I make the mistake of shrugging my shoulders as if she’s asking me if England can win the World Cup this year. Christ! Our lives together, her work, our happiness is at stake. And she tugs her arm free and turns to reproach me. ‘Who will be next?’
I ambush Furnival Jones at his office door first thing on Monday morning. ‘It’s about the reputation of the Service,’ I say, because fear of a scandal carries more weight with management than an appeal for natural justice. ‘And Phoebe Pool knew some important people … If the press gets hold of this it will accuse us of driving her to her death.’
That’s enough to get the wind up FJ and he summons Wright to his office. ‘Is this going to blow up in our faces, Peter?’
‘I d-d-don’t think so, sir,’ he says. ‘Actually, I’m inclined to view her suicide as an admission of guilt.’
I protest: ‘Oh, come on! Phoebe Pool wasn’t a spy, she was a patient in a mental hospital in great distress – I hear she could hardly speak. She had no idea what she was doing, but you coaxed her into naming her friends as Communists.’
‘N-n-not true.’
‘Blunt told you Pool was his courier? Blunt was lying. He threw you a bone. You’d know that if you’d gone about this properly. Pool cared nothing about politics. She was a sad, disturbed creature. Blunt gave you her name because he thought no one sensible would believe her capable of being an agent.’
‘Well, Peter?’ says FJ.
‘The O-O-Oxford circle may be as important as Cambridge, sir, and Pool was one of our sources. If I m-may say so, Vaughan isn’t being honest with you.’ Wright turns to look at me. ‘You’re on g-good terms with some of our suspects. And his wife was at Oxford with Pool and Hart, sir. They’re old friends.’
FJ glares at me. ‘Is that true?’
I shake my head in frustration. ‘That’s a smokescreen.’
‘You deny it?’
‘No.’
‘Then you should step away from the investigation.’ FJ picks up his pen and starts to write. ‘I’ll suggest Sir Dick appoints someone else from SIS.’
‘Well, sir, I should warn you, the chief knows as many of the FLUENCY suspects as I do – more. Professor Sir Stuart Hampshire.’
FJ puts down his pen. ‘Hampshire?’
‘Goronwy R-R-Rees gave us his name,’ says Wright.
‘The chief and Sir Stuart are very close,’ I say. ‘It was the chief who recommended Sir Stuart to the government as a suitable person to review our signals intelligence.’
FJ closes his eyes and groans. ‘Did you know that?’
Wright says, ‘We’re w-w-waiting until he’s finished the review before we speak to him, sir.’
‘When?’
‘In a year’s time.’
‘Bloody hell, Peter!’ FJ slumps back in his chair. ‘It will be too late by then.’
‘I have no doubt Stuart Hampshire is an honourable and decent man,’ I say. ‘The point is, I’m not the only one who knows some of the many suspects on Peter’s lists. Actually, you know them too, sir. FLUENCY should only be interested in evidence.’
FJ nods. ‘All right, Vaughan, you’ve made your point. And let’s have no more deaths. Christ, did you read that damn fool Driberg’s speech in the Commons? He wants a committee of politicians to oversee our work. So let’s not give the socialists a stick to beat us with.’ He spreads his palms on the desk. ‘Now, gentlemen, excuse me, I have to prepare for a meeting at Number 10. So if there’s nothing else?’
I would like to say, ‘Stop him bugging my home,’ but I can’t risk the small amount of credit I have with FJ. Oh, the pleasure Wright would have in accusing me of being paranoid, after all the things I’ve said about Angleton. There will be no justice for Phoebe Pool. Furnival Jones would have to have seen all I’ve seen during this investigation to recognise a filthy little stitch-up. Wright and Blunt, parasite and host, teasing each other, a little in love with each other, meddling in other people’s lives, careless of the consequences.
‘You’re a liar, Peter,’ I say, as we walk towards the lifts.
‘Just d-doing my job, Harry,’ he says mildly. ‘What about you?’
‘No one does a proper job here any more.’ I pull back the lift gate. ‘You take this one. I’ll wait.’
Wright steps inside and reaches for the handle. ‘You know we’re g-going to have to speak to your wife.’
‘My wife?’
The gate clunks into place, the lift whirs, and through the brass grille he says, ‘Well, Elsa’s name keeps cropping up.’ Then the lift falls – to hell as far as I’m concerned.
