Birth of a Spy

by Duncan Swindells

  ✽✽✽

  Hunter heard the coin before he saw it. It tinkled at his feet. The first of London’s commuters were crossing the bridge on their way to jobs in Whitehall or The South Bank. Some kind soul had thrown Hunter a twenty pence piece causing him to smile for the first time in days. He couldn’t or more accurately wouldn’t get a job and had had to scrounge money from Joth and even sometimes Amy but now, when he was literally down and out, people were throwing the stuff at him.

  Hunter found it almost impossible to think about Amy. His neatly ordered mind had taken the last memory of her and placed it somewhere thankfully deep and dark and necessarily unattainable and so the images left to him were frustratingly mundane; a hand on his shoulder, the daily requests that he hang up the bath mat, put away clean dishes, a badly made cup of tea from a cold pot, an argument. All the petty niggles and dissatisfactions which make up a relationship. Strange, he reasoned, that someone with such a prodigious memory should forget so readily. The worst of it, how easily he was forgetting Amy’s face, her eyes.

  Hunter found a discarded cup from the morning’s coffee run, tore off the top edge, fanning it out to make a bigger target and placed it in front of him. He kept his head down, staring at the pavement, his hoodie pulled up and gradually over the course of the rush hour, in ones and twos, fives and tens, he’d amassed a few pounds and just enough to get him onto a tube train. He might even manage a cup of tea, if anyone would serve him. After all, it had been three days since his last shower.

  During the night he hadn’t slept, not really. His hands were raw and weeping and a large bruise from the shooting was forming on his back making genuine sleep almost impossible. The enforced insomnia had given him a chance to take stock. He’d gone through all the knowns and unknowns and now he had a plan. Or at least he knew how he would spend the day. Wiseman had left him two pieces of information. He’d poured over the photograph endlessly, feeling he’d taken all he could from it. That just left the manuscript. There had to be something in that manuscript connecting the photograph to his grandparents. Hunter couldn’t for the life of him imagine what that might be, but he was going to spend the rest of the day reading George’s memoirs in an effort to find out. Hunter needed somewhere he was unlikely to be disturbed and where he could make a quick escape if it suddenly became necessary. He’d elected to sit on the circle line and just go round and round until he’d finished. He’d always be on the move which he felt could be desirable and he’d have somewhere to sit. Thanks to the generosity of London’s office workers he now had enough money for the fare and the station was just there at the bottom of the stairs.

  He bought a single to Westminster, half a mile down the Embankment, allowed the rush hour to subside, hopped on a train, then went straight to the carriage at its front and was pleasantly relieved to discover only three other people, a smartly dressed city gent and a young couple, tired from travelling, their hands intertwined, her head on his shoulder. He took a seat in the corner and put the messenger bag next to him, preventing anyone sitting there, although the smell he reasoned might well have been enough.

  The carriage was still littered with the morning’s newspapers. He picked one up and idly flicked through it. No news of the previous day’s events, even the report of the fun run in Hyde Park didn’t mention any trouble and suggested the day had gone off without a hitch. There had been plenty of time before going to press. Perhaps the police had forced the media to sit on the story, but Hunter couldn’t think why or if indeed the police had the powers to do such a thing. He put the paper down and took out the manuscript.

  George’s book had been typed on onion skin paper and then secured with treasury tags. That meant there was almost certainly a copy somewhere, probably with Wiseman’s publishers. There were 264 pages, double spaced and Hunter calculated the manuscript was probably about 70 thousand words. On the title page George’s farewell to him.

  For Scott. I am so very sorry. I made a terrible mistake.

  The delicate paper crackled with age as he turned the first page and began to read. Whilst the tube train flashed from station to station Hunter became increasingly engrossed in George’s life. The opening chapter concentrated on his early days whilst working with his father at Bletchley Park and could have been lifted straight from the first book. Hunter took out his biro. Now George was dead it gave him less satisfaction, but he couldn’t help himself. He underlined the word aceptable which seemed to be missing a C. The manuscript must have been typed at speed, George it seemed, no fan of correction fluid.

