I light another cigarette and rise. What the hell are we doing? Dick, my friend, this is your fault for trusting a sensitive investigation to Angleton’s creatures. Vietnam to Billericay, the Reds are everywhere. If they bring Hollis down none of us are safe. My mum was a good Christian woman and she liked to say, what goes around comes around; there’s a balance in the order of things. Most people believe something of the sort and have done since we ran around in skins. They have faith in a great system of cosmic justice. I don’t share that faith. Too many men get away with murder. In the Service you must learn to make peace with your conscience, but I can only consider the lines on my face with equanimity if I’m able to tell the mirror they are the cares of one who fights for liberty and decency and democracy. And I’ll fight this coup, this witch-hunt, inside the circle and, yes, outside it too, if necessary.
The shutters are open and there are no lights on in the house, so I assume Elsa is still dining with her senior civil-service colleagues. But her black wool coat and silver grey scarf are draped over a chair in the hall. I call to her and she doesn’t reply, so I sit at the piano in our little drawing room and play, and I’m too caught up in the music and the memories it evokes to hear her enter. ‘More nostalgia,’ she says, because she knows ‘Let’s Sing Again’ reminds me of my mother.
‘I was thinking of her.’
She kisses my neck and I reach up to stroke her hair. ‘Pleasant evening?’
‘Not really,’ she says. ‘You?’
‘No, but things are clearer.’
She leans back to look at me carefully. ‘Hum. That sounds, well, ominous. Is it something Maurice said?’
‘Something he didn’t say.’
‘Are you going to explain?’
‘I don’t think so.’ I give her a reassuring smile. ‘Don’t worry. Hawdd yw hi, I fod yn ddewr o tu nôl i mur.’
She laughs, then kisses my forehead. ‘All right, Merlin, and what does that mean?’
‘That it is easy to be brave behind a wall. But sometimes one has to step out from it.’
32
21 June 1965
THE LAST OF the Service Cavaliers are at Lord’s for the Test against New Zealand, the family men at boarding-school prize days and the regatta at Henley, and the smart young ladies who fetch and carry in the Registry are planning their holidays in the country or on the Riviera, and if they meet the right chap on the tennis court or by the pool they may never return. End of the summer term with just the headmaster’s report on FLUENCY to come, and while Dick considers how far he is going to push the knife into Roger’s back, Wright and his wife are sailing off the coast near their home in Essex. Evelyn is still at her desk, of course, and will be all summer, her tatty shawl about her shoulders even as the temperature touches ninety in the office. She is playing with a corner of it, like a small child with a comfort blanket.
‘Change your mind about him?’ she asks.
‘No, cariad. Have you?’
Her hand strays from the shawl to the birthmark on her face. ‘I think Hollis is more likely to be ELLI.’
‘You were certain it was Mitchell a year ago.’
‘Counter-intelligence isn’t a science,’ she snaps. ‘Besides, Mitchell may be working to Hollis.’
‘On the golf course?’
No one I’ve met can scowl like Evelyn. I am tempted to duck her to see if she floats. Her eyes bore into me as I open the safe and choose the most recent of the dozen files that are the collected days of Graham Mitchell, code name PETERS. They are the record of his mutterings in the mirror and copies of his correspondence intercepted in our flap-and-seals operation at the post office, transcripts of his telephone conversations, a log of his movements, and the chicken-feed intelligence Martin offered him in the hope he would leak it to a Russian controller. Graham Mitchell, former deputy director general of MI5: this is your life. And there isn’t a shred of evidence in those hundreds of pieces that proves he’s working for the enemy. Still we persist. Special facilities are in place at his home, with bugs in the telephone, the drawing room and the master bedroom, and there are watchers at the house on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays. A4 doesn’t have enough men to offer round-the-clock surveillance. That anyone would think three days a week worthwhile only serves to demonstrate how sclerotic and fearful MI5 has become as it turns upon itself – and it’s the same across the river.
