by Graham Ison
‘The next thing is to identify the woman, sir.’
‘And I suppose you want to borrow the C11 surveillance team to do it?’
‘Well sir, it would be —’
‘Forget it, Harry.’ Finch leaned back, his arms hanging limply down the sides of his chair. ‘Don’t you realise what you’ve got here? You’ve got a senior Foreign Office bloke who makes a meet with a bird in some grotty boozer in Mornington Crescent, and afterwards he goes back to his office — and she goes to the South African Embassy. What’s that — some sort of bloody coincidence? What’s she doing going in there, with an office pass? He’s married, you say?’ Tipper nodded. ‘Well that wasn’t a clandestine meet to have it off, was it? Because they didn’t. That would have been a hotel job — quick bang-bang, and back to the office. But what did they do — have a chat, you said — yes? No, Harry, I think your lot have stumbled on to something that might just be a bit interesting. Could be a bit deep. Know what I mean? And there’s enough there to be interesting. After all, the South African Embassy’s in Trafalgar Square, and the Foreign Office is less than half a mile away — and she — and he — both went to Mornington Crescent, and then travelled back to more or less the same place, but not together. No, Harry, my son, that’s all a bit dodgy.’
‘Well what do we do next, sir?’
‘You wait while I make a phone call.’ Finch opened the top drawer of his desk and ran his finger down a list of numbers. Then he tapped out four digits on his telephone.
‘Frank? Colin Finch. One of my DCIs, Harry Tipper, has just come in with a tale that might interest you. Have you got a minute if I send him up?’ Finch listened for a while and then, obviously talking about something else, said, ‘No, I didn’t go. Good do was it?’ He replaced the handset. ‘Go up to the eighteenth floor’ — he pointed to the ceiling — ‘and see Mr Hussey — Commander Special Branch, and tell him the tale.’ By way of dismissal, he picked up his pen. ‘Let me know how you get on,’ he said as Tipper opened the door.
*
Frank Hussey was big, grey-haired, and wore heavy hornrimmed spectacles. He stood up as Tipper entered his office and extended a hand. ‘Come in and sit down, Mr Tipper. Mr Finch tells me you’ve got an interesting story to tell me.’
‘I don’t know, sir, but he seems to think that it might be of interest to your Branch.’ For the next few minutes, Tipper recounted details of the enquiry, starting with the finding of Penelope Lambert’s body in Brittany by Colonel Matthieu, the identification, the tortuous unravelling of her past, and finally the meeting between Mallory and the unknown girl who had gone from Mornington Crescent to the South African Embassy.
Commander Hussey had said nothing throughout, his chair sideways on to his desk, his legs crossed, and the fingers of his right hand playing an occasional and silent tattoo on his blotter — the only item on an otherwise clear desk top.
‘That it?’ Hussey swung round, square-on to the desk.
‘Not quite, sir. There’s another South African connection which has only just come to light. One in which one of your DSs was involved, I believe.’
‘Oh? What was that about?’
Tipper outlined what he had learned from the two constables, finishing with the apparent rapid departure of Webster for South Africa.
‘Well, well,’ said Hussey. He turned to the telephone and tapped out four numbers. Waiting for an answer, he said, ‘I think we can resolve that now.’
The Detective Chief Superintendent who entered the office was called John Gaffney. He was in his mid-forties and had been in charge of the Special Branch international squad since his promotion some two years previously.
‘Busy, John?’
‘Always, sir.’
‘Well you’re going to be a bit more busy now, I suspect. I want you to listen to what DCI Tipper here, from C1, has to say.’ He turned to Tipper: ‘I’m sorry — Harry — isn’t it? Could you run through the story again, for Mr Gaffney’s benefit.’
Gaffney listened intently, occasionally nodding as though what he was hearing had a familiar ring about it. When Tipper had finished, he said, ‘The skipper in question was DS Ron Marshall — I’ll get you to talk to him in a minute.’ He turned to Hussey. ‘I think we’ll have to ask Harry to hold off — at least until we’ve had a word with the Security Service, sir.’
