‘Er mwyn duw, Elsa.’
‘A fake!’
‘You know me better than that.’
‘Now I do.’ Her chair screeches as she rises. ‘You betrayed me.’
‘Bloody hell, I’m trying to protect you.’
‘Get out of my way,’ she says.
‘Not until you speak to me.’ I reach out to her but she brushes my hand aside.
‘You bastard.’ And she slaps me so hard she knocks me off balance. ‘Bastard,’ she says again.
‘Tell me why.’
This time I catch her wrist and twist her hand away.
‘You want to know, you bastard,’ she says, her voice ringing with quiet fury. ‘Your whole life is a lie. The pain and damage you’ve done …’
‘No. What have they told you? That’s shit.’
‘No? What do you mean, no? Only two nights ago you were fucking a secretary. Deny it!’ Her lovely brown eyes are wet with tears. ‘Go on!’
How can I? I can only stare at her.
‘You can’t!’
‘I want to explain. It was nothing, believe me, darling. It was … work.’
‘Don’t call me darling,’ she says. ‘There is nothing to explain. Now, will you let me go?’
I stand as dumb and rooted as an Easter Island statue. Our eyes meet and I see anger, I see pain: what do I do? I open my mouth to speak but before I can think of something to say she has gone.
That night I lie awake in the spare room, and at dawn I hear her moving round our bedroom, pulling the big suitcase from the top of the wardrobe, emptying the old chest of drawers she uses for her underwear and blouses. I could tell her to stay, that I’ll leave, but I don’t have the strength to look her in the eye. I know what I want to say – that I’ve made mistakes, I’m not a good person, but I love her, no matter what she may have done, but I can’t be honest without making her an accomplice. So I lie in the little box room and listen to her bump her bags down the stairs. Too late, I skip to the landing window at the front of the house. There’s a cab idling in front of the house, and a minute later it turns out of the street. I’ll make it up to her, and I have to believe she’ll let me. If I brood on any other ending I won’t manage the next few days. I must focus all my hurt and anger. I know who’s to blame, and I step away from the window with a fierce determination to raise hell.
49
30 March 1966
CLIVE’S BOYS HAVE moved in opposite: flat 2, number 11, above old Mrs Holland. How do I know it’s Clive? I feel his presence, like winter in the bone. He is the black ghost dog of the road, the gwyllgi. A couple of his A4 goons are there with a kettle and a camera and they will be relieved in the early hours by a couple more. By then I’ll be in bed in our spare room. Yes, I’m glad Clive’s there because if I manage to pull this off it’ll taste sweeter. ‘Don’t hold grudges lest it cloud your judgement,’ we were taught, but sometimes it helps you see things more clearly. My turn to piss on you, Clive.
I’m sitting in the kitchen now with cold tea and a plate of toast, a coat Elsa forgot to pack on the chair beside me. I pick it up and press the collar to my face, smell her perfume, and for a time I feel as listless as a lotus-eater, incapable of rousing myself to any purpose. She rang on Saturday: she was sending a taxi for more of her things and that was all she was willing to say. Tossing the coat back, I rise and walk to the sink for a glass of water. Tomorrow the country votes in a general election. The opinion polls suggest Wilson will win, and if he does his government will build half a million new homes in the next four years. I expect Angleton will call it Communism. First results are expected sometime in the early hours of Friday morning. By then I will be either toasting Wilson with a good malt or locked in a Special Branch cell. But everything rests on remaining free to cast my vote.
Dick took his time summoning me to Century House. A vestigial regard for me, perhaps, or a quite natural reluctance to countenance the possibility that the officer he trusted to catch spies three years ago might turn out to be one. Whatever the reason, he has allowed me to put everything in place. In the four days that passed between my meeting with Maurice and my interview with Dick I was able to rent a room near Paddington station, rescue the microfilms from my deposit box and leave copies with my lawyer, check MI5’s duty roster for election night and settle on a route in and out of the building. I’ll drive Elsa’s little Sprite – she left the keys in the house – and I’ve moved the copy camera to the room in the Paddington guesthouse. Jack gave me another CIA toy in Vienna: I don’t care for guns but the High Standard HD22 has a barrel silencer, like the ones you see in the movies, and it should frighten the life out of anyone who gets in my way.
