by John Gardner
Gus Keene and his two assistants were spending long hours with all interested Railton parties and their interrogation of Lady Phoebe was possibly the most harrowing any of them had experienced. Caspar’s death had wrought terrible changes in the elderly lady, in her heyday so extrovert, sharp and blatantly well organised. It was as though her mind, her memory and intellect, had all passed from her at the moment of Caspar’s death.
Now Phoebe lived in a land of make-believe. She wept and laughed by turns, and on some days spoke to everyone as though Caspar was alive. Twice, while Keene, Carole Coles and Martin Brook questioned her, she waved them aside and told them they would have to ask Caspar. ‘He says I’m never to keep a diary.’ Her eyes were feverish. ‘Cas always says diaries can bring trouble. Never keep them. He doesn’t and neither do I.’
It was the one speck of magic dust the team took away with them.
‘Sir Caspar cautioned against diaries. That was a voice from the past, genuine,’ Carole said in the car, and the others agreed.
‘Therefore,’ Keene said, half an hour’s silence later, ‘Sir Caspar kept a diary for a purpose, and we know that purpose couldn’t have been to incriminate himself. QED. Quite Easily Done as my old mathematics teacher used to quip.’
‘Unless he wanted to make a clean breast. Plead guilty after they had interred his bones.’ The fat Martin Brook was unconvinced.
‘Don’t be more of a bloody fool than you already are, Fat Boy.’ Keene was off again, his mind striding through possibilities. ‘We’re all agreed that bloody diary’s too good to be true. Yet there has to be a reason for it. Why, why, oh bugger, why?’
They had several sessions with young Alex Railton, who continued to deny he had been near the Eccleston Square house, against all reason, for the evidence was there and they told him so.
‘If you won’t admit to it, Alex, then we’ll have to regard you as hostile and, therefore, possibly a person with things to hide.’
‘I have no thing, or things, to hide,’ Alexander snapped back. So they then became very hostile indeed, making threats to have him removed from GCHQ and really sweated.
‘Do that and all hell will be on your backs,’ he retorted, as though telling them the trail would lead them to great embarrassment.
‘For God’s sake let’s do him,’ Brook had pleaded angrily. But Gus would not hear of it. ‘More fish to be fried. Let’s gather some rosebuds while we may, then hang them around his nasty little neck.’
It was a hard time they had of it with brother Andrew, who also threatened litigation on a large scale. Unhappily he was a very experienced interrogator himself, and knew a lot of the tricks. Keene even went to BMW and voiced his opinion that Sir Caspar’s pair of male children should be taken by force. BMW roughly ordered them to hold their fire. ‘Bad enough being landed with the Confessions of Saint Caspar. Don’t want to go off at half cock with his bloody offspring. Leave well alone for the time being.’
Gus was not going to argue. The time would come, he considered, when all would see sense, or sense would finally prevail. So they took themselves off and had a long day’s journey into the early hours with the old folks at Redhill. It was not productive. Neither were the three days they spent with Naldo’s father and mother who both looked, and obviously were, tired and worried sick. James seemed to have become very feeble physically, though none of them could deny his sharpness of mind, for he answered every question pat, as though someone had fed them to him before the team arrived.
‘So we do it all again,’ Gus Keene announced, and they set to with new queries and several tributaries of reasoning. Much good did it do them.
Back at Warminster, Gus called them together in order to riffle through the piles of non-evidence before them. Then, one evening, the telephone rang at Gus’s private number and there was Big Herbie at the other end saying he had someone with him who wished to surrender only to Gus, and please would he not tell any of the big guns on the fifth floor, and especially no member of the Credit committee.
Gus sent Arden Elder off on a wild goose chase to Oslo, where they already had a low-grade defector pleading for someone to talk to. He then gathered Carole and Martin around him and the trio set off, in one of the service cars, a Rover with smoked windows, for Whitehall and the Annexe.
