‘Progress,’ Charlie said. ‘Good. Sleep on it. We’ll talk about it in the morning.’
I was dismissed. It wasn’t like Charlie to do that. I put it down to exhaustion and the illness. If anyone had an excuse to be short-tempered after a day like this, Charlie did.
I rang Sylvia Carr and she suggested I go to her flat for a drink, ‘though God knows why you think I should be able to help you.’
‘I want you to help me for Charlie’s sake,’ I said when I got there.
‘What did old Charlie ever do for me except say no?’ It wasn’t a question to which she expected an answer. I asked her if she’d read the article about Watson-Jones. She hadn’t and she took great delight in my description of it.
‘Why didn’t they ask me to write it?’ she asked. ‘I’d have done a far better job.’
‘It wasn’t Naismith’s idea. Someone put him up to it.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve talked to him. He admitted as much.’
‘Then why have you come to me?’
‘Who might have talked to Naismith?’
‘How should I know?’
‘These are your people, Sylvia. You’re part of their world. You know your way around them. I don’t.’
‘Meaning I’ve been to bed with too many of them, is that it? I’m sorry. That was cheap and uncalled for.’
‘Someone struck a bargain with Naismith. Help us and we’ll help you. That’s why he won’t talk.’
‘We all know what Naismith’s after. He’s been waiting for years with his tongue hanging out. Arise, Sir Nat.’
‘Who has the power to deliver that?’
‘Who has the power to make Naismith believe he can deliver? That’s the real question.’ I waited for her to answer. ‘Senior members of the Party. A Party grandee in the Lords. Very senior civil servants. Someone with connections or influence, a route to the decision-makers. It’s a pretty messy business, Dan, whatever the public face. A lot of mutual backslapping goes on.’
‘I need names,’ I said.
‘I know you do,’ she said.
‘They’re your friends.’
‘You make it sound as if I’d committed an offence.’
‘I didn’t mean to.’
‘You’re an unlikely sleuth,’ Sylvia said. ‘And I’m no Watson to your Holmes.’
‘Will you help me?’
She kissed me lightly on the cheek. ‘All right, darling, you’ll see I’m a woman who keeps her word. I’ll see if I can find your villain for you. But I’m promising nothing.’
9
MONTY
‘Why in God’s name waste time on an unknown general who poses as much of a threat to the future of the Soviet regime as a cold in the head?’ Rupert said angrily at the start of our weekly meeting. ‘He’s far too low down the pecking order to count.’
We were in for a bollocking and we got it. Time wasted, resources squandered, getting nowhere, blind alleys. We weren’t spared the full force of Corless’s frustration.
‘The Soviets have suffered a massive setback through the explosion at their laboratory. Maybe there’s an opposition to Stalin, maybe there isn’t. My masters want to know what’s going on inside the Soviet Union. Who’s hard, who’s soft on the nuclear issue. When I come to this Committee for answers, what do I find? You’re running around like headless chickens after a second-rate general no one’s heard of. Well, that isn’t good enough.’
We were instructed to redirect our scant resources into a search for credible opponents to the system, and to come up with answers rapidly. Wearily we returned to our rooms, reopened the files and began a new investigation. Mysterious dates, suicidal soldiers and commanders of tank regiments were out of bounds.
‘We’re victims of Rupert’s theory of the immaculate conception,’ Adrian Gardner said with more bitterness than usual. ‘Cock-up begets cock-up.’
A day later The Times’s Moscow correspondent reported the accident in laboratory D4, and there was immediate public speculation about the impact of this on the Soviet bomb and whether the subsequent delay (estimated, as we knew it would be, by Professor Stevens and others at between six months and a year) would create any political opportunities. Stevens wrote a piece arguing that our national energies would be better deployed using this unexpected event to reach agreement with the Soviets on the total banning of nuclear weapons than joining an arms race in which our participation would probably come close to bankrupting us.
Corless’s anger erupted again. ‘This is one of the men responsible for setting up the infrastructure to make the British atomic bomb.’ He banged the flat of his hand on the opened page of the newspaper. ‘Reading this, anyone would think he worked for the Soviets.’ He looked round the room in fury. ‘Now, I wonder where I’ve heard that before?’
Within hours we learned on the Whitehall grapevine that Stevens’s theme found favour with those Ministers who opposed the level of expenditure on nuclear research, and they were looking at ways to exploit this new situation. Large sections of the opposition were displeased. Among the more vocal was Watson-Jones, who saw the building of a British bomb as an essential condition if there were to be any hope of permanent peace in Europe. The Oxford Union held a debate: that ‘This House believes that now is the time to negotiate a nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union’, and the surprisingly high majority in favour was front-page news in the national press. At a deeper level, what we were hearing was a heart-felt cry for some kind of certainty in what looked to be a very uncertain world; for the removal of a new and terrifying threat to our lives.
*
I returned to my flat one evening in a mood of exhausted frustration after a day that had got us nowhere, and dug out the report I had asked Danny to write after his visit to Finland.