A strange thing happened on the morning of the meeting with Dick. One of the D3 secretaries hissed at me in a corridor. I stopped her and demanded an explanation. To my great surprise, she said, ‘You’re ruining our Service.’
‘Me, personally?’
‘Your cabal – spreading your poison.’ She said she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind even if everyone else in MI5 seemed to be, and our treatment of poor Mr Stevens was a disgrace!
In the end my meeting with Dick lasted for only ten minutes. He didn’t want to talk about the evidence. ‘There’s enough,’ he said, and the chorus of senior officers he invited to my interview was in agreement. I protested hotly because they were expecting me to. Phillpotts was rude about my record and quoted ‘our friend Anatoli’s suspicions’, and Martin accused me of keeping bad company at Oxford and of obstructing the FLUENCY investigation.
‘This witch-hunt is ruining the Service,’ I said, and I repeated the conversation with the secretary who accosted me in the corridor.
‘That’s what a Soviet mole would say,’ Phillpotts sneered.
‘There’s one too many in this room, and I think it’s you,’ I said, quoting Marx (Groucho), then called him ‘a twat’. Things were rowdy after that, and it ended with ‘the Schoolmaster’ ordering me from his office. The watchers moved into the OP point above Mrs Holland the same day.
I’ve made it easy for them by traipsing from pub to club for the best part of two days, only staggering home at closing time. Poor Harry must be taking it badly because he’s drinking like a fish. First the wife (oh, yes, they’ll know), then the Service. All he has left is his liberty, and he will lose that in due course, too. That’s what I hope Wright and the rest of them are hearing from the watchers. I’m putting on a performance Dirk Bogarde would be proud of.
I sleep badly and am up early. At nine o’clock I walk around the corner for The Times and breakfast in my favourite greasy spoon.
‘You all right, Mr Vaughan?’ Toni, its Italian proprietor, enquires. ‘You looking a little rough.’
One of Clive’s boys has followed me in, and when he makes eye contact with me I smile. ‘How’s Clive?’
He can’t have played the game for long because he looks thoroughly confused.
‘Old lags are the hardest targets to follow,’ I say. ‘Remember, keep your distance.’
‘Right,’ he says, rising from the table, ‘I’ll remember,’ and by the time Toni comes back with his order, he has gone.
‘He didn’t like the look of me, Toni,’ I say. Toni thinks I’m ‘a very funny man’.
I read in The Times that the Conservative leader, Ted Heath, was in ‘a defiant mood’ at his last press conference, which is surely code for ‘resigned to defeat’. I’m paying the landlady at the Snowdon boarding house in Paddington an extra two pounds for a television to watch the results programme. Labour needs the BBC’s big cardboard arrow to swing three per cent for something like a hundred-seat majority. That would be a historic result.
I devote the rest of the morning to burning personal papers, and to tracing Elsa’s new address and telephone number. At midday I resume my quiet display of falling apart at the Old Star on Broadway, and finish it two hours later in the Reform. This time the watchers keep their distance so it’s no great matter to order whiskie
s I don’t drink. I’m carrying the gun and silencer in my coat and I have a nasty little moment at the club when the porter – my old friend Mason – insists on hanging it up in the cloakroom for me. MI5 will have a club stooge it can call on to keep an eye on me. I pretend to fall asleep in one of the gallery chairs overlooking the atrium, The Times like a skirt across my knees. Who knows which of the grey heads dozing in armchairs beneath the portraits of the Liberal statesmen of the last century is the one who’s watching me, or even if there is anyone? It’s the ghost of Guy Burgess I feel the presence of, and when I close my eyes I hear his voice echoing in the gallery again: ‘You can’t blame Angleton and the CIA for all this, old boy,’ he says. ‘The Service is there to protect the few – members of clubs like this one. It’s their tool, and its fury will turn on anyone who threatens their interests.’
