Friends and Traitors

by John Lawton

  “Always, I suppose. He never said he was a spy, at least not directly, but I never really believed in his conversion to democracy. I never had any idea on what or whom he might be spying, and most of the time he seemed to be too indiscreet to be a spy. Many people must have drawn that same conclusion. He was easily dismissed. A bit of a joke. He could have walked around London in a black cape with a parcel marked ‘bomb’ and got away with it. The queer buffoon was near-perfect cover, I just never believed it.”

  “Yet you never told anyone?”

  “What’s to tell?”

  Westcott mused awhile. He could not seem to go ten minutes without a cigarette. Troy wasn’t certain whether lighting up and fiddling with matches bought him time or merely satisfied a craving.

  “Fifty-one. The last time you saw Burgess. And the time before that?”

  “Oh, that’s unforgettable. He threw a farewell party in 1950 just before he set off for Washington.”

  “Ah. You were there. Well, that’s gone down in the annals of debauchery, hasn’t it?”

  “Quite rightly so. I don’t think I’d ever seen him play the queer buffoon to the hilt before.”

  “Drugs?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Sex?”

  “Of course.”

  “And quite a … how should I put it? A Who’s Who of queer London?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that either. A smattering of men in uniform if that’s any kind of indication. Sailors, soldiers. But Guy Liddell from MI5 was there, Anthony Blunt was there … and so was the Deputy Foreign Secretary Hector McNeil—Guy had worked directly under him for years, after all. Of those, the only one I can recall speaking to was Blunt, and that was about art. He wanted an opportunity to come out here and look at my father’s Turners, Constables, and the van Gogh we have in London … I think he came to lunch later that summer. And I’ve no idea of the sexual preferences of any of those men. Moura Budberg was there. She insisted on talking to me. She usually does. I can’t remember about what—I have always found her presence somewhat disturbing. And quite possibly a couple of what Guy used to call ‘rough trade’—he was mixing a heady cocktail that night.”

  “And your part in this?”

  “To be appalled, I think.”

  Troy’s memory flashed. A full, immediate picture of the moment he went into the bedroom to look for his notebook. Burgess naked and erect. The naval uniform strewn across the floor. The moment Guy’s conquest, whoever he was, sat bolt upright as though stung, only to collapse back on the bed with a thump. Yes, appalled was the right word. He wasn’t going to mention this to Westcott. It added nothing and was a memory he’d done without for years and would rather do without now.

  “I left when McNeil did. He gave Guy a fairly plain warning to watch his step in Washington—a fraction short of calling the USA a nation of strait-laced prudes who would not take kindly to his antics. Guy laughed it off. But I’d had enough of him by then. He was drunk and clearly going to get drunker as night crept into day. I walked to the next corner with McNeil and bade him goodnight. It was the only word I spoke to him and I never saw him again—although I believe my brother was at his funeral. His embarrassment when the truth about Guy came out must have been unbearable.”

  “Vienna,” said Westcott. “Let’s go back to Vienna.”

  Troy gave him a potted version of meeting Voytek, the anonymous invitation, omitted her performance and cut to her surprise in the dressing room.

  “Burgess?”

  “Burgess in a crude disguise which only served to get him giggling. He cracked a joke or two, and as soon as Miss Voytek left us alone he dropped his bombshell. Hardly bothered with any preamble. The merest beating around the merest bush. He was homesick, he missed his mother. He wanted to come home. Would I oblige him by asking? I think he might have meant me to ask Rod, but I’d never do that. I wouldn’t want to involve Rod, and besides, Rod could never stick Guy.

  “Once I’d agreed, he said nothing more of any note, asked a lot of questions about life in London, had I seen so-and-so—half the names meant nothing to me, but he did ask about Guy Liddell, whom I’ve met a couple of times since Guy’s farewell party, about Goronwy Rees, whom I’ve never met, Tom Driberg, whom I know only too well … had I seen anything of his brother, Nigel—and was such and such still a thing there, was his favourite second-hand bookshop still open, and so on.

