Witchfinder

by Andrew Williams

Poor Malcolm Cumming is the head of D Branch (Counter-espionage) and, in theory, the man in charge of both Martin’s D1 Soviet section and Wright’s D3 Research. In practice Arthur writes his own rules. As far as he’s concerned, Cumming is good for counting paperclips and nothing else.

  ‘It’s unforgivable,’ says Wright, ‘just when things are running our way. M-M-Malcolm is so old school.’ He means Cumming is an old Etonian Cavalier and non-believer who thinks Martin is obsessed with proving the PETERS case (he is), and that he’s hiding evidence from the DG (he’s right about that, too); and that the hunt for a mole is doing terrible damage to the Service (it may be). I’m still in D3 when Martin flings the door open with such force it crashes against one of Evelyn’s precious filing cabinets.

  ‘Suspended!’ He’s white and trembling. ‘Cumming took it to Hollis, and he’s suspended me for indiscipline. You’ll have to take over the Blunt debrief, Peter. We can’t let up now.’

  And that’s what happens, only Wright has ideas of his own about how to go about it, and one of them is to put someone from the old Bentinck Street set in front of Blunt: me.

  ‘Are you going to do it?’ Elsa asks, when I tell her sometime around midnight.

  ‘I’m afraid it will muddy the water.’

  ‘Then don’t do it, Harry,’ she says.

  But Wright is insistent in a calculating way. ‘B-B-Blunt knows we’re groping in the dark,’ he says, on the first day of Martin’s gardening leave. ‘We need to shake him up a bit. I’ll play nasty, and you can be his friend.’

  Evelyn looks up from the papers she’s studying. ‘That won’t be difficult, will it, dear?’

  ‘Evelyn, cariad, Anthony and I have never been close – you must be confusing me with Sir Dick White.’

  The following evening, we are greeted at the door of the Courtauld by Brian, an effete young protégé of the director. Brian is wonderfully supercilious, as fine artists often are. We must look like old housebreakers in our raincoats, because he insists on walking behind us, in case we swipe one of the institute’s antiques, I suppose. I’m struck by the elegance and the opulence of the eighteenth-century circular stair that Anthony climbs to his private apartment every day. Our orders from Hollis are to go softly, softly, lest Anthony has a change of heart and decides to run to Moscow. Wright has absolutely no intention of obeying Hollis’s orders. Brian leads us across a drawing room in which the first man is tempting the first woman with an apple. For some reason, the painting reminds me that Guy said his friend Anthony preferred to play the woman’s part. There was no love lost between us in those Bentinck Street years. I wonder, Will Blunt try to turn the tables on me with some reference to that time?

  ‘How are you, Harry?’ he says, as if it were only yesterday. He must be surprised to see me, but his years of secret life as a homosexual and a Russian spy have made him even more expert than the rest of us at hiding his true feelings. While Wright talks, he glances at me coyly, like one of my teenage daughter’s friends. His face is long, lined and drawn with what may be care, and his tweed suit looks a little baggy. But he’s always been as tall and thin as a teasel, with so little flesh on his frame, it’s a miracle he doesn’t rattle. He’s mid-fifties, perhaps fifty-seven (I remember a birthday party in Bentinck Street). Rees used to say he was sly, Guy that he was ‘sensitive and shy’, and no man could hope for a truer friend. I don’t know Anthony well but I imagine there has been very little love and laughter in his life.

  We sit at his fireside and I compliment him on his study, which is just what I expected it to be, with fine furniture and old-master paintings, and his own Poussin over the chimneypiece; he tells me with pride that his students were responsible for gilding the elaborate plaster cornicing and friezes.

  Wright isn’t interested in art, it seems. ‘We’ve heard what you’ve had to say, Anthony,’ he says, switching on a tape recorder. ‘I don’t think you’ve been telling Arthur the truth.’

  Blunt’s shoulders tense. ‘I answered all his questions,’ he says petulantly.

  ‘That’s n-nonsense, and you know it is too. We’ve kept our side of the bargain, like gentlemen. You aren’t keeping yours.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ A nerve is jumping at the corner of Anthony’s right eye.

  ‘You must know the name of your successor at Five. You will have briefed him.’

  ‘I’ve told you already—’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘How do you know I know?’

  ‘Because it’s how Moscow works!’

