Hedge’s cheeks were scarlet. “What utter nonsense! What a thing to say! I’ve met the lady on a number of occasions and that is all. All, I tell you!”
“Possibly. But scandal can be so easily arranged. A word here and there, the odd hint, and the stage is set. The press would love it, Hedge. They would make mincemeat of you … adultery with the wife of a fellow high-ranking civil servant. I would think about that if I were you, Hedge.”
“But — but — really, this is quite preposterous! There has been nothing — no opportunity —”
“That’s not important. The damage would have been done irrevocably. And the result, Hedge? Think of it for yourself. You don’t need me to spell it out, I know.”
Hedge sweated. He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped at his face. Such evil men, with such evil thoughts, such evil intentions, to sully the name of a lady, not to mention his own reputation. And of course he could see it all. An accusation of a clandestine affair that would receive the accolade of truth the moment it appeared in the newspapers. Dirt in Whitehall, and a man high up in FO Security involved. He would be forced to resign. He mopped again at his face, his thoughts racing. Could these wicked persons actually read his mind, could they by some evil chemistry have been party to his innermost thoughts, the thoughts he was forced to admit to himself that he’d had many times about Mae-Li Reilly-Jacobs, the dreadful fantasies that visited him 50 often, Mae-Li Reilly-Jacobs in an unclad state, Mae-Li Reilly-Jacobs enfolding him in her arms while his hand strayed … but of course they couldn’t know that. (But they might, if they were as clever as they seemed to be, have known about his visits to the massage parlour in Soho, and that wouldn’t go down very well either in FO circles.)
He said, “In St James’s Park I asked what you wanted of me. You said you would soon be precise.”
“Yes. I shall be, Hedge. In the park I said we wanted your assistance. That’s all.”
“Well?”
The man turned away and went back to the tantalus. He poured himself another whisky. Then he gestured to the man with the T-shirt and jeans. “Set it up now.”
The T-shirted man left the room. Hedge sat and shook. Clearly, something nasty was on the way. The man was gone for around five minutes during which time no-one spoke. Hedge guessed they were leaving him to stew. The man came back with a video cassette. The other man, the thug with the bulbous running nose, sat on the arm of Hedge’s chair and brought out a knife which he held against Hedge’s throat. “No tricks,” he said.
The television was switched on. After some preliminary flickers, the screen showed an airport, one that Hedge didn’t recognise right off.
“Hanover in West Germany,” the original man said.
The scene shifted, showing a man getting into a car, presumably outside the airport. All Hedge saw was the back of the man, who looked elderly and wore a wide-brimmed hat and a cloak. The man was short and squarish. The scene shifted again, showing some buildings, and the car stopping outside a garage. The driver got out and opened the door for the elderly man with the hat and cloak. Now Hedge could see him full face. A kindly face, seamed with age, with humorous eyes and a friendly smile, a man who had been well known to him in years past and whom he had thought was dead.
“You recognise him,” the man stated as the projector was switched off and the lights came on again. “You recognise Logan.”
Logan. Francis Edward Moncrieff Logan as he had been known to the British security services. But born Heinrich Helmut Schreuder in Potsdam, in the year 1910. Logan, man of many parts.
“Logan alias Schreuder is still alive, Hedge,” the man said. “The film was shot very recently. At this moment, Logan is contemplating a trip into the German Democratic Republic.”
Logan. Hedge felt icy cold. Logan, whose kindly features were nothing but a front, a trap for the unwary, had been a time bomb.
He could become one again.
2
It was two hours later before Hedge was allowed to leave the house. The men were polite; would he like to be dropped handy for his home, or handy for the Foreign Office? Hedge opted for the latter; he had left his car there, and, urgently, he needed to study the back files, the computerised information on Logan to bring his memory up to date, even though there were aspects of Logan that in fact he knew he could never forget.
The Volvo dropped him in Whitehall and drove off fast, but not before Hedge had astutely made a note of its registration number. Walking fast for the FO he was admitted by the night security staff who were used to Mr Hedge appearing at odd hours. He enquired if by chance Mr Shard was in the building.
“He is, sir, yes.”
