Visibility

by Boris Starling

  The service, short as it was, finished, and Stensness’ coffin was lowered jerkily into the ground.

  Sir James clearly had clout, Herbert thought; not only to have a body removed from police custody without the knowledge of the investigating officer, but also to secure a plot in Highgate Cemetery.

  The mourners broke ranks and began to file away from the graveside. De Vere Green moved smoothly among them; a word for the scruffy Martian string-bean with bug eyes, a hand on the shoulder of the man Herbert took to be Stensness’ father, and a peck of sympathy for the mother—this, by some distance, the most human, humanitarian, and humane gesture Herbert had ever seen de Vere Green make.

  And then de Vere Green had run out of people to console. The moment he was left all alone, he wiped away a tear from halfway down his cheek.

  It was not the tear that made Herbert start; it was the look that came after it, a thousand-yard stare of utter devastation, the kind of expression found only on the face of a man whose world has crumbled and who knows not what to do. The mask had dropped.

  Herbert saw all this, and he knew. He knew.

  There was a wake being held in one of the pubs nearby. Herbert fell into step beside de Vere Green as the mourners wended their disjointed way there.

  “I always find wakes pretty mawkish, to be honest,” Herbert said.

  “I have to say, I tend to agree with you.”

  “Shall we go somewhere else?”

  De Vere Green looked puzzled at Herbert’s apparent solicitousness, but not suspicious; and that in itself showed how deeply Stensness’ death had cut him, because de Vere Green was suspicious of the man who sold him his newspaper and the man who shined his shoes.

  “If you like,” he said.

  They walked back through Waterlow Park, and Herbert felt a sharp jab of guilt at hitting a man when he was down as low as de Vere Green was—even after all de Vere Green had done to him. But he went ahead and did it anyway; not for vengeance, but simply because he needed answers. The pragmatist in him knew that this was as good a time as any, and probably better than most, to get them.

  “How long had you and Max been lovers?” Herbert asked.

  * * *

  De Vere Green tried to bluff his way out of it; he was too much of an old hand not to.

  What an absurd suggestion! Had Herbert lost his mind?

  You get that upset at the death of all your informers?

  All my informers are alive, Max apart.

  No; this was different. Herbert knew what he had seen.

  Herbert was mistaken.

  No, Herbert was not. And here was something else. Whatever Stensness had offered de Vere Green, he had offered to Washington and Moscow, too.

  Impossible.

  Ambrose Papworth, Sasha Kazantsev—Herbert had spoken to them both.

  Well, if they were involved, then it was definitely Five’s case.

  Perhaps; but it was now Saturday, and Five being Five, nothing would be done until Monday morning, by which time anything could have happened. De Vere Green had lost Burgess and Maclean over a weekend; who knew what he might lose this time?

  Clumsy, dear boy. And somewhat beneath you, if truth be told.

  It made sense now; why de Vere Green had been so keen to propagate the Coronation theory, because that would let him take control of the investigation, which would in turn allow him to bury his own involvement in the whole farrago.

  Ridiculous. But said with notably less conviction than before.

  Here was what was going to happen. De Vere Green could tell Herbert the truth, in which case Herbert promised to spare him as much as he possibly could; or de Vere Green could continue to hold out, in which case Herbert would regard him as fair game, at least as much as anybody else he might be investigating, and probably more, and he would not hold back for a moment if—when—he found something damaging.

  Five minutes to think about it?

  Of course.

  “You always were a good Watcher, Herbert,” de Vere Green said. “You always saw things very well.”

  With most people, the confession would have come in four stages; first haltingly, then with the jittery beginnings of confidence, thirdly in an uncontrollable gush, and finally with the dwindling eddies of the almost spent.

  De Vere Green was too much of a professional for that. He told Herbert the story in clear, measured tones, pace and cadence never varying, as though he had been waiting a long time to unburden himself.

  Maybe he had.

  There were no wooden boxes, metal grilles, or murmuring priests in Waterlow Park, but as a confessional it was more than adequate.

  De Vere Green had been entranced by Stensness from the moment he’d met him, of course he had. There had been something of the Ganymede about Stensness, with his blond hair, which he would push back from his forehead every few moments, and the unlined quality of his skin, as though he had sprung into the world fully formed and life’s vicissitudes had simply washed off him.

  This was eighteen months ago—yes, round about the time of the Burgess and Maclean business. Stensness and de Vere Green had met at some party or other, a ghastly boring official drinks thing. De Vere Green had sounded him out there and then: help your country, pass over some scientific data, get a bit of pocket money, that kind of thing.

  Stensness had turned him down flat. He didn’t think much of the government, or the country in general, and the only cause he wanted to help was that of science itself.

  Young, idealistic, naïve, hotheaded—and, for de Vere Green, utterly irresistible.

  De Vere Green had scribbled down his phone number and asked Stensness to call if ever he changed his mind. Fat chance of that, Stensness had said; but he’d pocketed the number in any case. If anything was to hook Stensness, de Vere Green had seen, it would be the secrecy of the whole thing.