  Anthony crosses his long legs, then flicks a speck of dust from the knee of his trousers. He knows how Moscow works, and he knows Wright is telling a fat lie. ‘I’ve told you, there was nobody else.’

  Wright barks at him, ‘Come on! What about your c-c-conscience? Have you thought about the agents who were executed because of you?’

  ‘There were no deaths.’

  ‘MI6’s spy inside the Kremlin? Tortured and executed – and there were others.’

  Blunt sighs impatiently. ‘Did we have a spy in the Kremlin? I didn’t know. I didn’t put anyone’s life at risk.’

  ‘But Kim did,’ I say. ‘Thirty, forty of our agents?’

  ‘M-more,’ Wright chips in. ‘Many more.’

  ‘And you knew, didn’t you, Anthony?’

  ‘No one died because of me,’ he says again.

  ‘Well, that’s a comfort, I’m sure.’

  Blunt closes his eyes for a moment and I lean forward to stop the recorder. ‘Okay. Perhaps a drink?’

  He smiles weakly. ‘Is it still whisky?’

  As he rises, I’m reminded of the delicate spindly sort of spider you see clinging to the bricks in autumn cellars. ‘I have some sandwiches in the kitchen, too,’ he says. ‘Ham and egg, I think.’

  The moment the door closes behind him Wright is up on his feet. ‘K-keep an ear open, will you?’ And, taking a tape measure from his pocket, he makes a note of the height and width of the chimneypiece. ‘What do you think? About six inches from the right side and, say, two feet from the floor? It’s going to be tricky, but …’

  Oh, the light in his eyes. He’s going to ask the rags at A2 to drill through the wall and embed a probe microphone. The timing couldn’t be better because the builders are in the house next door.

  ‘The telephone can’t p-p-pick up what he says in here because he’s moved it to the end of the hall … He’s n-no fool.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Anthony’s no fool.’

  The sandwiches are perfect white triangles. Blunt drinks gin; we – his tormentors – drink whisky. The tape recorder stays off and either this or the gin makes a difference because Anthony seems more at ease.

  ‘Sorry I can’t help you, Peter,’ he says, once, twice, thrice, as we turn on a roundabout to the question of the mole at the top of MI5. What about his controller, ‘Otto’? Did he ever mention …? He was talent-spotting at Oxford as well as Cambridge, wasn’t he? And Burgess … can you remember? He may have let the name of someone slip? But Blunt drops his bat on that one, too.

  ‘You won’t believe this,’ he says, ‘but I can tell you, Guy loved this country.’

  Wright snorts derisively. ‘He wanted Britain to be Communist.’

  Anthony can’t quite suppress the flicker of a smile. ‘Harry, you knew Guy, you were his friend …’

  ‘Guy was working for the Soviet Union,’ I say.

  ‘And you were helping the R-Russians too, Anthony,’ says Wright, ‘not this country – R-Russia.’

  Blunt closes his eyes and shakes his head with exasperation. ‘You have to have lived through it, Peter. You can’t understand—’

  ‘Oh, I understand all right, Anthony,’ he says angrily. ‘I know all about the thirties. We were poor. I had to leave school, and my world fell apart. My father lost his job, and took to the bottle. Oh, I remember the thirties!’

  The colour rises to Anthony’s cheeks and he mumbles, ‘Sorry.’ Embarrassing to be reminded beneath
your Poussin that it all comes down to class, especially if you’ve been a doughty champion of the proletariat. I imagine this is like the silence in my lord’s drawing room when the footman announces he has the daughter of the house in the family way. Wright is shifting awkwardly in the chair beside me. ‘Rees knew you were w-w-working for the other side, didn’t he?’ he says, perhaps to embarrass us both.

  ‘It was foolish of Guy to trust him.’

  ‘Was R-Rees a member of the Communist Party, too?’

  Blunt hesitates.

  ‘Come on, Anthony …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it was B-Burgess who approached him?’

  ‘Actually, Rees asked Guy if he could join the Party.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Guy said so. Guy wanted Rees to stay outside, work for peace in a different way.’

  ‘As a Soviet agent?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I hear the tinkle of ice and glass beside me. Wright is drinking, and I drink too, for the seconds I need to think.

  ‘Rees denies he was a member of the Party,’ I say.

