Wright’s face is as hard as stone. ‘Christ, he’s still fighting the last war.’ Robertson’s technician jibe has cut deep. ‘And Mitchell said nothing.’
‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘He was determined not to. That’s surprising, isn’t it?’
‘Mitchell’s lazy, he’s going in three weeks …’
‘No, think about it for a minute. Mitchell’s anxious – we’ve seen plenty of evidence of that – and he’s careful. He doesn’t want to talk about you in his office – even to Robertson. Why? Too busy, he said, but he hasn’t come back.’ I tap the top of the monitor. ‘Where is he?’
‘Meeting someone else?’
‘Perhaps,’ I say. I don’t believe it for a minute.
Then Mitchell sends me a note. He wants to share his last thoughts with me before I circulate my recommendations for a new vetting procedure, and he suggests the following Monday. I’m surprised because he was struggling for something to say at our last meeting. But the transcription ladies have heard nothing suspicious, our watchers seen nothing out of the ordinary. I run into Arthur Martin on the Friday before the Monday. He’s taking a turn in front of the monitor, and I can tell he’s straight from the pub. ‘It’s just like before,’ he says, glumly. ‘They’re closing rank.’
‘Who?’
‘The old guard, the public-school boys. It was like that with Kim and now … Mitchell went to Winchester, you know.’
When I press Martin to say more, he accuses Roger Hollis of doing his best to kill the investigation. ‘But I won’t let him this time.’
I leave him slumped over the monitor, a cigarette trembling in his fingers. Sunlight is streaming through windows into the mirror camera. Mitchell is no more than a shadow.
‘Is he guilty?’ Elsa asks on Sunday. She’s unpacking her holiday clothes and I’m watching from the bed, jealous of her tan and her breezy humour.
‘Did you miss me?’
‘Come on,’ she says, pressing me for an answer.
I tell her an officer from D1 investigations at Five is pulling the evidence together for Hollis and White. ‘Ronnie Symonds – was he there in your time?’
‘But you’ve seen the evidence already. Do you think he’s guilty?’ she says.
‘Martin and Wright seem certain.’
She punches my arm. ‘Come on. If you don’t want to talk about it, just say so.’
‘I don’t want to talk at all,’ I say, pulling her on to the bed beside me.
11
19 August 1963
GRAHAM MITCHELL’S SECRETARY rings on Monday morning to tell me to meet him at his club.
‘Couldn’t you dissuade him?’ Martin grumbles, when I telephone Pavilion Road with the news.
‘He’s the DDG,’ I reply.
Wright talks some nonsense about rigging a wire. Where? No, I’m glad they won’t be breathing down my neck.
The Royal Thames Yacht Club is next to the French Embassy, just along from the Hyde Park Hotel in Knightsbridge. Mitchell’s waiting in the entrance hall, his coat over his arm. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him in person and I’m surprised by the change in his appearance. He’s lost so much weight his Savile Row suit is hanging from his shoulders as if it was off the peg. Do I mind if we take some air?
‘I was going to show you my draft of the vetting report,’ and I lift my briefcase.
‘Later,’ he says.
We walk into Hyde Park, heading north towards the Serpentine. It’s another grey day in a summer of such days, with a dense front of cloud rolling in from the west. Conscious that Mitchell is dragging his foot on the gravel path as he limps, I shorten my stride. ‘Terrible summer,’ I say, to draw him into conversation. He offers a wan smile.
A few yards further, and I try again. ‘You wanted to talk, Graham?’
‘Let’s sit down first,’ he says, gesturing towards one of the benches at the edge of the Serpentine. ‘Do you mind?’
There are spots of rain in the wind now and the promise of more is driving rowing boats from the water and mothers with small children towards the buses at Hyde Park Corner. Mitchell steps in some of the duck shit that speckles the path but seems not to notice. ‘You sail, don’t you, Harry?’ he says, wiping the bench with his handkerchief.
‘Not me. I’m uncomfortable aboard anything smaller than the Queen Mary.’
‘Ah. I thought you were a sailor.’ He’s pulling at a loose button on the cuff of his jacket, his chin almost on his chest. ‘I’ve always admired you, Harry. You’re good at things I’ve never been good at – you make people like you. I remember during the war when you were thick with Rees and Burgess … You were great clowns.’
