The Secret Families

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The Secret Families Page 46

by John Gardner


  In an hour they had a prototype ready to fly. The next morning they started the test flights, with Naldo going off to Maida Vale to see his expert, Handy Hammerstein, and Barbara into the West End, to an estate agent who dealt with short leases on small furnished properties. She gave her name as Mrs Brenda Roberts, and they took her out to three small flats. She chose one in New Cavendish Street, in a block with an entrance next to a shop that sold model kits and model railway accessories. The charges were extortionate, but she said she would bring her husband tomorrow. In the meantime here was the deposit, in cash. On the way to the agent she had withdrawn four thousand pounds from a savings account. She would bring the remainder, with Mr Daniel Roberts, the next day. They would move in, she thought, around Christmas, or just after. Yes, she was ready to sign the lease. They would both do it in the morning.

  On her way back to Kensington, Barbara took the long way, stopping off at Paddington Railway Station to take her own photograph in one of the little automatic booths that had sprung up in recent years. The photographs on show outside the booth looked like ‘Wanted’ posters. When she next saw Naldo, Barbara could claim she was 99 per cent certain there was nobody on her back. Naldo had spelled it out for her. Always assume people are listening. It was the old rule. Take care, even if you are speaking from a public telephone box. Now, more than ever, they had to assume that, for a while at least, the shop would keep their private telephone bugged. Also they should use caution when moving about. They — this particular ‘they’ being BMW and his cronies, plus all those on the old Credit committee — would make certain that Barbara and Naldo did nothing to throw even a small spanner in the works. The late Sir Caspar Railton was trapped, bang to rights, condemned by his own mouth from the grave.

  They were always short-staffed, though, so movement was probably fairly safe, as long as he took the usual precautions.

  While Barbara was off fixing their private safe flat, Naldo talked to Handy Hammerstein. His instructions were precise, and Handy took his personal threats very much to heart. Naldo quite simply said he would kill the old man with his bare hands if any of this was passed back. Hammerstein believed him. If he talked, then his granddaughter would sit shiva for him within a week of his talking.

  On his way to Maida Vale, Naldo had also had his photograph taken, and called in at a small branch of Barclays Bank where he kept what he liked to call his ‘running money’. He cleaned out the account in cash, closed it and left with ten thousand pounds in his briefcase.

  At home, they pooled information by writing everything down, just as they had done in Moscow, carrying on conversations laced with venom aimed towards his former employers, who still had a stake in him, for the long debriefing continued.

  On this very same day, Naldo wrote a note to Herbie Kruger which, on the surface, seemed bland enough, but contained, first, the New Cavendish Street flat address and a codeword that would bring the large German running.

  This was posted, in the normal box, up near the Kensington Gardens entrance, together with one of Barbara’s photographs, sealed in a plain envelope and addressed to a post box number which Hammerstein cleared every day. Some of the old man’s clientele were a trifle on the naughty side, and the old boy kept certain parts of his work exceptionally quiet. At his age he did not wish to make a return trip to the Scrubs or Pentonville.

  On the following morning, Naldo watched Barbara’s back — and kept an eye on his own — when they went down to the estate agent’s office. There they paid a full three months’ rent in advance, had their excellent references checked, and signed the contract. It didn’t matter when they moved in, the lease began from the current date, and the telephone was activated.

  In the afternoon, Naldo met Gus Keene in the shop’s safe house on the corner of South Audley and Mount Streets. The irony of being debriefed at that location had escaped neither Keene nor Naldo, for this had been the very site to which Naldo had taken the retired Sir Caspar to meet Penkovsky, on the first night of Alex’s own debriefing.

  Gus had carried out the whole business on a very friendly basis. They had long since accepted the bulk of Naldo’s testimony, including the fact that he had shot Penkovsky at Sochi. Today they went on digging back over the years, for Gus had started at the present and slowly worked backwards. They had reached Naldo’s early days with the SIS, after he had taken up his appointment following the transfer made from the Royal Air Force. Naldo had fought in the Battle of Britain, ending up with what was commonly called ‘the twitch’. It had been a bad war for him by the end of 1940, and the transfer was made without rancour or innuendo on either side.

