by Len Deighton
‘I never went to college,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
He heaved himself off the sofa and went to the mantelshelf where he rummaged for matches and pulled at a flower petal to see if the daffodils were plastic; they weren’t. ‘You didn’t go to college but sometimes you hit the nail on the head, Bernard old friend. I’ve been thinking of that conversation you had with Bret Rensselaer this afternoon. It was only sitting here tonight that I began to see what you were getting at.’ I’d never seen Dicky so restless. He found a matchbox on the shelf, but it was empty.
‘Is that so?’
‘You think everything’s coming up too neat and tidy, don’t you? You don’t like the way in which that material implicating Trent has conveniently come into Frank’s hands in Berlin. You’re suspicious about his being on duty the night that damned radio intercept was filed. In short, you don’t like the way everything points to Giles Trent.’
‘I don’t like it,’ I admitted. ‘When I get all my questions answered fully, I know I’m asking the wrong questions.’
‘Let’s cut out all this nebulous talk,’ he said. He put the matchbox back on the shelf, having decided not to smoke. ‘Do you think Moscow know we are on to Trent? Do you think Moscow intend to use him as a scapegoat?’ Carefully he put his unlit cigarette back into the packet.
‘It would be a good idea for them,’ I said.
‘To make us think every leak we’ve suffered for the last few years has been the work of Trent?’
‘Yes, they could wipe the slate clean like that. We put Trent behind bars and heave a sigh of relief and convince ourselves that everything is fine and dandy.’
Now Dicky used the magazine to imprint red circles on his hand, examining the result with the sort of close scrutiny fortune tellers give the palms of wealthy clients.
‘There would be only one reason for doing that,’ said Dicky. He looked up from his hand and stared into my blank face. ‘They’d have to have someone placed as well as Trent…someone who could continue to provide them with the sort of stuff they’ve been getting from Trent.’
‘Better,’ I said. ‘Much better.’
‘Why better?’
‘Because Moscow Centre always like to get their people home. They’ll spend money, arrest some poor tourist to use as hostage, or even spring from jail an agent serving a sentence to swop him. But they really try hard to get their people home.’
‘I could tell you a few people who now find they don’t like it “at home”,’ said Dicky.
‘That doesn’t make any difference,’ I said. ‘The motive that Moscow Centre play upon is getting them safely back to Russia…medals and citations and all that hero bullshit that Moscow do so well.’
‘And there is no sign yet that they are going to try getting Trent back to Moscow.’
‘And that will spoil their record,’ I said. ‘They’d have to have a really good reason for letting Trent fall off the tightrope. There’s only one sort of motive they could have, and that’s positioning or making more secure another agent. A better agent.’
‘But maybe the Russians don’t know we’re on to him.’
‘And maybe Trent doesn’t want to go to Moscow. Yes, I thought of both those possibilities, and either could be true. But I think Trent is going to be deliberately sacrificed. And that would be very unusual.’
‘This other person,’ said Dicky. ‘This other agent that Moscow might already have in position…You’re talking about someone at the very top? Am I right?’
‘Look at the record, Dicky. We haven’t run a good double agent in years and we haven’t landed any of their important agents either. That adds up to one thing only: someone here is blowing everything we do,’ I said. ‘We’ve had a long string of miserable failures, and some of them were projects that Trent had no access to.’
‘The record can be a can of worms – we both know that,’ said Dicky. ‘If they had someone highly placed, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to act on everything he told them. That would leave a trail a mile wide. They are too smart for that.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘So the chances are that Moscow know even more than the evidence suggests.’
‘Do you think it could be me?’ said Dicky. He beat a soft but rapid tattoo on his hand.
‘It’s not you,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s not anyone. Maybe there is no pattern of betrayal – just incompetence.’
‘Why not me?’ Dicky persisted. He was indignant at being dismissed so readily as a suspect.