A memory comes to me of something the living, raging Guy once read to me in this place, and with time still to spare I wander round the gallery to the library and hunt for an edition of the playwright Oscar Wilde’s reflections from his prison cell. The great man was serving his sentence for gross indecency, and twenty years ago Guy spoke his words with a tear in his eye. As I prepare to spring my surprise on the Service, this short passage will serve as my apologia too.
Most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I allowed you to bring on me. The basis of character is will power, and my will became utterly subject to yours.
It is spitting fat drops of rain in the street known as Pall Mall. The young man I spoke to in Toni’s café is skulking in a doorway at the corner of Waterloo Place, while his mate is moving so slowly on the opposite pavement that the last of the rush-hour commuters are tripping over his feet. No hurry, chaps. I’m going to cast my vote.
My polling station is in the parish hall at St Matthew’s. I made a point of visiting it during the service last Sunday and listened through an open door as Maurice accompanied the English congregation in a passionless rendition of our great Welsh hymn ‘Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer’. A group of party tellers with red, blue and yellow rosettes are standing at the door this evening. My neighbour, Mrs Boycott, is there for the Tories, and when we make eye contact she smiles a one-of-us welcome, confident the son-in-law of Harold Spears can be trusted to vote the right way. ‘Just two hours until the polls close, Mr Vaughan,’ she says. ‘You like to cut it fine.’
‘Yes, Mrs Boycott, that’s true,’ I say, slurring my words for the benefit of Clive’s boys, skulking in doorways nearby. I hope they’ve fulfilled their democratic duty. Inside the hall the polling-station staff sit at a long trestle table ticking names and dispensing voting slips. I carry mine to a booth. The sitting MP is a chap called Smith: Eton and New College, Oxford (before my time); a banker with a stately home in Berkshire. Conservative, naturally. I know nothing about the Labour man but I give him my vote. Under the beady eye of the young woman who guards the ballot box I fold and post it, then turn away and make for the door. But instead of stepping on to the street I open the one in the wall to the left of it that leads into the church.
‘You can’t go in there,’ someone shouts.
Oh yes I can, and I do, closing the door firmly behind me. By the time a young chap from the polling station finds me, I’m on my knees pretending to pray.
‘I’m sorry, sir, you can’t stay here.’
‘Are you coming between me and my maker?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, again.
‘So you should be,’ I say. ‘Now sod off, will you!’
I follow the sound of his footsteps as he returns to the polling station to seek advice, and the moment he’s gone I’m off my knees. The door on the west side of the church opens into St Ann’s Street. I know it’s bolted on the inside and only bolted and that Father Turtle has lost the key. Just after eight now, and as I walk quickly up the street I try to calculate how long I’ve got before the alarm goes up. Has Harry scarpered like his old mate Guy, they will ask themselves, or is he just playing? From St Ann’s I cut through a Peabody housing estate to Abbey Orchard Street. Then Dean’s Yard, abbey precincts, and through the gatehouse to Sanctuary, where I manage to pick up a cab. It’s 8.45 p.m.
‘Curzon Street, please.’
My thoughts and my pulse are racing, and for a moment the sensation reminds me of Vienna in ’48 when a Soviet agent fired his gun at me. The driver wants to talk about the election but is quite happy with the sound of his own voice. He drops me a few yards short so I can do what I’ve done for the last three years and walk into the lobby as if nothing has happened and the DG is waiting to see me.
My right hand is round the silencer in my coat pocket, the gun is over my breast, but as I approach the entrance I feel a fool for bringing it. I’m hoping to see ‘Bobby’ Roberts on duty behind the glass in the security alcove and I do.
‘Thought you’d left us, Mr Vaughan,’ he says.
‘Back across the water, Bobby, just my desk to clear. Oh, here …’ I reach into my jacket for the temporary pass I filched in my last days and slide it under the glass. ‘I handed in my other one.’
This is my first big test. I can’t pull the gun on him because he’s just the sort of Queen-and-country chap to put duty before his life and the pursuit of future happiness. I watch him lift the pass in front of his nose.
‘Come on, Bobby,’ I say. ‘I promised the wife I’d be home to watch the BBC. Did I tell you? Her father’s a Conservative MP.’ (I know Bobby’s a Tory too.)
