by Len Deighton
Bosham, which the English – as a part of their chronic conspiracy to baffle foreigners – pronounce ‘Bozzam’, is a collection of cottages, old and new, crowded on to a peninsula between two tidal creeks that give on to inland waters, and eventually to the Channel. Here are sailing boats of every shape and size, and sailing schools and sailing clubs. And here are pubs crammed with nautical junk, and clocks that chime ships’ bells at closing time. And noisy men in sailor’s jerseys who tow their boats behind their cars.
The safe house was not too far from Bosham’s little church. It was a neat little ‘two up and two down’ with a freshly painted weather-boarded front, and bright orange roof-tiles. Even in the years of depressed property prices such little weekend cottages with their view of the boats, and sometimes even a glimpse of the water between them, had kept their value.
Summer was gone but it had been a fine day for those lucky enough to spend it sailing. But now there was an offshore wind and when I arrived and got out of my car the air was chilly and I needed the coat I’d thrown on to the back seat. It was twilight when I arrived. The yellow lights of the houses were reflected in the water and there were still people on some of the boats, folding their sails and trying to prolong the perfect day. Werner was waiting for me, sitting at the wheel of a Rover 2000 that was parked close up against the house. He opened the car door and I got in beside him.
‘What’s the story, Werner?’
‘A black girl…woman, I should say. West Indian. Was married to an American airman stationed in Germany. She’s divorced. Lives in Munich; very active political worker, very vocal communist. Then two years ago she became very quiet and very respectable. You know what I mean?’
‘She was recruited by the KGB?’
‘It looks that way. Last week she came to Berlin for a briefing. I followed Stinnes one evening after I’d noticed him looking at his watch all through dinner. Then I followed her. She came here.’ Werner smiled. He was a boy scout. He loved the whole business of espionage, as other men are obsessed with golf, women or stamp collections.
‘I believe we met,’ I said.
‘Came here,’ said Werner.
‘To England. Yes, I know.’
‘Came here,’ said Werner. He had the car keys in his hand, and now he tapped them against the steering wheel to emphasize his words. ‘To this house.’
‘How is that possible? This is a departmental safe house.’
‘I know,’ said Werner. ‘I followed her here and I recognized it. You sent me here. It was a long time ago. I brought a parcel of documents for someone being held here.’
‘Is she in there now?’
‘No, she’s gone.’
‘Have you tried to get in?’
‘I’ve been inside. I came out again. There’s a body upstairs.’
‘The girl?’
‘It looked like a man. I couldn’t find the main switch for the electricity. You can’t see much with only a flashlight.’
‘What sort of body?’
‘The shutters were closed so there was no daylight and I didn’t want to trample through the house leaving marks everywhere.’
‘We’d better take a look,’ I said. ‘How did you get in before?’
‘Kitchen window. It’s very messy, Bernard. Really messy. Blood on the floor. I’ve left footmarks, I’m afraid. Blood on the floor. Blood on the walls. Blood on the ceiling.’
‘What happened? Do you have an idea?’
‘Looks like the body’s been there a couple of days. Gunshot wound. High-velocity head shot. You know what happens.’
‘We’d better take a look,’ I said. I got out of the car. From somewhere nearby I could hear merry holiday-makers leaving the pub, their voices raised in song.
As Werner had already found, it was not difficult to get the kitchen window open, but my forced entry was not the demonstration of expertise that I’d intended. Werner did not comment on the way my shoes left mud in the sink and my elbow knocked a teacup to the floor, and for that restraint I was grateful to him.
I let Werner in through the front door and went to the cupboard under the stairs to find the fuse box and put the lights on. Nothing much had changed since I’d last visited the house. We’d had an East German scientist there for a long debriefing session. I’d taken my turn on the rota with him. To alleviate the misery of his internment he’d been allowed some sailing trips. The house brought back happy memories for me. But since that time two Russian air-force officers had been held here. One of them had eventually returned to the USSR. Despite the way in which all such internees were brought here in a closed vehicle, there had been fears about the address being compromised.