  For months, de Vere Green had wondered if Stensness would call. Wondered, desired, waited, like a teenager with a crush. He had wanted, he knew, nothing more than an excuse to see Stensness again.

  Months turned into a year, and in that time de Vere Green had forgotten about him, more or less; even lonesome bachelors couldn’t maintain crushes indefinitely, not without a little oxygen of encouragement.

  Herbert reflected that he had always thought of de Vere Green as curiously asexual; as likely as not to be found at his club in St. James’ on any given night, happy in the company of men who were as shy of their emotions as he was of his own, untroubled by the trials and tribulations of anything so base as sexuality. Clearly he had been wrong.

  And then, out of the blue, a few months back, Stensness had called.

  He wanted to meet up. More, he had wanted to take de Vere Green up on his offer.

  On his offers, plural, come to that: the spoken one, and the unspoken one.

  They had become lovers that night.

  De Vere Green had not been so cockstruck that he had failed to inquire about Stensness’ change of heart. Stensness said that he had been to Moscow in the summer—a piece of information that it had taken de Vere Green no more than a minute to confirm—on some sort of cultural exchange program.

  Herbert knew the type of thing: fatuous exercises in which each set of visitors saw exactly what their hosts wanted them to, no more and no less.

  But Stensness said that he had seen enough to realize that the Soviet Union was not all it advertised itself to be, and few men were as disillusioned as idealists who had suddenly lost their heroes. He had maintained his membership of the CPGB, but only in order to funnel information to de Vere Green. To this he had added whatever snippets of scientific discovery he thought might be interesting or useful.

  They had seen each other perhaps once a week, always discreetly, always in de Vere Green’s bachelor apartment. De Vere Green had asked Stensness to move in—ostensibly and for form’s sake as a lodger—but Stensness had refused. He wanted to keep his own life. De Vere Green had understood, and he had respected Stensness for it, bu
t of course he had wanted it otherwise.

  This was de Vere Green in the raw, Herbert knew; an aging man, head over heels in love with a beautiful youth he knew would never be his.

  Stensness had loved what he had seen as the glamour of de Vere Green’s job. For Stensness, as de Vere Green had surmised long before, the whole thing had been a game, replete with secret codes and furtive meetings, and the thrill of this would have palled for him much quicker than de Vere Green could ever have tired of Stensness’ looks and enthusiasm.

  Stensness had been the one thing in his life that de Vere Green had not shared, he said. Nothing in the files, and nothing with the Americans.

  So Herbert had met Papworth? A good man, Papworth, and on the side of the angels. But if de Vere Green was to lick a man’s backside, then he would at least like to be given the choice, rather than find himself shanghaied into it by the dictates of international politics.

  Herbert asked, what about Stensness’ parents?

  Good question. As far as de Vere Green knew, Sir James had been aware of Max’s communist leanings, but had treated it very much as a passing phase.

  Like homosexuality?

  Quite so. That was the only way Sir James could have dealt with it; otherwise he would have had to face the possibility that his son might have ended up like, in his own words, those damn mountebanks Burgess and Maclean.

  Lady Clarissa?

  Not a clue. Sir James had kept it all to himself. In Lady Clarissa’s eyes, Max had remained unsullied, perfect, like all sons were to their mothers.

  Herbert could have begged to differ, but anyway. What about Max’s informing? Had they known about that?

  Absolutely not.

  Sure?

  Positive.

  All right. Back to the topic in hand; the conference, and the rendezvous.

  In the fog and the cold, de Vere Green had seen his lover’s body floating by the shore of the Long Water, already lifeless. To have been found there would have exposed him to all sorts of questions, both professional and personal, which he would rather not have answered.

  What else could he have done, other than what he actually did: go home, stare numbly at the wall in shock all night, go to work the next morning as though nothing had happened, and, the consummate actor, feign ignorance when Herbert had appeared in Leconfield House a few hours later?

  It was not hard, showing the outside world what they wanted to see. De Vere Green could have kept that up pretty much indefinitely. Had he known that Herbert was watching back at the cemetery, he would never have let his guard slip like that, not even for a second.

  No; what was hard was when the door shut on him at night and it was just him, in his musty rooms with the dark red wallpaper and the hunting prints, without the laughter and arguments of children and the gentle nagging of a wife. Most of all, without the mundane, delicious normality of being a man who had nothing to hide.

  Back in town, people—ordinary citizens, acting out of public spirit—were using flares to guide motorists, and only the men who sold flashlights were happy; they were charging five shillings for a tinny-looking thing five inches long and with a wax face an inch across.

  “It’s daylight robbery,” one man protested as Herbert walked past.

  “Ain’t no daylight round here, squire,” said the flashlight seller.

  Herbert felt an inestimable sadness. At last he had seen de Vere Green brought low before him, a reversal of fortune he had imagined would afford him the coldest, purest of triumphs.

  Now it had happened, however, his emotions were quite the opposite. De Vere Green had appeared to him like the Wizard in Oz: behind the bluster and the façade was a man for whom there was nothing beyond love but an endless, reaching void. Herbert saw too much of himself in that to do anything other than shy from it.

  Be careful what you wish for, Stella had said, and Herbert himself had supplied the kicker: It might just happen.