Tipper looked dismayed. ‘This is a murder enquiry, sir,’ he said to the Commander.
Hussey held up a hand. ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘We’re not asking you to stop altogether; just to wait. There may be a plausible explanation for Mallory’s behaviour, but I have grave reservations about that. And if there is something sinister, as I suspect there may be, our enquiry may overtake yours: in fact, may help you to clear up your job. D’you follow?’
Tipper nodded. ‘Yes, sir, of course. But may I at least follow up this business of the videos?’
It was Gaffney who spoke. ‘We can do that now. From what you’ve been saying, it may well be connected. Once you start opening up something like this, there’s no telling where it might lead.’
*
‘We often get the Uniform coming up with things like this, sir,’ said DS Marshall. ‘The moment they find a foreigner’s involved in anything, they think we ought to take an interest.’ He smiled tolerantly. ‘Our own fault really, I suppose. We never tell anyone what we’re up to. Half the time we don’t know ourselves.’ He put his hand on the pile of video tapes on the table. ‘We were on the point of destroying these. They’ve been skulling around in the property store for ages.’
‘Perhaps for a start we could have a look at them,’ said Tipper.
‘Of course,’ said the Sergeant. ‘You won’t find much of interest on them, though, sir. Professionally speaking, of course — unless you’re from the Vice Squad.’
Tipper shook his head. ‘Straightforward murder,’ he said. ‘Well murder, anyway. On second thoughts, I’m not so sure about the straightforward bit.’
The Sergeant put a tape into the video-player and switched it on. The opening scene was the bed in Pauline Lawrence’s flat, and was obviously taken from the wardrobe, from exactly the place that Tipper had surmised the camera would be on the shelf. Two naked bodies came into view. Only their backs could be seen to begin with, but then they got on to the bed and started writhing, introducing to the sex act some quite original contortions. For a good two or three minutes the woman’s face was obscured by the man’s body, until at last she moved and Tipper let out a sigh.
‘That’s her,’ he said. ‘That’s Penelope Lambert alias Gaston. Well, well, well!’
‘Seen enough, sir?’ asked Marshall.
‘Not yet,’ said Tipper. ‘If this is what I think, it would have been of no value to her unless her partner’s identified.’
A few moments later the man rolled off the girl’s body and unwittingly faced the camera.
‘Christ!’ said Markham. ‘It’s only bloody Mallory.’
‘Are they all the same — these tapes?’ asked Tipper.
Marshall turned from the video-player with a laugh. ‘Yes, sir. Together they run to about two hours or so — and all as boring.’
‘I meant are the same two people in each video?’ asked Tipper snappily. He was beginning to tire of this supercilious dandy.
‘Oh I see. No. Same girl — different partner, as I recall. Long time since I looked at them.’
‘I have a feeling,’ said Markham, ‘that we’re about to meet some old friends.’
The other three tapes were put on. Tipper told the Sergeant to fast-forward each to the point where the man’s face was revealed. They were not surprised to see that one of them was John Wallace, the civil servant, and only mildly surprised that Richard Jacob was another.
It was the fourth tape that stunned them, and they saw it all through for the very simple reason that Penny Gaston’s partner on this occasion was a woman — but not a woman they knew.
‘Oh Christ!’ said Tipper, running a hand
through his hair. ‘Now what?’ He turned to the Special Branch Sergeant. ‘What was the outcome?’
Marshall opened the Venetian blinds. ‘Nothing! We went to his address a couple of days later to make some more enquiries but he’d gone — vamooshed. The couple in the house …’ He paused for a moment.
‘Chambers?’
‘That’s them, sir, yes. They said he’d had to go back to South Africa urgently — some story about his father dying. We did a few checks, more out of interest — but nothing. Immigration had nothing — no trace of his having left the country, at least not in the name of Webster. We traced a driving licence in that name and address, but that proved nothing. No trace all round. We even checked with the Security Service to see if he could have been South African Security.’
‘And?’
