The Last Kiss Goodbye

by Tasmina Perry

‘We couldn’t have expected Soames to admit to anything, even if he did know Dominic was a spy,’ said Elliot, as if he were thinking out loud. ‘It’s not James Bond we’re talking about. There’s a certain glamour about espionage, but this is out-and-out betrayal of one’s country, one’s friends, colleagues. Take Philby: he was responsible for the deaths of dozens of Western agents.’

  She told him about a phone call she’d had with Robert Webb, a former editor of Capital magazine, and an email conversation with another journalist associate of Dominic’s, both of which Elliot said he would follow up, even though the communication had been fairly fruitless.

  ‘So what about you?’ she asked, sipping her water.

  ‘Most of the Soveyemka press team from the period are now dead. But the list of spy names is fairly well documented if you know where to look, and I had it backed up by a member of the news team who was a junior reporter at the time.’

  ‘It’s hardly conclusive, though,’ said Abby.

  ‘I agree. The person I really wanted to track down was Dominic’s handler.’

  ‘Handler?’

  ‘If you’re an agent, your handler is your boss, the one who gives you your assignments, your point of contact. Have you never seen Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy?’

  She shook her head, remembering Nick buying the DVD and ending up watching it alone while she had a bath.

  ‘Bearing in mind that Dominic would have been in his eighties now, it’s no surprise that any handler of that generation of spies is no longer with us. But we have a meeting tomorrow with Alexei Gorshkov, the former KGB colonel, who I think is going to confirm Dominic’s activities.’

  Abby laughed nervously.

  ‘I’m just an archivist from Wimbledon. This morning I was supposed to meet my friend for brunch, and tomorrow we’re off to meet the KGB.’

  ‘You’re not just an archivist, Abby. You’re a journalist for the Chronicle,’ Elliot said in a way that made Abby feel a little bit bigger and bolder.

  She couldn’t stop a yawn escaping from her mouth.

  ‘Tired?’

  She nodded, and their eyes met for a brief, electric moment.

  She looked away, part of her willing him to leave the room, part of her hoping he would stay.

  He stood up and walked towards her. Abby’s heart started beating fiercely. He touched her shoulder with his fingertips as she held her breath, wondering what would happen next.

  ‘You’d better get some sleep. You’ve been travelling all day and we’ve got a big meeting tomorrow.’

  He left the room without even a kiss on the cheek good night, and Abby couldn’t help but feel disappointed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Abby was just about to reluctantly swing her legs off the bed and slip her feet into white fluffy slippers, helpfully put there by the housekeeping fairy at some point she hadn’t even noticed, when the bedroom phone rang.

  ‘Are you up?’ asked Elliot.

  ‘Just about,’ groaned Abby. ‘Although I could have stayed in that bed for ever.’

  ‘Gorshkov has put back our meeting until five p.m. That gives us a chance to get out and see the city.’

  ‘Well it’s an awfully long way to come just to stay in a hotel room, however much I could happily sit out on the balcony all day nibbling blinis.’

  Abby didn’t know whether Elliot had inside knowledge of the city or whether the concierge had guessed her taste correctly, but their day had been planned to perfection.

  They had breakfast in a nearby café, another grand space, with the feel of a Vienna tea room, where they ate butterbrots and tvorog.

  Many of the great sights of the city were within walking distance of their hotel: the Mariinsky Theatre, St Isaac’s Cathedral and the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood with its gold and turquoise onion-shaped domes that soared into the crisp blue sky. Just a glimpse of each one of them made Abby feel like a Romanov princess, although the many designer boutiques, expensive restaurants and chic fashionistas on the street made her realise that this was very much the twenty-first century.

  They spent the afternoon in the Hermitage Museum, set in the spectacular Winter Palace, an enormous mint green, white and gold villa that had once been the royal residence of the tsars and was quite possibly Abby’s favourite building in the whole city of architectural treasures. Inside was just as incredible. They saw golden thrones and dozens of objets d’art: clocks, crockery, caskets that had once belonged to Catherine the Great. As an art history graduate, Abby almost wept with joy at the museum’s collection. Room upon room was stuffed with works from the great masters: da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian. Elliot couldn’t have been a better companion, surprising her with his knowledge of Italian Renaissance art but not taking it all so seriously that they didn’t have fun.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, glancing at his watch as time slipped away from them. ‘We’d better get a move on. I can’t imagine the KGB are too tolerant of poor timekeeping.’

