‘If you c-c-care so much about the Service,’ he says, ‘tell me where you sent the other copy of the file.’
I smile and shake my head.
‘To Maurice Oldfield?’
I laugh.
‘Your wife says you were working with Oldfield. Did he help you pinch the file?’
‘I didn’t need any help.’
‘The polling station in the church hall – his idea? You knew the d-door out of the church was unlocked.’
‘You haven’t spent much time in the field, have you, Peter? It’s the sort of thing you take care of first.’
That makes him twitch. ‘Then why was M-Maurice meeting you at the church?’
‘Hymn practice.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I don’t care.’
He picks up his pen and puts it down again almost at once. ‘We have enough to lock you up and throw away the key.’
‘Conspiring with a foreign power to discredit a prime minister and overthrow an elected government: you will have to join me, and,’ I raise my voice for the microphone, ‘Sir Richard White too – guilty of a shocking breach of faith.’
‘That’s nonsense.’
‘Is it?’
He rises from his chair, smoothes the creases from his slacks and walks over to the window where he stands gazing out at grey concrete beneath a grey sky. What is he thinking? Nothing good for me. He isn’t able to temper the prejudice that shapes all our actions and opinions with reason. Not as clever as Angleton but just as implacable and, like Kim Philby, capable of sacrificing the lives of many people in pursuit of his convictions. Not so different from the Nazi fanatics I interrogated at a table like this one during the war.
‘Did you hear me?’ he barks. ‘We can make you d-d-disappear.’ He takes a step back towards the table. ‘Or we could do a deal. You hand over the films and a full confession and we’ll sweep it under the carpet.’
I nod sagely. ‘Did Dick authorise you to make a deal?’
‘It’s from C, yes.’
My knee is bouncing under the table. Careful! My body aches from my swollen eye to the broken bones in my foot, and I’m trying to contain a spring tide of feelings.
‘Well?’ He stands with his hands on the back of a chair. ‘Does M-Mitchell have the films?’
‘No.’
‘All r-right, Vaughan. What do I tell C?’
I look up at the strip light in the ceiling because I expect they’ve hidden the microphone there. ‘What should you tell Sir Dick? Tell Sir Dick to “fuck off”. Tell him he’s got to go, that you’ve got to go – Furnival Jones too. And Angleton should never be allowed to set foot in Britain again. I want to see the home secretary or the attorney general. I want to see a lawyer. I want an apology – and to my wife – and I want my pension paid in full.’ I lower my gaze to his face. ‘Hope they got that, all right.’
The corners of his thin mouth turn down, and once again he resembles the imp that used to gaze disapprovingly at me from the wall opposite my college window.
‘You’ve been pl-playing a game,’ he says, collecting his notebook and cigarettes. ‘Vaughan and Rees, naughty Welsh boys. Game’s over.’
‘Really?’ I say. Guards or goons? That’s all I care about now. If he leaves the room before me it will be to let loose the bullies again. ‘G-guards!’ he shouts, and relief breaks through me.
As they lead me away he has one more thing to say. ‘Vaughan!’ I stop and turn to look at him. ‘Your wife says she’ll n-n-never trust you again – a man who cheats his wife.’
‘You made that up, Peter.’ That may be how she feels but she would consider it too bourgeois a sentiment to share with Wright. ‘It’s another of your lies.’
He just stares at me.
‘The truth is, you can’t trust anyone,’ I say. ‘It’s the Service, of course. Only I have the wit to know when I’m lying, and you don’t.’
54
15 July 1966
I HEAR VOICES IN the corridor, then the grinding of the rusty lock and the fat mouse squeak of my cell door, but I don’t get up and I don’t turn to look because I know the guard called Jake is on duty and he’s a surly bastard. ‘Ah, the morning papers?’ I say. ‘Well, thank you, Jeeves.’
It’s something like nine o’clock. I’ve dressed and eaten, pissed in one pot, washed in another and am lying on my army cot.
‘Over there,’ I mutter, and point in the general direction of the tray.
