‘My father, of course, denied everything. But as his denial took the form of a statement issued to a Moscow press conference, it cut little ice in the West. He refused to answer questions, talked stridently of Fascist persecution and accepted gratefully the Soviet offer of political asylum. There was a diplomatic furore, of course. There was, after all, a warrant out for his arrest on a charge of murder. But the Russians were intransigent, time passed, he sank out of sight, the world forgot.
‘But I didn’t forget. Pa was right, when you learned things the hard way, you didn’t forget.
‘I’d learned the truth about him the hardest way possible. And the world would end before I forgot.’
7
… home thoughts …
Reilly had stopped massaging me at some point in my story, I hadn’t noticed when. Now she was sitting upright on my buttocks and I could feel the moist warmth of her crotch against my flesh, but it wasn’t doing anything for me.
‘Did you never hear from him?’
‘Oh yes. He wrote me a letter. It had a French postmark. It was written in haste, so he said. But it didn’t show any signs of haste other than being short, and he was never a man to waste words on the obvious. The obvious here was that what had happened was explicable in terms which would exonerate him of all blame. I could hear his voice as I read it. Confident. Assertive. Reasonable!’
‘If he didn’t write to explain, why did he write?’ wondered Reilly.
I laughed gratingly. ‘To comfort me,’ I said. ‘He knew how much I’d miss my mother. It was a sodding message of condolence!’
‘And did you write to him?’
‘Only once. After getting his letter. I wrote to him c/o The Kremlin. I said I hoped never to see him again in my life. But if I did, I would kill him.’
But of course the Brigadier and Reilly must know that. That’s why I was here. She turned me over now and recommenced work on my shoulder and neck. I watched her through half-closed eyes. Beneath the make-up, I saw now, her face was puckishly young, thirty at the most.
And since then, what? Tell me it all, my bucko.’
‘Oh come on, Reilly!’ I said. ‘You must have every last dot and dash of me in your records!’
‘Maybe we have,’ she said. ‘But this is the interesting part, isn’t it? The part that records can never explain.’
I said, ‘The Brigadier will be back soon,’ and tried to push myself upright, but the sinewy fingers at my throat dissuaded me.
‘He’ll not be back,’ she assured me. ‘Not yet awhile, anyway. And what if he is? This’ll not be the most shocking sight he’s seen this side of Christmas. Now, what really interests me, Mr Lemuel Swift, is how soon did you decide to do what you did?’
How soon?
I thought about it.
How soon?
It was impossible to say. Lives aren’t lived according to plans laid after carefully-thought-out decisions. They’re shaped by the gradual interaction of personality and situation. For almost a year, I had been cold, emotionally frozen. The papers were full of Pa for a long time. The Vassall case, the Profumo scandal, Philby’s defection, all made it a time of vast uncertainty, and when you finally lose a hero, you need to prove he wasn’t such a hero after all. The press tried to prove that his scientific and philanthropic achievements had been grossly overestimated and that his war service had been pretty negligible. A few voices, Uncle Percy’s loud among them, were raised in protest, but this was smothered by the news that Pa had married Kim and taken Soviet citizenship, formally renouncing all his UK titles and honours. An indignant Parliament saved him the bother by equally formally stripping them from him. By this time for some reason the papers had decided I was to be a sympathetic character, and it was almost as if I accepted the role for want of a better. There was a lot of crap written about not visiting the sins of the father, etc., and how they all applauded when I accepted the family title, saying it came from the Queen, but renounced all the Bessacarr monies and estates, saying they should belong to the people!
As usual, I had my twin reasons.
My bullshit reason was that I wanted to be my own man without any help from my paternal inheritance. My asshole reason was that the legal position as far as the property went was exceedingly complicated (the state can take a man’s title but not his money, it seems) and I had inherited enough from Mama to keep me comfortable.