‘I’d better ring the duty officer, sir.’
Someone has told him my clearance has been withdrawn, and here I am out of the usual office hours.
‘Don’t bother,’ I say, ‘I’m on my way to see the DO,’ and pinching the pass from his fingers I turn towards the lifts. ‘Labour by fifty seats.’
50
31 March 1966
I SLIDE THE gate back and push the brass lever up to five, and the last thing I see as the lift begins to rise is Bobby reaching for his telephone. On any average evening the duty officer takes calls and monitors the rip-and-read on the teleprinters and not much more. Wylie is the officer on the slate. If I’m lucky he’ll make his way to the lifts to meet me; if I’m not he’ll telephone FJ at once. I marry the gun and silencer and wedge it into my coat pocket. No violence, please.
Young Wylie must have sprinted along the corridor to meet me because the lift judders to a halt and he’s there to haul back the grille.
I don’t know Wylie but he seems to know me. ‘We were told you’d moved on,’ he says, a tremor in his voice. He’s an earnest-looking fellow, state not public school and from somewhere in the north of England. This is going to be a difficult night for young Wylie.
‘Picking up my things,’ I say, ‘if that’s all right? Check with the DDG, if you like.’
He gives me a sheepish smile. ‘I’d better.’
These are the FLUENCY days when no one dares to show initiative. Wylie was always going to plump for procedure, which is what I want him to do.
We walk side by side along the teak-panelled corridor to the front of the building, passing the assistant directors’ offices, banking, personnel, until the carpet runs out and is replaced by stained linoleum, and the ceiling is spotted with damp and nicotine. There’s no one else on duty here: Wylie is captain, first mate and crew. I watch him fumbling with his key. ‘In at last,’ he says, stepping aside for me. The remains of his supper are on the desk, and on the arm of the only easy chair, a spy thriller by Len Deighton. ‘Entertainment,’ he says, a little embarrassed. ‘I wish there was more of it around here.’ He waves the paperback at me. ‘It’s all so bloody routine.’
Along one wall, the usual grey civil-service filing cabinets, along another, an old army camp bed for quiet nights, which are most nights. A door in the wall opposite leads to a small windowless box where a teleprinter is chuntering a message.
‘That could be your adventure,’ I say, with a flourish.
He laughs. ‘
Perhaps.’
‘Best check.’
‘All right, I will.’ He slides round the table and into the communications room. Young Wylie, seeker after adventure, only there’s something in his manner, a reticence, a diffidence, that suggests precisely the opposite. I don’t expect him to give me any trouble. The teleprinter grinds to a halt and I hear him rip the signal off the roll. ‘It’s nothing,’ he shouts through to me, and a moment later he shuffles back into the office, his gaze fixed on the slip in his hands.
‘Sit down, Wylie,’ I say quietly, and he looks up at me at once. His jaw drops open (yes, it happens). ‘That one.’ And I wave the gun at the chair on the other side of the desk. ‘Sit down now!’ But he’s too shocked to move. ‘Wake up!’ I point the gun to the right of him and fire into the wall, and the percussion is no louder than the thud of a hardback book on a carpet, but I guess that only makes it more terrifying.
‘Hands on the desk. Do what I say and you’ll have your own thrilling story to tell. The keys to the DG’s office – where are they?’
He opens his mouth to speak, and thinks better of it.
‘Christ.’ I step forward and press the barrel of the gun to his temple, then yank his chair from the desk. ‘Do you know how long I’ve been doing this kind of work? I’m going to start with your kneecaps,’ I point the gun at his left one, ‘and it’s going to make a hell of a mess. So, one more time, where are the keys to the DG’s office?’
He shuts his eyes, his face wrinkled with doubt and anguish. ‘No. No, no—’
I slug him with the butt of the gun before he has a chance to say it again, and he slides from the chair. Then with my foot on his chest I ram the barrel against his kneecap. ‘I’m going to count to three. One. You’ll never walk properly again. Two. Let me tell you, young man, it isn’t worth it. Three—’
‘Cupboard by the door!’ He jerks his knees up to his chest and rolls on to his side with his head in his hands. ‘The cupboard.’
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