His verdict on Krasov was uncompromising. The man was a liar and should be neither believed nor trusted. Whatever he told us should be viewed with the utmost scepticism. However much it hurt, it was a judgement I had to sympathize with. I reviewed the evidence once more, this time with the cold eye Danny demanded.
It was hard to accept that our assessment of the damage to the Soviet research programme was not true. A hole in the ground was a hole in the ground, and first Martineau and now The Times had confirmed it was there. Dead scientists and technicians could not spring back to life. It would take some time to rebuild D4. But was this the only laboratory where such experiments could be carried out? If the accident had been caused by the Soviets getting it wrong, didn’t they possess the will and the resources to get it right? Wasn’t it reasonable to suppose that we might be placing too much importance on a single event, that our reading of Soviet psychology at this moment might be wrong-headed? The Soviets were always at their most dangerous when they thought they were in a weak position.
I was on surer ground when it came to the question of an opposition. If the political analysts thought the conditions were unhelpful and we were unable to find a single candidate (apart from General Kosintzev) around whose leadership an opposition might emerge, couldn’t this mean that in all probability there was no opposition? It was possible to argue that our enthusiasm for the idea of a new leader was a direct response to our growing distrust of Stalin.
What was unsettling about this analysis was that some weeks after Danny’s meeting with Krasov, Peter had himself confirmed the points in Krasov’s statement that I was now challenging. That was where the difficulty arose. Our trust in Peter was rightly sustained by the continued quality of his intelligence. Again and again, as Corless argued relentlessly in his defence, Peter had proved to be right. The only blot on an otherwise near-perfect record was his accusation against Stevens, and the jury was still out on that one. Krasov’s credibility might not exist, but casting doubt on Peter was going to be next to impossible, particularly if Krasov was the source of the doubt.
The deeper I went, the more I became aware of an uncomfortable truth. The notion that because the Soviets were w
eakened by the damage to their nuclear programme, they now might be prepared to bargain with the West, even to negotiate a non-nuclear treaty, had little basis in fact. We had no firm evidence that this was so, only a carefully placed suggestion originating from Krasov and confirmed by Peter.
The theory had been cleverly planted on us, my sceptical interpretation went, and it had taken root, as no doubt our enemies had hoped it would, sustained by the verifiable evidence of the destruction of a laboratory. On that firm but narrow base, we had allowed ourselves (deceived ourselves?) to build a dangerously top-heavy construction of theories on which we were now acting as if they were fact. We wanted a way out of our own nuclear dilemma, and events in Moscow appeared to provide such a route. It was all too well timed, too neat and tidy. It had none of the roughness of reality, the jagged edges of actual events. In the midst of it all there was something I couldn’t put my finger on.
An hour later my anxieties had formed into a theory, the shape of which was as unexpected as the logic was inescapable and frightening. We were only too ready to believe that the Russians were in trouble and keen to negotiate because of our own reluctance to build a nuclear bomb. Look at the economic drain on an already exhausted country, the argument went, made worse by the American refusal to share their knowledge with us. How much easier and cheaper not to have to build the damn thing at all. What Peter told us about the delay to the Soviet programme and the possibility of internal opposition to the bomb was what we wanted to hear. The intelligence he passed us added up to a solution to our problem. That was where we were going wrong. With Peter’s encouragement, we were thinking about ourselves and forgetting the Soviets. All of a sudden I had the impression that we were being deceived into lowering our guard long before the bell had gone for the end of the round.
10
RUTH
She begs him not to do this but by now his anger is so aroused that she cannot stop him, he cannot stop himself. He drives on into the countryside, through deserted villages she has never visited before, past a factory, its enormous chimneys raining black silt into the afternoon air so that the buildings, the fields, the trees, even the stagnant water in a small lake are all black. She sees no one, no living being, on this silent drive to wherever it is he is taking her. It is a dead landscape on a desolate planet.
They stop at the edge of a forest. He gets out of the car, puts on a pair of boots and gives her a pair too. He carries a shovel and they set off, one following the other, into the depths of the forest. The air is cold, their footsteps crackle on the floor of pine needles and fir cones and dead branches dried through the icy winter so that they snap with the slightest pressure.
Again there are no signs of life, no birds, no animals racing away into the safety of the shadows. This is a dead land, she thinks, and we are here to meet the dead.
They reach a clearing. Branches, their leaves turned brown, have been dragged into a kind of collapsed tent. Lykowski photographs and then drags away the branches to reveal turned earth, a large mound blacker than its surroundings because it has no covering of pine needles. He takes another photograph.
‘Is this it?’ she asks.
He nods in reply but says nothing. He walks across the mound, carrying his shovel. Then he attacks the earth in a frenzy, throwing it anywhere, digging frantically deeper and deeper. She cannot watch. It is too awful.
‘Look,’ he cries suddenly. ‘Come here.’
‘No.’
‘You must see for yourself.’
He is coming towards her, eyes blazing, anger visible in his stance. She relents. He takes her roughly by the arm and drags her back to where he has been digging.
‘Look there.’
She looks down and is sick at once. There, blackened and rotting, are three human heads – three women, their eyes already empty sockets, scarves still in place around their heads, their open mouths like tears in a sheet of old canvas.
