Hollis is losing patience. ‘Let me see.’ He picks up a picture of Mitchell with a bluff-looking fellow in his late fifties – ‘Graham’s brother-in-law’ – drops it back on the table and picks up another. ‘Son and daughter.’ Then another: ‘Oxford friend. A gaudy, I shouldn’t wonder. Do you have those at your college, Peter?’
Wright looks stony.
‘Graham took a first,’ says Hollis. ‘He isn’t going to keep incriminating photographs in his office.’
‘Agents b-b-become complacent,’ says Wright.
But it’s the bottom drawer of Mitchell’s desk that interests him most, which is strange because it’s empty. ‘See these,’ he says, pointing to four small marks in the dust.
Hollis bends closer. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Drag marks. Something small on legs. He’s taken something from here.’
‘What are you driving at?’ Hollis snaps.
‘Perhaps a c-copying camera, sir.’
Hollis stares and I know what he’s thinking. ‘You can finish up here, Peter, can’t you?’ he says at last, and nodding to me, ‘Harry,’ he steps back through the connecting door into his office.
‘Roger isn’t interested in evidence,’ Wright observes later. ‘He’s made up his mind Mitchell is innocent.’
Wright has persuaded me to join him for a Scotch at the Oxford and Cambridge. ‘You saw how he dismissed the marks in Mitchell’s drawer?’
I sip my whisky.
‘They would fit the base of a KGB camera like the one we found in Vassall’s flat last year.’ He lifts his briefcase on to his knee and takes out the transcripts the DG gave him in Mitchell’s office.
‘These relate to a barium-meal story we fed PETERS. I must say the results are very interesting.’
He explains: Arthur Martin has cooked up a fake surveillance operation against two Soviet security officers in London and passed the details to Mitchell to see if he’ll bite. It’s just the sort of information a top-level mole in MI5 would slip to his KGB controller.
‘And it looks as if he might have. Here,’ Wright passes me the transcript. ‘Something he was muttering to his mirror.’
The transcriber has offered two typed versions of the same sentence.
(i) Well I must tell? Yu-Yuri that they are. I am sure – (slight laugh) – he’ll laugh if the Russians (??have booked).
And:
(ii) Well I am most terribly curious if they are. I am sure – (slight laugh) – he’ll laugh if the Russians (??have booked).
I look over the top of the transcript and Wright is suppressing a smile.
‘I was thinking about your file in his safe.’
‘You didn’t mention it to Roger.’
‘Do you w-want me to? He doesn’t need to know everything at this stage,’ he says, inspecting his fingers. ‘Not if it doesn’t help the investigation.’
He’s making me feel extremely uncomfortable. He, we, will decide what the DG needs to know.
‘Explain what these mean,’ I wave the transcript at him, ‘or are you feeding me a barium meal too?’
‘The first version is the most likely. You will note the mention of Yuri. P-P-PETERS is going to tell Yuri about the surveillance operation. I know we can’t be sure it’s entirely accurate, but small pieces of evidence like this may be all we will have to go on. PETERS is clever. You heard Roger – he took a first!’
I smile. ‘I didn’t, did you?’
‘I don’t think it would make Roger think more highly of me. I didn’t go to a famous public school, you see.’ Before I can think of a reply he’s on his feet with his arm raised. ‘You will have another, won’t you?’
The steward takes our order, then Wright makes his way to the lavatory, and while I wait, I smoke and gaze about the room in search of a familiar face. The members near me are sober middle-ranking civil servants. The Oxford and Cambridge is that sort of place. Burgess would have wanted to kick up a fuss in here, just for the hell of it. I imagine him sprawling on burgundy leather beneath one of the room’s two enormous crystal chandeliers, twinkling like an old matinee idol as he sings a dirty ditty. Civil servants tut, civil servants remonstrate, and Burgess sings even louder.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Wright says, resuming his place.
‘I’m trying to remember a filthy song.’
‘You can share it with Hollis. It’s the sort of thing he likes.’ He watches me with a wry smile as the steward serves our drinks.
‘Penny for yours,’ I ask, when the steward has gone.