My real reason I didn’t yet know, any more than I understood the real reason for my decision to take over the running of the Bessacarr Trust, though the Press praised my bullshit reasons to the heavens, particularly when I stripped it of all its suspect political tendencies, re-registered its name as Vita 3 and relaunched it as a worldwide relief organization on the lines of Oxfam and the Red Cross. It was curious. There was the British Press holding me up as the perfect example of a brave young Englishman living down his wicked father’s crimes, while over in Moscow I knew for certain Pa would be preening himself that he had forced me ‘the hard way’ to take stock of myself and do something useful with my life! Not only that, but in his egocentric universe, Vita 3 would still be his idea, his creation, his monument. No matter what grandiloquent acts of renunciation I might make, I was still living on inherited capital.
Curiously, early in 1965 the incident which finally confirmed me as the Boy’s Own hero also gave me my first clear view of what I was really doing and my first opportunity to begin doing it.
I was in the Ethiopian-Somali borderlands. To tell the truth, I’m not sure which country I was in. There was no overt political trouble in either at the time but there had been a long drought and Vita 3 had offered to help. I was superintending the distribution of flour in a remote settlement. I had discovered in myself a considerable talent for administration but also discovered that such a talent, if overexposed, could keep you on your butt end in an office twenty hours a day. So as often as possible I accompanied Vita 3 missions on the ground.
As we were humping the flour off our ten-tonner, a group of men came drifting in from the bush. Nothing ununusual in that. Relief vehicles attract crowds the Third World over.
It wasn’t until one of them approached me politely and stuck a dangerously antique Luger automatic into my ribs that I realized this was something different.
And so began my first experience of being kidnapped by guerrillas.
I lived with them rough for four months and I think I learned more about the arts of surviving and killing during those four months than during the twenty-four I spent in the Royal Marines. They weren’t quite sure what to do with me at first. They’d simply wanted the flour and had taken me along as some kind of protection against immediate pursuit. Only their leader, a sad-eyed, intelligent youth who invited me to call him Ras, spoke English, and he was much concerned to make a profit out of me. As we became cautious friends, we would sit together in the evenings and discuss what I might be worth by way of ransom. What he wanted was guns and it took all my powers of argument to persuade him that there was no way anyone was going to hand over arms for my release.
‘Why not settle for money?’ I urged. ‘Then you can buy them.’
Ras shook his head.
‘Money we have. More we can get. What use is it? Where can we buy what we need?’
‘There must be plenty of arms dealers,’ I said.
‘Oh yes. For this kind of rubbish.’ He held up his ancient pistol. ‘We need new, modern weapons. Where shall we purchase these? It is a matter of trust as well as organization. We need a good friend in the West.’
His sad eyes looked at me questioningly. I wasn’t yet ready to buy my freedom with promises I intended to break (the Bessacarr motto was Trust Me) but a few weeks later, half-starved and lousy, with a bullet graze across my skull to show me that government forces were incapable of making distinctions through rifle sights, I was ready to promise anything. I doubt if Ras was really convinced but we made our arrangements like a pair of honest dealers and shook hands on the deal.
/> The day after that, I ‘escaped’ from the guerrillas and made my way back to a hot bath, an iced lager and eventually, in London, a hero’s reception.
Also waiting for me in London was Kate Hailey. Kate was a Whitehall career girl who at twenty-four was already discovering that the Civil Service was still a male club. The’sixties were swinging, but the swinging stopped at Westminster and Whitehall, except for the indiscreet few like poor Profumo. Later I came to suspect Kate was ruthless enough to have slept her way to the top, but as she worked in Uncle Percy’s department perhaps that particular avenue of advancement was a cul-de-sac. Percy at least did her the ‘favour’ of introducing her to me. It was semi-official to start with. Percy was a generous and energetic supporter of Vita 3 and he ‘loaned’ me Kate to help sort out some legal difficulties at the UK end. We hit it off pretty well. Soon she’d moved in with me and shortly after she’d announced, not with any great enthusiasm, that she was pregnant, we got married.
