The Human Factor

by Graham Greene

  ‘Something in the City?’

  ‘No glamour in that and these birds compare notes.’ He began arranging his things. He shut and locked his file of cards. There were two typed pages on his desk and he put them in his pocket.

  ‘Taking things out of the office?’ Castle said. ‘Be careful of Daintry. He’s found you out once.’

  ‘He’s finished with our section. 7 are catching it now. Anyway this is only the usual bit of nonsense: For your information only. Destroy after reading. Meaning damn all. I’ll “commit it to memory” while I’m waiting for Cynthia. She’s certain to be late.’

  ‘Remember Dreyfus. Don’t leave it in a rubbish bin for the cleaner to find.’

  ‘I’ll burn it as an offering in front of Cynthia.’ He went out and then came quickly back. ‘I wish you’d wish me luck, Castle.’

  ‘Of course. With all my heart.’

  The hackneyed phrase came warm and unintended to Castle’s tongue. It surprised him, as though, in penetrating a familiar cave, on some holiday at the sea, he had observed on a familiar rock the primeval painting of a human face which he had always mistaken before for a chance pattern of fungi.

  Half an hour later the telephone rang. A girl’s voice said, ‘J.W. wants to speak to A.D.’

  ‘Too bad,’ Castle said. ‘A.D. can’t speak to J.W.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ the voice asked with suspicion.

  ‘Someone called M.C.’

  ‘Hold on a moment, please.’ A kind of high yapping came back to him over the phone. Then Watson’s voice emerged unmistakably from the canine background, ‘I say, is that Castle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I must speak to Davis.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’ll be back at one.’

  ‘That’s too late. Where is he now?’

  ‘At his dentist,’ Castle said with reluctance. He didn’t like being involved in other men’s lies: they complicated things.

  ‘We’d better scramble,’ Watson said. There was the usual confusion: one of them pressing the right button too soon and then going back to normal transmission just when the other scrambled. When their voices were at last sorted out, Watson said, ‘Can you fetch him back? He’s wanted at a conference.’

  ‘I can’t very well drag him out of a dentist’s chair. Anyway I don’t know who his dentist is. It’s not on the files.’

  ‘No?’ Watson said with disapproval. ‘Then he ought to have left a note with the address.’

  Watson had tried once to be a barrister and failed. His obvious integrity perhaps offended judges; a moral tone, most judges seemed to feel, should be reserved for the Bench and not employed by junior counsel. But in ‘a department of the Foreign Office’ he had risen quickly by the very quality which had served him so ill at the Bar. He easily outdistanced men like Castle of an older generation.

  ‘He ought to have let me know he was going out,’ Watson said.

  ‘Perhaps it was a very sudden toothache.’

  ‘C specially wanted him to be present. There’s some report he wanted to discuss with him afterwards. He received it all right, I suppose?’

  ‘He did mention a report. He seemed to think it was the usual average nonsense.’

  ‘Nonsense? It was Top Secret. What did he do with it?’

  ‘I suppose he left it in the safe.’

  ‘Would you mind checking up?’

  ‘I’ll ask his secretary – oh, I’m sorry, I can’t, she’s off today. Is it all that important?’

  ‘C must think so. I suppose you’d better come to the conference if Davis isn’t there, but it was Davis’s pigeon. Room 121 at twelve sharp.’

  2

  The conference did not seem of pressing importance. A member of MI5 whom Castle had never seen before was present because the main point on the agenda was to distinguish more clearly than in the past between the responsibilities of MI5 and MI6. Before the last war MI6 had never operated on British territory and security there was left to MI5. The system broke down in Africa with the fall of France and the necessity of running agents from British territory into the Vichy colonies. With the return of peace the old system had never been quite re-established. Tanzania and Zanzibar were united officially as one state, a member of the Commonwealth, but it was difficult to regard the island of Zanzibar as British territory with its Chinese training camps. Confusion had arisen because MI5 and MI6 both had representatives in Dar es Salaam, and relations between them had not always been close or friendly.