  Of course, there were still practicalities to consider, and chief among them was that Herbert had de Vere Green over a barrel.

  Notwithstanding what he had said about going easy on de Vere Green, Herbert knew full well that he retained the whip hand. If at any time in the future de Vere Green failed to cooperate, Herbert could threaten him with exposure. It was a threat he had to be careful not to overdo, for then it would lose its bite, but equally it was a threat he had ultimately to be prepared to carry out, if it was to serve its purpose, and with a timing that he would have to judge with discretion; for once he exposed de Vere Green, he would of course have lost all the leverage that the threat had given him in the first place.

  Judgments and margin calls; these were the parameters of Herbert’s life.

  The Izvestia offices—address kindly supplied on Kazantsev’s press card, which Herbert still held—seemed to be, as far as Herbert could tell through the murk, housed in a down-at-heel mews in a down-at-heel area behind Victoria station.

  Privacy be damned; Herbert had been lied to.

  Kazantsev wore a soft smile that crinkled the ends of his mustache.

  “Inspector,” he said. “I wondered when you’d be back. How are you?”

  “Fine. You?”

  “Not so good.”

  Herbert liked the way the Russians took the question literally, not as a social pleasantry. There was something refreshingly honest in it, in contrast to the British—mustn’t grumble, mustn’t grumble, knowing life was crappy but pretending it was not—and the Americans—fine, fine, determined to be in ruder health than the next man.

  He reminded himself why he was there.

  “You weren’t straight with me last time,” Herbert said. Kazantsev shrugged as if to say, What did you expect? This was no less a negotiation than the haggling in a bazaar, and should therefore be treated as such. “This time, you’ll tell me the truth, or I’ll have you turfed out of here by Monday morning.”

  “Have you eaten?” Kazantsev asked.

  The question was so random that Herbert felt himself answering almost without realizing. “Now you come to mention it, no.”

  “Neither have I. And a man needs to fuel himself during the cold.”

  They went to a greasy-spoon café on the main road which ran from the station down to Vauxhall Bridge, and ordered two full English breakfasts; Kazantsev’s with tea, Herbert’s with coffee.

  It was past lunchtime, but the breakfasts were available all day, and there was something about the fog which so dislocated time that eating breakfast mid-afternoon seemed entirely appropriate.

  Herbert took a table by the window, exits and entrances within his sightlines. Once a spy, always a spy.

  “Before we start, Inspector,” Kazantsev said, “I want you to clear something up for me—the biggest mystery I have encountered in this country.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “I cannot for the life of me fathom this. How is it, despite all the crowds that trample and lie on it, the grass of England always springs up freshly and so green; while at home in Russia, where walking on the grass is strictly forbidden at all times, is it always so crushed and muddy?”

  Despite himself, Herbert laughed.

  If circumstances had been different, Herbert thought, perhaps he and Kazantsev could have been friends.

  “I know who Stensness was supposed to meet that night,” Herbert said. “And knowing what I know about that person, or those people, I think it’s safe to say that if you are merely an Izvestia correspondent, and have no connection whatsoever with Soviet intelligence, then I’m a Dutchman.”

  Kazantsev was encouraging Herbert as he talked, interjecting little phrases—“I see,” “I understand”—leaning forward, enough to show interest but not so much so as to be threatening.

  Herbert continued. “I want to know what your relationship with Stensness was—the whole lot, chapter and verse, start to finish. I don’t care about anything else. I’m not interested in your operational details or exposing your agents or anything like that.
A man has been murdered and I want to know who killed him. Simple as that.”

  The food arrived. Kazantsev took three mouthfuls, one after the other at a fearsome pace, and began to talk only when immediate hunger had been satisfied.

  “Max was an informer,” Kazantsev said at length. “No, not an informer, that’s the wrong word. That implies the information he was giving me came from sources who didn’t know and wouldn’t have wanted it. Max was a liaison, that’s better. He was my link to the Communist Party of Great Britain. He would tell me what was going on, pass over documents and stuff. In return, I would hand over instructions from Moscow. The CPGB knew he was doing this, of course. The top brass encouraged it. But they liked to let people like Max do the dirty work, for obvious reasons.”

  “Anything scientific?”

  “Sometimes. Low-level stuff. Crystallography, mainly. Nothing we weren’t getting from other sources. Nothing that a thousand scientists in Soviet academies weren’t finding out for themselves every day, come to think of it.”

  “Was he ever approached by other intelligence agencies?”

  “Five had a go at him once, about the time of Burgess and Maclean. He told me about it. I calmed him down and told him not to worry. This kind of provocation is pretty routine.”

  Herbert saw then why Kazantsev would have been a good agent runner. He gave sufficient confidences for one to want to return the favor, and he was as happy talking as listening.

  The problem, said Kazantsev, was that he had never been entirely convinced of Stensness’ communist credentials. On one occasion Stensness had started banging on about what Marx said in Das Kapital, and Kazantsev had interrupted him.

  “You have read Kapital?” Kazantsev had asked.

  “Of course,” Stensness had replied.

  “All ten volumes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you have accomplished the impossible. There are only three.”