  ‘Well, he would …’

  Blunt offers us his cigarette case, and I take one, and as I lean forward for a light I lift my eyes to his face. ‘There’s no love lost between you and Goronwy Rees, is there, Anthony?’

  ‘He wrote some unforgivable things about Guy,’ he says evenly. ‘You know how close they were. I expect he was afraid of this’ – and he gestures to the two of us – ‘or worse.’

  ‘And does Rees have reason to be afraid?’ Wright asks.

  ‘Rees was going to talent-spot for us at Oxford. Help Guy persuade students to do something useful for the Party – the Foreign Office, civil service. But before you ask, I don’t know if he managed to persuade anyone. And he left us in ’thirty-nine …’

  ‘But you stayed …’

  ‘You know I did,’ he replies. ‘Look, it’s late …’ He draws on his cigarette and folds the butt into an ashtray. ‘Can we leave this for another day?’

  But Wright is like a hound with a bone. ‘Do you know a woman called Jenifer Hart?’ he asks. ‘Maiden name Fischer Williams.’

  Blunt places his hands on his knees to rise. ‘Not really. A little.’

  ‘You d-do know her, then.’

  ‘A little. Through a mutual friend.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Someone here at the Courtauld Institute. I say, can we …?’ and he looks at me pleadingly.

  I say, ‘We can,’ at once, and I stand up, too. ‘Enough for tonight, I think.’

  Wright is furious, naturally, and tells me so on the pavement outside. We stand and argue beneath a street light, like a couple of old tarts who have had more than one over the eight, while cabbies circle Portman Square in the hope of our fare. I meet his anger with ‘I’m Mr Nice, remember?’ and argue we won’t bully the truth from Anthony; and what about the mole in MI5, what about ELLI, and when did we decide to go fishing for fry?

  ‘You’re thinking of Rees,’ he says, and it sounds like an accusation.

  ‘And the rest, Peter. Look, Blunt is looking after Blunt. He’s been blowing smoke up our arses for years. Ask Arthur.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he says coolly, ‘but you heard him. Oxford had – has – its Communists, too. ELLI may belong to an Oxford ring. Graham Mitchell was there, and others.’

  ‘Right,’ I say impatiently, ‘so I’ll tell Dick White we’re now on a trawl for anyone who used to be a member of the Party, not just in the Service but wherever we can find them. Is this Angleton’s idea, by the way?’

  Wright puts down his case to use both hands to trim his trilby. ‘I’m head of D3 now. This is my business, my bread and butter – mine.’ Before I can reply he steps into the gutter with his arm out to flag down a passing cab. ‘Do you m-mind if I take this one?’ It comes to a halt a few feet from him.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I say, with as much ice in my voice as I can manage.

  The cab door’s open and Wright is on the point of climbing inside when he turns back to me. ‘Are you afraid of something, Harry? Is that what it is?’

  And he’s gone before I can think of something to draw his sting.

  22

  23 May 1964

  ELSA SLEEPS. I have no wish to. To sleep would be to lose the perfect stillness and contentment of this hour. She lies in my arms and I am careful not to move a muscle lest I wake her, only rejoice in the pulse of her breathing, in the heat and perfume of her skin, her hair about my pillow. Her old teddy bear stares back at me from the wicker chair to the right of the door. On the mahogany chest of drawers there’s a photograph of her mother, and she has hung the Picasso lithograph she bought last week in a Cork Street gallery on the wall opposite, next to a watercolour of the girls. The wardrobe is ajar. Her black silk evening dress has slipped from a hanger and pours on to the floor. Her shoes. My shoes. Her Victorian jewellery box on the dressing-table. My dad’s old Davy lamp on the mantelpiece (‘Really, Harry? In the bedroom?’). In these things I rejoice. Call me to the chapel rail to own the wasted years. For the love I mumbled to others, I beg your forgiveness. Cariad, I have travelled the road, and now I see. Fifty is too late (did you want children?), but this I know: I love you more than life – yes, this liar, this old Service cynic – and I will let no man put us asunder.

  ‘Harry?’ She turns suddenly to face me, and I realise she was awake all the time.

  ‘I love you,’ I say, and I kiss her hair.

  ‘Harry … have you spoken to Blunt?’

  ‘Yes.’ And I know it’s unwise and we should wait until morning, but I ask her all the same. ‘You’ve not mentioned this business to anyone have you, cariad?’

  She rises to an elbow and reaches for the bedside light. ‘What are you accusing me of?’