  ‘Rivalry,’ C said, as he opened the conference, ‘is a healthy thing up to a point. But sometimes there has been a lack of trust. We have not always exchanged traces of agents. Sometimes we’ve been playing the same man, for espionage and counter-espionage.’ He sat back to let the MI5 man have his say.

  There were very few there whom Castle knew except Watson. A lean grey man with a prominent Adam’s apple was said to be the oldest man in the firm. His name was Chilton. He dated back to before Hitler’s war and surprisingly he had made no enemies. Now he dealt principally with Ethiopia. He was also the greatest living authority on tradesmen’s tokens in the eighteenth century and was often called in for consultation by Sotheby’s. Laker was an ex-guardsman with ginger hair and a ginger moustache who looked after the Arab republics in North Africa.

  The MI5 man stopped talking about the crossed lines. C said, ‘Well, that’s that. The treaty of Room 121. I’m sure we all understand our positions better now. It was very kind of you to look in, Puller.’

  ‘Pullen.’

  ‘Sorry. Pullen. Now, if you won’t think us inhospitable, we have a few little domestic things to discuss . . .’ When Pullen had closed the door he said, ‘I’m never quite happy with those MI5 types. Somehow they always seem to carry with them a kind of police atmosphere. It’s natural, of course, dealing as they do with counter-espionage. To me espionage is more of a gentleman’s job, but of course I’m old-fashioned.’

  Percival spoke up from a distant corner. Castle hadn’t even noticed that he was there. ‘I’ve always rather fancied MI9 myself.’

  ‘What does MI9 do?’ Laker asked, brushing up his moustache. He was aware of being one of the few genuine military men among all the MI numerals.

  ‘I’ve long forgotten,’ Percival said, ‘but they always seem more friendly.’ Chilton barked briefly – it was the way he always laughed.

  Watson said, ‘Didn’t they deal with escape methods in the war, or was that 11? I didn’t know they were still around.’

  ‘Oh well, it’s true I haven’t seen them in a long time,’ Percival said with his kindly encouraging doctor’s air. He might have been describing the symptoms of flu. ‘Perhaps they’ve packed up.’

  ‘By the way,’ C asked, ‘is Davis here? There was a report I wanted to discuss with him. I don’t seem to have met him in my pilgrimage around Section 6.’

  ‘He’s at the dentist’s,’ Castle said.

  ‘He never told me, sir,’ Watson complained.

  ‘Oh well, it’s not urgent. Nothing in Africa ever is. Changes come slowly and are generally impermanent. I wish the same were true of Europe.’ He gathered his papers and slipped quietly away, like a host who feels that a house party will get on much better without him.

  ‘It’s odd,’ Percival said, ‘when I saw Davis the other day his crackers seemed to be in good shape. Said he never had any trouble with them. No sign even of tartar. By the way, Castle, you might get me the name of his dentist. Just for my medical files. If he’s having trouble we like to recommend our own men. It makes for better security.’

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER I

  1

  DOCTOR Percival had invited Sir John Hargreaves to lunch with him at his club, the Reform. They made a habit of lunching alternately at the Reform and the Travellers once a month on a Saturday, when most members had already gone into the country. Pall Mall, a steely grey, like a Victorian engraving, was fram
ed by the long windows. The Indian summer was nearly over, the clocks had all been altered, and you could feel the approach of winter concealed in the smallest wind. They began with smoked trout, which led Sir John Hargreaves to tell Doctor Percival that he was now seriously thinking of trying to stock the stream which divided his park from the agricultural land. ‘I’ll need your advice, Emmanuel,’ he said. They were on Christian-name terms when they were safely alone.

  For a long while they talked of fishing for trout, or rather Doctor Percival talked – it was a subject which always appeared a limited one to Hargreaves, but he knew Doctor Percival would be quite capable of enlarging on it until dinner. However, he was shifted from trout to another favourite topic by a chance diversion to the subject of his club. ‘If I had a conscience,’ Doctor Percival said, ‘I would not remain a member here. I’m a member because the food – and the smoked trout too if you will forgive me, John – is the best in London.’

