Witchfinder

by Andrew Williams

  ‘You see,’ she says. ‘How can I?’

  Poor Nina must bear the war guilt of the nation on her slight shoulders.

  The next morning there’s a pavement artist outside my flat. He may be Russian, he may be Czech or German. It’s a long time since this sort of attention was routine, and the timing is troubling, just as we’re preparing to reel in an asset. Outside the embassy, two more goons in a blue Citroën, and there’s a clumsy shift change at four o’clock, from which I conclude they’re either very poor actors or they want me to be aware of their presence. I consider discussing them with the young station chief but only for a moment. As Marx (Groucho) said, ‘He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you: he really is an idiot.’ I take a gun home instead, and check my bolts and locks, and when it’s time to leave for the rendezvous with Hoffmann I use the fire escape at the rear.

  The air is thick with the rich beer of autumn decay. A Friday morning in October, and there are very few visitors to the gardens, only a work gang clearing leaves from the gravel. I wander between knee-high hedges and parterres with my guidebook, pretending to read about the palace, painted fresh cream and white, the nymphs and cherubs and sphinxes restored to their plinths after the ravages of war. From the first formal garden, I turn on to a path between high hedges and walk into the woods on the fringe of the park. Hoffmann has chosen to meet me beside an ornamental pond with fat Muscovy ducks preening at its edge. It’s a poor place for a rendezvous and I wonder for the first time if the clerk is being used as bait to lure someone from the Service into a trap – me. This isn’t the old Austria of kidnappings and killings that I remember from the forties, but every now and then it happens.

  An elderly man – late sixties or seventies – is walking towards the water’s edge with the air of someone who is familiar with this place. He has a thin face and a grey Lenin beard, and his clothes, brown suit and fawn cardigan, have seen much better days. From a string bag he takes some crusts and struggles with arthritic fingers to crumble them into pieces. I amble closer and he raises his chin and stares across the slime at me. With a jolt I realise he isn’t here for the ducks but for me.

  ‘Hoffmann can’t come, Herr Vaughan.’ His voice is military and from somewhere in the east. ‘But I have come.’

  My fingers close round the gun in my coat pocket. ‘And who are you?’

  He slides his palms together to dust off the breadcrumbs – ‘Now I will sit’ – and, turning his back to me, he walks over to a bench. ‘Join me, please. I have something for you,’ and he reaches into his jacket.

  ‘Steady!’

  ‘You are quite safe. A letter. May I?’ And he pinches an envelope from his pocket. ‘From Otto.’

  ‘Yah, of course. How is Otto?’

  ‘He’s worried about you.’

  ‘Good old Otto.’

  My new friend leans forward to offer the envelope. ‘Please.’

  But I’ve written dozens of captions for pictures of men exchanging packages in parks, and I’m quite sure his photographer is waiting with a lens the length of my arm to snap another. ‘You read it to me.’

  He raises a thin grey eyebrow. ‘If you insist.’

  ‘Oh, I do.’

  I watch him slit the envelope with a tobacco-stained nail, then adjust his gold-framed glasses. ‘Otto writes: I send this with an old comrade, Erich – I am Erich. Herr Vaughan, your friend Guy spoke of you often. He believed you to be a socialist and a man of peace, and that you would understand the choice he made. It has been so many years, but the struggle is not over, nor your part in it, Comrade.’

  Erich raises his gaze from the letter to study my face.

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘No, Herr Vaughan. Otto wants to meet you, here in Vienna.’ His eyes run down the letter. Then he slips it back inside his jacket. ‘The investigation in London … he is concerned for your safety.’

  That makes me smile. ‘Otto who recruited Guy and our other Cambridge comrades, yes? He was good, wasn’t he?’

  Erich frowns. ‘Herr Vaughan …’

  ‘But Otto’s dead.’ I get to my feet. ‘Purged. Consumed by his revolution. An enemy of the people in the end.’

  ‘Otto doesn’t matter,’ he says.

  ‘You’re quite right. A bourgeois individualist. So was Guy, by the way.’

  ‘Please sit, Herr Vaughan, we must talk.’

