Witchfinder

by Andrew Williams

  38

  1 November 1965

  WRIGHT PUTS HIS head round the door. ‘Roger wants to see us both.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  I put out my cigarette and reach for my jacket. ‘Any idea?’

  ‘No.’

  Since the CIA’s coup attempt in the summer I’ve spent no more than a few frosty minutes alone with Wright. We have become expert at dancing around each other. I expect he’s heard a report of the kitchen conference with Blunt, who has no reason to keep it secret. Clever Sir Anthony has probably sown as much discord as he can, hoping perhaps that we’ll be too busy scrapping with each other to care about him. But he has done the harm he can do, and it’s the beast and the madman in Rees that concerns me now. I know Wright has visited and tested him again because Isaiah Berlin wrote to tell me so. And not just Rees, Harry, your Mr Wright is trying to bully us all. In particular, he has the Service’s Oxford old boys in his sights, good people like Professors Hampshire and Hart and Zaehner, and, Harry Vaughan, he asked about you, too.

  Hollis greets us with a limp handshake and a broad smile. ‘Glad of this opportunity,’ he says. Wright catches my eye and raises an eyebrow, and I admit I’m surprised too. This must be a new Roger, clubhouse Roger, who’s retiring in a few weeks, because the Roger we used to know was cool and reserved with almost everyone.

  ‘Coffee? Would you arrange it, Val?’ he says to his secretary.

  He shows us to his sofa and sits opposite in a small magenta easy chair that wasn’t here on my last visit. My gaze is drawn over his shoulder to the desk, and not for the first time I feel a pang of regret that I was persuaded not to tell him I’d caught Wright rummaging through its drawers.

  ‘This business of independence for Rhodesia,’ he says, ‘the prime minister’s spinning like a top. I saw him at the opening of the Post Office Tower. Rhodesia’s for the other side of the Service, prime minister,’ I said. ‘There isn’t much we can do.’

  I sense Wright bristling beside me and, shameful though it is to own, I’m relieved that, for however long this interview lasts, Hollis will be the focus of his malevolence.

  ‘What are you and Mrs Hollis going to do, sir?’ I ask, a little cruelly.

  ‘Oh, the usual things people do in the country,’ he replies. ‘Yes. Hard to grasp, but not long now before I’m hanging in the rogues’ gallery.’

  We turn to look at the pictures of his predecessors on the wall to the right of his new chair and my gaze is drawn to the portrait of Dick, whose inability to say ‘no’ to Americans has landed us in this mess.

  ‘Well,’ Hollis slaps his knees, ‘you’re probably wondering why I’ve asked you up. Simply, I have a question – for you, Peter. Why do you think I’m a spy?’

  We must look uncomfortable, and he’s trying not to smile. Wright finds his voice at last. ‘The disappointments of recent years, sir. So many f-f-failures.’ He runs the tip of his tongue along his bottom lip. ‘The old fears. I think it’s important to rule out all the possibilities.’

  ‘Oh? But you must have been looking at new possibilities?’

  No pretence of bonhomie now. Roger wants answers; Roger wants facts. The son of the bishop has turned the other cheek for months. Not today. This is his last chance to fight before the Roundheads take over. Wright looks sideways at me, perhaps for some support: Oh, no, boy, you’re on your own.

  ‘Well, we’ve been going back through the files, sir,’ he says, ‘and there’s Anatoli G-Golitsyn’s evidence.’

  ‘Tell me,’ says Hollis, ‘tell me it all,’ and Wright does: all the crazy code names, half-truths, suppositions and downright lies. And Roger? He has the patience of Job, which is too much patience. I watch his quiet anger dissipate and his broad smile return, and I know he’s thinking it’s too comical, too ridiculous, and with only a few weeks to go, it’s not worth worrying about such a feeble case.

  ‘Well, Peter,’ he says, with a laugh, ‘I can see you’re ready to hang, draw and quarter me.’

  ‘If there’s anything you can h-help—’

  ‘Please don’t interrupt, Peter.’ Hollis raises both hands, like a policeman in front of an approaching truck. ‘Thank you for your frankness, but I am afraid you are wasting your time: I am not a spy.’

  ‘B-but c-can you offer any proof, sir?’ Wright’s colour is up. ‘Can you help our investigation?’