  ‘I like the food at the Travellers just as much,’ Hargreaves said.

  ‘Ah, but you are forgetting our steak-and-kidney pudding. I know you won’t like me saying so, but I prefer it to your wife’s pie. Pastry holds the gravy at a distance. Pudding absorbs the gravy. Pudding, you might say, co-operates.’

  ‘But why would your conscience be troubled, Emmanuel, even if you had one – which is a most unlikely supposition?’

  ‘You must know that to be a member here I had to sign a declaration in favour of the Reform Act of 1832. True, that Act was not so bad as some of its successors, like giving the vote at eighteen, but it opened the gates to the pernicious doctrine of one man one vote. Even the Russians subscribe to that now for propaganda purposes, but they are clever enough to make sure that the things they can vote for in their own country are of no importance at all.’

  ‘What a reactionary you are, Emmanuel. I do believe, though, there’s something in what you say about pudding and pastry. We might try out a pudding next year – if we are still able to afford a shoot.’

  ‘If you can’t, it will be because of one man one vote. Be honest, John, and admit what a hash that stupid idea has made of Africa.’

  ‘I suppose it takes time for true democracy to work.’

  ‘That kind of democracy will never work.’

  ‘Would you really like to go back to the householder’s vote, Emmanuel?’ Hargreaves could never tell to what extent Doctor Percival was really serious.

  ‘Yes, why not? The income required for a man to vote would be properly adjusted, of course, each year to deal with inflation. Four thousand a year might be the proper level for getting a vote today. That would give the miners and dockers a vote, which would save us a lot of trouble.’

  After coffee they walked, by common consent, down the great Gladstonian stairs out into the chill of Pall Mall. The old brickwork of St James’s Palace glowed like a dying fire through the grey weather, and the sentry flickered scarlet – a last doomed flame. They crossed into the park and Doctor Percival said, ‘Returning for a moment to trout . . .’ They chose a bench where they could watch the ducks move with the effortlessness of magnetic toys across the surface of the pond. They both wore the same heavy tweed overcoats, the overcoats of men who live by choice in the country. A man wearing a bowler hat passed them; he was carrying an umbrella and he frowned at some thought of his own as he went by. ‘That’s Browne with an e,’ Doctor Percival said.

  ‘What a lot of people you know, Emmanuel.’

  ‘One of the PM’s economic advisers. I wouldn’t give him a vote whatever he earned.’

  ‘Well, let’s talk a little business, shall we? Now we are alone. I suppose you are afraid of being bugged at the Reform.’

  ‘Why not? Surrounded by a lot of one man one vote fanatics. If they were capable of giving the vote to a bunch of cannibals . . .’

  ‘You mustn’t run down cannibals,’ Hargreaves said, ‘some of my best friends have been cannibals, and now that Browne with an e is out of earshot . . .’

  ‘I’ve been going over things very carefully, John, with Daintry, and personally I’m convinced that Davis is the man we are looking for.’

  ‘Is Daintry convinced too?’

  ‘No. It’s all circumstantial, it has to be, and Daintry’s got a very legalistic mind. I can’t pretend that I like Daintry. No humour but naturally very conscientious. I spent an evening with Davis, a few weeks ago. He’s not an advanced alcoholic like Burgess and Maclean, but he drinks a lot – and he’s been drinking more since our check started, I think. Like those two and Philby, he’s obviously under some sort of strain. A bit of a manic depressive – and a manic depressive usually has that touch of schizoid about him essential for a double agent. He’s anxious to get abroad. Probably because he knows he’s being watched and perhaps they’ve forbidden him to try and bolt. Of course he’d be out of our control in Lourengo Marques and in a very useful spot for them.’

  ‘But what about the evidence?’