  ‘And, Comrade, your research … I never met or spoke to Otto. Be sure to tell whoever sent you that.’

  ‘Please’ – he’s on his feet too – ‘please take this telephone number.’

  But I’m walking away, escaping, Muscovy ducks croaking and flapping from my path. Erich isn’t KGB. Erich’s a fraud – that really does frighten me.

  Nevertheless, it’s the KGB story I report to London: HOFFMANN BURNED. KGB SEDUCTION. ADVANCES REJECTED.

  And London acknowledges. In more enterprising times it would have turned me into a fake defector and ‘dangled’ me at the KGB – only it wasn’t the KGB. Perhaps, Dick, you knew.

  By the evening the pavement artists have gone from my street, from the Casa Nova, too. All the same, I keep the gun.

  Harold Wilson promises ‘fresh and virile leadership’, more houses, better health, better education, that everything will be better in a ‘new Britain’. ‘But it’s too close to call,’ Elsa says, when I ring her on the eve of the vote, ‘and never mind Wilson – what about you? What about us? When are you are coming home?’

  The ambassador throws a party for embassy staff on election night and snap reports from the constituencies are run from the communications room to the ballroom. There should be excitement, but it is an entirely dreary affair. The crystal chandeliers are too magnificent, diplomats too careful. The evening is the usual painful waltz from group to group: ‘You have a daughter at Cheltenham Ladies? How nice!’

  At midnight the ambassador announces he’s retiring to his bed to be fresh enough to wrestle with the diplomatic implications of the result, and the embassy sheep stampede after him. I manage to shut the gate on a couple of the livelier third secretaries. ‘You can’t go before we know it,’ I say, taking the seat at the ballroom grand, ‘and a party isn’t over until I sing.’

  ‘Do you know anything by the Kinks?’ someone says.

  ‘Hum a tune, and I’ll improvise.’

  But the station duty officer closes the lid on my fingers before I have a chance. ‘You’d better look at this, Harry,’ he says, and hands me a wire from Moscow. The leader of the Soviet Union has ‘asked to be relieved of his duties’. Nikita Khrushchev has gone. Pushed. Because first secretaries of the Communist Party don’t walk away from power.

  ‘Will the world be safer?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘Where were you when the balloon nearly went up in Cuba, Harry?’

  I send the duty officer to the ambassador and the head of station and order another bottle of wine, because the man who took us to the brink of nuclear annihilation in the missile crisis of ’62 is leaving the world stage.

  The ambassador appears as I’m entertaining the last of the party people with my sleazy version of the Soviet national anthem. He declares it to be in ‘very poor taste’. We are still discussing the implications of the Kremlin coup when we learn of white smoke in London: it’s Wilson! Harold has sneaked into Number 10 with a four-seat majority.

  The ambassador asks me why I’m laughing, and I would love to tell him just for the expression on his face: Your Excellency, CIA Counter-intelligence believes a Soviet spy is now running the country.

  Late afternoon, and Friday traffic is bumper to bumper in the street outside the embassy. I’m writing a note for the ambassador on the situation in the Kremlin when the young station chief puts his head around the door. ‘What do we know about this new chap, Brezhnev?’

  ‘Ukrainian. A political commissar with the Red Army during the war, and a protégé of Khrushchev: this is a stab in the back.’


  ‘Ah,’ he says.

  ‘It’s all in my note to the ambassador.’

  ‘Right.’

  Half in, half out of my tiny office, he blinks at me through tortoiseshell-framed spectacles, apparently lost for words. My friend, I want to tell you this: it isn’t too late to look for an honest job in the civil service or business, or as ambassador to a small African republic – only if I say so you are certain to take offence. ‘Well, is there anything else?’

  ‘Oh, yes, there’s something from London,’ and he passes me a coded wire.

  ‘Do I need to get the book out or are you going to tell me?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you do,’ he says, with a sixth-form smirk. ‘They want you home tout de suite.’

  27

  24 October 1964

  A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN in an emerald green dress and matching shoes is waiting for me in Arrivals. She has changed her hair to a thick shoulder-length curl, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, and when she removes her dark glasses I see she’s done something with her eyebrows too.