Officially the house had not been used for such defectors for some years but, such was the dogged plod of departmental housekeeping, all the arrangements about its upkeep had obviously continued. Not only was the electricity still connected and paid for; the house was clean and tidy. There were signs of use: crockery on the draining board and fresh groceries in evidence on the shelf.
I went upstairs to the front bedroom first. I opened the doors and switched on the light. It was just as messy as Werner had described. The pale-green floral wallpaper was spattered with blood, there was more on the ceiling and a sticky pool of it on the floor. Exposure to the air had discoloured the blood so that it was no longer bright red but brownish and in places almost black.
It was a small room, with a single bed made up with loose covers and cushions to look like a sofa. In the corner there was a dressing table with a large mirror in which was reflected the body of a man sprawled across the cheap Indian carpet. He had been thrown forward from a small kitchen chair in which he’d been sitting. The chair was on its side; its backrest showed bare white wood where a bullet had torn a large splinter from it.
‘Do you recognize him?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s one of our people, a probationer. A bright kid. His name is Julian MacKenzie.’ The light shone on a circular disc of plastic and I picked it up from the floor. It was a watch glass with a scratch on it. I recognized it as the one from my old Omega. After it stopped I’d put the watch and the crystal in an envelope and never taken it for repair. I wondered who had found it and where.
‘Did you know he was coming here?’ Werner asked.
I switched off the light and pulled the door closed on the dead boy. I looked into the next room. It was another bedroom, with another single bed. ‘Single bed,’ I said, trying to keep my mind from thinking about MacKenzie’s body. ‘No one could believe that this was a weekend cottage. Weekend cottages are always crammed with beds.’
There was a dressing table in the corner, this time littered with torn pieces of wrappers, some face powder and the smudge marks of spilled liquids. There was a large plastic box on the bed. I opened it carefully and found a set of electric hair-curlers. I closed the lid again and wiped the places I’d touched. A waste-paper basket held a collection of plastic bottles: shampoo, moisturizing cream, hair conditioner, hair colouring and a lot of screwed-up tissues and tufts of cotton wool. There was more evidence of occupation in the bathroom: long hairs in the bath where someone – probably a woman – had washed her hair, and towels draped unfolded on the rack so that they would dry easily.
‘That’s right,’ said Werner. ‘It’s not like a weekend cottage; it’s like a safe house.’ He followed me downstairs. I looked round the kitchen. ‘Did you discover where the booze is kept when you first got in?’
‘There’s no booze.’
‘Don’t be idiotic, Werner. There is always booze in a safe house.’
‘There’s a bottle of something in the refrigerator.’ Werner took a chair and sat astraddle it, leaning his elbow on the chairback, his hand propped under his wide jaw. He watched me, his black eyes glowering under those bushy black eyebrows, and his forehead wrinkled in a disapproving frown. Sometimes I didn’t notice what a huge bear of a man he was, but now, his shoulders hunched and his feet spread wide apart, he
looked almost like a Sumo wrestler.
He stared at me while I found some glasses in a cabinet and got the drink – a large square-shaped green bottle of Bokma oude jenever – from the refrigerator. It had no doubt come from some sailing trip to the Dutch coast. Still standing, I poured some for myself and one for Werner. He waved it away at first, but when I drank some of mine he picked it up and sniffed it suspiciously before sipping some and pulling a face.
‘Poor MacKenzie,’ I said. I didn’t sit down with him. I went round the room with bottle and glass in my hands, looking at all the pictures, the fittings and the furniture, remembering the time I’d spent here.
‘A probationer, was he? He hadn’t learned when to be afraid.’
‘The black girl was dressed as a nurse. She got a ride in my car. She said she was late for work. She pulled a hypodermic needle on me. The seat belt held me. I felt a bloody fool, Werner. But what could I do?’
‘She must have slept in the second bedroom. There is a nurse’s uniform in the wardrobe and a box of medical equipment including a couple of hypodermics and some drugs with labels that I don’t understand.’
‘She said she was from Jamaica. They probably chose her because she has a British passport.’ I sat down and put my glass on the table with the bottle.