‘Something Mitchell said to me two years ago. He said, “They’re not ten feet tall, you know, Peter!” He meant the Russians. I was pretty sure someone was shitting on our doorstep then, and I told Hollis and Mitchell so, but Hollis let Mitchell tear into me.’ He sips his Scotch. ‘He said I had n-n-no proof and it was speculation, that I was just hypothesising. “Not ten feet tall, Peter.” Patronising shits.’
I’ve heard enough. ‘Sorry, Peter.’ I finish my drink and lean forward to rise. ‘Promised to cook supper for someone.’
He nods slowly. ‘Miss Frankl Spears?’
‘Do you know her?’ I haven’t spoken of Elsa and wouldn’t choose to. ‘She doesn’t use the name Spears.’
‘You were in Vienna together?’
‘That’s right.’ I slap my hands on my knees – ‘OK’ – and stand up. ‘And you’re still moving the television feed from Mitchell’s office to Pavilion Road?’
‘I am. Hollis has got a warrant for a tap at his home, too.’
‘Good.’
He’s looking up at me, but I can’t see his eyes for the chandelier in his glasses. ‘I would like to talk to you about Vienna,’ he says. ‘You were both there when the SUBALTERN operation went down, weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘A terrible business. And Miss Frankl left the Service. Terrible. Did they ever get to the bottom of it, how the Russians …?’
‘Doesn’t it say in my file?’
He smiles. ‘You’ll have to ask PETERS,’ he says, which is nonsense, because I know now that he’s read it too – and, what’s more, he knows I know.
8
1 July 1963
THE CURTAINS ARE drawn in C’s office and the air is thick with smoke.
‘In the circumstances, the minister made a decent fist of it, sir.’
‘Ted Heath’s a sound fellow,’ Dick replies.
A bead of sweat trickles down my spine. On my way to Broadway I passed a party of young women in bright dresses, with an ice bucket and a hamper for the park.
I’ve come from the gallery in the House of Commons where I listened to the minister cough up as much of the truth about Philby as we’re ready to share with the people. Gazing down at the green benches below me I thought, If only you knew. The lives and secrets he betrayed: if only you knew. The many apologies made for him by his friends over the years: if only you knew. But we tell ministers what they need to know, and ministers tell MPs even less.
‘A Labour MP asked if Philby was tipped off by someone in the Service,’ I say, consulting my notes. ‘He said, “Now the country knows there’s a third man, can it be sure there isn’t a fourth?”’
Dick sighs. ‘The prime minister blames us for opening this up. He says when his gamekeeper shoots a fox he doesn’t hang it at the drawing-room door, he buries it out of sight, and that’s what the Service should have done with Philby.’ He closes his eyes a moment. ‘And now we’re at his door with another fox.’
I find it hard to judge. Are we on the trail? Martin tells me nothing. Dick says he’s a good chap, just needs careful handling. ‘That’s why I’ve given the job to you, Harry.’
Ah, the old Dick White charm. I don’t argue because I have no wish to return to Vienna. Life with Elsa … Well, I couldn’t be happier.
‘You will bring her to dinner, won’t you?’ Nick Elliott says, when we meet in my office an hour later. ‘Elizabeth is cross with me for not asking, only you’re
never here.’ I thank him and enquire after his sainted wife. But he isn’t listening. He has stepped over to the window I share with the corridor and is forcing the blind shut.
‘What’s going on, Harry?’
‘New vetting procedures, Nick,’ I say, shaking a cigarette free from a packet.
‘Can’t tell me, right? May be a traitor. This place is full of ’em.’
He sounds hysterical. I say so.
‘If you spent any time here …’ he says, gesturing to the warren on the other side of the blind. ‘We’re treading on eggshells.’
This is the first time I’ve seen him lose his old Etonian sangfroid. ‘Things settle down, Nick. It was the same when Burgess left in ’fifty-one.’
‘It’s not the same. Some people want to use this to break the old Service. Come on, Harry.’ He runs a hand through what’s left of his hair. ‘What’s going on?’
‘What do you think is going on?’
He stares at me while he considers what he’s prepared to say. ‘It’s anyone from the old days, Harry. They’re lifting all our files – yours too, I shouldn’t wonder.’
