I’m waiting for Clive’s report in a café beneath the railway arches on Waterloo Road. I can almost stand my spoon in the tea. I drink it for the memory of a chocolate brown pot on an oak table in a smoky kitchen, Father calling from a tub in the yard. I read in the Mirror that the miners have accepted an increase of fourteen shillings a week, but the railwaymen are preparing to strike. A British spy called Wynne is about to go on trial in Moscow. He’s pushed Philby from the front page; he’ll be back there soon enough. We’re still pretending we don’t know where he’s gone, which is only possible because the KGB is saving him for a big show. When the time is ripe to create maximum confusion, it will return its star defector to the stage to twist the knife. I understand the home secretary is preparing a statement, and at Six we tread softly while we wait. This is the eye of the hurricane.
I have a tiny office in the Broadway warren with two telephones and a filing cabinet. My radiator leaks, my blind is broken. To the question, ‘What are you doing here, Harry?’ I say, ‘Vetting review for C.’ It’s a cast-iron alibi because everyone knows we need one. The ship is holed and Harry Vaughan is back from Vienna to bail. I can flit between Six and Five without arousing suspicion, because it was Graham Mitchell who wrote the old procedure. In the last six weeks, I’ve wasted hours in his office discussing its failure to pick out Philby and the rest, and he is the same clever, shy, almost sly man I met at MI5 during the war, still barely capable of looking me in the eye.
The café door jingles and in walks Clive with a face as long as a fiddle. He eases his weary frame into the seat opposite to make his report. Subject left at the usual time and took the usual route. Subject didn’t execute a brush-pass exchange with a thickset Slav or leave a package on a park bench. No pick-up, no dead drop, no phone-box call, no attempt to play it by Moscow Rules. Subject took the usual train home to his wife Pat in Chobham. Clive says we’re wasting our time, and Clive’s one of the best in the business – ex-army, ex-Special Branch. We’re nothing without numbers, he grumbles, and if MI6 is serious about this man it should have watchers on him round the clock. ‘Someone who plays golf would be useful,’ I say. Clive’s too footsore to smile. I summon the waitress and order him tea and a bun, and I warn him that it’s the same routine tomorrow, but it’s forecast to rain.
With time to kill I take a cab back to Dolphin Square where I’ve rented a furnished flat on the opposite side of the court from Elsa. ‘Until you’re sure you’re here to stay,’ she said – but I can count on the fingers of one hand the nights I’ve spent in the place. It belongs to an MP who’s on good terms with the Service. Elsa says it smells of his cigar smoke, of whisky and damp wool.
My neighbour to the left works at the Treasury, my neighbour to the right in the City. The Firm has fitted a disc tumbler to the door, so the Firm has a duplicate key, but everything seems the same. There’s a fox head on the wall in the hall and a photograph of the Honourable Member in hunting pink. I’ve added touches of my own: some pans, an old upright piano, and a pair of binoculars. I pick them up now to check the square below. Street, park, club, a greasy spoon beneath a railway arch – I’m always looking for someone who’s trying too hard not to look at me. Clive says Mitchell never goes through this routine, that he’s either a brilliant double agent or no sort of agent at all.
As for Dolphin Square, I can breathe easy. I haven’t seen Mr Black Mac and Trilby since my first night here. There may be someone, there may always be someone, but if there is he has the decency to keep his distance.
I raise the glasses to Beatty block to be sure there are no lights in Elsa’s flat. She’s expecting to work late at the War Office. A tidal wave of shit is rolling up Whitehall and in the next few weeks it will break over her minister. Jack Profumo was sharing his call-girl lover with a Soviet intelligence officer. A personal crisis has become a matter of national security. His blood is in the water. The sharks are circling. They’ll splash it all over the country’s front pages. And the public will enjoy one of its periodic fits of morality. Churchmen will pray for more probity in political life. But Elsa says Jack Profumo’s a decent and courageous man, a soldier who fought on D-Day. I know he will feel more frightened and helpless now than he has ever done. Because he’s lied to Parliament, he’s lied to his wife, he’s told all the lies he can tell, and the only thing he can do is crawl under a stone and hide. And if that’s no longer possible, well, then they have you.