  ‘With more bits of paper? I can probably find some notes.’ He sighs. ‘Honestly, I don’t remember. And I wonder: is this FLUENCY business more than a waste of time?’ He addresses the question to me, but Wright jumps in to answer. ‘We sh-should have been through this process years ago, sir.’

  ‘I was asking for Harry’s opinion, Peter.’

  ‘Well, after Philby some sort of investigation was inevitable, wasn’t it, sir?’

  ‘Some sort, yes, but has it gone too far, and—’

  Wright interrupts again. ‘It’s a c-complicated business, sir. You r-receive our b-briefs, you know how—’

  ‘Riveting, I’m sure. Riveting. All that history, all those files.’ He smiles as if he’s practising. ‘Yes. Well, thank you for your time, gentlemen,’ he rises, ‘don’t let me keep you from your … researches.’

  I assume Hollis wanted me to witness their exchange because he wants me to include it in a report to C.

  ‘What happened to the coffee?’ I mutter, as we leave.

  ‘Typical of R-Roger,’ Wright replies.

  Val is bent over her desk in the DG’s outer office but she glances up as we pass and I can see from the spark in her eye that she knows our business and despises us. That woman has steel in her soul. I expect she would have made a firmer director general than her lover.

  ‘No doubt about it,’ says Wright, the second the lift gate clangs shut. ‘The way he c-c-clicked his teeth with his pencil when I mentioned ELLI, and drumming the edge of his seat. Hollis is the one. He’s our mole.’

  ‘Not now, Peter. Not here.’

  He ignores me. ‘I expect he wanted you there because you’re on his side.’

  ‘Are you accusing me of being a spy, too?’

  He smiles. ‘Not yet.’

  I watch the lift light fall from five to four and say nothing, but Wright is too excited to let it go. ‘If Hollis thinks we’re going to drop this …’

  ‘I’m sure he knows you better than that, Peter.’

  ‘Good,’ he says emphatically. ‘I’ve spoken to Jane Archer. She says it could be Mitchell or Hollis or both – she thinks Hollis.’

  ‘Either or neither?’ I turn to face him, the length of my arm away. ‘She said neither to me, Peter, neither of them, and she seemed pretty certain.’

  The corner of Wright’s left eye twitches. ‘You visited her?’

  Ting goes the lift bell to signal we’re back on the third floor and I reach for the brass handle to open the gate, but he’s closer and grabs it before me, holding it shut.

  ‘You’re d-d-determined to protect him.’ His voice trembles a little.

  I roll my eyes. ‘Reds everywhere. Trying to save the country from the DG and his deputy, and the prime minister?’

  ‘Not just me. We’ve b-been investigating Harold W-W-Wilson for years – at least ten years.’

  ‘And our old Oxford soldiers, some of our finest minds, after the service they gave this country during the war.’

  The lift protests as someone tries to summon it to another floor. It feels very small and warm. I want to ask Wright why Elsa is on his list and warn him to keep away, but he’ll blame Pool or Hart or both, and it’s better he doesn’t know I’m on to him.

  ‘Our enemy’s w-winning,’ he says. ‘He was cl-cleverer than us in the thirties and we’ve been p-playing catch-up ever since.’

  ‘That’s Jim Angleton speaking. People made bad choices in the thirties for good reasons. That’s all. Carry on like this, we’re going to become just like our enemy.’

  ‘If you feel like that you should resign f
rom the w-working party.’

  ‘And leave this to you and Angleton?’

  ‘I could ask Dick to r-r-replace you.’

  I sigh. ‘You could try. Now, are you going to let me out of here?’

  He stares at me belligerently for a few seconds, then turns to draw back the gate. I slip past without a word, but as I approach the swing doors into the corridor he calls to me – ‘V-Vaughan’ – and I have to suppress the urge to keep walking. We’re teetering at the edge of a precipice and it’s time to retreat a little.

  ‘Peter?’ I turn. ‘What now?’

  A secretary is crossing the landing and we must shift from foot to foot together, as if we’re performing an Aboriginal dance, until she disappears through the doors behind me. Then Wright raises his gaze from his shoes to my face. ‘J-J-Jim Angleton’s conducting his own enquiries into Russian penetration at the Agency, I’m sure you’ve heard.’