  ‘You look ravishing.’

  She smiles mischievously and reaches for the lapel of my jacket. ‘No ravishing at the airport.’

  ‘But I can kiss you.’ I’m too delirious with happiness to care that we’re creating a scene. ‘I love you.’

  We motor into London in her Sprite and Elsa shouts across the noise of its engine, ‘Well, how did you manage it?’

  ‘Change of thinking, cariad. You can thank Mr Wilson.’

  I can see she isn’t inclined to thank anyone. ‘You promised to take the job at the Economist.’

  ‘I will. Soon.’

  ‘What’s wrong with now?’

  ‘Loose ends. Something they need me to do.’

  She glances at me. ‘Is that true? I think you’re afraid to leave.’

  I lean sideways and try to kiss her cheek, and she pushes me away. ‘Harry! We’re going to crash.’

  The following day – Sunday – Maurice Oldfield rings me at home and proposes we meet at his club.

  ‘It’s your first day back,’ says Elsa. ‘What about your girls? They’re only here for a few hours.’

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘What’s so important it can’t wait for Monday morning?’ She sounds anxious.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s just how Maurice likes to do things.’

  A chat with whisky in convivial surroundings is how my life in the Service began, and I imagine it will end the same way. I’m glad it’s with Moulders because he’s a civilised man with secrets of his own. Dick has called him from Washington to make him his deputy, which is just about the only sensible thing Dick’s done since Philby set us chasing our tails.

  The Athenaeum Club is a shining white neoclassical temple dedicated to gentlemen of learning and those with good connections who pretend to it. Lest anyone doubt the serious intent of its founders, there is a gold statue of the goddess of wisdom over the portico, and beneath the cornice, a blue and white frieze of the marbles stolen from the Parthenon by a disreputable member of a less worthy London club. Moulders is a farm-boy scholar, quite comfortable with clever people, but silver-spoon Kim was a member of the Athenaeum too, and even his friends say he’s a philistine.

  Maurice is waiting on the staircase beneath a marble statue of the naked Apollo. I’m sure no one in the club enjoys a finer appreciation of his divine physique. He greets me warmly but awkwardly, like a teenager on a first date, then leads me into the Morning Room where we sit by a Sunday-in-autumn fire. The steward brings us whisky, and only when we’ve finished our first and the usual pleasantries does Maurice lean over his broad thighs and say, ‘Dick wants you to know the file’s closed. There’s to be no mention of OATSHEAF.’

  ‘That’s understood.’

  To be sure it is, he stares at me through his large black-framed glasses, like one of the club’s illustrious scientists inspecting a specimen. ‘So,’ he says, when he’s satisfied, ‘welcome back to the fold. How long has it been? Three months?’

  ‘Longer. I’m not counting paperclips, Maurice. I want a proper job, my old job.’

  ‘PETERS?’

  ‘It needs someone like me.’

  ‘Oh, you think so?’ Maurice strokes the roll of fat beneath his chin where his neck used to be. ‘Then you should know there have been changes. There’s a new working party, FLUENCY, and Peter Wright’s in charge. I don’t suppose you consider that a change for the better.’

  ‘What happened to Arthur Martin?’

  ‘Sacked for insubordination. He just about accused the director general of working for the Russians.’ He pauses. ‘I imagine you think ransacking Roger’s desk is an act of insubordination too … I advise you to forget it.’

  ‘Does Roger know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Dick wants me to forget a lot.’

  ‘Those are his terms. Martin’s gone, he doesn’t want to lose them both – Jim Angleton won’t wear it. You’re back because I persuaded Dick you should be – not just me, by the way, Roger wants you inside the investigation, too.’ He smirks and leans forward to poke my knee with a forefinger. ‘Surprise you?’

  I admit it does.

  ‘Roger knows you aren’t impressed by the case against Mitchell.’

  ‘Are you?’

  He ignores me. ‘We need clear thinking, because Dick wants to turn the Service inside out – investigate every discrepancy, no matter how small, every lead, every half-baked supposition, every suspicious incident in the history of Soviet intelligence in this country.’