A couple of hours later I’m standing in one of the streets near the rubble of what used to be Euston station. The monumental stone arch that was built with hope and confidence at the dawn of the new railway age and through which millions of passengers passed has gone: work is beginning on a timid glass box that I suppose we must believe is someone’s vision for the future. Arthur Martin lives close enough to the new station to be woken by the pile-drivers. He isn’t expecting me and I’m not expecting a warm welcome, but one of his neighbours is leaving the block, so I draw the last comfort I can from my cigarette, kick the stub into the gutter and march across the street to catch the door from him before it closes.
Martin’s flat is on the second floor, second on the right. He takes his time to answer and I sense him looking at me through the spy-hole. ‘Vaughan. What on earth …’
I show him a bottle of whisky. ‘We must talk, Arthur.’
He frowns, and I guess he’s wondering if we absolutely must talk. But the doorstep isn’t the place for ‘friends’ to argue, so he leads me into his hall. ‘What is it you want?’
‘To talk about Mitchell.’
‘Why can’t it wait? I’m not alone.’ He looks embarrassed, and I wonder fleetingly if a young thing is lying naked by the fire in his sitting room. Ridiculous, of course.
‘He’s one of us,’ he says. ‘Our principal scientific officer. All things technical and more.’ He pauses. ‘He knows about Mitchell.’
I want to ask him why, because Hollis and White have instructed us to tell no one, but Martin has made up his mind to introduce me and is holding the sitting-room door open.
His friend is at a small dining table with what looks like a file from MI5’s Registry. Perhaps things have changed but removing files from Leconfield House used to be a hanging offence. He smiles and rises, and as he steps forward to greet me the fingers of his left hand trail surreptitiously across the table and he flips the file shut. His name is Peter Wright. I haven’t heard of him, but he seems to know about me. He speaks with a stutter, like Philby, and must be in his late forties, bald, with just a sad fringe of grey at the back and at the sides. As we exchange fatuous pleasantries, an image comes to mind of a stone grotesque at my old Oxford college, a lined, weather-beaten face, with a large nose and a stern brow.
‘Peter has come to me with his concerns,’ says Martin.
‘P-p-putting two and two together,’ he says, ‘jobs that have gone down suddenly, the failure of some of our double agents, I’ve been worrying about it for … er … years.’
I shrug off my mac and throw it over the back of the couch. ‘You’ve spoken to Roger Hollis?’
‘I told him I’d spoken to Arthur – let my hair down about my worries,’ he says, without irony. ‘Do you know R-Roger?’
‘Not well.’
‘Roger’s a bit aloof.’
Martin grunts contemptuously. He must be resigned to my presence because he has found some whisky tumblers in a sideboard. The room is small and crowded with cheap furniture, but neat and spotless, in keeping with his fastidious nature.
‘Peter thinks it’s Mitchell, too,’ he says, handing us our drinks.
‘And what did Hollis say?’ I ask.
Wright spreads his hands upon the table. ‘Well, he d-d-didn’t seem surprised, actually. I think he was expecting me to come to him. He said, “Graham Mitchell’s retiring in six months. That’s how long you have to prove it.” Oh, and “I don’t have to tell you I don’t like it Peter. I don’t like it one bit.”’
‘So …’ I raise my
glass. ‘Welcome to our wild-goose chase.’
‘If that’s what you think, Vaughan …’ Martin is twitching with anger.
‘Hold on, this isn’t an investigation, it’s a farce!’ I say. ‘Turn on the tap. Twenty-four-hour surveillance of Mitchell or we’re wasting our time.’ I pick up a corner of the Registry file. ‘Unless you think you’ll stumble across the truth in these.’
‘I’ve told Hollis,’ says Martin, ‘but he’s refusing to let us bug a deputy director general.’
‘Then we don’t have—’
‘But I’ll take this to the prime minister if necessary.’
I want to laugh, but that wouldn’t be wise. ‘Right, Arthur,’ I say instead. ‘Fine.’
Martin is wringing his cut-glass tumbler. I hope he’s imagining them around Roger Hollis’s neck and not mine. Wright says something about Dick White: they went to the same minor public school in Hertfordshire. Perhaps he’s giving his friend time to recover his composure.