‘If you’d been a Moscow agent, you would have handled the office differently. You would have kept your secretary in that anteroom instead of moving her inside where she can see what you are doing all the time. You’d make sure you know all kinds of current matters that you don’t bother to find out. You wouldn’t leave top-secret documents in the copying machine and cause a hue and cry all round the building the way you did three times last year. A Moscow agent wouldn’t draw that kind of attention to himself. And you probably would know enough about photography not to make such a terrible mess of your holiday snapshots the way you do every year. No, you’re not a Moscow man, Dicky.’
‘And neither are you,’ said Dicky, ‘or you wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place. So let’s stick together on this one. You’re going to Berlin to contact the Brahms net. Let’s keep your reports of that trip confidential verbal ones. And from now on let’s keep the wraps on Trent and everything we do, say or think about him. Between us, we can keep a very tight hold on things.’
‘You mean, don’t tell Bret?’
‘I’ll handle Bret. He’ll be told only what he needs to be told.’
‘You can’t suspect Bret?’ Immediately I thought of Fiona. If she was having an affair with Bret, any investigation of Bret would reveal it. Then there would be the very devil of a fuss.
‘It can be anyone. You’ve said that yourself. It could be the D-G.’
‘Well, I don’t know, Dicky,’ I said.
Dicky became agitated. ‘Oh, I see what you’re thinking. You think this might be a devious method of starving Bret of information. So that I can take over his job.’
‘No,’ I said, although that was exactly what had crossed my mind.
‘Let’s not kick off to a bad start,’ said Dicky. ‘We’ve got to trust each other. What do I have to do to make you trust me?’
‘I’d want something in writing, Dicky. Something that I could produce just before they sentence me.’
‘Then you’ll do as I suggest?’
‘Yes.’ Now that Dicky had voiced my fears, I felt uneasy – or, rather, I felt frightened, bloody frightened. A Moscow agent in place endangered all of us, but if he was caught, maybe he’d leave the whole Department discredited and disbanded.
Dicky nodded. ‘Because you know I’m right. You bloody well know I’m right. There is a Moscow agent sitting right at the top of the Department.’
I didn’t remind Dicky that he’d started off by saying that it was my conversation with Bret that eventually made him see what I was getting at. It was better that Dicky thought it was all his own idea. Balliol men like to be creative.
There were footsteps and a knock at the door. The doctor came in. ‘The patient is sleeping now, Mr Cruyer,’ he said respectfully. Given the Victorian setting, I had expected a man with muttonchop whiskers and stovepipe hat. But the doctor was young, younger than Dicky, a wide-eyed boy, with long wavy hair that reached down to his stiff white collar, and carrying a battered black Gladstone bag that he must have inherited from some venerable predecessor.
‘So what’s the prognosis, Doc?’ said Dicky.
The doctor put his bag down on the floor while he put his overcoat on. ‘Suicide is no longer the rare tragedy it once was,’ he said. ‘In Germany, they have about fourteen thousand a year, and that’s more than die there in traffic accidents.’
‘Never mind the statistics,’ said Dicky. ‘Is our friend upstairs likely to try again?’
‘Look, Mr Cruyer, I’m just a GP, not a soothsayer. But whether you like statistics or not, I can tell you that eight out of ten suicides speak of their intentions beforehand. If someone sympathetic had been available to your friend, he probably wouldn’t have taken this desperate step. As to whether he’ll try again, if you give him the care and attention he obviously requires, then you will know what he’s going to do long before any quack like me gets called in to mop up the mess.’
Dicky nodded as if approving the doctor’s little speech. ‘Will he be fit by tomorrow?’ said Dicky.
‘By the weekend, anyway,’ said the doctor. ‘Thanks to Miss Trent.’ He moved aside to let Giles Trent’s unmarried sister push past him into the room. ‘Her time as a nurse served her well. I couldn’t have done a better job myself.’
Miss Trent did not respond to the doctor’s unctuous manner. She was in her late fifties, a tall thin figure like her brother. Her hair was waved and darkened and her eyeglasses decorated with shiny gems. She wore a cashmere cardigan and a skirt patterned in the Fraser tartan of red, blue and green. At the collar of her cotton blouse she wore an antique gold brooch. She gave the impression of someone with enough money to satisfy her modest tastes.