I reach into my jacket for a packet of cigarettes. ‘I’m not sure I appreciate the comparison.’
‘I mean you make people laugh. But you’re a decent chap too. Rees is arrogant and lazy, and Burgess is … Burgess. You don’t tear down people for sport.’
‘There were times,’ I pull a face, ‘and I’m sorry for them.’ He ignores this and the cigarette I offer him.
‘Look, Harry, I’ve made mistakes – we all have – but I love this country. We both do – you know my wife, Pat, worked for the Service?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course you do. Of course. I can’t understand a man like Philby, can you? I would never turn my back on my friends and my country. Never.’
‘No.’
‘Look, I know it’s time to go – yesterday’s man, and all that …’ He closes his eyes a moment. ‘But not like this, Harry. Tell Dick and Roger, “Not like this.”’
‘I don’t understand …’
‘Yes, you do.’ He stares at me, very angry in a quiet way.
I nod once. ‘Right, Graham. Noted.’ Then, to avoid his gaze, I lean forward to rescue his cuff button from the gravel. ‘And this is yours.’ I drop it into the palm of his hand, dry and calloused by ropes and the sea. ‘I don’t suppose Pat will need to sew it back. Not now.’
He tries to smile. ‘I don’t suppose she will.’
The wind is whisking the surface of the Serpentine into short, white-tipped waves and rolling the chained boats on the opposite bank. We have only gone a few yards when it begins to rain hard and straight, soaking my linen jacket and speckling the thin summer dress of a young woman, who scurries past in search of shelter. Mitchell holds his umbrella over us but in seconds my slacks are soaking. I glimpse Clive from my watcher team between the trees and wonder if Mitchell has seen him too. He doesn’t say much as we walk, although we couldn’t be much closer beneath his umbrella. At the door of his club he offers his hand and another sad smile, then calls me back to remind me of his farewell drinks party.
‘And Elsa? I’d love to see her,’ he says. ‘Such a shame she left us after SUBALTERN.’
‘You think so?’ How can he say so now?
‘The Service is that sort of place, isn’t it? If you want to take the blame, everyone is happy to oblige you.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘I don’t want it to be like that for me. I’ll always wonder if there was any point to my life.’
At Pavilion Road the officers and foot-soldiers are gathered in the transcription room on the first floor. There has been a most unholy row. Heads turn to look at me as if I’m responsible for the poisonous atmosphere.
‘Who died?’
Martin is slouching against the wall by the window, de Mowbray hunched over a monitor, and Wright presents a stony face.
‘Well, who died?’
No one replies. So, I address my watchers, ‘Show’s over, boys,’ and, glancing down the staircase behind me, ‘What are you waiting for?’ It’s the cue for everyone below officer rank to troop out of the door.
Wright explains: ‘Roger has been here. He’s spoken to the prime minister and the PETERS interrogation is out of the question.’
‘The useless bastard! But the bottom line is, the bottom …’ Martin is so incensed he has to pause for breath. ‘We have to make him. Threaten to resig
n – all of us.’
I catch Wright’s eye. ‘It was the prime minister’s decision?’
‘R-Roger says Harold Macmillan believes another scandal would be calamitous, but I expect Roger encouraged the PM to think so.’
Martin bangs his fist on the window ledge and curses. In the difficult silence that follows, I watch him twitching with anger. His certainty is troubling, and why is it so personal? Revenge, perhaps, for old-school-tie putdowns and the years he was passed over for promotion. He’s turning PETERS into a feud with Hollis and the old Service.
‘If the prime minister has spoken …’ I venture.
‘What about the Americans?’ Martin barks back. ‘We must tell them – they’ll insist on interrogation. PETERS has compromised joint operations.’
‘If he’s a traitor.’
‘You don’t think we have enough to justify it?’
‘Steady, Arthur.’ I smile with all the sincerity of the old Maerdy minister, who preached love and forgiveness to our parents in chapel, then martyred us boys in his Bible class with a stick. ‘If you want to shout at someone, shout at the prime minister.’