‘Yes, I saw her go through immigration with UK passport holders.’
‘But why this house, Werner? If she was a KGB agent, why this departmental safe house? They have their own places, houses we don’t know about.’
Werner pulled a face to show me he didn’t know the answer.
‘I sent MacKenzie off to find her.’
‘Looks like he found her,’ said Werner.
‘You followed the black girl here. What then?’
‘I went back to London. Zena was in London, just for two days. I didn’t want to leave her on her own. She frets when left alone.’
‘You’re a bloody wonderful agent, Werner.’
‘I didn’t know it was important,’ said Werner. His flushed face and the anger in his voice were indications of embarrassment. ‘How could I guess it was going to turn out like this?’
‘But you came back. Then what?’
‘The black girl’s car had gone. I saw a Ford Fiesta parked down near the pub. It had a radio telephone. I recognized the fittings and the antenna.’
‘MacKenzie. Yes. None of the senior staff have the standard radio-telephone fittings nowadays. It’s too conspicuous.’
‘I climbed in here. I found the body. I phoned you. End of story.’
‘I appreciate it, Werner.’
‘Smart boy, your MacKenzie. How did he get on to her? She’s not easy to follow, Bernard. What did she do that led your boy right here?’
‘I don’t know, Werner.’
‘And he didn’t phone in to tell you what he was doing?’
‘What are you trying to say, Werner?’
‘Your MacKenzie was one of them, wasn’t he? It’s the only explanation that fits. He was a KGB employee. He told you nothing. He helped them do whatever they had to do, then the black girl silenced him.’
‘It’s a tempting theory, Werner. But I don’t buy it. Not yet anyway. I’d need more than that to believe that MacKenzie was a KGB employee.’
‘So how did he track them down? Was it just luck?’
‘You saw the body upstairs, Werner. It’s not pretty, is it? You and I have seen plenty of that sort of thing, but you went a bit green and I needed a drink. I don’t see it as a woman’s deed. She fires a gun; splashes a lot of blood. There are screams and cries and a man mortally wounded. She sees his death agonies. She fires again; more spurting blood. Then again. Then again.’ I rubbed my face. ‘No. I don’t think a woman would do it that way.’
‘Then perhaps you don’t know much about women,’ said Werner feelingly.
‘Crime passionel, you mean. But this is not the case of a woman who surprises her lover in bed with her rival. This was cold-blooded murder. MacKenzie was seated on a chair in the middle of the room. No evidence of any sexual motive. The bed was not even rumpled.’
‘If not the black woman, who?’
‘It wasn’t done by a woman. It was a man; men probably, a KGB hit team.’
‘Killing one of their own people,’ said Werner, resolutely holding to his theory.
‘If the KGB had recruited MacKenzie at Cambridge and then he was able to get a job in the department, they’d be keeping him in deep cover and waiting for him to get a desk for himself. They wouldn’t kill him.’
‘So, if he wasn’t a KGB agent, whatever secret did your MacKenzie discover that made it necessary to kill him?’
‘MacKenzie was no great detective, Werner. He was just a sharp young kid with a brilliant academic record from Cambridge. He wasn’t even an ex-copper; no investigative experience, no training, and he wasn’t a natural the way you are a natural. He’d never be able to trace an experienced KGB agent to a safe house. He was lured here, Werner. Someone was providing him with clues he had to fall over.’
‘Why?’
‘It was our safe house, Werner. A closely guarded departmental secret. The KGB bastards wanted to show us how clever they are.’
‘And murder your probationer to rub salt in?’ Werner was not convinced. He drank some more gin, looking at it after he sipped it as if he thought it might be poisoned. ‘Strange-flavoured stuff this…’ He read the label. ‘…oude jenever. It’s not like real schnapps.’
‘Hollands; it’s supposed to taste like that,’ I said. ‘It was used as a medicine when they first concocted it.’
‘You’d have to be damned ill to need it,’ said Werner, pushing it aside. ‘A deliberate murder?’