  Immediately after the war George had done his stint of National Service. He’d been stationed in war torn Vienna, boxed a little for his regiment and when he wasn’t doing that, acted as a liaison officer between the occupying forces, spending significant amounts of time working in the Russian quarter. He’d briefly and foolishly it seemed, fallen in love and been engaged to a local girl, but when his time in Austria had ended so had the engagement and George had returned to London and civvy street. Hunter fought the soporific swaying of the carriage and read on.

  Whilst on National Service George had discovered two passions which would remain with him for the rest of his life; smoking and writing. In Vienna he’d spent every waking moment jotting down ideas and sketching out short stories and then had continued once demobbed, landing small writing jobs for some of the more respectable magazines of the time and submitting collections of short stories to interested publishers. But the real turning point in George’s fortunes came in 1953 and a chance encounter with an old friend from his army days at a charity cricket match in Hampshire. Hopwood Morgan had briefly been a contemporary of George’s, working with the Special Operations Executive from their headquarters at 64 Baker Street. They were both of a similar age, Wiseman hinting they had both lied about their dates of birth in order to serve King and Country. Both had had junior positions as little more than gofers, then when the war ended George joined his father at Bletchley and he and Hoppy had gone their separate ways. On Civvy Street Hopwood had exploited his experiences with The Baker Street Irregulars carving out a reputation for himself as an adviser to the spate of war films being made on both sides of the Atlantic during the early nineteen-fifties. By the time their paths crossed again Hopwood was so in demand he’d managed to get himself double booked.

  Hunter rubbed a tired and twitching eye and underlined another spelling mistake.

  Hoppy it seemed, had been poached from the British film he was about to start work on at Elstree Studios and was due to jet off to Hollywood and a considerably larger budget. In an effort to keep his head down and stay as far away from London and the film’s understandably irate production company, Hoppy had invited himself to a friend’s in Shawford, Hamps. Upon arrival he’d been quickly seconded to the local cricket team where he would later renew his friendship with George Wiseman. Would George help him out? The struggling author had been only too pleased and immediately agreed to take on the job as script editor and military adviser on a low budget film about a Dutch spy ring being run from London by the very organization he had briefly worked for during the war, the SOE.

  Hunter watched another platform of exhausted Londoners as they waited for the doors to slide open and the now familiar announcements to commence.

  In its own small way the film George worked on became something of a success and on the back of it he was invited to America to do a similar job for a Hollywood epic on the war in North Africa. This was all fascinating stuff and Hunter was enjoying George’s tales of his early life, but he was struggling to see what on earth any of it could have to do with his grandparents. He knew his father’s mother had spent a little time living and working in America, but that had been in Washington and so nearly three thousand miles away from Wiseman in Los Angeles. In any case Hunter couldn’t imagine how their paths could have crossed even if they had been working in the same city as one another, as his grandmother had been an art historian, briefly employed as a curator at The Nat
ional Gallery in preparation for an exhibition of the works of Mary Cassatt. Hunter was confident she had no more or less interest in films or Hollywood than anyone else. Added to which there was no reason for him to think that she and Wiseman had been in The States at the same time. Another dead end.

