Witchfinder

by Andrew Williams

  ‘There are other candidates,’ Wright observes, ‘but for now the Harts must be our number-one suspects. J-JACK and ROSA may be at the centre of a new ring – an Oxford ring.’

  Elsa’s in our drawing room – she calls it that – feet on the couch, a glass of gin on an arm, but she’s still in the black coat and light blue scarf she wore for work. She has set a fire to take the edge off the room, but it’s stuttering as badly as Peter Wright. It’s the sort of thing she should leave for someone familiar with life below stairs (me).

  ‘If I get it going, will you make love to me?’

  Her smile is its own season. ‘If you promise to keep me warm. Shall I pour you a drink?’

  ‘No, stay where you are.’

  I take off my jacket, crouch in front of the grate and begin to build again, and as I work she tells me of her day and her new minister, Mr Healey, who is a funny and civilised man. ‘He reads,’ she says. ‘His favourite poets are Yeats and Auden. I told him my husband was a friend of Dylan Thomas, and he launched into a poem. I can only remember a phrase – mercy of his means?’

  ‘From Fern Hill. Oh, as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,/ Time held me green and dying,/ Though I sang in my chains like the sea.’ I shuffle across to her on my knees and place a sooty finger on her nose. ‘My love.’

  29

  THE GIRLS ARE with their mother and the golfer at Christmas. We do what we must with Elsa’s family in Oxfordshire, where the mahogany is polished to the surface of a mirror, and so is the silver, the Christmas tree from the estate is decked with real candles, the parish choir sings in the hall, and generations of the Spears family look down from the walls at me.

  ‘My son-in-law is something in the Foreign Office’ is how old man Spears introduces me to his guests. Twenty at table on Christmas Day: two lords a-leaping, a Conservative MP banging on about the socialists in the BBC, tipsy ladies dancing and falling (‘A bit rum,’ someone says), and the maids serve goose and partridge. Elsa says, ‘Be good,’ so even when all agree the country is going to the dogs under Labour, I sip Daddy’s fine wine and say nothing to provoke, only imagine serving them a generous helping of Burgess at his mischievous best.

  When we’re alone I grumble, and Elsa says I’m tribal, that her father and his friends have a point. Labour has slapped 15 per cent on all imported goods, except food; it can’t make up its mind whether to join the Common Market or how to meet the challenge of colour television, Concorde, rocket development, and defence. It says it wants to keep the country in the economic big league but doesn’t seem to have any idea how to do so. ‘You sound like a civil servant,’ I say.

  ‘Because I respect people who get things done,’ she replies belligerently.

  We drive to the Black Mountains for New Year and stay in the guesthouse at Llanthony Priory. It was recommended by one of Elsa’s friends as a place of pilgrimage for poets and walkers, but the gale whistles into our room in the west tower, the mattress is shot, the dressing-table mirror cracked, and there’s bugger-all to do but imagine the view of the hillside. ‘When the mist lifts we’ll walk,’ she says on the first day, then again on the next. But the rain keeps rolling over the Vale of Ewyas, and by New Year’s Eve she is coughing like a horse and feels too rotten to move to somewhere cheerier. Turning the sheet under her chin, I ask, ‘Which of your friends do we have to thank for this recommendation, cariad? I’ll send them a postcard.’

  ‘Jenifer came here before the war.’

  ‘Jenifer with one n?’

  ‘Harry?’ Elsa has caught a note of concern in my voice. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Here. Drink this,’ and I reach for the hot toddy I’ve prescribed from the bar.

  ‘Now, what is it?’

  I put my hand on her brow to check her temperature. ‘You must rest.’

  ‘Don’t fob me off!’ She’s exhausted and close to tears. ‘Come on!’

  I should say, ‘I can’t tell you,’ but she knows I break the rules when I want to. I’m tired too, and my only resolution for the new year is to hold on to the best of my life lying here beside me; and the light has gone, the rain rattles the window, and I’m trapped in this cell with only steak pie and beer for supper, which I’ll have to eat alone. I roll on to my side and look down into her dark eyes and say, ‘Peter Wright seems to think Jenifer and Herbert are spies.’

  ‘No!’ Struggling to her elbow sets her coughing again.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I say, rubbing her back. But she won’t listen. She won’t rest until she learns more, and when I tell her the intelligence came from Phoebe Pool she begins coughing again with a vengeance. I settle her on a mountain of pillows and insist she drink a little more of the toddy. When she’s able, she says Phoebe doesn’t have a political bone in her body, and that Blunt must have put her up to it. ‘Art and books, that’s all she cares about, Harry. She isn’t a Communist.’