‘He was seated in that chair in the middle of the room, Werner. His executioner was behind him. The pistol held against the top of the spine. It’s the way the Okhrana executed Bolshevik revolutionaries in the time of the Tsar. In the nineteen-twenties the Tcheka hunted down white Russian émigré’s in Paris and Berlin. Some of them were killed in that fashion. In the Spanish Civil War, Stalin’s NKVD went to Catalonia and executed dozens of Trotskyites like that.’
‘But why would a KGB hit team be so theatrical? And what did the black girl come here to do?’
‘She came to see me. Or, more accurately, she saw me when she came to London.’
‘What did she come to see you about?’
I hesitated about my reply. I poured myself another shot of gin and drank some. I’d always liked the curious malty flavour of Hollands gin and now I welcomed the fiery path it blazed to my stomach.
‘You’ll have to tell me,’ said Werner. ‘We’re both too deep into this one to hold back any secrets.’
‘Fiona sent a message. She says she’ll let me keep the children here for a year, but she wants me to prevent the Stinnes enrolment.’
‘Prevent it?’
‘Not encourage it.’
‘Why? Did it really come from her, or is it a KGB move?’
‘I don’t know, Werner. I keep trying to put myself in her place. I keep trying to guess what she might do. She loves the children, Werner, but she’ll want to impress her new masters. She’s given her whole life to them, hasn’t she, her career, her family, her marriage? She’s given more of herself to Moscow than she ever gave to the children.’
‘Stinnes is involved,’ said Werner. ‘The black girl was briefed by Stinnes. I saw them together.’
‘Let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe Stinnes isn’t told the whole plan. If they know he’s seeing you when he comes West they might deliberately keep him in the dark.’ I took off my glasses and cupped my hands over my eyes to spend a moment in the dark. I felt very tired. Even the prospect of a drive back to London was daunting. Surely the existence of this safe house must have been something that Fiona had revealed to them. What else had she told them, and what else might she tell them? MacKenzie was upstairs dead, but I still had trouble believing it. My stomach was knotted with tension, and
even the drink didn’t relax me, or remove from my mouth the rancid taste of fear.
A sudden noise outside made me jump. I got to my feet and listened, but it was only one of the revellers falling over a rubbish bin. I sat down again and sipped my drink. I closed my eyes for a moment. Sleep was what I needed. When I woke up it would all be different. MacKenzie would be alive, and Fiona would be at home with the children, waiting for me.
‘You can’t just sit here all night draining that bottle of gin, Bernard. You’ll have to tell the department.’
‘The trouble is, Werner, I didn’t tell them about the black girl.’
‘But you told MacKenzie to find her.’
‘I kept it all unofficial.’
‘You’re a bloody fool, Bernie.’ Werner had always believed that he could do my job better than I did it, and every now and again something happened to encourage him in that delusion. ‘A bloody fool.’
‘Now you tell me.’
‘You make trouble for yourself. Why didn’t you tell them?’
‘I went into the office fully intending to. Then Bret started droning on, and Frank Harrington was there to play the heavy father. I just let it slide.’
‘This is murder. A departmental employee, in a safe house, with KGB involvement. You can’t let this one slide, Bernard.’
I looked at Werner. He’d described the situation concisely, and in just the way the KGB operation planners had no doubt seen it. Well, the only thing they didn’t allow for is that I might avoid the consequences by keeping my mouth tightly shut. ‘That’s not all of it,’ I said. ‘The black girl made me drive out to London Airport. When I was there Fiona got into the back of the car. I couldn’t get a look at her but it was her, no doubt of that. I’d recognize her voice anywhere. The stuff about the kids came from her direct. The black girl was with her. She heard what was said, so I suppose it was all KGB-approved.’
I expected Werner to be as astonished as I’d been but he took it very calmly. ‘I guessed it might be something like that.’
‘How did you guess?’
‘You saw the electric hair-rollers upstairs. Rollers to change a hairstyle. There were a lot of cosmetics too. Cosmetics no black girl could use. And hair dye. When you didn’t draw attention to them I realized that you knew there was another woman. It had to be Fiona. She came here to make her hair curly, and colour it so she wouldn’t be recognized.’