‘There are more,’ he says, angrily. ‘If I were to dig here. Or here. Or here.’
He drives at the earth with his shovel as if the force will split it open and reveal the corpses beneath. There is a terrible smell, a poisonous miasma and she vomits again and again, as she runs away into the trees. She puts her arms around the trunk of a fir tree and sobs. How can he do this to her? She believed him, she did not need proof. Why has he brought her here?
He is shouting at her, his voice hoarse with tears. ‘They did not die in a fire, there are no burns on their bodies or their nightclothes. They died because they were shot in the back. Where we are standing is a killing ground.’
She turns round. He is refilling the hole he has made, covering up the dead once more. He drags back the branches, working with a demented energy as if his life depended upon it.
‘What have we been told?’ he shouts at her. The words echo among the trees and are lost in the depths of the forest. ‘There was an explosion, people died in a fire. That is a lie. Look. Here. They were brought in lorries. Look!’
He points to the tyre marks, evidence frozen until the spring melted the snow but too soon for the rains to wash away the marks, and flowers to push through the earth to conceal the evil of the place.
‘Did you notice that the heads were female? Females bodies side by side. I imagine, if I dug over here, I would find male bodies. Before killing these old people, they separated husbands from wives.’
This at last is the evidence she has been searching for. The apartment building was empty when it exploded. Its occupants had already been forcibly removed, brought to this deserted place, shot and buried secretly. It is not the image of the dead and dying that haunts her, it is the presence of the thin, pale figure of the intelligence officer at the crime Pavel has uncovered, the man without whose continued protection she is as good as dead.
He walks back towards her. ‘Is this what we have become? Murderers of our own people? These men and women were taken from their beds at gunpoint, our own citizens, innocent of any crime, their only mistake being that they lived in that block. They were driven here like cattle, separated from each other and shot because that was the order that had been given. This is the burial ground of the state’s crimes and we have uncovered their dirty secret.’
She wipes her face and her eyes, the nausea only just under control.
‘Sixty-eight people lie here,’ he says. ‘I have not counted the bodies, but I have stolen the list of residents from the block near D4 and I have counted them. I know their names. Their ages. The numbers of their flats. This is their final resting place, a clearing in a forest that, had it not been for the last confession of a young soldier, might have remained undiscovered for years. There is only one question to ask. Why did it happen? Why?’
He shouts the word why, and it reverberates among the branches of the trees. Is it her imagination, or do the stilled branches move in reply to his entreaty? Do they bow out of respect for the terrible scene he has revealed?
She cannot answer him. He has told her nothing new. She has known the truth all along. Not the terrible details he has shown her – she has not recreated the appalling suffering of the last minutes of their lives – but the intolerable injustice of killing innocent people in the middle of the night for no other purpose than to make a political argument that much stronger, to reinforce the lie on which someone’s power is based.
‘Look here,’ he says. His hands are full of spent cartridges he has collected. ‘What more evidence do we need?’
‘Take me away from this place,’ she says.
But Lykowski is busy. He has stripped the bark off two branches and now he is tying one piece to another. He has made a cross. With difficulty he plants one end in the frozen earth and supports it with stones. It is something, a marker of where the dead lie. No one will see it and in time, soon, it will collapse. But they will both know that they have done something, however small; that they have paid their respects.
11
MONTY
The downpour which
had been threatening since I’d left Strutton Ground broke as I was crossing Horseferry Road, and caught me in full flood. I was dripping wet when I put my head round Miss Pertwee’s door.
‘Oh, Mr Lybrand,’ she said, ‘Mr Maitland’s so sorry. He’s been called away. He said would you mind waiting.’
I was given a cup of tea and offered a digestive biscuit from the famous floral tin. I was either unexpectedly in favour or Miss Pertwee was deeply embarrassed by Colin’s absence. Her treasury of digestive biscuits was famed for being as tightly guarded as her virginity.
Two days before, Colin had given us the ‘good news’ that a small group of senior civil servants had written a confidential policy paper for the Cabinet, arguing that in the light of what we now knew about the present political situation in the Kremlin, and given our own straitened circumstances, it was surely responsible to investigate the possibility of a negotiated nuclear settlement with the Soviets before committing ourselves to building our own bomb.
I was taken aback at the strength of support on our Committee for this course of action. Guy Benton saw it as a vindication of the consistent Foreign Office line that ‘we must not allow ourselves to become captive to the easy characterization of Homo sovieticus as our natural enemy’. Arthur Gurney viewed it as a reprieve for his growing opinion that ‘building the bomb cannot be seen as a suitable activity for a civilized society’. Boys-Allen sucked his pipe and nodded while Adrian Gardner, cynical as ever, whispered that Corless was beating us with the stick of our own importance so that we would continue doggedly down ‘the line of investigation Rupert’s career is anchored to’.
‘You’ve been very quiet, Monty. Any comments?’
What could I say? I was as responsible as anyone else round the table for the interpretation of Peter’s intelligence. We had produced a stream of reports on which the conclusions of this Cabinet paper were based. Who would believe me if I said I now thought its recommendations had their origin in the offices of Moscow intelligence?
Making Enemies Page 30