Maurice Oldfield urges me to keep my cool. I creep into Century House at one o’clock when I can be sure the new head of Counter-intelligence at MI6 is lunching at his club. I’ve spent no more than a few minutes with Christopher Phillpotts and I pray and will offer sacrifice to whatever God there may be that it remains that way. He was doing Maurice’s old job in Washington, and has come home with baggage. I’m supposed to be carrying out ‘special duties’ for C, but I fear our new head of Counter-intelligence will try to claim me.
I stand at Maurice’s window and gaze out at a grey-blue iridescent mass of cloud tumbling along the Thames. Century House will soon be under siege.
‘Do nothing for goodness’ sake,’ I hear him say. ‘I’m trying to keep you out of this.’
I laugh.
‘I know, I know.’ He holds up his hand. ‘What I mean is, our new head of Counter-intelligence has drunk deeply of Angleton’s cup, and he’s come home to root out Communists from our side of the Service. We’re all under suspicion, of course, but you … you have your own special relationship with Jim Angleton.’ He adjusts his large glasses with his right hand. ‘So, watch it!’
Nicholas Elliott says more. ‘It’s a fucking disease. Crackpots’ – he means Phillpotts – ‘has brought it home from Washington. Back here five minutes and he’s turning the place upside down.’
By the time I find Nick’s new corner office on the sixth floor the rain is lashing his windows.
‘Another purge, Harry! It does Dick no credit that this is happening on his watch. Have you heard? Andrew King’s gone.’
King was station chief in Vienna after me in the fifties and a decent one, too.
‘Why?’
‘Because he was a Communist at Cambridge in the thirties. For a few months only, and he told his board all about it when he joined the Service twenty years ago. But now it’s once a sinner, always a sinner. He was judged by Crackpots and found wanting. Donald Prater has been called back from Stockholm for the same reason. Warner is leaving Geneva because he has too many Russian acquaintances. I keep fielding calls from our station chiefs asking me how the hell they’re expected to do their jobs if they can’t make contacts with potential defectors.’
‘How many?’
‘Have gone? Eight so far. Collins, Paulson, but there’ll be more. Do you know Don Bailey? He’s resigned in protest. Brave man.’ Elliott reaches into his desk drawer and takes out a bottle and two glasses. ‘You see? It’s driving me to drink.’
‘To more drink, Nick.’
‘But you’ll have one, won’t you, old boy?’ He pushes a generous measure of whisky towards me. ‘I’m thinking of a job in the City and some decent money.’
I gaze over the rim of my glass at him. The City? Perhaps. I’ve never seen Nick in anything but a suit, always immaculate, always expensive, a natural clothes-horse because he’s as thin as a rake. ‘You’ve been threatening the City for years.’
‘And now they’re pushing me out!’
‘Dick’s just made you controller of Western Europe.’
‘Dick who? Seriously. Your old friend Arthur Martin is going to “interview me” – that’s what he calls it – for the third time! He’s made it his life’s work to prove I knew Philby was a spy, that I’m guilty.’ Elliott rolls his eyes. ‘Honestly, Maurice Oldfield has to step up – he is the bloody deputy chief. He should speak to Dick. Put the Servi
ce before his own ambition. What about you? You’re part of all this.’
I pick up my empty glass and raise it to my eye, and now there are at least half a dozen Elliotts twinkling in the crystal, all of them different in some small way.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ he says.
‘This is how Jim sees things.’ I place the glass back on his desk and rise. ‘I aros yn ddiogel, Nick. Don’t give up. It’s too soon for the City.’
He just grunts.
Foolishly, I stay at Century House for a special showing of a documentary film about a nuclear attack on our country called The War Game. There are thirty of us in the briefing room and for an hour or so we sit and watch the end of the world as we know it in black and white. The film has been shot like archive, as if the sky has fallen in already. Between reels I close my eyes and think what it would be like to be a survivor in a room like this with twenty-eight middle-aged men in suits, one woman and three plates of Rich Tea biscuits. The BBC has decided to pull the film because the public can’t bear too much reality, but the new controller of the Soviet bloc has a copy. Just as the air-raid sirens go off I notice Phillpotts four to the right of me, black brogues on the back of the chair in front. Minutes later the Soviet missile explodes, causing instant flash blindness and a firestorm. Then our bombers reach the borders of Russia and mutually assured destruction is complete. At this point I consider escaping but decide it might send the wrong signal, and sit through the grisly aftermath, the rationing, the looting, the corpse-burning and a declaration of martial law.