  Hunter was about to start a new chapter in George’s life when he saw them. At the far end of the train, two transport police had opened the connecting doors from the adjoining carriage and were walking purposefully towards him. All the disadvantages of such an empty compartment now abundantly clear. With a dirty thumbnail he creased the page’s corner, packed away his bag, and tried to conceal his nerves. Hunter had been so engrossed in George’s manuscript he hadn’t noticed his hood slip down, revealing his shaven and bloodied head and to edge the hood back on now would surely attract attention. As the men drew closer Hunter picked up a discarded newspaper and pretended to be examining the back pages, the suddenness of his actions only making him feel more conspicuous. With both transport police on top of him Hunter fixed his gaze on their boots. The taller of the two men blew his nose, complaining about his hay fever, whilst his partner made for the driver’s door. Hunter’s hands were damp and clammy, every fibre in his body was screaming at him to run, to take flight, but to where? Whilst the first policeman exchanged pleasantries with his colleague on the other side of the secure metal door Hunter struggled to remain still and remember which station they were approaching. The acoustic inside the carriage changed subtly as the train entered the station and slowed. High Street Kensington. Hunter had as long as it took to travel the length of the platform to make his decision, although if thought about too much it did stretch credulity that anyone as scruffy and down at heal as he would be alighting at this particular platform. As he stood to move closer to the sliding doors, the sniffling policeman’s partner returned and so momentarily Hunter was caught between them. Head down he mumbled an apology, edged past and hoped that they would not follow him off the train. The doors slid open and Hunter watched in the carriage window’s reflection as the two policemen took up position at the centre of the train, hanging to the handrails and carrying on their conversation. Certain they would not follow, he hopped off and made his way to the escalators.

  So that was where it happened. That was where Amy had been taken from him. He sat on the grass on the other side of the blue and white police flutter tape. It was still very much a crime scene, a pair of bored looking WPCs stood next to the Peter Pan Monument trying to keep out of the sun. Hunter was growing used to the new found anonymity his look afforded him even if his head did still smart where he had repeatedly nicked it. There in the distance were the Italian Gardens. The chase seemed as though it had happened a lifetime ago. But Amy’s death, her murder, burnt hot in his memory. The instant that she had been shot would live with him forever, a little like one of Wiseman’s bloody photographs. He took out the manuscript and located the page with its bent corner.

  The next couple of chapters concentrated on George’s move to LA and his newfound lifestyle. He mixed with Hollywood’s great and good, on one occasion finding himself sat next to Orsen Wells at dinner. It wasn’t difficult for Hunter to imagine how the Americans would have lapped up George’s debonair dress sense, cut glass accent and impeccable manners. There was a man who, if he chose to, could charm the very birds from the trees. But he was interested to see that Wiseman wasn’t just mixing with Hollywood’s creative types, he had also been introduced to some of America’s foremost politicians. He’d met Senator Pat McCarran, author of the infamous 1950 anti-communist act that bore his name. He’d been introduced to Adlai Stevenson who had gone on to run unsuccessfully against Eisenhower in the 1956 Presidential Election and he was a regular dinner guest of Alan Greenspan the global economist and recently appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve. Whatever George had been up to he was doing it at a pretty high level. Posession Hunter noted seemed to be missing an S. He underlined it.

  Hunter flicked back. Just a few pages before he had seen corespondence and underlined that too. He hadn’t to turn too many pages over before he found another and then another. In the first fifty pages he found ten spelling mistakes, each spaced five pages from the previous one. And not just errors where the wrong letters had been used, no each time there was an actual letter missing. He turned over the next five pages and started reading. George was treading the red carpet at a black tie launch, George was drinking daiquiris and horsing around with Cary Grant and a surprisingly ribald David Niven, George was struggling with a tactfully anonymous writer’s poorly written script. And there it was, originaly missing its L. This was happening far too regularly to be a coincidence. Hunter went back to the beginning and every five pages, when he found a mistake, he wrote the letter at the top of the corresponding page. Quickly he had a sequence of eleven letters. They didn’t spell anything but Hunter recognised them instantly. What had Wiseman said? In one respect they all look the same. That clever old bastard. He’d hidden a code in his unpublished memoirs. He’d said Hunter was the only one who would understand it and now he did. Yes, Hunter thought, you did make a terrible mistake and if I’m correct you’ve made about forty more.

  Hunter was so engrossed he’d forgotten about the two police women. They were walking towards him. Best be off. In any case, if he were to decode Wiseman’s message he was going to need a new laptop and his programme back from Alec.