I draw deeply on my cigarette, then grind the butt into the ashtray. ‘Peter Wright?’
‘Who?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Quine from Counter-intelligence here. Martin at Five. But I hear Jim Angleton at the CIA is running the show. He wants to tear our house down and Martin is ready to help him. Spends half his time in America.’
I shake my head.
‘You don’t know?’ He sighs with exasperation. ‘Come on, Harry.’
‘Say “Come on, Harry” one more time, Nick, and I’ll punch you.’
‘Ah.’ He pushes his glasses back up his nose with his index finger. ‘Sorry, old boy.’
There are voices in the corridor and one is C’s secretary’s. A moment later, an impatient knock at the door and in she sails, filling my box with lavender perfume. ‘Glad I caught you, Mr Vaughan. Ah, and Mr Elliott.’
He holds up his hands. ‘Just leaving, Miss Edwards.’
Dora inclines her head and smiles just like the Queen.
Elliott pats my arm. ‘Take care now.’ I sense he leaves a happier man for turning me into a suspect, too.
‘Polly Garter, we’re alone,’ I say. But Dora Edwards is in no mood for teasing and no lover of Dylan Thomas in any case.
‘C asked me to give you this,’ she says, presenting me with a note, ‘and Mr de Mowbray is trying to contact you.’
It’s just a couple of lines: PETERS has broken cover. Intensive surveillance. Your presence requested at safe house. C.
Dora fingers her pearls. ‘A reply?’
‘No, Miss Edwards. As Marx says: “Please go, and never darken my towels again.”’
I take a cab to Sloane Square, and dash between cars to the white stone island in the middle, where fashionable young sit at the edge of the Venus fountain, trailing their fingers in the water, laughing, flirting and smoking, and I pause to light one, too. There’s a soggy copy of the Evening News at its base with the report of Ted Heath’s statement to the Commons on the front page. I’m the only one in the square who cares. You’d have to live in Wonderland to care on a balmy evening like this one. No one crosses the road after me, so I carry on to the opposite side, pausing again to check the reflection in the window of the Peter Jones department store.
Clive’s little team is kicking its heels in the makeshift sitting room of the safe house.
‘On standby,’ he says, when I ask him why. He looks thoroughly pissed off. I expect he’s thinking of the summer evening he might be spending in the garden at his local pub or with that little minx on the Transport desk at the Battersea garage.
‘Get someone to clear those plates off the floor,’ I say grumpily. I had plans for the evening too.
Martin, Wright and young Stephen de Mowbray from Six are upstairs in the office. No one has opened a window or emptied the ashtrays in days. Even by the standards of a Service safe house it is a kind of summer hell. But as good as his word, Wright has moved the closed-circuit television feed here and now it’s my people from Six who are watching Mitchell on the other side of the looking glass, noting any word or activity that might be suspicious. I’m here, it seems, because Wright is convinced he’s identified one.
At about four o’clock in the afternoon PETERS was observed writing on a scrap of paper. At half past four he changed his mind and tore it into small pieces. When he left for home, Hollis’s secretary fished the pieces from the burn bag used for classified waste and Wright has pasted them together. The paper is on the table in front of them, weighted by an ashtray, and it must be important because Wright is grinning like the cat that got the cream.
‘It’s a map of the common land near PETERS’s home. Here,’ he says, sliding it towards me. ‘Your man Clive says it’s to the north of the village.’
The sketch is in Mitchell’s fine hand, certainly. He’s drawn arrows and dotted footpaths, including one across the Common with the letters RV between. I don’t need Wright to tell me that it’s the sort of map you make for someone if you’re planning a rendezvous in the middle of nowhere. He tells me all the same because he’s excited, and so are Martin and de Mowbray. They want me to agree to round-the-clock surveillance on the Common at once. I have doubts. A good agent doesn’t meet his handler on his own doorstep – not in my experience. Neither would I expect him to be foolish enough to sketch his intentions, then throw them into a Security Service bin. But if I say so Martin will counter, ‘Even good agents make mistakes,’ and he’s right, we do. But if Graham Mitchell is a Soviet spy he has been one of the best in the game for twenty years. So, yes, I have doubts and questions. If I ask them, Martin will judge me a non-believer and he’ll lose his temper, and I’ll be no closer to finding out what the hell he’s doing behind my back.
