Dead Letter Drop

by Peter James

  I’d had a good look round before getting to the house and hadn’t seen any sign of either a tail or anyone surveilling the house, but I wanted to remain out of sight and decided not to take any chances. I left via the bathroom skylight and into a garden behind. A short distance away my own car was in a garage, having gone in for a long-overdue service and respray while I was away. The garage would be opening in about an hour’s time. I walked down the road to a cafe and had some breakfast. The beard on my face was now into its third day and I was starting to smell horrible. I knew, because I noticed it myself.

  I got to the garage at five past eight and a mechanic was just unlocking. He greeted me cheerfully, not appearing to notice my condition, and pointed to my XK 120 Jaguar tucked away in the rear corner of the garage, surrounded by a tightly packed bunch of sick-looking vehicles. ‘Lucky yer didn’t get back sooner, guv, only dropped th’engine back yisserday. We wozn’t expecting yer frannuvver week. She’s goin’ like a jewel, but don’t take ’er more’n three-five in iny gear for a few hunnerd miles – after that she’ll be good for any ling yer want. Or’ll jus git these out th’away for yir.’

  He cleared the space in front of her remarkably quickly, and I walked up to examine her. His grasp of the Queen’s English wasn’t too hot, but he was God’s gift to motor cars. The paint job was superb, and the midnight blue gleamed even in this dimly lit garage. The house and furniture I hadn’t ever cared about that much, but if anyone had so much as laid a finger on her I would have been one hell of a lot madder.

  When I bought her nearly ten years back, she had been sitting in a barn on an old farm; the farmer had acquired her for his wife in 1953 but after driving her only a couple of times had abandoned the car because it wasn’t any good at crossing fields. Fortunately the barn had been dry and it had taken little effort to get her going. The two of us had struck up an immediate and lasting friendship.

  I eased myself into the seat now, and put my hands on the black four-spoked steering wheel, stared down the long bonnet, and at the tops of the wheel arches rising on either side. I turned the key and immediately the ignition light came on, the gauges sprang into life, the fuel gauge needle darting across the dial, the ammeter needle flickering nervously in the centre of its dial. I pulled the choke and pushed the starter button, and the starter motor turned the engine slowly, lazily, quietly, like it always did; then with a muffled boom, followed by a sucking sound from the air intakes, then a crackling burble from the exhaust the long needle of the large rev counter heaved itself up from its rest at zero and, after sweeping unsteadily backwards and forwards past the thousand mark, settled firmly at 1,500; the speedometer needle jumped up and down a little on its rest in apparent anticipation; I blipped the accelerator and the rev counter needle swung up to 2,500 beautifully smoothly, then swung back down again to 1,500. I dropped my left hand onto the slim knob of the gear lever and pushed her into first; I tugged the fly-off handbrake and it fell limply down onto the carpeted floor. My foot came up off the clutch as I pressed the accelerator again, and we surged gently forward, out of the garage and into the street; for a few glorious moments all my problems were a million miles away.

  The road was clear; I turned the wheel and accelerated off. She was being beautifully responsive, eager for her run, and sounding sweeter than I had ever remembered. The bonnet in front of me, through the split windscreen, loped through the building traffic, effortlessly pulling the rest of the car along behind it.

  The going was easy as we were driving against the flow of the rush hour; we went down Notting Hill Gate, round White City roundabout, down towards Hammersmith, then down over Putney Bridge, through Putney, and out onto the A3. We hooked left at the Robin Hood roundabout, then I opened her up to the maximum 3,500 rev limit the mechanic had advised, and in half a minute was thundering along at a rock steady 90 on the clock. I pushed the side screen open a short distance and the bitter December air thrashed in; I let it continue for several seconds until I was shaking with the cold, and then closed it again. It made me feel a lot better still.

  I drove to Guildford, where I bought a battery razor, a sports jacket, trousers, shirt, tie and underclothing, then washed and shaved in a public lavatory under the hawk-eye of an uncommonly wretched attendant who was convinced I was going to try to steal the soap.