  He retraced his steps to High Street Ken. and found a little café. It was packed, ideal for Hunter to lose himself in. But he must be careful. The men inside were probably construction workers or taxi drivers, judging by their attire, but it was also just the sort of place the police might stop by for a quick cuppa. He scanned the interior then walked past twice, snatching furtive glances before moving quickly on. Satisfied he could lose himself and that there was an empty table towards the rear next to a fire escape, he went in. There was a friendly buzz about the place and no one paid him any attention. He’d guessed right and now he was inside he could see the black cab driver’s leather IDs almost everywhere. The only table not full of boisterous tea swilling taxi drivers entertaining four labourers in grubby T-shirts and high-viz waist coats, their hard hats competing for space with yawning plates of English breakfast. The quartet were animatedly discussing the previous night’s football results as Hunter passed, gazing longingly at their food. He took a seat at the last table with the fire exit to his side. There was just enough for a sweet cup of tea plus 20 pence to call Alec. He’d see how long he could make the tea last before the woman running the place threw him out. With the manuscript in front of him he picked up from where he’d left off, skipping ahead to where he suspected George had inserted a mistake. Every so often he checked one of the other pages finding them all perfectly spelt, but every fifth page, as he’d expected there would be, there was a freshly misspelled word. George, at another opening night party. George, having dinner with a minor American politician. George, working on the set of a new Hollywood war film. Hunter’s list of letters was growing steadily longer.

  ‘You running away from home, dear?’

  The owner stood over him. He would have to find somewhere else.

  ‘Yes, yes I suppose I am.’

  She was a kindly looking woman, probably late forties, early fifties with a mop of unruly blond hair, shockingly overweight and smelling of stale tobacco she wheezed at the slightest exertion. Unbidden she poured Hunter a fresh cup of tea.

  ‘Thank you.’ This simple act of maternalistic kindness following the previous few days was almost enough to break him.

  ‘You got a family, dear?’ Hunter pushed his saucer around nervously. ‘Well, you must be somebody’s son, eh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Call ‘em. Just to let ‘em know you’re okay,’ she said then shuffled off back behind her counter. Hunter had the distinct impression there was some dreadful personal experience wrapped up in her last remark. He took the phone from his bag. Dead.

  On the
back of the last page of George’s manuscript Hunter compiled the fifty-two spelling mistakes. Through force of habit he put them in capital letters and in groups of four. Once he’d finished there was no longer any doubt in his mind, he was looking at a code and he desperately needed his laptop. The tea gone and the owner of the café thanked and reassured he headed off to find a phone box and a computer shop.

  Phone boxes, or at least phone boxes which worked, were pretty thin on the ground in this part of London. The only place Hunter thought he might find one was the tube station. He waited for the beeping to stop and inserted the twenty pence piece. Alec’s answer phone. He swore as he listened to his friend’s voice and then left a quick message.

  On the other side of High Street Ken. station there was a huge electrical store which seemed to sell every product under the one roof, everything from fridges and freezers to mobile phones and televisions. Most importantly they sold laptops. Hunter knew he would never get away with lifting something from the shop, all the machines were secured with vinyl-coated, tamper-resistance cable, making them almost impossible to steal, but if he could get on line with one of the store’s demonstration models he might get at his software and feed the code straight in. Hunter had been in this type of shop hundreds of times before. He’d spent much of his student life in electronics stores, buying upgrades or drooling over the most recent releases. He knew what to expect, tables laid out with the latest kit. They’d all be on so that customers could come and play and the store was sure to have a secure wi-fi connection so that the staff could demonstrate any internet capability. It would be password protected but Hunter had a good record of working out passwords created by lazy shop assistants. They had to be something that every member of staff could easily recall and in Hunter’s experience ranged from PASSWORD to the name of the store. If they were feeling particularly creative they sometimes included a number. Given enough time he would have his programme up and running in the background and no one would be any the wiser. Then it would simply be a case of staying out of the way of the police and returning before the store shut to see what the algorithm had turned up. Additionally, if he was lucky he might get a chance to charge his mobile phone, although he wasn’t sure he was ready for the messages he expected to find.