3
Gus housed Barbara in what they all called the hospitality suite: in reality a very safe area away from the Warminster main house. It was a purpose-built brick building with no windows, but a pleasant interior with all mod cons, including room service, provided by two stalwart members of the Warminster staff, who could have been deaf mutes for all the response anyone got from them.
‘You’ll want to rest, Barbara. You don’t mind my calling you Barbara?’ Gus had given Carole the job of settling their unexpected visitor into the quarters. ‘Woman stuff,’ he said patting Carole on her neat little bottom, an action they both rather liked, particularly when it was surreptitious.
‘You can call me Minnie Mouse if you like.’ Barbara was edgy and in one of her touch-me-and-I’ll-scream moods.
‘OK, Minnie. Waddya wanna do next?’ Carole did her impression of Mickey Mouse. She had others, including a fabulous Streisand, and a rather good Shirley Bassey which she usually did in private for Gus.
It broke the icemaiden attitude that Barbara had cultivated from the moment the three inquisitors had arrived at the Annexe.
‘She talk to nobody but you, Gus. Also, until you’ve talked, I would not mention this to anybody else, and by anybody this I mean. Not Willis, Tubby, C even. And certainly not that crazy committee they got to say Caspar was fucking double.’ They were in the outer office and Herbie had shut Barbara away to rest in the next room once he had called Gus. ‘Is deadly secret,’ he said.
‘But she’s talked to you, Herb. Yes?’ The eyebrows rose.
‘Not exactly. No.’
‘Come on, you fat fraud. She landed up on your doorstep.’
‘Listen.’ Herb laid a finger alongside his nose. ‘Between the two of us only, OK Gus?’
‘Always,’ Keene lied. ‘You know you can say anything to me. Wouldn’t repeat it to a soul.’
Herbie cosied up to Gus Keene. Whenever Herbie did that, Gus thought it always spoke of intimidation. ‘Look, old sheep —’
‘Horse.’
‘Sheep, horse, what’s the difference? Listen well. That lady has come in from a very cold climate. I tell you for once only. Barbara didn’t want to come. But she did. It is to bring truth. She and Nald cooked it between them …’
‘The truth?’
‘No, her getting out. She tell me only what is good for my eyes, right? Nothing. OK. She has things only for your eyes also. You screw this one up and you answer direct to me, Gus.’
‘I’m a little senior to you, Herb.’
‘Go take a flying jump. Senior makes no difference. This is the real world. The bloody Ks warn her. You got to keep her in pearly for long time.’
‘In what?’
‘That’s what she say. “Herbie, not even the fifth floor boys. Naldo says Gus has to keep me in pearly.”’
It took a full minute, by way of devious logic, for Gus to work out that he meant purdah.
Now, he waited in the big house, concocting ways and means in case Barbara really had got something big and the world was going to explode around him.
‘What you reckon?’ Fat Martin asked from his place by the window.
‘Instinct tells me Naldo’s trying to do a deal. He wants to come in. Realized his mistake and doesn’t like it over there with the babushkas and snow inside during a long hard winter. But my instinct could be very wrong. I can’t buy Caspar as a Soviet penetration, and I’ve never seen Naldo as a willing defector. Herb could just be right. Maybe she has something bloody important, and maybe we are to be the keepers of the holy book.’ He opened his mouth to say something else when Carole Coles came in, all of a rush, with red cheeks.
‘She wants to talk now,’ she pu
ffed. ‘No rest. No sleep.’
‘A little chicken soup?’ Gus asked.
‘You’ve been talking to room service.’ She grinned. ‘Chicken soup and a big juicy steak. Red wine. Said the house red would do fine.’
‘Anything would do fine if you’ve just spent several months in a Moscow winter. Two days, they tell me, is quite long enough.’
‘Are we going to let her talk now?’
‘Naturally. First rule. Let it all come gushing out. See if we can give her absolution after that.’
They all trooped out towards the hospitality suite.
Barbara had taken a shower and was dressed in a white towelling bathrobe. Her hair was swathed in a turban made out of one of the hand-towels, and the deaf mutes had delivered the food. The air smelled as though someone had taken a shampoo in a steak restaurant.