  At the end of this particular session, Naldo said he had a favour to ask.

  ‘Ask away.’ Gus lit his pipe and drew in with a bubbling noise.

  ‘We want to take a short holiday,’ Naldo said. ‘Around Christmas. In a couple of weeks, in fact.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So we’d like our passports back, Gus.’

  Keene thought for a while. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem. As long as you’re on the level, Naldo. This has nothing to do with the late Sir Caspar’s letter, I hope?’

  ‘That’s something we all have to live with, Gus. It’s unbelievable, but we have to accept it. That’s all there is.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Gus, if the truth had been known, had reservations about Caspar’s letter, but the facts could not be disputed. The graphologists had been at work. It was Caspar’s typewriter, his paper, and, definitely, his signature. There was no side-stepping Sir Caspar’s confession from the grave. ‘I give you a ring tomorrow?’ Gus asked. ‘Have to clear it with the chief. BMW would say no just for the hell of it, so I’d rather go over his head. Christmas, you say?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘What about the great tradition? The Redhill Christmas party?’

  ‘I want to put a lot of miles between myself and the rest of my family this year. Isn’t that what you’d do in my situation?’ Gus nodded, understanding.

  As they were leaving, Naldo said he would be popping in and out of the Eccleston Square house during the next week or so. Purely family stuff. ‘I have to talk to my father and Dick sometime. We don’t intend to hang around in this country for longer than is necessary, so the place’ll either have to go to young Arthur, or one of the other Railton children. I want to make sure the obnoxious Alexander doesn’t get hold of it.’

  ‘Understood.’ Gus gave a wink and a conspiratorial smile which said, ‘I’m with you there.’

  The truth was at odds with the information Naldo had given to Gus. The only other person who knew the facts was Barbara. During their first walk in Kensington Gardens, Naldo had gone through his theory: a thesis that had materialized, as though from the blue, on his way back from the shop to Kensington, after the meeting with the respectable Leo Morris, who was as Caesar’s wife.

  The mind, under pressure, and subjected to a shock as great as Caspar’s call from the dead, had produced a sudden, ready-made, solution. It was as though Naldo’s brain had been poked with a sharp knife. Until then, the jigsaw had been only partly completed: the deceit of the Penkovsky affair, which in turn had cast the first doubts on Caspar, had been taken care of. Naldo only felt happy when he thought of the shots fired in Sochi. How could there be remorse at righting both a personal and international wrong?

  The rest, though painful, was all in place. Only a couple of pieces of the puzzle remained unanswered. Andrew’s arrest had been another shock, unaccounted for at the time. Yet now, with the knife of Caspar’s letter plunged into his head, the entire picture, with all its duplicities, intrigues and betrayals, lay in front of him, an unclouded landscape in his mind.

  As he went through each step, striding through the nebula of nannies, and the kite-flying children in Kensington Gardens, Barbara had asked, ‘Would there have been time?’

  ‘Just.’ Naldo still wore the grim look of a man hearing of sudden death. ‘There would just have been time, all I need ar
e the back-up facts — doctor’s evidence; a sign that he was not where he should have been on that day. The funny thing was that I didn’t really take in the poor old thing’s words while I waited for Alexander and Andrew to arrive. Only came back this morning, as I left the shop. The brain is an oddity. But there’s just time for it to have been done that way. No problem, if he had a following wind and some luck. The rest is obvious, and proven.’

  In the present, with Gus, just as they were leaving, Naldo asked if they had ever got anything out of Caspar’s widow. ‘Anything of value, I mean?’

  ‘Spit and a cough.’ Gus shrugged. ‘Poor old thing was too far gone for anything lucid. You saw her, Nald. She simply got worse as time went on.’

  ‘And then she died.’

  Gus repeated the words, in agreement, ‘And then she died.’

  That night, at dusk, with Barbara watching his back, Naldo returned to Eccleston Square and let himself in. Even though Maitland-Wood’s bully-boys had turned the place over, it had been put back together with care. Now he prayed that Caspar’s sons did not know their father as well as he, the nephew.