  ‘Ex-KGB,’ said Abby hopefully.

  The Mianovitch Building stood in the middle of a park, surrounded on all sides by hedges and fountains, as if it had been dropped into the middle of the city from the air. Such old-world elegance was an incongruous sight out in the suburbs, half an hour’s drive from the city, where rows and rows of grey tower blocks – ‘the people’s housing’ – pressed in on all sides. Abby peered out of the window of the taxi – an Eastern European town car with leather seats and rusting chrome bumpers – as it slid past a row of shops, some of them boarded up, a queue of sullen people outside one. What were they queuing for? she wondered. She leant forward to the driver.

  ‘That shop?’ she said, pointing. ‘Is it a bakery?’

  The driver, a thickset man in a lime-green Adidas top, shrugged and pulled a face to indicate he didn’t understand.

  ‘Bread?’ said Abby, miming eating.

  The man laughed. ‘Bread? No, this.’ He held up his mobile phone and chuckled to himself.

  ‘The Russian Apple store, clearly,’ said Elliot.

  As they got closer to the Mianovitch Building, they could see that it was in a similar state of disrepair. The mouldings were cracked and a colony of pigeons evidently lived in the gutters, if the stains on the once white walls were anything to go by. But it still had a sheen of bygone glamour, with fluted columns and tall windows.

  ‘Was it some sort of mansion, before communism, I mean?’

  Elliot turned a page in the guidebook open on his lap.

  ‘Built in 1897, apparently, as the country residence of one of Tsar Nicholas’s relatives,’ he read. ‘At one time the gardens stretched for miles, but the city grew up around it, and after the revolution it became a possession of the Politburo, used for parties and visiting dignitaries. Sort of like the Russian equivalent of Chequers, I suppose. Or at least it was at one time.’

  The driver pulled up outside the grand arched entrance.

  ‘You wan’ here?’ he asked, gesturing to the building doubtfully. ‘No tourist no come. Just old men.’

  Elliot raised his eyebrows at Abby.

  ‘I think what he’s trying to say is that this place has seen better days.’

  The driver nodded towards Elliot’s laptop bag, then over to the nearest tower block.

  ‘Bad men steal this. Bad men here.’

  ‘We’ll be careful,’ Elliot said, handing the man a fistful of currency.

  He touched Abby’s arm reassuringly. The gesture made her feel safe as she followed him through the high doors and into a huge lobby.

  ‘Wow,’ she said, looking up at the domed ceiling. Sunlight was pushing in through dirty windows, winking off the dust motes in the air. ‘I bet this was amazing.’

  ‘Still is, in a faded sort of way,’ said Elliot, heading for the wide marble stairs that curved away on either side of the hall. ‘Second floor, room thirty,’ he said over his shoulder.

  At the top of the stairs, they turned into a dingy corridor. There was a sme
ll of overcooked vegetables and floor cleaner, although Abby was fairly sure it hadn’t been used for a while. She looked at the doors as they passed: all heavy oak, all tightly closed. It was intimidating, like a hotel shut up for the winter.

  ‘How are we supposed to know which room it is?’ she whispered as they turned a corner. ‘It’s all in Russian.’

  ‘Don’t think it matters,’ murmured Elliot, nodding towards the end of the passageway.

  A man was standing there watching them.

  ‘Mr Hall, I presume?’ he said with a faint accent. He was tall, with a slight hunch to his shoulders and white hair combed straight back from his temples. ‘And Miss Gordon too, I believe?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Elliot, putting his hand out. ‘And you are Mr Gorshkov?’

  The man did not reply; instead he gestured to the open doorway to their left. ‘Please, step inside. It is best if we do not talk out here.’