The moment the lights go on Phillpotts hails me. ‘Did you enjoy that?’
‘Oh, lots of laughs.’
I watch him edge round other people’s knees with the obvious intention of collaring me. He is Laurence Olivier playing Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, tall and with a matinee-idol smile that he can turn on and off. Flash! It’s on, and he shakes my hand warmly.
‘Clever of Shergold to arrange this,’ he says. ‘Good to remind people why we do what we do. Look, Vaughan …’ he takes my arm and steers me towards the door ‘… have you a minute?’
‘Not really.’
His grip tightens a fraction. ‘I’ve been in touch with Peter Wright. He’s happy for me to speak to you.’
‘Is he?’ I pull my elbow free. ‘Oh, good. But Wright isn’t my keeper. If you want to speak to me, ring and arrange a time.’
‘All right, Vaughan,’ he says frostily, ‘I will,’ and he turns and stalks away.
My appointment with Sir John Nicolson is at five o’clock but there’s a signal fault on the Underground, then a traffic jam on North End Road, and by the time the cab drops me at the entrance to his hospital I’m fifteen minutes late. The Manor House is an uninspiring red-brick building in a style commonly encountered in the twenties suburbs at the edge of the city. From newspaper cuttings I know it has a link with the trade unions, which may be why Hugh Gaitskell chose to come here when he became ill in the December of ’62.
Reception rings Nicolson’s office and there’s no reply, so I persuade an orderly to show me the way. We meet the director on a long corridor between Chest and Orthopaedics, coat draped over his arm, his day at the hospital done. Can we speak somewhere private? Reluctantly Nicolson agrees. His office is in Administration, half a mile of corridors away, so he steers me into a ward and, with a proprietorial air, asks a nurse to find him a side room. There’s still a name on the door, but Mr Ken Jones has taken residence in the mortuary. Nicolson stands on the other side of an unmade bed with his back to the window. On a bedside locker, a vase of rotting red carnations and a well-thumbed paperback. Maybe it’s the flowers or the smell of stale urine, but the sickly-sweet smell of decay reminds me of Belsen concentration camp. Perhaps they left poor Jones in this hot little room longer than they should have done.
I ask Sir John about Gaitskell and he rumbles through a mental note of the Labour leader’s case. He was admitted to Manor House Hospital suffering from flu-like symptoms, which he said he’d picked up on a visit to Paris. His symptoms became more acute and he was moved to the Middlesex Hospital. The antibodies in his blood were attacking his organs, and tests seemed to indicate an immunological disease, Lupus erythematosus. Nicolson concedes that the medical team should have realised sooner, but Gaitskell was fifty-six, and the disease is most common in women under forty. His end was swift and unpleasant. ‘We did all we could in the circumstances.’ Nicolson clears his throat to disguise his feelings. ‘Hugh was a great friend of mine, you know.’
I ask him if he is a hundred per cent sure it was lupus. He says the post-mortem wasn’t that conclusive, and if I want more information I should speak to Dr Somerville at the Middlesex. ‘Hugh was just terribly, terribly unlucky, Mr Vaughan, and so were his countrymen. One of your colleagues came here with a wild story … Hugh wasn’t murdered. But if you’d like another opinion, speak to Somerville.’
Elsa is home early, packing for Germany. She flies tomorrow. ‘Mary wants to stay here on Wednesday and Thursday.’
‘You told her you’d be away?’
She lifts her gaze from the blouse she’s folding. ‘She’s your daughter!’
‘Just to manage her expectations,’ I say. ‘It’s you they want to see most.’
I ask her if she’s seen The War Game and she says she has and is going to recommend it to all the military men she meets.
‘And when you get back?’
‘You mean us? I’ve asked a friend if I can stay for a while. Just to be away from this place.’
‘Who?’
‘It’s only a possibility – while you sort things out here.’ She’s leaning over her case as she packs one of the navy skirts she wears to the ministry, then the white silk blouse from Bazaar that I bought her for Christmas. A lock of hair falls in front of her face and she sweeps it behind her ear without thinking. She does it several times a day and always with grace, as natural as the bubble and sun sparkle of a fast-flowing stream, as natural as the high cry of the curlew in wild places.