Mitchell lives with the stockbroker set in Surrey in a mock-Tudor house on a private road of houses built at the turn of the century. His home is comfortable but unremarkable, which I am sure was his intention when he bought the place. There’s a large garden with brick terraces and a tennis court, a stream and several acres of open woodland and pasture. The common where we spent the summer of ’63 waiting for him to meet the KGB is a couple of miles away.
To be sure I catch him I'll telephone him from Victoria but hang up when he answers. The traffic is terrible on the A316 and I don’t manage to reach Chobham until half past seven. I park Elsa’s little sports car a good way from his home and approach through the wood to be sure Monday is still a day of rest for the boys from A4 and no one has eyes on the house. Mitchell is on his hands and knees digging something into a bed with a trowel.
‘Hello, Graham.’
‘For God’s sake, man!’ He almost jumps out of his skin. He looks tanned or windblown from sailing, and he’s put on weight, which is a good sign, because the last time I saw him he looked like a corpse. But his face is scored with deep lines that I don’t remember two years ago and I wonder if the cloud of suspicion that hangs over him has taken its toll.
‘Why are you here?’ He’s struggling to rise but I don’t offer my hand because he’s sensitive about his disability and would hate me to notice.
‘Unofficial.’
‘Of course. You would have rung the bell like a decent human being otherwise.’
‘Do you mind if we sit there?’ I say, pointing to a bench overlooking his pond.
‘So no one can see you from the house? Look, say what you want to say quickly and go.’
‘I’m afraid it’s going to take a little time.’ I walk over to the bench and Mitchell follows, and when we’re sitting side by side he removes his gardening gloves and throws them on the grass at my feet as if he’s issuing a challenge.
‘Well?’
‘How’s Pat?’
‘What do you want, Vaughan?’
‘There’s still SF in your home.’
‘You haven’t come here to tell me that?’
‘No. No, I haven’t.’ I offer him a cigarette and he refuses. I think he’d happily choke me with the packet – the last time we spoke he asked for help and, like the Levite, I passed by on the other side. ‘There’s a Welsh saying: Mae chwarae’n troi’n chwerw wrth chwarae hefo tân. Things turn bad when you play with fire. Well, C’s fire is burning out of control.’
‘Ha!’ he barks at me. ‘Are you worried about your own skin? Any idea what we’re going through here?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re not the first uninvited guest in my garden, you know. They don’t care to hide any more.’
I try to look sympathetic but I remember the relish with which he used to send the same goons from A Branch to burgle members of the British Communist Party. He used to say it was his finest hour.
‘I know you’ll help me, Graham, because we fought together and won, and that means something, and we knew what we were fighting for, but there are people in the Service now who don’t know.’
Mitchell leans forward with his elbows on his knees and gazes at the shimmering surface of the pond where the fish are rising in concentric circles.
‘I don’t owe the Service anything,’ he says, but with a note of resignation in his voice, ‘and what can I do now anyway?’
‘I’m not sure yet. Perhaps just listen.’
And he does, his hands clasped in a pious fist, thumbs to his lips, as he did on those rare occasions he was stumped by a
crossword in the Listener. I tell him his old colleague Blunt is a traitor, and the CIA is plotting a coup; the President of the United States knows everything and our prime minister nothing. Dick seems ready to throw Roger under a bus, and FLUENCY is collecting names for a great British purge.
‘Can I have that cigarette now?’ he says. ‘Roger Hollis is no more a traitor than I am, but I suppose you know that or you wouldn’t be here.’ He accepts a cigarette and a light from me and inhales deeply. ‘That’s better, yes. I’ve promised not to, but … The thing is, Roger was the first to suspect Blunt. “He’s the mole,” he said to me. “Blunt’s ELLI.” That was years ago, just after the war. He confronted Blunt, accused him to his face: “You’re ELLI.” Blunt denied it, of course. Do you think Angleton and Wright know that?’
‘I’m not sure they would care to. Wright despises Roger.’
‘And me?’