‘Come in.’ She sounded bright.
Maybe too bright, Gus thought. ‘You want to keep us up all night, I understand.’
‘I want to give you the headlines. I think there’ll be plenty of time to write the whole story later.’ She crumbled bread into her soup. ‘Forgive the manners, I’d forgotten what real bread was like until I got into Dublin. I ate like a pig for three days, and I fancy going on like that. It’s only —’ She stopped short, and Gus quickly looked at her. The brightness had been a pose. Now great lashing tears were hitting her cheeks and forming rivers of pain.
‘Only what, love?’ Carole was exceptional when it came to tears. She had her arm around Barbara’s shoulders, and Barbara was making a wet rag out of Carole’s clean white blouse.
‘Naldo …’ Barbara sobbed. ‘I want him back.’ Then, like a child, ‘I want Naldo back … I want him … Didn’t want to come out alone … Please get him back in one piece. Please.’
‘Take your time, Barbara,’ Carole cooed as though to a frightened infant. ‘Just take your time, then give us the news. If it’s for real, we’ll get him back. Just tell us.’
4
Jumping forward several months, skirting the debriefing of Naldo Railton in Moscow, together with his burgeoning relationship with Kati, to the arrival of Arnie with General Spatukin, there was news for Barbara’s husband.
Naldo walked in the Park of Culture and Rest, Dzerzhinsky Park, with Arnold. It was cold and their feet crunched in the frost of snow. Heads down, with the fur hats pulled over their ears, and hands in the pockets of their greatcoats. Two old friends sent out for a walk in the park by a very senior KGB general.
‘They got sound on us?’ Naldo asked out of the corner of his mouth. Not even a lip-reader could have deciphered.
‘We’re clean and on our own.’ Arnold looked up, glancing around to see only children running or sliding among the statues and bare trees, their mothers watching. ‘Not a hood in sight,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Why not? How they been treating you, Nald?’
‘They let Barb go.’
‘I know. I vouched for her after listening to the tapes. I have their complete trust.’
‘And I haven’t?’
‘Oh, you have. They’re very impressed. You did very well, and I managed to piggyback you. Together, Naldo, we’ve convinced them, but don’t drop your guard, they’re suspicious devils.’
‘Spatukin?’ Naldo muttered.
‘What about him?’
‘He must know I’m dodgy. Caspar walked out on him. Left him to carry the can. He was Caspar’s control, and my uncle didn’t like him much.’
‘He liked your uncle. He also likes us, and I think that was because of Cas.’
‘How?’
‘Cas turned the bugger.’
‘What?’
‘Cas ended up controlling him. Kept him in cold storage against the time, then handed him over to us. Just after the Rogov business in fact. I got to lay the news on you, Nald. Spatukin is with us. I’m off to Vietnam in two weeks. There I hope to make certain contacts. Get the ball rolling. Once I’m back, it’ll be Spatukin who’ll provide the long weekend passes for us to visit Sochi and look up your old buddy Penkovsky.’
‘Jesus!’ Naldo could hardly believe it. Then the horrors hit him. He thought of all the ruthless pain and trouble that had gone into the three operations run in order to get Brunner forced on the Soviets in East Berlin. He thought of the dead. Of plump little Schütz, dumped from the car; of the woman, Hanna Düse who had never returned; and of the one who had come back and would never operate again. The one who wakened with night sweats and nameless horrors. Naldo had packed the whole thing away in his mind, or he would also waken screaming. ‘No one thought of letting us know, or even giving us a slice of the take?’ he asked quietly.
‘Not my department.’ Arnie did not glance in his direction.
‘You let us … You let me go through those three charades, two dead and one blown forever just to get some low-grade stuff, when you had his nibs sitting here in Moscow Centre?’
‘He doesn’t oblige very often. Besides, your people were desperate to get someone in, and it helped with the cover we were building for myself.’