  ‘And Jenifer-one-n?’

  Elsa frowns. ‘Political with a small p. We all were. She went on a summer camp for unemployed workers and had an affair with a milkman there. I remember laughing because he was the camp cook with a tent to himself, so disappearing for sex was easy.’ She smiles and reaches out to stroke my face. ‘Perhaps she was a Communist, but not a spy.’

  I take her hand from my cheek and kiss the palm. We should be candid with each other about the past. This is the time. But there have been many times in the seventeen years we’ve been lovers, and even now as it threatens to catch up with us both I can’t bring myself to ask her. And perhaps it’s right to let another opportunity pass, and it’s too late for that sort of conversation. Instead I say, ‘You see the problem?’

  She laughs, but not in a nice way. ‘My two best friends at university are suspected of being traitors?’

  ‘So, you say nothing, you know nothing,’ and I place my finger on her lips.

  ‘I know,’ she says, brushing it away, ‘but I don’t believe it. What is the point of this investigation? I thought you were trying to find out if someone tipped off Philby. The Harts are academics and have been for years.’

  ‘I’m afraid we’re way beyond that, cariad.’

  New Year’s Day: I leave her sleeping and drive into the Valleys. I don’t know what I’m hoping to find there. I feel like a city sightseer in Elsa’s toy car, the sort of person who might describe the rows of sooty two-ups-two-downs, the chapels, pit heads and slag heaps as ‘rum’. I came to Merthyr Tydfil as a student one summer to help run a workers’ education course. The iron and steel works had closed a decade before, the furnace fires that gave birth to the town were cold, and the men had nothing to do but drink and fight, and if the slum they used to call ‘Little Hell’ was history, you didn’t have to look hard for barefoot coal-hole poverty. I had enough empathy to be angry, and enough hope to believe I would be one of those who would change things for the better. I took that anger and hope back to Oxford, where a few weeks later I met Rees and his friends and listened to their vision of a caring society, and I answered the call to the barricades to fight capitalism and Fascism.

  Driving on to Maerdy, I park the car opposite number 72 Oxford Street, where forty years ago the breadwinner, the rent-payer, was my father Jack Vaughan, 30, coal miner-hewer. Where’s Oxford, Tad? I asked him once.

  He laughed. ‘A long way from here, boy.’ Gazing at our grey-stone home in the middle of a row of grey-stone homes, I wonder if the mine owners were having a joke at our expense, or if they chose to name our street after the city of dreaming spires because we could barely imagine such a place – like the city of God – Seion in Welsh – which was the name the elders chose for the barren barnlike chapel Mum took me to on Sundays. Yes, Oxford Street, a reminder to us all that there was – is – an order to things on earth too, a shining city in England for the elect, where an entitled few learn to govern the many. I was a small miracle, because it was easier for a miner’s son to pass through the eye of a needle than go to Oxford.

  Word is getting abo
ut and kids are gathering to run their fingers along the bodywork of the car and ask me questions I can’t answer about the engine. I lift the smallest behind the wheel and while he plays – ‘Dwylo! Leave the gear stick, will you!’ – I gaze up the valley at the drams in the sidings and the colliery winding gear and the slag mountain that has grown fifty feet in the years that have passed since I left my first home. Tad’s down the valley beside Mum in Ferndale cemetery, not far from the graves of the men who perished in the pit explosion of 1885. Tad used to tell me how his father, my grandfather, helped to dig out the bodies and that one of them was his own brother. It was my grandfather who took me to my first political meeting in the working-men’s hall just around the corner from our house. I was about ten and the main speaker was Arthur Horner, the miners’ leader and one of the founder members of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

  Aunt Brenda is still in North Terrace, as close to Maerdy colliery as it’s possible to be without drawing a wage. I’m the university nephew she boasts about but doesn’t want to see. I knock on her door all the same, and she welcomes me with a peck on the cheek and shows me into the front room, because I’m too smart in my Jermyn Street shoes and shirt and my brown suede car coat for the kitchen table – that’s for proper family. We drink tea and I listen to her stories. Cousin Ivo is still at the pit, Cousin Frank has moved to another. ‘How is Frank?’ I say, struggling to put a face and facts to the name. There are more cousins further down the valley and in Cardiff, and one called Jean is working in a branch of Woolworths in London. Brenda knows they’re nothing more than names to me, and because this is Maerdy and not ‘polite’ Chelsea, she says so. ‘It was a pit-tee you left us, ’Arry,’ she says, her voice the sing-song of the Valleys. ‘Your Anti Elen did her best, I suppose – wasn’t what your mother would have want-ed, though.’ She pauses. ‘You weren’t at Elen’s fu-ner-al, were you?’