‘We’ve sent Bill to the Common with a couple of the girls,’ says de Mowbray. ‘It’s open heathland so it isn’t going to be easy.’
‘All hands on deck, then,’ I say. ‘We need eyes on Mitchell’s house, on both of the car parks marked on the map, someone at the rendezvous point and a couple of dogwalkers on the Common. Do any of the girls have pets?’
‘He knows we’re looking for someone,’ says Martin. ‘He may be meeting his controller. I don’t think he’ll run – not yet. He’ll want an exfiltration plan to be put in place.’ He takes a step to the table and picks up the map. ‘Anyway, keep me posted, won’t you?’
By the time I’ve made the arrangements it’s midnight. In a few hours I will be on the Common. My head is thick with fatigue, with the details of the operation, with intrigue and stale smoke, and although I’m weary I must walk if I am to sleep. This time I pass the windows of Peter Jones without a glance and follow the road from the Underground station into Holbein Place. All I can hear as I walk beside the yellow-brick wall that runs the length of the street is my footfall and the song of a solitary bird confused by the big city night.
When my mind is clear and I can think of something else, I think of my girls whom I’ve seen just once in the five months I’ve been home. They live with their mother and stepfather near Virginia Water. He’s an insurance broker and a golfer; I haven’t the foggiest idea what she does with her days. She isn’t reading War and Peace. I’m paying the fees for the school she chose. She must be happy it’s money well spent because the girls are beginning to sound just like her.
I want them to visit their other family, to see the pit where their grandfather and his father cut coal, and their house in the middle of the terrace at the head of the Rhondda. I want them to aspire to more than Susan, who loves them, I’m sure, and whose great misfortune it was to fall for a man she didn’t understand and couldn’t trust. I want the girls to make better choices. I want them to know more of life than Surrey. I want them to meet Elsa. I want them to have a better father – if it isn’t too late. Graham Mitchell is a good father.
9
STEPHEN DE MOWBRAY rings me from the chess tournament in Brighton. Mitchell drove down in his Morris, watched and played and ate a round of egg sandwiches, and now he’s on his way home. He made no attempt to pass a message to any of the Russian competitors. The investigation draws another blank and de Mowbray is lucky to be alive and at liberty after racing red lights all the way to the south coast to be there in time.
Here, in a rented house in Sunningdale, I work my way through the overtime sheets and wait for the next shift change on Chobham Common. It’s just a couple of miles away. Our watchers walk back, eat, sleep, grumble and fart, and, if they’re not on an overnight, catch a train back into London – except Jean, who drives home with the poodle. The bright lights have never seemed brighter. They’re bored and losing patience because we’ve nothing to show for our summer break from the city but sore feet and red faces. Mitchell’s little sketch map has sent us on a wild-goose chase, and I’m beginning to suspect it was drawn and tossed in the full knowledge that someone would fish it out of his wastepaper basket.
I ring Pavilion Road and speak to Wright. ‘Oh, come on, Harry,’ he says, and uses his favourite line of Mitchell on me: ‘He’s not ten feet tall, you know.’
I trump him with Hollis’s: ‘No, Peter, but he did take a first at Oxford.’
He has the grace to laugh.
But when I ask if Martin is with him the answer is ‘No,’ and to the question, ‘Where can I find him?’ there is no answer. So, I tell him to warn Martin that if nothing happens on the Common this weekend I’m pulling our watchers out.
Clive is briefing the night shift and he’ll handle things on the radio from the safe house. I leave them to their pie and beans and beer, and set off for home in a pool car. My ex-wife and daughters live a short distance away. I’m not expected and an awkward hour with the girls in the golfer’s sitting room would be worse than no time at all. But I drive past their house and admire the front garden, cut and rolled like a green, and on my way into London I resolve to persuade Susan to let me take them for a couple of days’ re-education before they go back to school.
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