‘Jesus, God!’ Naldo reflected on the difficulties they had running Brunner anyway. The Ks had taken him into their service, given him a modest training, promoted him two notches and then let him run errands between the centre and Karlshorst. It took a fortune to support him, ten days to collect a letter, and that only gave them names of the latest KGB officers promoted in Moscow. Once, in the few months they had run him, Brunner had provided quality material and London had come back to say they already had it from the Kremlin watchers. And all the time, General Spatukin was passing on tasty tidbits to Langley. Whether he obliged often, every week, or once a quarter made little difference to Naldo’s feelings.
‘Why should Cas pass Spatukin to your people? Why not keep him for his fellow British?’
‘I thought you had figured your uncle. By the time we did the Rogov thing he was already a very disillusioned man.’
‘And maybe he knew something nobody else knew. That the penetration in London was really bad.’
‘Quite possibly.’
‘And now Spatukin wants me to marry his daughter?’
‘Quite possibly,’ Arnie repeated, not looking at him this time. ‘Insurance I should imagine. If he can’t get out you can always take his daughter along for the ride.’
‘Barb’s going to love that.’ Naldo spoke with great bitterness.
5
In the present, inside the hospitality suite at Warminster, Barbara had no way of knowing of this future little side-show. They all sat around and watched her eating, Martin Brook writing down her request for books. When she had finished, and offered each of them a glass of the house red, Barbara sat back.
‘There are things I have been instructed to tell you before you ask anything else. I’m going in head first and just pray you’re not stupid; pray you don’t run to the headmaster or his nasty little committee with it. All I ask is that you hear me out. Then you can put the questions back to me.’ She smiled, and her crimson-ringed eyes lit for a second. ‘It concerns active penetration agents here. Now. It also concerns a fake diary. You ready?’
‘We’re all sitting comfortably.’ Keene smiled back. ‘Now you can begin.’
SIXTEEN
1
Give them the logic first, Naldo had instructed her. So, for starters, Barbara told them the things they knew, or could check. The suspicions, the intruders at Eccleston Square, the operations called Fontana, Dredger and Matador. She gave the names of the agents involved. Who lived and who died. Then, as he had also suggested to her, she told of their version of the way in which Naldo had slipped out of sight; of the secret arrangement he had with Arnold Farthing, and what had happened when he arrived at the villa in Ascona. She did not know anything about the photograph, but Gus Keene did, and already he had begun to think of ways and means in that direction.
‘I don’t know how Arnie made contact,’ she said. ‘All Naldo would sa
y was that Arnie sent him a message which could really not be resisted.’
The talks that she had been party to with Gus, before slipping out of England herself, seemed to have been forgotten. At the time, Barbara had been worried that her one act of infidelity might have put her husband in jeopardy. Now she could not make the simple connection.
Oh Christ, Gus thought, Naldo played the gentleman. He did not want to make her feel bad, so he stayed deaf, blind and dumb about the picture of his wife copulating under the eye of a camera, or grinning, half-dressed. He was certain the photographs existed, and that would have been the obvious way for Arnold to have hooked him.
‘Wherever we lived in the world we always had an escape route,’ Barbara continued, oblivious to Keene’s slight sigh. ‘A system if we had to get out fast. There was always a way. Naldo was cautious. He arranged things as best he could for London, and I asked why. He simply said, “No reason, but always think of the worst.” Naldo knew of his enemies, and felt it was prudent.’
Only then did she side-track and get to Caspar Railton’s diaries. As she spoke she remembered Naldo’s written words to her in the dingy flat across the road from the watch factory. ‘If Gus is the man I think he is, give him, and those he trusts, the fact that there are two diaries and nobody will interrupt until you’ve told the lot.’
It worked almost like a charm, even though there were some pertinent interruptions. ‘I don’t suppose anyone knows that Caspar left two diaries?’ she said clearly, dropping her voice on ‘diaries’. ‘One was for the consumption of service brass, and possible penetrations. The other is the real thing. Like a coin. Two sides. But the real truth is, like the Queen’s head, on one side only.’