  ‘Sounds like a purge?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it that … yet. But it is a troubling time.’

  ‘With a paranoiac in charge here and on the other side of the Atlantic.’

  ‘Those are C’s orders. That’s what he wants.’ Maurice takes off his glasses and pinches the corners of his eyes. ‘How’s Elsa?’

  ‘Fine, Maurice. Fine. Thank you.’

  ‘Still in Whitehall?’

  He knows she is. ‘Yes. What are you trying to …?’

  ‘C doesn’t want this in Whitehall.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ I say, doing my best to sound aggrieved at the suggestion. ‘Or the politicians – the prime minister to know …’

  Slipping his glasses back, he leans over his knees and gazes at me. ‘Well, Harry, that isn’t your concern.’

  For the first time in twenty years I feel a need to dress my office with things that will take me from the corners and corridors of the Service. I arrive in Curzon Street with a box of photographs of Elsa and the girls, pebbles I’ve collected over the years from mountains and beaches, and the miner’s lamp from our bedroom.

  ‘N-n-nest-building?’

  ‘Something like that, Peter.’ I’ve been at my desk five minutes when he appears at the door.

  ‘T-to get things straight before the FLUENCY meeting,’ he says. ‘Well, after that nastiness … We have to be able to trust each other, Harry.’

  ‘That’s understood.’

  ‘We’re going to get to the bottom of this, Harry, even if we have to vet a generation.’

  ‘Right, Peter.’

  He looks at me in his corner-of-the-eye way. ‘You know, FLUENCY is going to be painful for some of us. P-p-people we’ve known for years have some tough questions to answer. But we can’t shy away from that, Harry.’

  I nod philosophically. Wright is Dick’s new man now: what can his old one do?

  There are seven of us at the FLUENCY committee table. Evelyn sits on Wright’s left, pulling a loose thread from her shawl; to her right, young Alice Shepherd, and Patrick Stewart, the new head of investigations at MI5 – he’s in a wheelchair. On my side of the table, Terence Lecky from Counter-espionage at MI6, and his deputy, Hinton. Wright has just told us this is a solemn moment, and we’re all wearing our Sunday chapel faces, the ones we will offer to you, Lord, at the Day of Judgment. And he begins with a homily: FLUENCY will investigate anyone who so
much as gave the Cambridge spies the time of day. FLUENCY will trawl the files for old Communists who might lead us to agents still active. FLUENCY will examine the testimony of defectors again for clues that might help us identify the mole at the top of Counter-intelligence, code name ELLI. Lecky interrupts him: ‘Mitchell is still chief suspect?’

  ‘One of them …’ says Wright.

  ‘Who are the others?’

  ‘Well, we’ll c-c-come to that, Terence.’

  Wright isn’t ready to name the DG at our first meeting. I’m sure he likes a white rabbit as much as the rest of us but he’s careful too. He’ll take his time, raise the possibility as an impossibility that must be investigated, then work on us in a series of smoke-filled one-to-ones.

  ‘We know a R-R-Ring of Five was at the centre of everything, and that it recruited other rings. I would like to make a little prediction,’ says Wright smugly. ‘Half the spies we catch are hiding in our files, we just n-need to look at them more closely.’ He touches a pen to his lips. ‘We have a lead: a woman called Pool acted as Blunt’s courier in the thirties, not only to his pals in C-Cambridge but to Party members in Oxford, too.’

  I gaze across the table at Evelyn, who is careful not to catch my eye but raises a hand to the purple birthmark on her face. And just that gesture tells me she knows Pool is a connection to my wife.

  ‘I don’t need to r-r-remind you,’ says Wright, ‘that we proceed with caution. Strict protocols. We don’t want to offer government an excuse to interfere. L-let’s keep this out of the hands of the politicians … the socialists.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ says Stewart, and the others nod like fairground ducks poked by a stick.

  The first chance I get I step out for air. I feel an enervating sense of foreboding. FLUENCY is going to be just what I expected it to be. Protect and Survive is what the civil-defence bods urge us to do if they drop a bomb – it seems apposite. I want to crawl under the kitchen table until it’s over and drag my wife with me.