  ‘Ever vigilant.’

  ‘Are you sneering?’

  ‘Not on this occasion. It’s his job. I would rather he was hunting moles on his patch than crashing about on ours.’

  Wright smiles, but not in a pleasant way. ‘Then you’ll be pleased to hear he’s made more arrests. Jack Ellis is an old friend of yours, isn’t he?’

  ‘A good man,’ I say coolly. ‘A big-hearted Texan patriot.’

  ‘J-Jim will be the judge of that.’

  All those years young Peter spent shovelling shit on a Scottish farm: behold the man. I watch him push through the doors and wonder how much this is about me. Jack Ellis doesn’t have the imagination to be anything but a red-blooded American patriot so I guess he’s being punished for talking to me, and the worst of it is that I always knew there was a chance he would be. I feel shame and afraid for my friend: friend no more. In that smoke-filled office in Langley, the blinds shut to the morning, Angleton sits with a cigarette between his yellow fingers, his head buzzing with wild imaginings, quite incapable now of recognising the difference between loyalty to him and to his country. Stalin was the same, they say. And Kim Philby, these seeds you managed to sow, this fear and confusion is your legacy: you’re still winning.

  *

  The Langley switchboard puts me on hold while it rings through to the Soviet Division. Then the Agency operator comes back to me: ‘Sorry, sir, Special Agent Ellis is out of the office.’ The operator can put me through to the deputy chief of the division, Mr Bagley.

  ‘No, that won’t be necessary,’ I say.

  I know I shouldn’t share it with Elsa but guilty secrets are the hardest to keep, and Jack and Michelle are her friends, too. She has tickets for a new play at the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square. The liberal press says it’s thoughtful and unsentimental, the conservative press degenerate filth. For the entertainment and education of bourgeois London, a play about their young working-class neighbours, with no money, no hope, bugger-all to do on their estate but stone an abandoned baby. I’m not in the mood for that sort of lesson and I tell Elsa so. She protests: ‘These tickets are hard to come by.’

  ‘Sorry. I’ll explain, but not here on the street – there,’ and I point to the White Hart at the corner of the square.

  There’s a flock of canaries in the lounge bar, young folk in bright clothes chatting noisily about the play I’ve decided to skip. ‘Want a ticket?’ I ask a girl in a Mary Quant mini and a peaked sailor’s cap like the one Lenin wore during the revolution.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she snips at me. ‘I have friends. I’m going with them.’

  Elsa laughs when I tell her. ‘Come on, you’re in your fifties.’

  ‘You know it was perfectly innocent. I’m much more innocent than you think.’

  ‘All right. I believe you.’ She smiles and touches my face. ‘Now what’s so important it can’t wait until after the performance?’

  ‘Jack’s in trouble,’ I say, and I tell her why, and my excuses. I sound about as innocent as Anthony Blunt.

  ‘Resign, Harry,’ she says, ‘for God’s sake.’

  ‘And let him win? And what about you?’

  She sighs and lifts my hand from her knee. ‘What are you saying? Don’t make me the excuse. You’re not doing anything worthwhile – you said so yourself.’

  I shrug. ‘Still trying to fight the good fight.’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ she whispers fiercely at me. ‘You love the intrigue and the lies. You love it and hate it, too, and you despise Wright but you see his shadow when you look in your mirror.’

  ‘That’s unfair. Plain wrong.’

  ‘You think so?’ She pushes away the gin she’s barely touched and rises. ‘I’ve had enough. I’ll telephone Jack and Michelle.’

  I think of Jack with the secretary from the embassy and wonder if he would have let me wheedle the truth from him if I hadn’t caught him at a weak moment. He loves his wife, Michelle; we all love our wives, I’m sure. ‘They’ll be monitoring Jack’s calls,’ I say. ‘Best leave alone.’

  We weave our way through the young people round the bar, with their educated London accents and their talk of change, and I hear an echo of my own student days. Pub nights after public meetings, Goronwy Rees’s eyes still shining with zeal for a real revolution: now just a Sloane Square fashion accessory. Elsa tugs my sleeve. ‘You’ve been here before. Look behind the bar.’ Beneath the wall-mounted whisky bottles, there’s a photograph of the actor Dirk Bogarde. ‘They must have filmed some of The Servant here.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘My God, what a bastard I was in that movie.’