My visitor clears his throat, insisting on my attention. Rolling on to my side, I’m amazed to see Maurice Oldfield at the open door, brown brogues in one hand, a hanger with jacket and trousers in the other. ‘Hello, Harry,’ he says. Just that: ‘hello’. He stands in the sunlight, which pours through the bars on bright mornings, like a portly angel or a matinee idol in the spotlight. Lord, have you sent thy instrument to set me free? And as I stare at him a lump the size of a golf ball rises in my throat. One hundred and six days I’ve spent in this cell: I want to shout that at Moulders! But he’s holding my cream jacket and those are my blue trousers, and he’s smiling with warmth and concern, so he’d better do the talking because I don’t think I’m able to.
‘The beard,’ he says. ‘I hardly recognise you.’
That makes me laugh.
He checks his watch. ‘You can shave if you’re quick.’
I swing my legs round and rise. ‘Where am I going?’
‘I’ll tell you in the car.’
‘Tell me now!’ I snap at him.
He hesitates. ‘You’re going to Downing Street.’
Maurice doesn’t ask how things have been for me. An astute fellow like Maurice won’t poke a hole in the dam lest he’s engulfed by a flood of pent-up anger and pain. He leaves me to shave and change, and I hear him talking to my guards in the corridor.
‘You’re bringing me back here?’ I ask, as he leads me to the waiting car.
‘Believe me, I hope not,’ he says, ‘but I think that will be up to you.’ More he refuses to say in front of the goons MI5 has sent to secure my delivery.
‘But have you seen her, Maurice?’ I say, as we pull away. ‘How is she?’ He puts a chubby hand on my arm. ‘Leave of absence.’
‘You have seen her?’
‘Yes.’ He slips his glasses off and examines the lenses. ‘She did ask after you. I couldn’t tell her much.’
I nod. ‘Does she think I’m working for the KGB?’
‘I don’t know what she thinks. We need to sort everything out, Harry,’ he says firmly. ‘Today, I hope.’
The sun is blinking through the windscreen, the car full of cigarette smoke. We turn on to the A3 into central London and our driver works his way up through the gears. I can’t see the road ahead for the square head and shoulders of his companion in the seat in front of me, but tidy tree-lined streets flash past my side window, solid red-brick houses with names like The Ferns and Elm Lodge, clipped box hedges and borders of snapdragons and dahlias. The tip of my tongue finds the gap in my front teeth – bottom incisor – then the gap at the top, and I wonder, Bloody hell, how can things be so normal, so ordinary? They just are, of course, they just are, and I know I should be happy that they are, and not resentful that Richmond and Putney cannot imagine what is said and done in their name.
Tired of the silence after so many days in my cell, I ask Maurice about the Union flags I see hanging from the balconies of flats and in shop windows. ‘Is it war?’
‘Association football,’ he says. ‘The World Cup.’
The officer in front of me twitches, and I guess he’s thinking, Where the hell have you been, Taff?
In a bloody hole, boy, in a concrete hole.
‘You missed the seamen’s strike,’ says Maurice. ‘The prime minister declared a state of emergency. Blamed Communist agitators for stirring up trouble.’ He turns to catch my eye, just to be sure the irony isn’t lost on me. ‘What with strikes, cuts, a credit squeeze, the country is in a bit of a mess.’<
br />
We’re crossing Westminster Bridge and preparing to turn right into Whitehall when Maurice tells me the prime minister is on a visit to Moscow, and I’m foolish enough to feel disappointed he isn’t in Downing Street to welcome me. Wilson is on another mission to make peace in Vietnam; no one gives him a hope. Maurice says the Americans want him to ‘butt out’.
‘You’re sure he’ll want to come back from Moscow?’ I ask. Maurice isn’t amused. ‘Oh, come on,’ I say. ‘You’ve brought me here, but you’ve told me nothing.’
Leaning forward a little, he tries to peer over the shoulders of my escort. ‘Here on the left,’ he says to the driver, ‘just in front of the Treasury – we’ll walk the last few yards.’
My police escort climbs out first and stands waiting at my door. ‘All right, man,’ says Maurice, walking round the car to join me. ‘He isn’t going to run off, and if he does you can afford to give him a head start.’