  Brenda isn’t curious about my kids, my wife, or my work, so when she has said all she wants to say I take my leave. Only before I go she shows me into her back room, crowded with cheap furniture and photographs of babies, and against one of the walls is my mum’s old piano. The brass candle fittings have gone, the corners and edges are chipped white, the lid has split and there are heat rings in the varnish, because for twenty years it has served as a sideboard. I sit and play ‘Cwm Rhondda’ but there are so many loose and broken strings the tune is unrecognisable. Mum taught me the notes and she would accompany my father, who was a decent baritone, and now this wreck that was once their pride and joy is all that’s left of that time. Brenda wants rid of it and she says that if I would like it for sentiment’s sake it’s mine. I thank her, but it is beyond saving.

  I drive back in the grey dusk and climb the spiral staircase to our room in the monastery tower, where Sister Elsa is still in bed but feeling better, and I tell her of my visit to the village and Brenda and Mum’s old piano, and she strokes my cheek with the back of her hand and kisses me sweetly. ‘It’s upset you. Don’t let it,’ she says. ‘You’ve changed. We all have.’

  1965

  30

  6 March 1965

  MAURICE RINGS TO warn me that Angleton is in town to offer advice and assistance. ‘And he’s booked a table at Wheeler’s to celebrate your birthday,’ he says.

  I wonder whether Angleton has the date from Maurice or from a file he keeps on me. In any case, I’m obliged to ring Elsa and postpone our champagne evening.

  ‘But not the sex,’ I say. ‘I’ll be home in time for that.’

  ‘No champagne, no music, nooo sex,’ she says, her tongue in her cheek. ‘But there’s always tomorrow.’

  Wheeler’s is a bohemian sort of place. We are obliged to sit as tight as sardines round two square tables pushed together. My birthday, but Angleton’s party, so Martin is there, nipping at a whisky, and Wright. I watch him smooth the scruffy fringe of grey hair round his bald pate then wipe a bead of sweat from his upper lip with a forefinger. Maurice is straining over his belly to lean close enough to hear our host’s quiet voice. And Angleton sits in a tub chair on my right, his face pinched and raddled by booze and cigarettes, insomnia and paranoia, yet handsome in a tired intense way. As always, he’s immaculately dressed in a black wool three-piece, white shirt and college tie.

  We start with pleasantries, even a toast to me. I’m on my third glass of wine and our main course has just arrived when he introduces the ‘trouble with your Service’ conversation, which is the real purpose of our dinner. Morale is low, you’re struggling for direction, he says, and it’s the fault of those at the top. ‘It’s two years now since Philby tripped off to Moscow and the mole who tipped him off is still in place.’

  ‘We don’t know that, Jim,’ says Maurice.

  ‘Maurice, we do. I’m meeting your boss tomorrow. I’m gonna warn him that failure to deal with the penetration of both your Services is compromising the security of my country too.’ He sips his drink, and I’m suddenly conscious of the sound of people genuinely enjoying themselves. ‘I’m going to ask Dick to make this a joint operation. You boys don’t have the resources you need for your FLUENCY investigation. We have a good man at our station in London and I want him to work with you. What do you say?’

  Wright is nodding, and Martin mutters, ‘I agree,’ because they cooked this up with Angleton days ago – I don’t doubt it – and they’re here to persuade the deputy chief of the Secret Intelligence Service to support it too.

  Everyone is looking at Maurice, who has a forkful of fish hovering inches from his mouth. I know he won’t be happy but he’s a politician, and I’m not surprised when he passes the buck to me. ‘Harry?’

  I think it’s a bloody disastrous idea. Angleton’s man in London would be just the first through the door, followed by God knows how many, until we belong to the CIA. But I say, ‘Help is always welcome. Have you discussed this with the director general of the Security Service, Jim?’

  He gazes at me impassively, then picks up his cigarettes. ‘We must try harder to recruit a KGB officer, perhaps here in London, but it doesn’t matter where, just as long as he is able to identify the mole in British intelligence.’

  ‘Then I can take it that no one has raised the possibility with Sir Roger.’