  1966

  39

  3 January 1966

  THERE’S A GREEN Bedford van in the street on the first working day after New Year’s Day and it’s still there at half past six in the evening. No sign of the workmen but the door to the block at number 12 is wedged open with a toolbox. They’re parked on double yellow lines with passenger side wheels on the pavement. I squeeze past with my bag of groceries and make a mental note of the name: Hardy Jones Electricians, in trust-me gold letters. The splint is still in place in the frame of our front door, there’s no sign of entry, and when I check the directory I find a company of the same name in Kennington. I ring but it’s late and no one answers. That’s the Monday. On Thursday, a couple of decorators arrive in a yellow van and carry their stepladders, buckets and brushes into our neighbour’s house. This lot are Leigh and Sons and they promise High Quality Work and a Friendly Service, which means nothing, because they teach painting and plastering to the A2 goons at Five, and I’m sure they’re encouraged to take pride in their work.

  The Beatles have grown from wannabes to international popular music stars, prime ministers and presidents have come and gone, yet the hunt for a deep-penetration agent and his sub-agents in the Service rolls on into a third year. In many small ways it’s polluting my life. Elsa’s right: I’m drinking too much and carrying more on my hips. We laugh less than we used to, and she says she loves me just a little less every time I tell her now is not the right time to leave the Service. But she keeps asking, ‘What must you see through, Harry? You’re not making sense!’

  She left the house without a word an hour ago and I’m glad because I don’t want her to see me twitching at a curtain.

  I’m still getting out of my coat when Evelyn steps into my office. ‘Happy New Year!’ I say.

  ‘This is your copy,’ she replies, dropping the latest FLUENCY report on my desk. ‘We meet the new DG at nineteen hundred tonight.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  No one is sad to see the back of Hollis but no one I respect is jumping for joy over his successor: Martin Furnival Jones, FJ to everyone, Highgate School and Cambridge University, where he studied languages and law. Two years older than me – he’s fifty-three – but he joined the Service the year after, in ’41. He’s even shyer than his predecessor. A birdwatcher, I hear. As far as I can tell the only truly remarkable thing about FJ is the size of his ears, which are as large as dinner plates. As for his judgement, well
, Arthur Martin has been bending those ears for years.

  ‘Monstrous,’ FJ says, when we gather in his office later that evening. ‘You want me to accept these?’

  Wright says, ‘We do,’ and launches into a long tendentious defence of the FLUENCY working party’s conclusions. I watch FJ prowling round the room in shirtsleeves and braces, a pipe clenched between his teeth, and I know he’s thinking, Oh, Lord. Wright drones on, too excited to keep it simple. What he’s trying to describe are three circles of penetration. Outer circle: the Communist ‘agents of influence’ in government, in Parliament, in the civil service, in the universities, in trade unions, in pressure groups and charities. Four hundred names so far, the names of men FJ might meet at his club, names an educated man in the street might recognise. Middle circle, the ‘true bills’ unearthed from the service archives that point to a ‘middling-grade agent’ in MI5. The report names eight possible candidates before settling on the ‘perfect match’: Michael Hanley, the director of C Branch at MI5. Finally, the nub, the kernel, the crux, the heart of the conspiracy, the master spy ELLI, stripped of all his influence now: Sir Roger Hollis.

  ‘Monstrous,’ Furnival Jones says again. ‘You understand what this means?’ A corner of Wright’s mouth lifts just a little – the hint of a smile – but I guess FJ’s too upset to notice. ‘Hollis and Hanley! Really, Peter?’ He smacks his copy of the report on the table in front of us. ‘You’re accusing not only my predecessor of being a spy, but the man most likely to be my successor too!’ FJ glares at all of us. ‘It’s ludicrous.’ Turning to his desk he snatches up his tobacco pouch and begins packing a fresh pipe. Wright glances at Michael Stewart, who understands he is to speak in our defence. Is FJ listening? He’s working on the pipe, tamping, sucking, a tongue of flame in front of his face, which is more expressive than I can ever remember it, his eyebrows lifting and collapsing into a web of frown lines.

  ‘Enough!’ He hasn’t the patience to listen to more. ‘Do you all agree on these conclusions?’

  Wright looks at me. ‘Almost all of us, sir.’