  I had a couple more cups of coffee in a cafe and actually began to feel like any normal human being once more. It wasn’t such a bad feeling.

  19

  I drove a few miles out of Guildford, down the bypass, and turned off at a signpost marked Milford. It was a country road, just about two lanes, and every few hundred yards were sets of gateposts, ranging from the ordinary to the baronial, beyond which stretched rhododendron-lined gravel driveways up to hidden houses. There was thinning shrubbery on either side of the road, mostly brown or bare in its winter state, with the occasional splash of evergreens. I drove over a small hump-backed bridge and came to a parade of shops and a village green which was evidently the cricket pitch in summer.

  I obtained directions from a newsagent and carried on. After a mile or so I found what I was looking for: Scatliffe’s house. It was the type of house any self-respecting stockbroker might have owned. Mock Tudor, built probably in the late twenties, set about 50 yards back from the road, and no shortage of gravel and evergreen shrubbery in front of it; it was by no means a magnificent dwelling but it was smart. There was a mud-spattered Mini Metro in the driveway, and I noticed the front door was ajar.

  I drove on past, then turned around, pulled over well into the side of the road and switched off the engine. It looked to me as though Mrs Scatliffe was about to go off shopping, which suited me fine; whilst Scatliffe was now high up the scale he didn’t yet rate a police guard on his house, although the local constabulary would no doubt keep a closer watch on it than on most. From the information from Wotan I knew that there were no live-in staff and a char came only three days a week and this wasn’t one of her days. There was a part-time gardener but he only came afternoons.

  I lit a cigarette and turned on the radio to see what was going on in the world. Radio Four was occupied by a passionate do-it-yourself Christmas-decorations maker; she was explaining how to make paper chains out of cornflake packets. Radio Three was into Brahms. Radio Two had Jimmy Saville holding his own with a heart-transplant surgeon. Radio One was analysing the chart potential of a record called ‘I did Dung’ by a new group called Filthy. The world was going on as normal.

  I thought about Sumpy; she’d be back in New York by now. I thought about Christmas and wondered where I would be. I looked at the dust that had gathered in a hundred places inside the car – above the dashboard, on the steering column, over the dials – and wondered when I’d have the time to give her the spring-clean she needed.

  The nose of the Metro appeared out of the drive and amid a cloud of steam and smoke from the choked engine on this cold morning the car turned out onto the road and drove off away from me.

  I started up and followed, to make sure she wasn’t just going to the shops nearby. She drove down onto the bypass, then turned left towards Guildford. I turned back, drove on past her house out of sight of the drive, pulled over onto the verge, wrote a note stating ‘Broken down’, stuck it on the windscreen, raised the bonnet, and set off briskly for the house. I reckoned on a good hour before the local bobby would start showing any interest in the car. Parking a car in the countryside is always a problem; in a town, nobody takes any notice but to a dutiful bobby a parked car in the middle of nowhere is as suspicious as a man walking down a street in a black mask, carrying a bag labelled Swag.

  Mrs Scatliffe couldn’t have been planning to be away long – she hadn’t even locked the front door. Just to be sure no one was in I rang the bell, with a spiel ready about a mix-up between the local water board and gas board, resulting in a gas leak in the water pipes, and fingered my identification card from the gas board in my pocket. But the spiel wasn’t required and I let
myself in.

  The house was decorated much as the exterior had hinted; it was comfortable, well carpeted and parqueted, and the furniture was mostly comfortable-looking conservative and reproduction antique. There was a strong bias towards the nautical in the paintings and prints, not surprisingly since Scatliffe had spent a good deal of his life in the navy, although mainly in Admiralty House rather than on ships.

  I quickly checked all the rooms in the house to ensure there were no visitors anywhere that I ought to know about. The house was empty.

  I settled into Scatliffe’s study and started a routine systematic search. The system I used was one Scatliffe himself had devised.