Possibly that was her aim from the start. I can’t complain. If she was using me, I was abusing her. There was something dead inside of me. I insisted that our daughter should be named after my mother, but even that was a symbolic rather than an emotional act. Perhaps I married Kate because I sensed that the relationship would make no real emotional demands on me. As for Angelica, I played the proud parent, indeed I felt real affection, but always there was a barrier. Unstinting love for my daughter would have set limits on unstinting hate for my father.
I shudder now to think how unbalanced I must have been. There was no plan. I even half persuaded myself that my first exercise in arms smuggling, which consisted of sticking a few automatic rifles at the bottom of a few relief crates and letting Ras know where he could hi-jack them, was merely the necessary act of an honest Englishman. News spreads fast in the subversive world. A short while later I was approached by another group of ‘freedom fighters’ at the other end of Africa. I tried to persuade myself that this time I was being blackmailed into it.
But even if there was still no plan, at least my motives were becoming clear.
I was out to destroy Vita 3, the Bessacarr Trust.
The Trust was my father. It symbolized his self-righteousness, his self-advertisement, his self-justification. I wanted it to become a model of that universal benevolence which ignores the pain and needs of those who should be nearest and dearest. I wanted my father to understand that his marvellous creation had been dealing out death in the guise of peace and love just as surely as he had dealt out death to Mama.
For my revenge to succeed, Vita 3 had to succeed. I threw myself whole-heartedly into turning it into one of the UK’s primary relief organizations. And at the same time, I threw my alternative persona, christened Alexander Evans, into the illicit arms business.
Getting hold of weapons was the most difficult thing. I had to find out which corrupt officials of which indifferent governments were willing to sell the end-user certificates which are the official documents authorizing purchase of arms. I had to find whom to bribe, whom to trust, whom to threaten, whom to deceive. I soon realized that where there’s a need for food, there’s usually a need for bullets too.
I was for a while completely schizophrenic, I believe. Lem Swift and Alex Evans hardly knew each other, yet the latter desperately wanted to merge with the former once more. As Evans, I seemed to bear a charmed life. Difficulties smoothed themselves at my approach. I took larger and larger risks, made more and more outrageous deals, yet everything worked. The thing was, I wanted to be found out! I wanted this huge heap of agony to descend on to Pa. And at the same time I suppose I wanted to be whole again.
It finally occurred to me that I might have to precipitate discovery myself. And with that decision, some instinct of self-preservation returned to life in me. Before, I’d been content to die Samson-like in the wreck of Pa’s dreams. Now it began to seem to me that Pa’s pain would be exacerbated if I managed to escape scot-free! Survival is a great persuader!
It seemed an ironic bonus that Venezuela, Mama’s birthplace, should be the obvious bolt-hole. I had inherited Mama’s family estate on the Isla de Margarita, established there long before it became a tourist trap. I had influential friends in Caracas, some vague claim to citizenship, and I had never put through any deals with South American guerrilla groups.
So I set about triggering the blow-up.
Having decided on survival, I also decided it made sense to maximize my personal fortune. I could by now demand and get one hundred per cent advance payment from my customers and in the early months of 1971, I’sold’ every subversive group I had contacts with precisely what they wanted. I was into Europe by this time and I even contracted to supply the Red Brigade with several thousand fragmentation grenades and fifty Sam 7 missiles. It caused me a certain perverse amusement to cheat these ‘freedom fighters’. I’d long since been sickened by the left-wing self-righteousness of most of them. It reminded me of Pa. It was right they too should pay.
So everything was set. My last act was to make sure that in every Vita 3 shipment scheduled to go out in the next month there was a crate of guns. No special markings. They would be opened with the other crates. And then the balloon would go up. And when they came looking for Antonio Lemuel Ernest Sebastian Stanhope-Swift, 6th Viscount Bessacarr, they would find nothing except a detailed account of Alexander Evans’s activities over the last eight years.