  ‘It’s a bit patchy still, but can we afford to wait for perfect evidence, John? After all we don’t intend to put him on trial. The alternative is Castle (you agreed with me that we could rule out Watson), and we’ve gone into Castle just as thoroughly. Happy second marriage, first wife killed in the blitz, a good family background, the father was a doctor – one of those old-fashioned GPs, a member of the Liberal Party, but not, please note, of the Reform, who looked after his patients through a lifetime and forgot to send in bills, the mother’s still alive – she was a head warden in the blitz and won the George Medal. A bit of a patriot and attends Conservative rallies. Pretty good stock, you’ll admit. No sign of heavy drinking with Castle, careful about money too. Davis spends a good deal on port and whisky and his Jaguar, bets regularly on the tote – pretends to be a judge of form and to win quite a lot – that’s a classic excuse for spending more than you earn. Daintry told me he was caught once taking a report from 59800 out of the office. Said he meant to read it over lunch. Then you remember the day we had the conference with MI5 and you wanted him to be present. Left the office to see his dentist – he never went to his dentist (his teeth are in perfect condition – I know that myself) and then two weeks later we got evidence of another leak.’

  ‘Do we know where he went?’

  ‘Daintry was already having him shadowed by Special Branch. He went to the Zoo. Through the members’ entrance. The chap who was following him had to queue up at the ordinary entrance and lost him. A nice touch.’

  ‘Any idea whom he met?’

  ‘He’s a clever one. Must have known he was followed. It turned out that he’d confessed to Castle that he hadn’t gone to the dentist. Said he was meeting his secretary (it was her day off) at the pandas. But there was that report you wanted to talk to him about. It was never in the safe – Daintry checked that.’

  ‘Not a very important report. Oh, it’s all a bit shady, I admit, but I wouldn’t call any of it hard evidence, Emmanuel. Did he meet the secretary?’

  ‘Oh, he met her all right. He left the Zoo with her, but what happened in between?’

  ‘Have you tried the marked note technique?’

  ‘I told him in strict confidence a bogus story about researches at Porton, but nothing’s turned up yet.’

  ‘I don’t see how we can act on what you’ve got at present.’

  ‘Suppose he panicked and tried to make a bolt for it?’

  ‘Then we’d have to act quickly. Have you decided on how we should act?’

  ‘I’m working on rather a cute little notion, John. Peanuts.’

  ‘Peanuts!’

  ‘Those little salted things you eat with cocktails.’

  ‘Of course I know what peanuts are, Emmanuel. Don’t forget I was a Commissioner in West Africa.’

  ‘Well, they’re the answer. Peanuts when they go bad produce a mould. Caused by Aspergillus flavus – but you can forget the name. It’s not important, and I know you were never any good at Latin.’

  ‘Go on, for heaven’s sa
ke.’

  ‘To make it easy for you I’ll concentrate on the mould. The mould produces a group of highly toxic substances known collectively as aflatoxin. And aflatoxin is the answer to our little problem.’

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘We don’t know for certain about human beings, but no animal seems immune, so it’s highly unlikely that we are. Aflatoxin kills the liver cells. They only need to be exposed to the stuff for about three hours. The symptoms in animals are that they lose their appetites and become lethargic. The wings of birds become weak. A post mortem shows haemorrhage and necrosis in the liver and engorgement of the kidneys, if you’ll forgive me my medical jargon. Death usually occurs within a week.’

  ‘Damnation, Emmanuel, I’ve always liked peanuts. Now I’ll never be able to eat them again.’

  ‘Oh, you needn’t worry, John. Your salted peanuts are hand picked – though I suppose an accident might just possibly happen, but at the rate you finish a tin they are not likely to go bad.’

  ‘You seem to have really enjoyed your researches. Sometimes, Emmanuel, you give me the creeps.’

  ‘You must admit it’s a very neat little solution to our problem. A post mortem would show only the damage done to the liver, and I expect the coroner would warn the public against the danger of over-indulgence in port.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve even worked out how to get this aero –’

  ‘Aflatoxin, John. There’s no serious difficulty. I have a fellow at Porton preparing some now. You only need a very small quantity. Point 0063 milligrams per kilogram bodyweight. Of course I’ve weighed Davis. 0.5 milligrams should do the trick, but to be quite sure let’s say .75. Though we might test first with an even smaller dose. One side advantage of all this, of course, is that we should gain valuable information on how aflatoxin works on a human being.’