  “In the morning I went to the embassy, asked for a secure line to London, and got through to Jordan Younghusband at Five. That evening we met again in a restaurant. He was even more unhappy, still the Englishman in exile, still on the brink of tears with every sentence. But somehow we got around to what he’d done. To his sins. He got drunker and drunker. Resentful that he was always badgered about what he knew and who he knew. The world expecting him to name names. So I played a game with him … took up the question every newspaper’s been asking since he defected … ‘is there a third man’ or ‘who’s the third man?’

  “I suppose I meant it as a joke, but once I’d started the game Guy seemed only too willing to play. I said something like, ‘You’re the first man,’ and Guy said, ‘You can always trust the alphabet.’ I said, ‘Maclean second,’ and got ‘Good bloody grief, is he really?’ And when I said, ‘Who’s on third?’ I think the reference to Abbott and Costello was lost on him and he simply said, ‘Philby.’”

  “No surprises there, then.”

  “No. We all knew that. Only an idiot or a Daily Express reporter would have believed a word Philby said at his press conference. So, I said, ‘Fourth?’ And Guy said, ‘Blunt.’ And I was surprised.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh Blunt’s a wrong’un, alright.”

  “Do we knight our wrong’uns now?”

  “Touché, Mr. Troy. Sir Anthony is … what’s the word … contained. Not a problem. And I’ll spare you any conflict of loyalty—I would not expect you to betray a friend—when you asked him who came next he named Charles Leigh-Hunt, did he not?”

  “So, you knew about Charlie?”

  “We do, but we didn’t—if you catch my drift. His sudden resignation from Six in 1956 was all that alerted us. Prior to that he was not, to my knowledge, under suspicion, except insofar as we are all under suspicion. Did you get Leigh-Hunt the job in Beirut?”

  “No. I had nothing to do with it. My brother, Rod, and my brother-in-law Lawrence Stafford arranged it. They offered him the job, and it’s not much of a job from what I hear. Not much more than stringer really. If he’s hiding, he’s hiding in plain sight. You could pull him at any moment if you so chose.”

  Westcott paused for thought, drew his scarf up around his neck, then sunk his hands deep in his pockets.

  “We have no solid evidence he’s a traitor. Less than we have on Blunt, in fact. Your word, Burgess’s word. Nothing that would stand up in court. Similarly, Inspector Cobb vanished only a couple of weeks before Leigh-Hunt resigned. I’d put money on Leigh-Hunt having killed Cobb, but neither you, in the Murder Squad, nor I, in Special Branch, could prove that.”

  “I think I told you a little earlier, my squad wasn’t asked to investigate Cobb’s disappearance. It is a Scotland Yard unwritten rule—the Branch investigate their own.”

  “We did, and came up with nothing. Nothing except a whisper of Leigh-Hunt, that is.”

  Troy said nothing. Westcott picked up his thread.

  “Did you ask Burgess about anyone else?”

  “I pushed ahead with the game of numbers. I asked who was number six—or six hundred six, or whatever silly number we’d reached by then.”

  “And?”

  “He told me to mind my own business and fell face down onto his plate. I got nothing more out of him. Indeed, there was nothing more I wanted. It was just a game. It’s not the business I’m in. I got him back to his hotel, rolled him onto the bed, took off his shoes, and left him to sleep it off. I saw him twice more. Around noon the ne
xt day to tell him MI5 were sending someone out, and when I ushered Blaine in and I ushered myself out. I don’t think I even shut the door between entering and leaving. Blaine didn’t want me there, and I was more than happy to oblige. I never saw Guy again.

  “When the Vienna police let me go, I went straight round to Guy’s hotel, but needless to say he was long gone. Roderick Spode had checked out.”

  “Why Roderick Spode?”

  “Guy was fond of literary jokes. I believe he told Melinda Maclean he was called Roger Styles—an Agatha Christie character. Roderick Spode is from the Jeeves books, and ironically enough, he’s a fascist caricature. The Russians must have offered him a fake passport in whatever name, he could hardly travel as Guy Burgess, and he had to have his little joke with them.”

  “Did he leave a note?”