  The first search bore no fruit. Nothing in the bathroom cabinet and medicine chest, so he tried the bedside table in his uncle’s room. It was arranged with the same neatness Caspar had used all his life. A small tape machine stood on top, next to the alarm clock and telephone. A pair of headphones neatly fitted into a corner of the drawer. Tapes lay in two piles of three in the opposite corner: Mozart, Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Vivaldi clashed with West Side Story. All there if the old boy could not sleep. A pad and silver propelling pencil, then, there it was, a porcelain pill-box with Hatchards’, that most famous of bookshops, transferred in colour on the lid.

  Naldo removed the lid, taking a cheap tin pillbox from his own pocket. The two tablets he had hoped to find lay in the palm of his hand for a second before he tipped them into his pillbox, then replaced lids and closed the drawer.

  He went downstairs, for one piece of evidence was of no use without the other. In the room they called the Hide he opened the large roll-topped desk and went straight to the secret drawer. Caspar had shown him all the workings, years ago. ‘Even your pa doesn’t know this, Naldo,’ he had said. ‘Old Giles, my grandpapa used it all his life.’

  You had to remove the first two small drawers to the right of the upright paper slots, which still held some of the stationery Naldo had seen in C’s office. The dead letter had been typed neatly on this kind of paper. Next, the bottom matching drawer on the far left. They all came right out with no pushing or pulling. Then, down to the underside of the desk itself. He pushed in on the tiny catch and there was a click as the central section moved. Naldo lifted it away, and there, as he had hoped, were pages of notes and letters, all in Caspar’s hand and in green ink. There were crossings out, and scribbled marginal notes, and that was only to be expected. Caspar never committed himself to a full letter, typed personally, until he was satisfied with a draft. And it was his old practice to keep all drafts for three months.

  He had kept to the routine right up to the end. What Naldo required was at the top of the pile, on plain white A4 paper. He sat in front of the desk, the paper in gloved hands, as he deciphered his uncle’s writing. Then he shed tears. Weeping was often a release of tension and Naldo had never been afraid to weep, especially now when tension had to be wrung out.

  ‘Not a tickle,’ Barbara told him, when they met, back in Kensington Gore. The next day, they both did a temporary move to the rented three-roomed flat in New Cavendish Street. The passports had been picked up by messenger from Hammerstein; C had released their own passports, and they had booked their short break. Naldo had even given Gus all details. It was out of season in Corfu, true, but the weather usually remained mild.

  They were all set. Barbara dialled Herbie’s number at ten that night, from New Cavendish Street, and simply said one word — ‘Karl’.

  ‘Groucho,’ Herbie grunted back. An hour later he was at the door, a bottle of wine in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other. ‘Is house-warming,’ he grinned.

  2

  On the night that Naldo made his raid on the Eccleston Square house, other things were taking place on the fifth floor of the shop, in C’s own office.

  Mark Bertram-Prince, tall, tough and expert at reading accounts upside down, had dropped in from Washington for the day. He was to leave that night and his report mainly concerned the pressures that were building up around the American agency.

  Things had started to happen during the presidential election campaign. They were only now coming to a head. Rumour had piled itself on rumour, particularly after the strange break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the smart, cool grey Watergate building on the night of 17th June, almost six months previously. Nixon had won the election in November, and next month, January 1973, he would be sworn in for his second term as President of the United States.

  But rumours travelled, and word had reached the fifth floor in London, that the agency was already battening down hatches, covering trails, and reorganizing. C wanted to know exactly what was what, from the horse’s mouth. Bertram-Prince was gathering up his belongings, ready to head out to Heathrow for the evening Washington flight, when he dropped a cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, into the clear air of C’s office.

  ‘Arnie Farthing,’ he said. ‘Heartbreak,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’ C did not even look up, which was a bad sign.

  ‘I gather things have gone very quiet.’

  ‘How quiet?’

  ‘Deafeningly.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And people’re looking very unhappy.’

  ‘Fill me in.’ C leaned back in his chair.

  ‘First, I caught a whiff during late summer, which is the silly season anyway, apart from this Watergate thing which had started to develop. God knows where that’s finally going to land —’

  ‘The whiff?’