‘I love you,’ I say, and put my arms about her, frozen over the bed with my chest against her back.
The tension drains from her at last and she turns to face me. ‘I don’t want to leave home, Harry,’ she whispers.
‘I’m working things out,’ I say. ‘It’s just I’m afraid there’ll be hell to pay when I do.’
‘Stop the riddles,’ she says. ‘Tell me why.’
I don’t want to – ‘Not now, not here, darling’ – and I push her gently away. Then I close the suitcase and lift it from our bed. ‘I can be quiet – can you?’
43
ON YOUR FIRST day at the Fort, they teach you that the enemy is always listening and sometimes your friends too. That’s how it was in Vienna and Berlin and Washington. Men I’ll never meet have heard me groan with pleasure and whisper love to women I shouldn’t have. You never get used to sharing your life with a stranger. Elsa thought to escape it when she resigned from the Service. She’s sleeping peacefully beside me now, but in a few hours she’ll fly away, and in the course of her journey she’ll reflect on what is happening to us, and hovering in her thoughts will be questions about the past that we’ve never asked each other.
Was Elsa a member of the Party?
She seemed to strain every fibre of her being to make a success of SUBALTERN. I know that’s what I thought at the time. Her people were the ordinary men and women of the refugee camps, patriots like Béla Bajomi who turned down CIA money to work with her. When SUBALTERN collapsed her record and connections were good enough to secure her a senior role at the War Office. And now she is under investigation. Sooner or later Peter Wright is going to ask her, Are you a member or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? If the answer is ‘Yes,’ she’ll be forced to resign, and in Moscow Philby notches up another.
9 February 1966
I read in my paper at breakfast that West Germany has agreed to give East Germany twenty-four million dollars of
consumer goods – coffee and butter and fruit – in return for the release of nearly three thousand political prisoners. By my calculations, that’s a ransom of eight thousand dollars per prisoner, proving once again that Soviet-style Communism is bankrupt in every way. You wonder what we fear when a political system is struggling to feed its people. The answer must be the wild men on both sides. Angleton. Wright.
We meet in his new office a few hours later. Someone in B Branch has decided his status entitles him to three windows and a glass conference table. From the science room in the basement, with no windows, he has risen in three years to the third floor with three, and he looks smug about it. As further proof of his ascendancy he has called us together to announce he has persuaded FJ to reopen PETERS and DRAT. This time Graham Mitchell will be interrogated, while enquiries continue into Roger Hollis’s past. My colleagues on the FLUENCY working party are delighted, of course. And there’s more ‘good news’ because Wright’s D3 team has come up with a fresh list of senior civil servants who may or may not be members of the Party. His favourite has just stepped down as permanent secretary at the Ministry of Power.
‘You know, Burgess’s friend, Proctor,’ he says. ‘Classic KGB fodder.’
Sir Dennis Proctor is living in a farmhouse in the South of France on his fat civil-service pension; Wright is intent on blowing into his life like the mistral. He flies there tomorrow. ‘And I’ve spoken to Christopher Phillpotts,’ he says to me, at the end of the meeting. ‘He wants you back in Six’s fold.’
‘Then he will have to speak to my shepherd,’ I reply.
On my way home I stop at a phone box and telephone Chobham. Ring once, ring twice, ring off. And to be sure Mitchell understands, I send a postcard of the Tower of London too. We shot a German spy there during the war. Twenty-five years ago, almost to the day. The poor sod landed by parachute and broke his leg, but because we’re a civilised nation we waited for it to heal before we executed him.
10 February 1966
On Thursday mornings, renowned cardiac specialist Dr Walter Somerville sees private patients at a clinic in Harley Street. His waiting room smells of lavender and the walls are hung with competent oil paintings of cow pastures and calm seas. His secretary is dressed immaculately in baby pink Chanel – ‘Ordinary tea or China?’ – and she is very attentive. Surgery is almost over and Dr Somerville has only a fat man in his forties to see. Just the effort of breathing is making him sweat. The doctor’s door opens as I’m blowing the steam from the rim of my cup. He looks at me intently, as if he’s trying to diagnose my condition or marry me to one of his files. Then the penny drops. ‘The policeman? I’ll be with you in a minute,’ he says.
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