‘I think so. And you know how things stand between the DG and Arthur Martin. That wouldn’t amount to a row of beans if Dick wasn’t bending over backwards to please the CIA.’
Mitchell examines his cigarette, then puts it out on the bench even though he’s smoked only a fraction of it. ‘This CIA inquiry, Gray’s inquiry …’
‘My source says its conclusions were written before Gray set foot in the country. The American ambassador or Deputy Director Helms will take them to the prime minister and demand the head of Hollis as the price of future co-operation. That’s just the beginning. They want to reduce the Service to a CIA satellite.’
‘Harold Wilson won’t stand for that.’
‘And if they bring him down?’
Mitchell pulls a face. ‘I say, steady, Vaughan.’
‘Just a thought.’
‘It’s the sort of thing the Americans do in banana republics, not here.’
‘Of course you’re right. We have a special relationship, don’t we?’
Someone is calling from the house. ‘Hello. That’s Pat,’ he says.
‘I’d rather she didn’t see me, Graham.’
‘All right.’ With a hand to the bench he rises and limps towards the house. I light another cigarette and try to concentrate for a moment on the warmth and the song of a robin, and evening gold on the water. One day Elsa and I may move to a cottage and become thoroughly English, like Pat and Graham. Elsa will have a cuttings garden and I will … I will write a thriller.
‘You haven’t told me what you want me to do?’ Mitchell is back with two bottles of pale ale.
‘You’re still a member of the Royal Thames? Mr Duff will leave you a message.’ I take a slip of paper from my pocket. ‘When you hear from him, ring this number, seven o’clock sharp. Use the phone box at Chobham station.’
Mitchell passes a hand across his brow. ‘I don’t know what you’re planning … Will it sort things? Will they leave us alone?’
I don’t have the heart to say, ‘No.’
At our regular Thursday FLUENCY meeting we agree priorities. Now it’s official, Lecky and I are to concentrate on Hollis’s time in China in the thirties. Wright and the others will review his student days at Oxford and his career in the Service. As soon as the meeting’s over Wright catches a flight to Washington. I cross the river to speak to Maurice and, for the first time in months, he invites me to brief C in person. Keep it short and factual, is his advice, and I follow it to a T. No mention is made of our differences. He’s full of the boyish bonhomie that has served him so well. I imagine he’s the same with Hollis, and that he makes the same meaningless excuse for FLUENCY: ‘an unfortunate necessity’. I tell him ‘Peter’ is on his way to Langley, and he just nods. I could tell him a lot he doesn’t know about our transatlantic cousins and the report they’re writing for their president but I don’t want to spoil the surprise.
At home, Elsa hands me a postcard of a lovely thing in a pink bathing suit on the balcony of a Holiday Inn. She knows it’s a piece of ‘mischief’, and that ‘love Kathy’ is nobody and means nothing, but the message ‘looking forward to the party on 12 July’ means something, and so does the Washington postmark. ‘You’re not going to explain?’
‘No.’
‘Jack?’
‘No.’
‘Careless. Here, catch!’ She throws me some matches. ‘Jack should have sent you a cable.’
The following morning, Mr Duff leaves the message at Mitchell’s club.
33
10 July 1965
WE DRIVE TO Oxford for lunch with Bethan and a friend, who may be more than a friend, who went to Eton. ‘Her choice, not yours,’ Elsa says on the way home, ‘and all that talk of the South Wales Valleys … Why don’t you stop pretending? You were at a boarding school too.’
‘It should have been the county grammar.’
‘Poor Harry.’ She laughs and takes a hand off the wheel to push me. ‘What a desperate fellow you are.’
On Sunday evening I walk round the corner to the telephone box outside Labour Party headquarters in Smith Square to take Mitchell’s call and we arrange to meet the following day.
‘You’re sure about this, Vaughan?’
‘Dead certain,’ I say (which is nonsense).