  He gave Abby a slight smile, then stepped through into a large apartment. Like the rest of the building, there were echoes here of its previous use – thick carpets and heavy polished furniture. Perhaps it had been a reception room or a suite for guests. But the thing that struck Abby was the amount of books: in tall bookcases, in piles on the floor, stacked on tables; there was even a tower of them in the stone fireplace.

  ‘Please, excuse the disarray,’ said the Russian. ‘I’m afraid history is one of my hobbies and there never seem to be enough books about any one subject.’

  He moved an armful of volumes, clearing space for them to sit in two large velvet armchairs.

  ‘This building is amazing,’ said Abby, still looking around.

  ‘Yes, but it was once magnificent. A venue for important affairs and people, everything polished and gleaming. There was a string quartet permanently employed to play in the drawing room, did you know that? Imagine!’ He shook his head sadly. ‘And look at it now. Reduced to the status of a boarding house for retired servants of the state.’

  He perched on a wing-backed armchair and bent over a tray of tea things.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, I anticipated your arrival – it’s already brewed.’ He smiled up at Abby. ‘I spent some time in your country, you see, and developed a taste for the English way of things – at least when it comes to tea.’

  Abby smiled back as she took a bone-china cup and saucer from him. Alexei Gorshkov wasn’t at all what she had been expecting. She had imagined a stern, granite-jawed soldier with a stiff back and a gruff demeanour. The real Gorshkov was more like a slightly distracted Oxford don.

  ‘Mr Gorshkov . . .’ began Elliot.

  ‘Alexei, please. I’ve had enough of formality to last me a lifetime.’

  ‘Alexei, then. You said this place was a home for retired servants of the state. Am I correct in thinking that you were a senior member of the KGB?’

  Gorshkov smiled. ‘If I was, you wouldn’t expect me to answer that question directly, would you? Let’s just say I was a faithful servant of Mother Russia.’

  ‘A faithful servant who worked in the field of intelligence,’ added Elliot cautiously.

  Alexei nodded. ‘Oh, I think I can say that much, yes.’

  ‘You say you spent time in the UK. Was that in conjunction with this work?’

  Gorshkov nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘And did you ever employ British operatives?’

  Abby looked at Elliot and frowned. At this rate they wouldn’t get back to St Petersburg until midnight.

  ‘Were you a spy, Mr Gorshkov?’ she asked. ‘Did you know another spy, a British spy, called Dominic Blake?’

  Elliot flashed her a surprised and slightly irritated look, but Alexei seemed to soften and started to laugh.

  ‘I was very active in espionage in your country for many years,’ he said. ‘But I was never a field agent myself.’

  ‘Then what were you?’

  ‘A spymaster.’ He looked over at Elliot. ‘But then Mr Hall already knows all this, don’t you?’

  Elliot frowned. ‘I’m sorry. What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that you asked your friend Paul Jacobs to put you in touch with a senior KGB operative. Once you had my name, you researched me from your terminal in the Chronicle building, making three telephone calls to contacts in the security services before you emailed me.’

  He smiled at Abby’s astonished expression. ‘No need to look so startled, Miss Gordon. I even sent Tomas to drive you. It was his job to make you believe you were flagging a random taxi.’

  He held up a hand to silence her questions.

  ‘It’s no secret who I am. The security services on every side always know their counterparts – that’s the easy part. The hard part is finding out what your opposite number knows.’

  He paused to pour himself more tea.

  ‘So now we’re all introduced. The only question remaining is why have you come all this way? Or to put it another way, why is Dominic Blake so important to you?’

  Abby and Elliot exchanged a look.

  ‘You knew we were coming to ask about him?’ said Abby.

  Gorshkov gave a gentle good-humoured snort.

  ‘Give me a little credit. I searched for Mr Hall’s name on the internet; the first thing that pops up is a story about the Great British Explorers exhibition, alongside a picture of a man kissing his fiancée. And of course I recognised Mr Blake immediately.’

  ‘You knew him, then?’ said Elliot.

  ‘Of course. That’s why I agreed to meet you.’

  ‘Were you his handler?’