The furnishing of the room was like Miss Trent: sober, middle-class and old-fashioned. The carpets, bureau-bookcase and skeleton clock were valuable pieces that might have been inherited from her parents, but they did not fit easily there and I wondered if these were things Giles Trent had recently disposed of.
‘I used my common sense,’ she said, and rubbed her hands together briskly. There was a trace of the Highlands in her voice.
The young doctor bade us all goodnight and departed. Goodness knows what Dicky had told him but, despite his little outburst, his manner was uncommonly respectful.
‘And you’re the man my brother works for,’ said Miss Trent.
‘Yes, I am,’ said Dicky. ‘You can imagine how shocked I was to hear what had happened.’
‘Yes, I can imagine,’ she said frostily. I wondered how much she guessed about her brother’s work.
‘But I wish you hadn’t called in your local doctor,’ said Dicky. He gave her the card listing the Departmental emergency numbers. ‘Much better to use the private medical service that your brother is entitled to.’ Dicky smiled at her, and held his smile despite the stern look she gave both to the card and to Dicky. ‘We’ll get your brother into a nice comfortable room with a night nurse and medical attention available on the spot.’ Again the smile, and again no response. Miss Trent’s countenance remained unchanged. ‘You’ve done your bit, Miss Trent.’
‘My brother will stay here,’ she said.
‘I’ve made all the arrangements now,’ said Dicky. He was a match for her; Dicky had the thick-skinned determination of a rhino. I was interested to watch the confrontation, but again and again my thoughts went back to Fiona. Morbidly I visualized her with Bret: talking, dancing, laughing, loving.
‘Did you not hear what I said?’ Miss Trent asked calmly. ‘My brother needs the rest. You’ll not be disturbing him.’
‘That’s a decision that neither of us need concern ourselves with,’ said Dicky. ‘Your brother has signed a contract under the terms of which his employers are responsible for his medical care. In situations like this’ – Dicky paused long enough to raise an eyebrow – ‘your brother must be examined by one of our own medical staff. We have to think of the medical insurance people. They can be devils about anything irregular.’
‘He’s sleeping.’ This represented a slight retrenchment.
‘If his insurance was revoked, your brother would lose his pension, Miss Trent. Now I’m sure you wouldn’t want to claim that your medical knowledge is better than that of the doctor who examined him.’
‘I did not hear the doctor say he could be moved.’
‘He wrote it out for me,’ said Dicky. He’d put the piece of paper between the pages of his magazine and now he leafed through it. ‘Yes, here we are.’ He passed the handwritten document to her. She read it in silence and passed it back.
‘He must have written that when he first arrived.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Dicky.
‘That was before he examined my brother. Is that what you were doing all the time before he came upstairs?’
‘The ambulance will be here any moment, Miss Trent. Can I trouble you to put your brother’s clothes into a case or a bag? I’ll see you get it back of course.’ A big smile. ‘He’ll need his clothes in a day or two, from what I understand.’
‘I’ll go with him,’ she said.
‘I’ll phone the office and ask them,’ said Dicky. ‘But they almost always say no. That’s the trouble with trying to get things done at this time of night. None of the really senior people can be found.’
‘I thought you were senior,’ she said.
‘Exactly!’ said Dicky. ‘That’s what I mean. No one will be senior enough to countermand my decision.’
‘Poor Giles,’ said the woman. ‘That he’d be working for a man such as you.’
‘For a lot of the time, he was left on his own,’ said Dicky.
Miss Trent looked up suddenly to see what he meant, but Dicky’s face was as blank as hers had been. Angrily she turned to where I was sitting holding a folded newspaper and pencil. ‘And you,’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s a crossword,’ I said. ‘Six letters: the clue is “Married in opera but not in Seville”. Do you get it?’
‘I know nothing of opera. I hate opera, and I know nothing of Seville,’ said Miss Trent. ‘And if you’ve nothing more important than that to ask me, it’s time you took yourself out of my house.’