  His desk revealed nothing, except that he appeared to support a considerable number of charities, including being a member, for some reason, of the Water Rats. He was a month overdue with his American Express bill, about which a computer had written him a caustic letter; he had just applied for a credit account at Harrods; and he was collecting estimates for a switch from oil-fired central heating to gas. I was amused to discover correspondence in which he had been attempting unsuccessfully to persuade Scotland Yard to intervene on his behalf in cancelling half a dozen parking tickets: an extremely rude letter to him from the Chief Commissioner accused him and his whole department of a cavalier attitude towards yellow lines, and a general wholesale contempt for the motoring laws of the country.

  Relationships between the Yard and the Department were frequently less than amicable, with the Yard regarding us as a bunch of privileged thugs who went around doing whatever we wanted, leaving them to clear up the messes we left behind. In a way they had a point. They dealt with the enforcement of the written laws of the land, adhering as closely to the book as possible. Our work had little to do with these laws and we abided much of the time by nothing but the law of the jungle. The police could measure their results by numbers of convictions and annual increases or decreases in the crime rate. We never had yardsticks; there is little that is black or white in the murky world of espionage and counter-espionage: one is perpetually scrabbling and scratching around in an endless blanket of grey.

  Never was this blanket more apparent than today, sitting in Scatliffe’s study, searching for God-knew-what – some little scrap of paper that would make my hunch a certainty – listening for the engine of Mrs Scatliffe’s Metro – a noise, which, if I missed, would result in my being drummed out of the Department by the seat of my pants, my short and curlies, and anything else remotely grabbable.

  I found the safe. Scatliffe had made little effort to hide it; it was behind a leather-bound collection of John Buchan novels, and it opened within 30 seconds. There was nothing in it. Nothing. I stared inside, then felt the base plate. There was a little give and after a few moments of jiggling with my knife blade it came away, revealing a combination dial underneath; it was more than a little crafty. The dial was harder to crack and it was a full couple of minutes before the door swung up and I pulled out the contents: a sheath of documents and two small heavy boxes.

  The documents were uninteresting, mostly share certificates, and the boxes contained Krugerrands; about £10,000 worth at today’s prices. I was disappointed and put everything back as I had found it.

  I made a brief but reasonably thorough search of the rest of the house and turned up nothing of any interest. I could find no other hidden safe nor hidey-hole and, short of a search that would leave his house in a similar state to that in which I had found my own, there was little further I could do. I let myself out and walked back down the drive; just before I got to the gates I heard a car slowing down and within seconds of my disappearing into a particularly accommodating rhododendron bush, Mrs Scatliffe came sailing into the driveway.

  I felt a lot happier when I was back in the Jaguar, cosseted by the smell of old leather and warm engine oil, with the throaty roar of the exhaust as I drove out past the far side of Guildford, past Basil Spence’s towering red-brick monstrosity of a cathedral, heading towards the M3 back to London.

  I rarely enjoyed poking around other people’s houses and I enjoyed poking around Scatliffe’s least of any; there would have been a lot to answer for if I’d been caught. As I drove, I began to unwind, my heartbeat slowing down from cerebral haemorrhage level to its more normal coronary arrest level.

  I was disappointed my trip down here hadn’t been fruitful, but I knew I would have been very lucky if Scatliffe had been careless enough to leave anything lying around. I thought about Charlie Harrison, now better known to me as Boris Karavenoff, and hoped he was doing his stuff. I hoped that Arthur Jephcott was as trustworthy as Fifeshire had assured me he was. I hoped I wasn’t making a terrible mistake; I was going to look more than a little foolish if I was wrong. I checked the mirror constantly for signs of a tail but the road behind me was clear.

  Until Wetherby had surfaced, I had no idea who was after me; I’d figured it must be the Russians. But the appearance of Wetherby had changed all that, or so it seemed to me; it was my own side that were after me. I didn’t yet have any proof, but the facts tallied. Maybe Wetherby was a double agent. Maybe. Maybe he was working under instructions from the Pink Envelope. Maybe he was the Pink Envelope; but Karavenoff had said the Pink Envelope was in a very senior position in Whitehall – Wetherby had been transferred to Washington. My gut-feeling was that it was Scatliffe; but I had no evidence. None at all. But if not Scatliffe, then who?