  Because it’s plain from his evasion that Hollis doesn’t have a clue, and our dinner and Angleton’s meeting with Dick tomorrow are an attempt to sew up a new role for the CIA in the service before the DG has a chance to call, ‘Foul.’ I try to catch Maurice’s eye, but he is still concentrating intently on stripping his fish. He clearly has no intention of committing himself to anything at Wheeler’s. ‘Will you excuse me?’ I say, rising from the table.

  I’m standing at the urinal when the door opens and Angleton steps up to the stall to my left. He doesn’t speak or look at me, only does what he’s supposed to do. But I make a point of staring. ‘Hello, Jim.’

  ‘Harry,’ he replies, his gaze fixed on the bright white tiles a few inches from his face.

  ‘You’ve certainly got it in for Roger.’

  ‘No, Harry.’

  ‘Trying to sew this up behind his back? I suppose you recognise our confusion as an opportunity to take control. Turn us into an outpost of Washington.’

  ‘Don’t you think Sir Roger has some questions to answer? Why has he refused to authorise the interrogation of Graham Mitchell?’

  ‘Because he hasn’t seen a shred of credible evidence against him.’ I turn to wash my hands. ‘Tell me, Jim, do you have it in for me too?’

  He takes his time. I watch him in the mirror as he finishes his pee, then steps up to the basin next to mine. ‘Really, Harry, is this necessary?’ he says at last. ‘It’s your birthday.’

  ‘Yes. You arranged that stunt in Vienna. “OTTO sends his regards.” OTTO the Soviet illegal. Burgess’s friend. Philby’s controller.’

  I try to make eye contact in the mirror, but he is concentrating very hard on soaping his bony hands. ‘That was your message, Jim.�
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  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did they make a pass at you?’

  ‘No. You did. Comrade Erich was working for you. You were testing me. I want to know why you?’

  ‘You’re paranoid, Harry,’ he says, dropping a hand towel into the laundry bin.

  I laugh. ‘That’s rich.’

  ‘You need a holiday. Perhaps with your wife. Elsa, isn’t it? I understand she works at your defence ministry.’ He wants to leave but I’m standing in his way. ‘We should get back to the others,’ he says, glancing at his watch and shuffling towards me.

  ‘Did you plan your game in Vienna with Peter?’

  The door opens and we’re no longer alone.

  ‘Guilty conscience?’ he whispers, and his shoulder brushes mine. ‘See you back up there.’

  The following afternoon Maurice rings me to arrange a meeting at his club, and in a corner of its smoking room he warns me Angleton is through the gate. No minutes were taken of the meeting because Dick doesn’t want anyone to see it in black and white, but giving the CIA access to FLUENCY has set us on a slippery slope: he is sacrificing the independence of the Service.

  ‘The chief doesn’t know Jim like I do,’ says Maurice. ‘I tell you, Harry, we are going to regret this piece of business for a long time.’

  Angleton meets his disciples twice more before he returns to Washington. I know because Wright tells me with the satisfied smile of a one-time technician who knows he’s now running the largest mole hunt in the history of the Service. Colleagues pass him in the corridor with a wary glance: they know something’s afoot. FLUENCY is supposed to be secret, but it’s impossible to hide the new desks and bodies in D3. And the names of those my colleagues deem to be ‘worthy of further investigation’ roll in by the day. There’s a little list. I even offer a name or two of my own: Maurice says I must or Dick will find an excuse to replace me.

  Dylan Thomas used to say he held a beast, an angel and a madman inside. Dylan was a great poetic soul. I hold the mad-man at bay because Maurice trusts me, because I’m a member of the investigation team, because Elsa loves me, and my children are ready to give me a second chance. But Rees is never far from my mind. Rees, who has more of the beast and the madman than the angel. Rees is on the FLUENCY list. The Harts are on the list, and some Oxford professors, Berlin and Hampshire, Zaehner and Bowra. The members of the Communist Party’s historians group – Hill at Oxford, Hobsbawm and Thompson at Cambridge – are on the list. Civil servants – thirty so far – including the permanent secretary at Fuel and Power (‘Classic Cambridge Communist,’ says Wright). A couple of soldiers, a sailor, and rich men like Burgess’s friend Rothschild are on the list. Scientists and art historians – Phoebe Pool – are on the list. Trade-union leaders, of course, and, most sensitive of all, the politicians. No one dares talk of Wilson, but his cabinet … There are six ministers including the man charged with responsibility for the defence of the realm, Denis Healey, and Members of Parliament, like Tom Driberg and Bernard Floud, who was at university with my wife.