into place.

  ‘You’re late,’ Wiseman grumbled over the intercom and then the grating electronic buzz sounded as the security door opened. Hunter moved inside and along a short, tiled corridor to a smartly painted front door with an elegant brass knocker and the discreetest of matching brass nameplates.