‘I’ve nothing more important than that to ask you, Miss Trent,’ I said. ‘Perhaps your brother will be able to solve it.’
Jesus, I thought, suppose Bret turned out to be a Moscow man and was trying to recruit Fiona to his cause. That would really be messy.
‘It’s not a crossword at all,’ said Miss Trent. ‘You’re making up questions. That’s the classified page.’
‘I’m looking for another job,’ I explained.
15
Dicky had Trent taken out to Berwick House, an eighteenth-century manor named after a natural son of James II and the sister of the Duke of Marlborough. It had been taken over by the War Office in 1940 and, like so many other good things seized temporarily by the government, it was never returned to its former owners.
The seclusion could hardly have been bettered had the place been specially built for us. Seven acres of ground with an ancient fifteen-foot-high wall that was now so overgrown with weeds and ivy that it looked more like a place that had been abandoned than one that was secret.
On the croquet lawn the Army had erected black creosoted Nissen huts, which now provided a dormitory for the armed guards, and two prefabricated structures which were sometimes used for lectures when there was a conference or a special training course in the main building. But, despite these disfigurements, Berwick House retained much of its original elegance. The moat was the most picturesque feature of the estate and it still had its bulrushes, irises and lilies. There was no sign of the underwater devices that had been added. Even the little rustic teahouse and gate lodge had been converted to guard posts with enough care to preserve their former appearance. And the infra-red beams and sonic warning shields that lined the perimeter were so well hidden in the undergrowth that even the technicians who checked them did not find them of easy access.
‘You’ve got a nerve,’ said Giles Trent. ‘It’s kidnapping, no matter what fancy explanations Dicky gives me.’
‘Your taking an overdose of sleeping tablets upset him,’ I said.
‘You’re a sardonic bastard,’ said Trent. We were in his cramped second-floor room: cream-painted walls, metal frame bed, and a print of Admiral Nelson dying at Trafalgar.
‘You think I should feel sorry for you,’ I said. ‘And I don’t feel sorry for yo
u. That’s why we are at odds.’
‘You never let up, do you?’
‘I’m not an interrogator,’ I said cheerfully. ‘And, unlike you, I never have been. You know most of our interrogation staff, Giles. You trained some of them, according to what I saw on your file. Say who you’d like assigned to you and I’ll do everything I can to arrange that you get him.’
‘Give me a cigarette,’ said Trent. We both knew that there was no question of Trent’s being permitted anywhere near one of the interrogators. Such a confrontation would start rumours everywhere, from Curzon Street to the Kremlin. I passed him a cigarette. ‘Why can’t I have a couple of packets?’ said Trent, who was a heavy smoker.
‘Berwick House regulations forbid smoking in the bedrooms, and the doctor said it’s bad for you.’
‘I don’t know what you wanted to keep me alive for,’ said Trent in an unconvincing outburst of melancholy. He was too tall for the skimpy cotton dressing gown provided by the housekeeper’s department, and he kept tugging at its collar to cover the open front of his buttonless pyjama jacket. Perhaps he remembered the interrogation training report in which he’d recommended that detainees should be made to suffer ‘a loss of both dignity and comfort’ while being questioned.
I said, ‘They’re not keeping you fit and well for the Old Bailey, if that’s what you mean.’
He lit his cigarette with the matches I gave him and then hunched himself in order to take that very deep first breath that the tobacco addict craves. Only when he’d blown smoke did he say, ‘You think not?’
‘And have you centre stage for a publicity circus? You know too much, Giles.’
‘You flatter me. I know only tidbits. When was I a party to any important planning?’ I heard in his voice a note of disappointed ambition. Had that played a part in his treachery, I wondered.
‘It’s tidbits the government really hate, Trent. It’s tidbits that are wanted for the papers and the news magazines. That’s why you can never get into the Old Bailey through the crowds of reporters. They know their readers don’t want to read those long reports about the Soviet economy when they could find out how someone bugged the bedroom of the Hungarian military attaché’s favourite mistress.’