Martin gestures with his arms in frustration. ‘You don’t know James Angleton. If the deputy director general of the Security Service turns out to be a traitor and we’ve kept the evidence from him …’ He catches my eye; his are tired and bloodshot. ‘After Philby, it will be a complete disaster.’
‘All right,’ I agree. ‘We show the Americans all the evidence.’
Martin’s shoulders sag, Wright puffs out his cheeks, and de Mowbray … Well, no one gives a fart for his opinion.
‘I’ll tell Roger we think the same,’ says Martin.
‘On the Americans,’ I say cautiously. ‘And just the evidence, because we haven’t proved Graham Mitchell’s guilty. I don’t think we will.’
Martin opens his mouth to argue. ‘Hold on, Arthur,’ I say. ‘There’s something you need to hear. Mitchell knows we’re investigating him. And I think he’s close to a breakdown. That’s what I’m going to tell Dick White. As far as I’m concerned, PETERS is over. We’ve nothing. It’s over.’
I know they don’t agree but that’s all I have to say, and now I want to go, with a silent prayer to whatever God there may be to spare me from another day on PETERS. At the bottom of the stairs I pause to pinch my wet trousers from my knees, and hear Martin ranting and stamping round the room above. I hear my name and a chair crashing to the floor, and so do the watchers waiting in the room below. Clive’s back from foot patrol and greets me with a wry smile.
‘All right, boys,’ I say. ‘Anyone fancy a pint?’
12
27 August 1963
THE MAERDY MINISTER was a liar. I realised that when I was seven and Mum was dying but God wasn’t listening. I could hear her pain: why couldn’t he? We were mid-terrace, so our neighbours on either side could hear it too. A few months later I moved to my aunt Elen’s home where it was possible to scream blue murder and no one would take the slightest notice. I think I understood even then that it was the minister’s job to make excuses for God. Mum was the believer, and Dad was something called a Communist. ‘Opiate of the people,’ he used to say, quoting Marx (Karl) on religion. Someone must have told him because I never saw him read anything more challenging than a paper. But I read Marx. Window-seat overlooking the quad, the college choir processing to chapel, and I thought of Marx and Mum and her minister and the miners and their families in Maerdy. ‘To call on them to give up their illusions,’ Karl Marx wrote, ‘is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.’
So, I return to the safe house the following day, where Dick White says I must stay for as long as it takes to read PETERS the last rites. My watchers go out in the rain again, the transcription ladies sit in front of the monitor. Martin is distant, Wright conciliatory, and at half past six in the evening de Mowbray comes in off the street to say Mitchell’s rumbled him too. ‘He just turned and stared at me,’ he says. ‘London passing by, and he stood and stared.’
Perhaps he twigged when his name was dropped from the ‘Most Secret’ circulation list, or perhaps it was our street work, because we were never good enough. I expect him to storm into Hollis’s office, but he gives nothing away. ‘Because he’s guilty,’ says Martin. It is hurt and bewilderment I see in his eyes. Then, on the Thursday after his Tuesday encounter with de Mowbray, he approaches the mirror in his office and mutters, ‘Why are you doing this to me? Why?’
Jill, the transcription girl, drops her pen, and I swear in Welsh.
‘He’s cracking up,’ I say, and Jill begins to cry.
Later I tell Wright, and he dismisses it casually as ‘good acting’. ‘I’ve no scruples about this, Harry,’ he says.
‘You’ve no scruples because you’ve no empathy,’ I reply.
We’re all trying to pretend we’re as worldly and insouciant as James Bond, but deep down we’re the same resentful schoolboys, cripples and orphans we were before we joined the Service, even the tough guys, the hard men who enjoy the nastiness, like my watcher Clive, who grew up pulling wings off flies and boasts of losing his virginity at fourteen.
‘I think he’s goin’ mental,’ says Jill (she isn’t a brigadier’s daughter).
I look up from her legs to the calendar on the wall behind the monitor. ‘He has to survive one more week, then he’s gone. Free.’ I tell her this because she’s a sweet-hearted thing and there’s no need for her to know that the stink will follow him home when he retires, that he won’t be clear of it until D1 finishes its review of the evidence, and that Martin is demanding a full interrogation.