The frosted-glass partition in the alcove slides back and I show my pass to Roberts, the duty policeman. On the other side of the Pond, young men in sharp suits, with urgent expressions, hurry about the lobby of the CIA on all days and at all hours. Here at MI5 there’s just Bob the Bobby flicking through a Sunday paper. I take the lift to the third floor, show my face in D3, then open my own office. There’s something I must do before tomorrow and I need to pinch a typewriter to do it, only before I have a chance to do so Evelyn pushes her way into my room. I anticipated her presence but not the speed with which she pounces or her state of agitation. She’s trembling like a teenager on a first date.
‘Cariad, were you waiting for me? How sweet.’
She lifts a protective hand to her face. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘In my office? SIS business. What are you doing here?’
‘The defector, Volkov,’ she says. ‘We’ve missed something.’
That’s a lie. So I ask, ‘What?’
‘Well, I don’t know yet,’ she snaps.
‘Heard from Peter?’
‘Just to say he’s spoken to Jim and he was pleased with the FLUENCY report.’
‘Of course. Did Peter say anything else?’
‘Only that he’ll brief us at the next meeting’.
She has scratched the birthmark on her face, which is something she does when she’s feeling anxious.
‘Don’t work late,’ she says.
‘I won’t.’
When she’s gone I take the Scotch from my desk drawer and settle down to wait awhile. Thank you, dear Evelyn, your face may not have launched a thousand ships but it tells a good story nonetheless. I wager she has just learned about the CIA plot to remove Hollis. Wright will have briefed her on the phone and warned her ‘to tell no one’. Then the last person she expects to see on a Sunday evening, the last person she wants to see, turns up: me. She’s in a state because she knows it’s her duty to inform Hollis at once, but Wright has persuaded her to let events run their course. She’s making a mistake: Angleton is as reliable as a three-jump cowboy, to borrow from my old friend Jack. I raise my glass to salute Jack and his postcard of the girl in the pink bathing costume.
*
At four o’clock the following afternoon I park a pool Rover on the opposite side of Pall Mall from the Travellers Club. Mitchell is in the passenger seat beside me, a cigarette between his fingers. ‘Just for today,’ he says. The Travellers is the gentleman’s palazzo between Maurice’s club and mine. Popular over the years with royalty, politicians and explorers, its members are generally less erudite than members of the Athenaeum and less liberal than those of us who belong to the Reform. Sir Roger Hollis is a member of the Travellers, and if he has the sense to realise that the ‘PERSONAL’ typewritten note I left for him yesterday is from som
eone with his best interests at heart he will arrive there in a few minutes’ time.
Mitchell asks, ‘What will happen after this?’
‘He won’t be able to stop the FLUENCY investigation, not while it has Dick’s support.’
‘Remember the fuss after Burgess and Maclean defected?’
‘I was in Vienna.’
‘White was deputy DG of Five then, of course – “No turning in upon ourselves,” he said, “because that’s what the bloody Russians want.”’ Mitchell folds the butt of his cigarette into the dashboard ashtray. ‘One has to investigate these things. It’s all about who one trusts to do it. Never liked Arthur Martin. A bit unstable, don’t you think? At least he has some experience. This fellow Wright … perfectly competent technician, but what was Roger thinking making him the chairman of a working party as sensitive as this one?’
‘This is your chance to ask him.’
A traffic warden taps on the driver’s side window and I show him my police identification and ever so politely tell him to sod off.
‘I suppose Wright was White’s choice,’ says Mitchell.
‘Or Angleton’s.’ I touch his arm. ‘Look.’ The director general’s black Bentley turns right across the traffic on to Pall Mall and draws up at the Travellers. I sink in my seat and reach across to stay Mitchell’s hand as he reaches for the door. ‘Not yet. Not with me in the car.’
Hollis executes a little pirouette on the pavement, then climbs the steps of the Travellers where a porter is waiting to tip his hat.
‘Give him a minute,’ I say, ‘and remember, nothing about our source.’
‘I’m not an idiot, Vaughan.’
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