  I churned over all those I had met since joining MI5. I hadn’t met many people – it had been policy, ever since Philby, to discourage socialising and friendships within the Department. But Karavenoff said the Pink Envelope was powerful; I had certainly met all of those who were powerful: Fifeshire; William Carreras, head of MI6; Scatliffe; Euan Wagstaff, deputy head of MI6; Sir Maurice Unwin, head of MI6 Washington; Granville Hicks, his deputy; Sir John Hobart, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Major Sir Nyall Kerr, head of Combined Central Information, the organisation at Hyde Park, with Arthur Jephcott and the quiet boffin Norman Prest directly under him; Guy Cove-Eastden, head of the Armoury, with Leslie Piper, in charge of the dirty tricks department, and Charles Babinger. the ballistics expert, under him; John Terry, head of Public Relations, and his second-in-command, Duncan Moss; Recruiting was headed by Gordon Savory, with Harold Townly and Wetherby under him; Anthony Lines, the Home Secretary, to whom the whole of MI5 was ultimately responsible; and others too, any of whom could quite well qualify.

  I had met many of them at a cricket match in which I had been invited to play. Invited, that is, in a manner not inconsistent with the manner in which I had been recruited into MI5. The British Secret Service is not a place where niceties, such as the option to refuse something, are a customary part of life; nor, in my limited experience, are they even an exception to the rule: they simply fail to exist.

  It was in this sense of the word that the Home Secretary invited me to play in his team, in a curious match he was instigating that he hoped would become an annual event on the calendar: MI5 versus MI6. Two old enemies.

  The invite greatly annoyed Scatliffe and not without reason, since I was far junior to everyone else who was going to be playing and I was an agent, and agents are meant, by policy, to be kept in the dark and not exposed to the gods that control them, except when it is vital, and in Scatliffe’s view the shortage on the Home Secretary’s team did not constitute something vital. But there was little he could do about it; it was a Friday afternoon during my year’s hard labour for him, and Scatliffe was discussing with me a report I had made, when Lines strode into his office.

  There was little doubt in anyone’s mind in the whole country that Anthony Lines would be the next leader of the Conservative Party and that he would serve more than one term as Prime Minister. The media already took almost more notice of what he said and did than the Prime Minister, and he certainly shone through the media with a magnetic charisma. Serious but genial, incisive, tough, fair, ever on the ball, a brilliant fielder of awkward questions and a
lethal bowler of challenges, a batsman who had had a long and striking innings, yet who gave the impression that his innings had only just begun; it wasn’t surprising he wanted to organise this match.

  He held out his hand towards me. It was warm, small, exquisitely manicured, a delicate white as if it had been sprinkled with talc, and had a softness about it which suggested that if ever during its 50-odd years of life it had held a spade, it had been wearing a kid glove at the time. This hand for sure had never held any rougher instrument of manual labour than the microphone of a dictating machine.

  Like so many people in public life, he was smaller than I had imagined, no more than 5 foot 8, and his face was less assured, more nervous than that which I had seen on television and in the papers. It was a good-looking but basically weak face, with a boyish cut of fair hair, and blue eyes that squinted slightly, with heavy bags underneath. ‘How do you do, Max!’ he had said on being introduced by Scatliffe, using the American technique of jumping straight to the first name, and smiling a benign smile that had the warmth of an outdoor lavatory in January.

  ‘Well, thank you, sir!’ I buttered him up with the ‘sir’ bit and it earned me several more seconds of benign smile.

  ‘Do you play cricket, Max?’

  I hadn’t played cricket for ten years and wasn’t particularly good when I did. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  ‘We’re having a little game this Sunday and I’m a man short in my team – perhaps you’d care to play?’

  Scatliffe’s face turned apopleptic: his most-hated minion being invited to join the brass hats at play! ‘I don’t think it will be possible, Minister, for Flynn to play – I believe he’s on an assignment over the weekend, aren’t you, Flynn?’ He gave me a hard stare.