So I was almost ready to depart. One thing remained to do and that was to say my goodbyes. I’d half persuaded myself that the more obviously ignorant Kate was when the scandal broke, the better it would be for her. But that was ‘bullshit’ reasoning. ‘Asshole’ reasoning urged me to silence also. But in the event I found I couldn’t leave without seeing Angelica and without giving Kate some explanation and some warning against the press and police assault that was bound to come.
Kate and Angelica had been spending some time visiting Kate’s family in Lancashire and were driving back that day. My plane ticket was booked for early the following morning. I was alone in the Bloomsbury house feeling the afternoon pile its minutes on me like stones and wondering if I could really go through with it. When the doorbell rang, I experienced a moment of sheer terror, thinking that Kate and Angelica had got back early.
But they wouldn’t need to ring, of course. I was still mightily relieved when I opened the door and saw on the doorstep a man; middle-aged, solidly built, smiling lips, watchful eyes.
‘Sorry to trouble you, my lord,’ he said. ‘But I wonder if I could have a word. Hunnicut’s the name. Detective Chief Superintendent Hunnicut.’
I returned his smile and invited him in.
‘What can I do for you, Chief Superintendent?’ I asked with a puzzled air.
I was able to look genuinely puzzled as he began to explain he was in charge of a Special Fraud Squad section. Surely what I had been doing was unlikely to be investigated by the Fraud Squad? But gradually the truth emerged and I was hard put not to laugh out loud at the absurdity of it.
The thing was, Vita 3’s figures never lied. No one would ever believe that later, but it was true. If we said we’d received x thousand pounds and spent it on y tons of rice to be sent to Thailand, that’s precisely what happened. The trouble was the arms shipments which went too. Some nosey bastard had worked out that to move a stated payload of relief supplies, we should have needed one transport less than we used. Or rather claimed to have used, for the accusation was that Vita 3 was padding out its statement of expenses to make a few hundred quid on the side!
Hence the Fraud Squad. And because young Lord Bessacarr, whom everyone loved, was at the top of the pile, Detective Chief Superintendent Hunnicut had been told off to look into the matter.
I ceased to be amused when he mentioned that as a matter of routine, a Vita 3 shipment currently awaiting dispatch from Gatwick was going to be carefully checked, and would I care to be present when this was done?
I regretted, but a meeting with the Minister for
Overseas Development would prevent me from doing that, but if the Chief Superintendent would care to meet me at Vita 3’s offices at six p.m. when the staff had gone home, he could browse at his leisure through the records. He agreed and departed. I watched him drive away, then went into top gear myself. The case was altered. Or rather it would be as soon as those other cases at Gatwick were opened. I’d planned to be safely settled in Venezuela before the first discovery of illicit arms was made. Now I was going to be pushed to be out of the country. But I found myself surprisingly unworried as I grabbed my already packed case and headed for Heathrow. The reason was not far to seek. I was relieved at being given an excuse to avoid the confrontation with Kate, the farewell scene with Angelica.
At Heathrow the first available plane was going to Barcelona. I took it. From Barcelona to Rome. From Rome to New York. Once you’ve made up your mind to move, move fast and keep moving. That was Pa’s advice. Good advice should never be ignored, whatever its source.
I was wise to take it. The hunt was up even more rapidly than I’d expected. Hunnicut was a wily old fox. Two minutes after they opened the crate with the guns in, he’d been on to the Ministry of Overseas Development to check if I had an appointment with the Minister. And when he learned I hadn’t, he came after me personally. The guns meant that strictly speaking I was no longer his department’s concern, but he didn’t wait for the top brass to define parameters of responsibility. He’d got the first sniff and I was his prey.
We almost dead-heated in Caracas. It’s curious. Nothing that I’d actually done had changed, but because the balloon had gone up rather earlier than planned, I was now regarded even by my influential acquaintances as a fugitive from justice rather than a rich and welcome incipient citizen. That was all Hunnicut’s fault. But now I had occasion to bless the man. For, as I’ve said before, his attitude to the Venezuelan authorities rapidly undid all his own good work. By the time Scotland Yard got one of their international charm school graduates out there, it was too late, thank God!
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