‘If he was, they hadn’t heard of him — at least not in that name. It keeps coming back to that — identification. But that could have been the reason for his disappearance. Suddenly coming to the notice of police, even though it was through something silly like this.’ He gestured towards the pile of tapes.
‘The girl performing on the tapes was a secretary at the Foreign Office. Lived in the flat above Webster. And she’s our murder victim,’ said Tipper mildly. ‘Furthermore, the man on the first tape is her boss — soon to be appointed an ambassador it’s said, and the bloke on the second tape is a senior civil servant at the Department of Trade.’
The Sergeant paled, his overbearing self-confidence shattered. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘We didn’t know that.’
‘And it seems to me, young man,’ said Tipper brutally, ‘that you did nothing to find out. And yet you say you thought Webster might have worked for South African Security.’
‘I shouldn’t ever apply to become a real detective.’ Markham couldn’t help hurling a gratuitous insult at Special Branch whenever the opportunity presented itself.
‘It could well be that she was murdered by any one of the men on those tapes — or Webster.’ Tipper hammered his point home. ‘To say nothing of the anonymous lesbian,’ he added.
‘Good God!’ Marshall was suddenly very apprehensive; someone might suggest that he hadn’t dealt with the Webster enquiry as thoroughly as he should have done. This DCI from C1 sitting opposite him with a sardonic expression on his face was probably one of the many CID officers who thought that Special Branch was a collection of tossers. ‘I think I’d better let Mr Gaffney know about that,’ he said.
Tipper smiled. ‘Good, because I shall be telling your Commander,’ he said with a certain amount of satisfaction.
The Sergeant looked unhappy.
*
John Gaffney, meanwhile, had set up an incident room and made a number of telephone calls. He had devoted some time to the selection of a suitable sergeant for the office; major incident enquiries, like many other aspects of police work, were only as successful as the administrative support they received. An efficient sergeant, controlling a well organised office, was the officer who supervised such enquiries; get a poor organiser and you never recovered from the inevitable chaos of the first twenty-four hours. The result of the telephone calls was the convening of a conference at that stark grey building in central London that is the headquarters of the Security Service. Present were the Director of the branch that handles counter-espionage, two members of his staff, MI5’s legal adviser, and Detective Chief Superintendent John Gaffney with his Commander, Frank Hussey. In the corner was the self-effacing Andrews, leader of the watchers — the MI5 surveillance team.
‘We have absolutely nothing on this,’ said Carfax, the Director, with a sackcloth-and-ashes expression on his face that implied that he should have known. ‘And the first priority, clearly, is to identify the woman. As you say, Frank …’ He nodded towards Hussey. ‘It may be a coincidence that she went from Mornington Crescent to the South African Embassy. To be perfectly honest, that would have been a very silly thing to do if there is any information being passed by Mallory to the South Africans and she is the contact — very silly indeed. But then, as we know, people do do some very silly things.’ He smiled blandly at the others.
Hussey was tempted to mention Bettaney, the MI5 officer who had put a note through the letter-box of a KGB man at the Russian Embassy in London offering his services, but thought that this was probably neither the time nor the place. ‘Do you want any help from us?’ he asked.
‘I think that we can take the identification on at this stage, Frank,’ said Carfax. ‘Or more precisely, John Andrews can.’ He looked across at the watchers’ team-leader. ‘Yes, John?’
‘We’ve started,’ said Andrews. He was a practical, down-to-earth fellow, and disliked Carfax’s posturing.
‘Ah yes, of course. Good.’ For a moment or two he stared down at his notes. ‘In the meantime, we have launched a thorough enquiry at the Foreign Office, to see what, if anything, our friend Mallory knows that could be of value to the South Africans.’ He turned to one of his assistants, a pale desk officer called Monk. ‘Is there anything yet, Charles?’
‘The Foreign Office is a maze,’ he said, a distasteful expression on his face, as though it were an organisation with which he would rather have no dealings at all. ‘But it seems that he is in charge of one of those difficult departments that has a variety of responsibilities.’ He shook his head. ‘All very untidy. One of the tasks he has is something to do with the economics of South Africa.’ He leaned forward earnestly. ‘But just what relevance that has is a bit of a mystery — at least at this stage.’ He stopped, the inflection in his voice making it sound as though there were more to follow, but nothing came.