  ‘Uncomfortable. If I read it correctly, the standard of intelligence they were getting back dropped alarmingly.’

  ‘You know how these things go.’ C was patting him along the road.

  ‘Usually, yes. Good stuff, followed by a bucketful of chicken crap, then, bingo, sixty-five gold ingots in a row. My feeling is that the chicken crap became normal. Now I don’t think there’s even a dribble. Heads are on the line. People are worried.’

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘Here and there. Then, last week, a chance remark — overheard, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ C gave a solemn nod. ‘The chance remark?’

  ‘Gave me the impression that Arnie’s disappeared, whether into the cellars of Lubyanka or Lefortovo, or the high table out at the main complex, I cannot tell. But some of the CA people’re looking gloomy as hell.’

  ‘Thanks for the tip.’ C was on the verge of saying, ‘We have problems of our own,’ but stopped himself in time. All he knew was that Naldo and Barbara Railton were booked to go off to Corfu for a couple of weeks over Christmas, and bells had started to ring in his head. He did not have the manpower to follow them. He could only trust that they weren’t up to anything devious.

  3

  ‘So, what game we playing, Naldo?’ The three of them were seated in the small flat’s largest room. They had drunk Big Herbie’s bottle and broached another of their own.

  ‘Not a game, Herb.’ Naldo poured what looked like arterial blood into Barbara’s glass. ‘No games now. A private operation. Run from here, by me.’

  ‘You’re out, Naldo. You gone private.’

  ‘When did that ever stop anyone?’

  ‘Is games when you go private.’

  ‘You call clearing Caspar for good, and putting the record straight, mere games?’

  ‘You reckon you can do that, Nald?’

  ‘More’n that. I can do it, and I want to do it with the highest possible co-operation. You going to help, or am I going to have to get myself so
me casual labour?’

  ‘You serious?’

  ‘Never more so.’

  ‘You really believe that can be done?’

  ‘With your help. In or out now.’

  ‘Count in. Me!’ Herbie banged his breast with a clenched palm.

  They drank to it, and Naldo began to rattle off instructions. ‘It shouldn’t take more than four, maybe five, days as the crow flies.’

  ‘Is Christmas. Give me an extra day for the holidays.’

  ‘Six maximum. The end of the Christmas break is essential, Herb. It’s our safest way back in. Got me?’

  Herbie said he was receiving loud and clear.

  ‘As soon as you’ve put it together, I want you to send this cable. We’ll call you around three, maybe four, days after the cable reaches us. Don’t fret if it’s longer. We’re dealing with the Greek postal service here. Sometimes they take longer, OK?’

  ‘I just wait. No worries.’

  ‘And you’re not to go to Redhill if they ask you. Get some nice jolly young woman to spend Christmas with you; make the red cabbage stuff you like, cook her a turkey, but stay indoors.’

  ‘All the way.’ Herbie’s large head did its Buddha nod.

  The next morning, Naldo and Barbara took a hire car to Gatwick and joined the charter flight to Corfu, under their own paper: Mr and Mrs Donald Railton.

  They had not booked themselves into anywhere near the main town. In 1972 the large hotels and the crowds had yet to mushroom, but the signs that it would happen were everywhere. They took a taxi to a small hotel, perched above a bay in Paliokastritsa. There were only half a dozen other guests, the food was terrible, but the weather stayed mild, and there was a splendid taverna a short walk down through the hotel gardens and a quarter of a mile down the road.

  Below, and along the coast, they could see, from their balcony, the beginnings of the blight that would eventually ruin this isle of ginger beer, cricket and eccentrics. Two beehive hotels were growing from piles of rubble. By the summer, they supposed, the place would be swarming with men in Dr Scholl sandals, and girls in bikinis, straight from the fleshpots of Wigan, Scunthorpe and Ruislip. Nothing wrong with the people, but, like deforestation, a place of calm beauty would be transformed into a kind of Golden Mile with sun. After that, the American tourists would find it. Nothing wrong with that either, but it would bring inflated prices, rip-off tours and fake souvenirs.

 

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