‘I feel sorry for him, ’Arry,’ she says. (I encourage informality.)
‘Do you, love?’ I reply, and pat her knee affectionately. ‘Me too. Fancy a drink after this?’
Late Friday afternoon, and the chief is at his desk in Broadway Buildings. For once the blinds are open and sunlight is pouring into the dusty corners of his room – and they are dusty. He’s sitting with his back to the window – I can barely see his face – and there’s a blinding halo about his white hair: Sir Dick White, martyr to his subordinates. I tell him one thing and Arthur Martin tells him another. My turn now. We’re meeting to review PETERS before the big showdown. Martin and Wright are preparing to confront Hollis. Officially, it’s an MI5 affair – so I won’t be there – but Roger listens to Dick and Dick is listening to me.
I don’t waste time with the mistakes we’ve made: we all know there isn’t enough evidence for a prosecution. What about the KGB camera? Dick says, and it takes me a moment to realise he’s talking about the marks at the bottom of Mitchell’s desk drawer. ‘Really, sir?’
I’m quite sure Mitchell is in the clear and should be allowed to retire to the golf course. But we should show the Americans the evidence and if they insist on an interrogation … The PETERS investigation team is of one mind on this, and we’ll resign if Sir Roger doesn’t agree. Dick makes a note, then glances at his watch. I guess he’s impatient to escape to Sussex to be with Kate and the boys.
‘What next for me, sir?’
‘Let’s see what the D1 review of PETERS comes up with, shall we?’
I want to say we’re dancing on eggshells, that Mitchell’s in danger of losing his mind and Martin’s a casualty, too; that I hear from Nick Elliott and others that the scent of treachery lingers in every corridor of this building, that ‘friends’ are going about their everyday business on tiptoe; that we’ve spent months and thousands of pounds on surveillance but we’re still looking for proof in the dust at the bottom of a drawer, and we’re no closer to proving there’s a master spy than we were eight months ago. Instead I nod and grip the arms of my chair to rise.
Dick checks me with a gesture. ‘From Moscow station.’ He leans across his desk to present me with a signal flimsy.
Beneath the
usual security and circulation codes there is a single line of type in capitals. I gaze at it for a few seconds and try not to show that it hurts me: BURGESS DIED BOTIN HOSPITAL THIS MORNING.
Guy Burgess, formerly of this parish.
‘Drank himself to death,’ says Dick.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ I reply, with faux nonchalance. ‘Was he alone?’
‘I don’t think Philby was at his bedside, if that’s what you mean, and his mother lives in London. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but I’ll make an exception for Burgess: he didn’t have one redeeming quality. He was a bugger and a shit. Good riddance.’
‘I wonder if the Russians will bury him in his Old Etonian tie. That’s what he would want.’
‘After putting two fingers up to us all?’ He snorts with derision. ‘I suppose I should tell Anthony Blunt. Do you think he knew Burgess was a traitor?’
‘You know Blunt better than I do, sir.’
I remember the two of them were thick before Blunt left Five for finer things. He’s Sir Anthony Art Expert now, director of the Courtauld Institute, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures.
‘They were at Cambridge together,’ says Dick. ‘I’ll drop him a note. Everyone else can read it in The Times.’
I wonder if by ‘everyone’ he means Rees in particular, because Rees was Guy’s closest friend for years, and mine, until he betrayed us both.
Dick is shepherding me to his door. ‘Take a few days off, Harry. Go somewhere with your girls.’
‘They’re going back to school, sir.’
‘Take a week. The smoke will have cleared by the time you get back.’
‘I’ll miss Mitchell’s leaving do.’
Dick grunts. ‘Seriously?’
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess: he claimed his family was Huguenot many moons ago and that Burgess used to be ‘Bourgeois’, which is funny, because bourgeois is everything he used to despise. He went from his posh school to Cambridge and was immensely proud of both, and so was Philby. He was a book Communist. The only members of the proletariat he was truly interested in were the young men he used to forage for in the blackout during the war. That isn’t quite true, because he did like me, even when I refused to let him suck my cock.
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