A bus roars past, trailing a cloud of diesel fumes, followed by a black cab and another, and as we walk along Whitehall I struggle to hear what Maurice is saying. Taking him by the arm, I lead him from the traffic into King Charles Street where we stand beneath the white-stone portico entrance to the Foreign Office.
‘We’re trying to keep it from the press …’
‘What, Maurice? What?’
‘I told you. The MP Bernard Floud – he committed suicide. Gassed himself a few days ago. I’m afraid Peter Wright tipped him over the edge. Wilson was going to make him a minister.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Wright was putting him under pressure to reveal his links to the Communist Party.’
‘Were there any?’
‘At one time.’
‘One time,’ I scoff.
Maurice puckers his lips – an expression of disapproval that makes him look quite camp. ‘You should have told me the truth,’ he says.
‘About the Party? Christ, Maurice. I was a member for a few months before the war.’
‘Dick was furious with me. Accused me of being naïve, of endangering the security of the Service.’
‘Because of me?’
‘And now the job is probably Phillpotts’s to lose.’
‘What?’ It takes me a moment to realise he’s fretting about the succession. ‘Is Dick going?’
‘As deputy, it should be me who succeeds him.’
‘Sod off, Oldfield.’ I point to the gap in my teeth. ‘See? I don’t care who crows from the top of the dungheap. If we’re not here to talk about the plot against this country and its prime minister we’re not here to talk about anything, and you can ask the car to take me back.’
‘Where are the other films?’ he says.
‘You think I’m going to tell you here?’
‘Well, as a favour. It would help me.’ He smiles mischievously. ‘No, I don’t expect you to. However, if I might advise you … You’ve made C look a fool, and even a decent man like Dick finds that hard to forgive. Don’t push him too hard. He knows he’s made mistakes. Take my word for it, things are changing for the better.’ He glances at his watch. ‘Look, we must go.’
I expect him to lead me to the door of Number 10 but we pass Downing Street. ‘The Cabinet Office,’ he explains. ‘We have an appointment with the cabinet secretary.’
Sir Burke Trend’s office on Whitehall is opposite the Banqueting House where a king was beheaded by revolutionaries. Civil servants exist to snuff out revolutions. They like the state to evolve at the pace of a Galápagos tortoise. I have never met a stupid civil servant, or a bold one. I know nothing of Trend but I expect he was expensively educated and is a member of one of the more prestigious London clubs, and as I climb the stair at the Cabinet Office – modest by the Empire standards of Whitehall – I wonder if my fate was settled in the smoking room at White’s or the Reform or the Civil Service Club and if I am only here so Trend can reveal it to me.
Our guide knocks and Trend bids us enter. I shuffle forward with a hand to my waistband: after three months of prison food my trousers are too large. The Nazis used to humiliate their opponents in court in the same way, before pronouncing a death sentence.
‘Burke Trend,’ he says, clipping his name in a business-like voice. He’s fit-looking fifties – about my age – lean, even a little gangly, with a high forehead and a strong jaw, and as he shakes my hand his face is a tabula rasa. I am ready to believe after only a few seconds that he is a consummate man of secrets, and as the PM’s principal adviser, I suppose he must be.
‘No introductions necessary, I think.’ He stands aside so I can see my masters seated at his table. Sir Dick White is doing his best to ignore me. Furnival Jones is gripping his chair so tightly his knuckles are white.
‘Gentlemen,’ Trend gestures to the conference table, ‘if you please.’
I sit opposite Dick, who lifts his eyes from a file and fixes me with a hostile stare. Trend takes the seat at the head of the table; the management sits opposite. We’re in a grand room in the classical style with pillars and a high ceiling, fine early-Victorian plasterwork above the picture rail, burgundy flock paper below it, and half a dozen portraits of aristocrats I don’t recognise. No filing cabinets, no embarrassing secrets, except the ones we will speak at Trend’s mahogany conference table – and if he runs around them in true civil-service fashion, well, there are plenty of spare chairs.
‘To the matter at hand,’ he says, ‘which is nothing less than the special relationship with the United States. The prime minister is hoping to visit Washington this month, Mr Vaughan.’ He peers at me over his tortoiseshell-framed glasses. ‘Any suggestion in the press that the prime minister is the subject of an investigation by rogue elements in our intelligence services and the CIA would damage our relationship further and his efforts to secure peace in Vietnam. Do you understand?’