  Troy took his left hand from his overcoat pocket and handed Burgess’s note to Westcott.

  “I thought you might ask,” he said.

  Westcott took it in at a glance.

  “Pudding Island?”

  “Another of Guy’s jokes. A double joke, in fact. It’s Lawrence Durrell’s contemptuous term for Britain. Stodgy and tasteless. Double in that Guy was always rather fond of pudding.”

  “Hmm.”

  Westcott handed the note back.

  “Should we be looking into this Durrell chap?”

  §98

  Just before three, the Fat Man brought the Bentley round to the front, to take Westcott back to the railway station.

  He shook Troy’s hand, a glimmer of a smile visible above the tartan scarf wound about his chin.

  “Thank you, Mr. Troy. May I say it’s been a pleasure.”

  “You will understand if I say it hasn’t?”

  Westcott dipped his head, looked up again, the smile still intact. He wasn’t taking hump. Troy was glad. He had no wish to upset the old man, but temptation tugged at him all the time.

  “Will we be meeting again, Mr. Westcott?”

  “I don’t know. A little too early to say, and I need hardly stress that our conversations are secret, and you shouldn’t discuss what we’ve said with anyone else.”

  Westcott was still smiling as he said this. As though a routine remark uttered at the wrong point in the routine should be accepted by Troy as a matter of routine.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Troy.

  “About secrecy, Mr. Troy? I never joke about secrecy.”

  “Mr. Westcott, surely you can’t believe any of this is secret? To single out just one issue, Norman Cobb—when he disappeared the back of the bog door on the third floor at the Yard was covered in graffiti for weeks. ‘Comrade Cobb.’ ‘Nikita Cobb.’ There was even one that read ‘Burgess, Maclean, Cobb—who the fuck is next?’ But you retired early in ‘56, didn’t you? You would have missed all that.”

  “I rather think I did. It may be ambitious, and possibly naïve, to think that secrets will remain secret, but it’s my job to try.”

  §99

  If Troy had one trait in common with Burgess, it was that boredom made him wicked.

  By the middle of the following week, a dull, grey, wintery Wednesday, Westcott had not asked for another meeting, but the plods continued to traipse after him.

  Troy walked down St. Martin’s Lane, down Villiers Street, to Charing Cross Underground, and caught a Circle Line train, on the inner track, towards Liverpool Street. At Liverpool Street, where trains regularly departed for “Harwich and the Continent,” a slogan vividly displayed and which he hoped might induce a touch of panic in his pursuers, he dawdled awhile by the ticket office, then exited at the far side, and climbed the steep outside staircase to Broad Street Station, and the North London Railway—suburban trains for Highbury, Hampstead, and Richmond. A grim little place which had once been the busiest station in the world. And if memory served, Mr. Pooter had gone to his office on this railway line in The Diary of a Nobody.

  He got out at Hampstead Heath and set off uphill in the direction of Kenwood House.

  A few hundred yards on, roughly level with the end of Well Walk, was a huge oak, battered by time and wind and rain. As a boy he’d climbed it dozens of times, and he knew that at chest height was a hollow about the size of a football. One summer, he’d found a red squirrel in residence. She had shrieked as loud as any goose. Today the hollow was empty.

  He slipped in the envelope, looked quickly around, and walked back to the ponds in the lee of South Hill, where he found an empty bench, took out a paperback book—Burmese Days by George Orwell—and read until the light had dimmed. Then he packed up, walked to Bel-size Park Station, and caught the next Northern Line train home to Leicester Square.

  Somewhere in Scotland Yard or at MI5 HQ in Leconfield House someone would be trying to make sense of the note he had left. An extract from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll:

  They hunted till darkness came on, but they found Not a button, or feather, or mark, By which they could tell that they stood on the ground Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

  In the midst of the word he was trying to say, In the midst of his laughter and glee, He had softly and suddenly vanished away— For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

  Troy had always been fond of Boojums. He’d never wanted to meet one—a sensible precaution considering the fate of those who did—but the affection remained.

  §100

  About Ten Days Later

  Someone was following Frederick Troy.