‘Dick White says we have to be seen to do this properly,’ says Martin. His gaze flits to my face and away. ‘He’s going to speak to Roger.’ Reaching into the pocket of his fawn cardigan for his cigarettes, he shakes one free from the packet. ‘You think this is a wild-goose chase? You’re wrong.’
He lights his cigarette with a match and shakes out the flame. ‘We’re sure we have a mole now.’
‘You seemed pretty convinced before.’
‘Well, now we know,’ he says coolly. ‘The Americans can place a KGB officer called Modin in Beirut. He hasn’t left Moscow for years, then out of the blue Beirut. Why?’ Leaning across the table, he draws the Registry file towards him and flips it open. ‘Our old friend Yuri Modin.’ A photo is clipped to the first page: he’s forty something with a fleshy face, high forehead, and an Asiatic look about the eyes. ‘That was taken here a few years ago. He was Burgess’s controller in London – Philby’s too.’
‘Philby’s?’
‘Oh, yes. Old comrades. The Soviets knew we were on to Philby, so they dusted off Yuri Modin and sent him out to Beirut to arrange his exfiltration.’
Martin sits back and draws on his cigarette with a challenge-me-if-you-dare look in his eyes, and I don’t care to because he does seem to be on to something.
‘Who tipped off the Soviets?’ he says. ‘I think it was Mitchell, and so does Peter.’
I nod slowly. ‘You’ve made that very clear.’
My glass is empty. Philby would have finished a bottle by now; Burgess would be halfway through the next. I reach across the table for the whisky. Martin refuses more, Wright takes a little, and as I fill my own glass I talk about surveillance and of the many hours I’ve spent with Mitchell pretending to review our vetting procedure. ‘Graham doesn’t give much away,’ I say, ‘and after a working life at MI5 that’s how it should be. Yes, he’s distant and an intellectual, but only our Soviet enemy would consider that a crime. He’s more interested in chess and sailing than in our great game and those who break its rules. Within sight of the finishing post, who can blame him? I have watched Mitchell on the golf course and sailing on the Solent, and in Oxford I spoke to the few who remember the student scholar, and I’ve found nothing to arouse suspicion.’
Martin protests. He repeats his assertion that Mitchell was known to have Communist Party sympathies in his youth. Well, fine, but no one I’ve met has said so. The only Party on his curriculum vitae is the Conservative Party because he worked in its research department before the war.
‘You were at Oxford, weren’t you?’ says Martin. ‘Did you find that helpful?’
‘Helpful?’
‘In persuading people to talk to you?’
‘Of course, Arthur. I wore my New College tie.’
He smiles his tense smile and grinds his cigarette out in an ashtray painted with a picture of the Kremlin. ‘Goronwy Rees was at your college.’
‘Before me.’
‘Did you catch up with him when you went down there?’
I sigh heavily, then finish my whisky in one fiery mouthful. ‘Up, Arthur. One goes up to Oxford.’ Slapping my hands on my knees, I rise. ‘As Marx – Groucho – would say, “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, only this wasn’t it,”’ and reach for my coat. ‘If you can’t work with me, you’d better tell Sir Dick – or I will. It’s about trust, see.’
Wright’s on his feet, too. ‘I should go as well, Arthur.’
Martin has thrust his hands into his cardigan pockets like a bolshie schoolboy. ‘Trust has to be earned,’ he mutters.
‘Then I’ve no more reason to trust you than you to trust me,’ I reply.
6
WRIGHT FOLLOWS ME into the street. He says he lives somewhere in Essex but he’s going to spend the night at the Oxford and Cambridge Club. As we walk towards Euston Road he tells me of the chart he’s drawn up of operations that have gone wrong and the probability they were compromised by a Russian spy. He’s going to put his case to Dick White in the morning, spread the chart on his table so he can see the scale of things. I nod and grunt and wonder why a technical bod with no experience of investigations is caught up in the hunt for a mole. But I don’t want to ruffle his feathers because he seems a reasonable bloke and anxious for my good opinion. We pause at the entrance to Euston station.