‘Perfectly,’ I say.
‘Course you do.’ He reaches into his navy suit jacket for his pipe and tobacco. ‘Then if you are still in possession of … certain papers, perhaps you will be good enough to return them to the Security Service.’
FJ snorts at this piece of politesse; I answer him with a belligerent stare.
‘Have you a copy?’ Trend points his pipe at the file beneath Dick’s balled hands. ‘Or have you passed it to someone else, Mr Vaughan?’
‘Have you read the file?’ I ask.
‘I have.’
‘And the prime minister?’
He hesitates. ‘The prime minister knows as much as he wishes to know.’
‘Does he know rogue elements were plotting a coup against him?’
‘For God’s sake!’ FJ splutters. ‘Bloody nonsense. I know what you’re doing, Vaughan.’
‘Do you?’ I lean over the table, my fingers balled into a fist. ‘Well, what the hell were you doing? The file was in your safe. The chief of Counter-intelligence at the CIA is – and I quote – “offering to relieve us of our problem”. The problem was the prime minister of this country!’
FJ ignores me and addresses Trend directly. ‘Jim Angleton was flying a kite, Sir Burke, that’s all.’
‘A kite?’ Trend strikes a match and holds it to the bowl of his pipe. ‘Really. Well, Mr Angleton has clearly exerted a good deal of influence on our intelligence services.’ He pauses to puff and char the tobacco. ‘And I must say, gentlemen, I am inclined to agree with Mr Vaughan that they have been led astray.’
I catch Dick’s eye and he looks bloody uncomfortable.
‘But, Mr Vaughan, let me be clear,’ says Trend. ‘The prime minister does not want this unfortunate episode to sour our relationship with the United States – which is in a delicate enough state – and you must agree he has more reason to be angry than anyone. He has been deeply affected by the death of Mr Floud. He doesn’t want an American-style witch-hunt here for Communists. You sent the WORTHINGTON file to a reporter, Mr Vaughan …’ Trend pauses to draw on his pipe again. ‘Mr Oldfield believes you acted for the right reasons – not for mone
y or a love of sensationalism. I hope he’s right and we can count on your discretion, because the prime minister is adamant that none of this can appear in the press.’
I nod slowly. ‘But there will be changes? Angleton is running the whole damn show. There have to be changes.’
‘Mr Vaughan. Please.’ Trend taps on the table. ‘I understand Mr Angleton enjoys the confidence of the director of the CIA …’ He turns to Dick, who nods curtly.
‘Then we will continue to give him an audience,’ Trend says, ‘but that is all. I have assured the prime minister that the WORTHINGTON file will be destroyed and there will be a thorough review of the FLUENCY investigation. So, Mr Vaughan, your desperate act has succeeded in changing things.’
I don’t know whether to believe him. There are so many loose ends: what about Wright? What about the phone taps on MPs and the civil servants who have lost their jobs? What about Blunt, who has been allowed to keep his, and what about the three months I’ve spent in detention without trial, and the hammering they gave me for doing my duty? What about my wife?
Trend is tapping the ash from his pipe into a glass ashtray. ‘Well, that’s my piece,’ he says. ‘The details I leave to you.’ Collecting his papers, he rises with a polite smile. ‘Gentlemen.’ I listen to his footsteps as he approaches the doors behind me. Dick sits straighter; FJ takes a deep breath; Maurice reaches for his cigarettes. Threats and coercion are the business of the uncivil service. My old colleagues are just waiting for them to close to open hostilities.
Dick first: ‘Your moral outrage doesn’t convince me, Vaughan,’ he says. ‘This is about saving your skin. I’ve made mistakes, I admit, but you were certainly the biggest.’
I smile. ‘Flattering, really, when you’ve made such a terrible mess of everything. I couldn’t let it go on. Believe it or not, I have some values, and I joined during the war to protect them. One way or another the Service has been my life, and, well, I did what I did to make sense of that life.’
Dick glares at me. Nothing I say will convince him entirely of my innocence.
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