  ‘I wasn’t his handler. That was Vladimir Karlov. He died in 1993. But I knew Blake well. We met on many occasions and I found him to be charming on every single one of them.’

  ‘What was his role?’ said Abby.

  ‘He gathered information. Information that Vladimir would assess and pass up the chain. Very simple, very efficient. For the most part, anyway.’

  ‘Who recruited him, and when did it happen?’ asked Elliot.

  Abby looked at Alexei, praying that he would not name Rosamund.

  ‘Dominic was recruited at Cambridge,’ said Gorshkov simply. ‘His college had a legacy of producing good men for Russia.’

  ‘I don’t understand why he would do that,’ said Abby. ‘What persuaded him to join? What made him betray his country?’

  ‘Burgess, Maclean, Philby . . . no one believes what they are doing is wrong, Miss Gordon. There are any number of reasons why a man may join the other side; greed, lust, fear – all can be powerful. But can you guess the strongest of all?’

  ‘Ideology?’ said Elliot. ‘Belief in the cause?’

  ‘God, no. Politics is far too objective and far too prone to change. For example, you might be happy to give up secrets to undermine a certain government, but what if that government changed? Would you simply stop passing us information? No, contrary to what people think, spies are rarely motivated by belief – unless it’s in their particular God, of course.’

  ‘So what is the strongest motivation?’ asked Abby.

  ‘Hate, of course. Hate will drive men to do anything. And it keeps burning and burning, usually for ever.’

  ‘And what did Dominic Blake hate?’ asked Elliot.

  ‘The British establishment. I forget the details, something to do with his father and the way they treated him during the war. It was a common theme in recruitment at that time; a lot of grudges were held after the war. Either way, Dominic came to our notice in his final year at Cambridge, practically breathing fire at the local Communist Party meeting. We soon put a stop to that, of course.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘An outspoken communist shouting about the evils of the establishment? Hardly subtle, is it? No, we explained that he could further the cause far more effectively by playing a role, being the stereotypical public school cliché, joining the rowing club, making friends with the right sort.’

  ‘The right sort?’ asked Abby.

  ‘The sort who might one
day be in the Cabinet.’

  Alexei’s gaze trailed out of the window as if his thoughts were lost in the past.

  ‘Dominic was special, I can say that after many years of experience. Most agents are opportunists. They get themselves in a useful position – a border control officer, say, or a worker at an aerospace factory – then they wait for interesting information to come their way. But Dominic was proactive. He’d think about what information could be useful to us, then he’d seek it out, talk to people, take out the guesswork.’

  ‘Working as a journalist must have helped him.’

  Alexei nodded.

  ‘He joined one of the broadsheets straight out of Cambridge, but he realised it would take him years to climb up the Fleet Street ladder and have the ears of the rich and powerful. So he decided to set his own pace and launched Capital.’

  Abby’s shoulders slumped in disappointment. She imagined Dominic charming Soames’s father with his vision for an exciting new magazine, getting him to invest and support him, and all the while he wanted to peddle a secret communist agenda.

  ‘He was also a sexually attractive man,’ continued Gorshkov, choosing his words carefully. ‘Some of his most useful pieces of information were obtained not through idle tittle-tattle, but in the bedroom. Breathless embassy secretaries, personal assistants to Whitehall bigwigs, politicians’ wives. One affair was particularly useful. The wife of a War Office minister, Gerald Hamilton.’ He allowed himself a little chuckle at that one. ‘It is amazing what you can find out second-hand.’

  Abby shook her head, not wanting to believe any of it.

  ‘How do we know you are telling the truth?’ she asked recklessly.

  Alexei didn’t look offended. ‘My dear, the Cold War is over. My life too is in its final act. You asked me a question, I will tell you what I know. When you are eighty-five years old, there is no point keeping things to yourself.’

  ‘Alexei, what we really want to know is what happened to Dominic Blake, not whether he was a spy or not.’

  ‘And why is this important fifty years after his death?’

  ‘Because the people he loved deserve to know.’

  Alexei gave a slow, soft exhale.