  He was pretty certain the Branch had given up tailing him, and in keeping with their habitual, lazy practices they knocked off sharpish at five thirty every day—that was in all probability how they had lost Burgess and Maclean. The new man, caught in reflections from shop windows, was much more persistent. Troy had yet to see his face clearly. All he knew for certain was he was a big bugger in a black macintosh. No hats to disguise him, no change of outfit from one day to the next. Troy had always thought such tactics crude—after all, who could disguise posture or gait, which were giveaways as much as any item of clothing—and so it seemed did his follower. He relied on distance and concealment rather than disguises. A man in a black coat? How obvious was that? London in winter was a sea of black overcoats and gaberdine macintoshes. A flotsam of trilbies punctuated by the odd bowler. All the same, Troy had spotted him two days ago.

  Emerging from the Gay Hussar at lunchtime, Troy had gazed idly around and seen no sign of him. But by the time he passed the window of Foyles booksellers, less than two hundred yards away, there he was, a sudden flash in the plate glass.

  Early that Friday evening, Troy emerged from the London Library in St. James’s Square. It was time to call it a day and go home. Or—time to turn the tables. The logical route home was along Pall Mall, through London “Clubland,” to the top of Trafalgar Square, by the National Gallery. It was time to test logic. If he gave his tail the idea that he was trying to lose him, then the man might more readily accept that he had been lost. At the end of Pall Mall, Troy turned up the Haymarket, and into the “mighty roar of London’s traffic,” as the BBC put it nightly, at Piccadilly Circus. There, quite certain his tail had followed, he vanished into Swan & Edgar.

  Emerging into Regent Street he joined the throng around the base of Eros and waited. Eros was about as cosmopolitan as the cosmopolis got, the tawdry hub of empire: tourists wandered, took photographs in the half-light that would look awful when printed up, gazed in awe at the illuminated advertisements that silently mocked the architecture; drug addicts shivered, twitched, and begged—Troy saw one off with a ten-bob note and “You’re blocking my view”; prostitutes, tired of pacing Piccadilly in high heels and tight skirts in search of a fare, kicked off their shoes and sat on the pedestal beneath the demigod of their trade.

  “You up fo’ it?” said one, a beautiful black girl with crimson lips and green eye shadow.

  “Do I look as though I’m up for it?”

  “Dunno. I can’t see what ya little chap’s tinking from
heayah.”

  “Well, my big chap is saying off-duty copper to you.”

  “Off duty? So ya might be up fo’ it, den?”

  He waited a full twenty minutes—so long that the prospect of drugs or sex or both might begin to seem tempting—before his man emerged, a look of frustration on his face. He was younger than Troy, perhaps thirty at most, tall, lean, and quite handsome. He glanced at his watch, stared into the crowd without seeing Troy, turned up his collar and headed off past Eros and into Coventry Street. Troy could almost swear he had silently mouthed the word “bugger.”

  His destination was obvious. The Northern Line tube station at Leicester Square. If he’d gone down to the Underground at Piccadilly Circus, he would have taken the Bakerloo or Piccadilly lines. A tourist might be a slave to the tube map and its carpet of coloured thread, a Londoner wanting the Northern Line would simply walk the four hundred yards to the next tube station rather than change lines at track level.

  The trick now was to get ahead of him. Troy cut across to Lisle Street and ran like hell for the Charing Cross Road, hoping the crowds of shoppers in Leicester Square would slow his man down.

  At the tube station he waved his warrant card at the barrier and ran down the escalator to track level. The question now was “north or south?” and logic was no help. It was a simple gamble. To stand where the lobby divided travellers north or south was to be spotted. He had to be on one platform or another, huddled among the tired and the impatient Friday-night Londoners.

  He chose northbound. If he was wrong, so what? It was odds on he would be followed tomorrow or the day after that or Monday, and equally odds on he could lose him again.

  A train came and went while he waited, and he began to feel exposed, but in minutes the platform filled with passengers again. Among them, his man, eyes glued to a copy of the News Chronicle. He’d given up. Accepted that he had lost Troy. He didn’t look around, simply glanced at the destination board and went back to his paper.