For a moment or two Carfax waited expectantly, and then said, ‘Ah yes, thank you, Charles.’ He glanced across at Delaney, the legal adviser. ‘Anything you want to say, Dudley?’
‘You haven’t said anything yet that leads me to believe that this chap Mallory has committed an offence,’ said Delaney with withering lawyer’s logic. ‘So the answer is no.’ Hussey smiled to himself.
‘Mmm, quite so,’ said Carfax, unwilling to take on the lawyer. ‘Well for the time being, gentlemen, that seems to be about as far as we can go. Shall we meet again, say the day after tomorrow?’
‘What for?’ asked Hussey, cross at having had his time wasted at a totally unnecessary conference. ‘Personally, I am not at all impressed by the fact that the South Africans and the Foreign Office are involved. I know they’re both highly emotive to government, but as far as I am concerned, at worst it’s a breach of the Official Secrets Acts, and John Gaffney here is quite capable of dealing with an OSA job.’ He scowled at the assembled Security Service representatives. ‘Come to think of it, I’m not too sure that I shouldn’t perhaps have put a detective superintendent in charge of it. And I might just do that if it turns out to be nothing. So many of these scares do.’
*
‘Bloody waste of time,’ said Hussey, as he got into his car. ‘Where are you going, John, Waterloo?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Hop in,’ said the Commander. ‘I’ll drop you off. It’s the least I can do for wasting your time as well.’
*
It took the Security Service watchers three days to identify the woman. And that, they subsequently discovered, was because she’d had two days off from the office. But on the third day she left South Africa House, walked to a nearby car park, and led them quite unsuspectingly to her house in Hendon. It was a matter of simplicity thereafter to check the diplomatic index and discover that her name was Eva van Heem, a single woman of thirty-three, and a second secretary at the embassy.
‘So what do we do now?’ asked Gaffney of the assistant director upon whom Carfax had put the responsibility of the day-to-day running of the enquiry in conjunction with Special Branch.
‘We wait and see, I suppose.’ Hector Toogood stood up. ‘We could go and have a beer.’
‘That’s the best suggestion that your lot have made so far,’ said Gaffney. ‘Why don�
�t we do that.’
Chapter Twelve
The Head of the Foreign Office walked through the archway from the quadrangle just as the anonymous black car containing the Director-General of the Security Service drew into the kerb outside Number Ten.
‘Good morning, John.’
‘Good morning, Edward.’
The policeman had already rung the door bell, and together the two men entered the front hall. The messenger took Sir John Laker’s light fawn overcoat and umbrella and hung them on the stand by the famous leather watchman’s chair, and then preceded them down the long corridor that led to the Cabinet Room and the private office.
The Prime Minister’s principal private secretary, Ronnie Mansell, hurried towards them. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said. ‘We’re upstairs this morning.’ Mansell, a fussy little man, always spoke in the plural whenever he mentioned the Prime Minister.
He led the two men up the staircase, past the gallery of former prime ministers, not strictly in the order they had held office, because some had upset the system by coming back after a break, like Baldwin, MacDonald, Churchill and Wilson. And at the top, facing visitors with a look of reproachful smugness, Spencer Perceval, one of the only two prime ministers to have been assassinated. The other, as John Gaffney knew only too well, was Radford Fairley.
Across the landing they processed, to the west side of the old house. The principal private secretary tapped lightly and opened the door of the study.
‘Sir John Laker and Sir Edward Griffin, Prime Minister.’
‘Come in, come in. Good morning.’ The Prime Minister shook hands with each of them. ‘Do sit down.’
The two officials sat, side by side on the settee, feeling a little like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. This was not going to be an easy interview. The Prime Minister moved a high carver chair and sat facing them, thus achieving a physical ascendancy. It was a typical politician’s ploy.
‘Well, and who’s going to kick off?’ The Prime Minister smiled — dangerously. ‘Sir Edward?’