  ‘I’m not accusing you, I’m asking.’

  ‘That’s not what it sounds like.’

  I try to caress her cheek and she brushes my hand roughly aside. ‘I ask because I love you,’ I say, ‘and I don’t want someone to hurt you – to hurt us.’

  ‘But you know I wouldn’t talk to—’

  ‘Please, darling,’ I cut across her, ‘when was your last contact with Jenifer Hart?’

  The trendy beatnik people in berets and turtlenecks who float up and down the King’s Road most weekends have been driven from the White Hart by a dog-racing crowd. The public bar is full of men who still wear caps and speak proper London. First race at Stamford Bridge begins in an hour, and I gather from the young enthusiast at my side that the favourite is called The Pimpernel, and if I fancy a flutter he would be happy to take my money.

  In the mirror behind the bar I watch Rees with his newspapers and a pint, a cigarette dangling from his bottom lip like a Welsh Popeye. Eight years since we last met and even at opposite ends of a smoky bar I can see those years have not been kind to him. Nefoedd wen. In truth I’m a little shocked. ‘A short life but a gay one,’ he used to say, and those years of raising hell are catching up with him now. For all that, he is still a beautiful man: Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men perhaps, or Burt Lancaster in The Leopard. His hair has turned white but it keeps an unruly curl, and his thick eyebrows are as dark and expressive as they were on the day I first met him thirty years ago, and if his face is creased and mottled by hard living it has not lost its shape. The man to his right rises with an empty glass. Rees removes the fag from the corner of his mouth and smiles, and I see a flash of the green-eyed impish charm that has broken many hearts. Clever women – the writers Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann to name but two – have thrown themselves at his feet, and many men would have liked to. He was, and doubtless remains, a brilliantly gifted child, spoiled and dangerous.

  The barman rings his bell, the pub doors open, and the dog punters rise almost as one. I leave with them and wait on the opposite side of the street for Rees to reel out in his own time. He will make his way to the barge, just as he did yesterday and the day before. I follow his reflec
tion in a shop window as he glances anxiously up and down the pavements. Someone must have rattled his cage and it doesn’t take much effort to deduce who that someone might be. But you’re all right, Goronwy, no one else is following you today. Off he goes, limping along the crowded pavement, and in a hundred yards or so he will turn left on to Old Church Street then right on to Chelsea Embankment, where he will cross to the riverside.

  The Reeses are struggling. Hand to mouth since he was forced from his post at Aberystwyth University for writing his scurrilous pieces for the People. Berlin gave me an address in Kensington, but that flat’s gone, the car too. They’re just one step ahead of the taxman. Poor Margie. She was quite the innocent when she fell in love with Rees. As I listened to them promise to forsake all others, I knew she could have no real inkling of the unstable, undependable, pleasure-loving egomaniac and philanderer she was promising to love and honour and obey for a lifetime. ‘Extremely unwise,’ I remember Burgess observing, ‘a foolish step,’ and now Margie is living in a leaky houseboat just a few yards from Battersea Bridge, and if the Revenue comes calling they may have to slip the mooring and drift out to sea.

  ‘You!’ she says, when she sees me at the bottom of the gangway.

  ‘Hello, Margie.’

  She’s so shocked she covers her mouth. I don’t hear what she says next, only her frustration.

  ‘You look well,’ I say. (Margie is an English rose.)

  ‘He isn’t here.’

  ‘I know he is’ – and to prove me right and his poor Margie wrong the cussed man calls from the cabin of the tub, ‘What have you done with Encounter?’

  Margie takes a step closer and almost loses her footing on the mildewed deck. ‘Steady!’ I shout, more for his benefit than hers.

  ‘You people. Why don’t you leave us alone?’

  Too late. A deck hatch thuds open and Rees’s head, with its tangle of white hair, pops up, like a dummy from a ventriloquist’s box. ‘Who is it, darling?’

  ‘Vaughan,’ she says. ‘Harry Vaughan.’

  His head disappears at once, and a few seconds later I hear him clumping up to the deck. Margie refuses to look at me. I am Oxford and Bentinck Street, I am other girls and Guy, I am the Service, above all I am a Welshman – Cymro dw I – and she has no love for us, excepting Goronwy. ‘Darling’ – she takes his arm – ‘you don’t have to speak to him.’