‘You’re living in Dolphin Square, aren’t you?’ He seems reluctant to say goodbye.
I raise an eyebrow.
‘Arthur told me. That’s where we picked up last year’s traitor – Vassall. A p-poof – so many seem to be.’
‘I’ll be careful.’
Wright smiles. ‘Expensive.’
‘Oh, not that bad. Right’ – I offer him my hand – ‘I’m walking back.’
‘Are you?’ he says. ‘Mind if I join you? I’m going that way.’
We cross Euston Road and walk into soot-stained yellow-stock Fitzrovia, where the papers say the new London bohemians are playing their guitar music, smoking marijuana and reading Jean-Paul Sartre in translation. We click-click in step, pass a pavement café where students are debating with too much passion what is worth saving and what of the past should be swept away, and their raised voices follow us into the next street, with their angry talk of isms: imperialism and colonialism and the old cultural Fascism. I wonder if we look like the past to them in our macs, dark suits and brogues; Wright is wearing a trilby and swinging an umbrella.
As we walk he begins to talk of Martin, who is, he assures me, a ‘solid chap’, a voice in the wilderness until now. He was right about Philby all along, and right about the penetration of both services. Dick White was a good head of MI5, he says. When it blew up in the fifties with Burgess and Maclean, Dick was one of the first to realise the enemy’s best spies weren’t hogs in the parlour, they were clubbable chaps who had gone to good public schools and Cambridge – a tight little Communist circle festering at the heart of the establishment. Dick was ready to fight the good fight – ‘think the unthinkable’ his refrain.
Five was prepared to root out traitors in high places, only it didn’t, it couldn’t, because the enemy was in and of the upper classes, but the upper classes knew him not. The Cavaliers at Six dismissed Five’s claims as service rivalry and reds-under-the-beds nonsense, and when push came to shove, Dick White didn’t have the guts to take them on after all. Martin was hung out to dry. He’d made enemies at Six and in Whitehall, so to keep the peace Dick sent him to Coventry for a few years or, to be more precise, to the police service in Malaya.
We scuttle between Oxford Street buses and walk on into Soho. Dean Street doors and windows are open even on this cool evening, and from a house where I know Karl Marx lived and three of his children died, there’s the jingle-jangle of pop. As I walk along the street there are memories of evenings with Rees and Burgess at the Flamingo Club, of too much wine and cruel laughter, of girls in the blackout, the smell of hot fat at the Super Fry, and the poems of Dylan Thomas read by Thomas in the York Minster pub; and if I thought Wright wa
s a companion to enjoy such things I would ask him to share a memory at our old table in the corner of the lounge bar, beneath the cracked mirror stuck with theatre bills and photos of dead musical-hall performers. But Wright is still talking of his friend Martin and the years he’s spent hunting for spies. ‘All those years, while your country’s enemies collect a good salary for selling its secrets, no one will believe you because you didn’t go to the right public school or to Cambridge University.’
‘Arthur has some old scores to settle.’
‘Unfinished b-b-business,’ he says. ‘Arthur’s impatient to put things right. You know, he was over in the United States briefing the CIA? Have you met Angleton and Harvey? Angleton’s the prep school sort. Harvey’s a cowboy. They used to respect us, but now they think we’re untrustworthy motherfuckers – that’s what Harvey said to Arthur, “untrustworthy motherfuckers”.’ Wright swings his umbrella at an empty cigarette packet, which slides from the pavement into the gutter. ‘Arthur says we’re treated like beggars in Washington and the only way to change that is to deal with our problem. That’s why he’s impatient.’
The curtain has fallen at the theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue and we have to weave our way along the crowded pavement in silence. The people I pass are smarter and more at leisure. For all the bleak headlines of spies and strikes in the newspapers this is a brighter city than the one I left for Vienna. ‘Swingin’,’ they say. There’s a new American musical on at the Queens. ‘Remember this place in the war?’ I shout, above the babble of excited voices. ‘A bomb took off the front.’ I was there just the night before. Burgess got so drunk Goronwy Rees and I had to carry him from the theatre. Guy was a clever man, but he only really cared about his own performance.
Witchfinder Page 4