“Ah, good. Ask him to be so kind as to come immediately to my office.”
Hedge went upstairs in the lift and walked through to his office suite. Hard on his heels came Simon Shard.
“I’ve been trying to get hold of you, Hedge —”
“Yes, yes, Shard. First things first.” Hedge knew that he had now to confide in Shard. This thing could not be swept under any carpets. “I’ve been subjected to — to unpleasantness. I’ve been kidnapped.”
Shard lifted an eyebrow. “They didn’t keep you long, Hedge.”
“No, they didn’t, but that’s not the point.” Hedge shifted irritably in his chair behind his big desk. Shard was often too flippant for his liking, lacking in a decent respect, but the police were like that these days, not really knowing their proper place. “The point is, I’m being threatened.”
Unbidden, Shard sat in an easy chair facing Hedge. “You’d better explain fully, hadn’t you?”
Hedge did. He started with the telephone call ostensibly from Mrs Reilly-Jacobs. Shard caught him up straight away. “You should have told me, Hedge,” he said.
“Yes, I see that now. But I was threatened, you see, even at that stage. I decided not to risk anything.” Before Shard could catch him up again he launched into his exposition of the kidnap. He told Shard what had been said about Mae-Li Reilly-Jacobs.
“Dirt,” Shard said. He looked hard into Hedge’s eyes. “No truth in it, I take it?”
Hedge answered snappishly, “Of course there’s not, what a thing to ask — typical police reaction.” He paused, seeing the sardonic look in Shard’s eye. “You do believe that, I hope?”
Shard nodded. “Yes, I believe it. Go on, Hedge. What do they want?”
Hedge told him about Logan. Shard reacted. “Logan,” he said. “Now, that’s odd. What I had to report to you … that’s about Logan too.”
Hedge looked alarmed. “Coincidence?”
“Probably not. I’ve heard from the Bonn Embassy — the same as you’ve just told me. That Logan’s alive and is about to cross into East Germany. If we take it he really is alive —”
“Oh, he is. They showed me a video.”
“Of Logan, recently?” Hedge nodded; Shard went on thoughtfully, “A video. Why couldn’t they have sent it to you? Less risky, I’d have thought. Total anonymity, no faces, no house interior to be described later.”
Hedge dabbed at his cheeks with his handkerchief. “I think it was a case of — of personal impressment, if you follow. They bullied me, you know, Shard. It was more immediate than a video arriving out of the blue, I suppose. And they had to get their points across, of course.” Hedge paused. “How long has it been known that Logan’s alive, Shard?”
“A matter of a few days, that’s all —”
“It should have been reported sooner.”
“Bonn wanted to be sure. They didn’t want to jump any guns. Logan’s been a long time dead. Or said to be dead.”
“But now that he’s not —”
“Yes — now that he’s not. He’s hot, Hedge, very hot, even after all these years. That is, if he lands up in Moscow. History tells us quite a lot, you know. It tells us our hands, British hands, were not all that clean in our dealings with wartime Moscow — right?”
Hedge nodded glumly. A lot had indeed become known about Logan,
who had been a double agent. Through Logan a good deal of false war information had been passed to Russia, much of it on behalf of Logan’s other master, Adolf Hitler. The results of this chicanery had been fairly lethal for Russia and had led among other nastiness to greater Russian casualties during Hitler’s march on Stalingrad than would otherwise have been the case. Even today, even with glasnost, Moscow would not be pleased with Britain if the truth came out, and Logan might have his own reasons for implicating Britain.
Shard asked, “What do these people want with you, Hedge, in connection with Logan?”
Hedge was sweating again. He dabbed at his cheeks and there was a shake in his fingers that Shard noticed. He said, “They want him, Shard. It seems they want him themselves.”
“What for? Did that emerge?”
“Not precisely, no. But we do know of Logan’s strong Nazi sympathies — that is, we’ve come to know since the wartime days. At the time, of course, that wasn’t known —”
“So you’re saying there’s a Nazi connection, Hedge?”
“Yes — no. A neo-Nazi perhaps. All this reunification business … it’s only too likely a reunified Germany will throw up another Hitler. The Germans still have their dream, you know. Some new charismatic patriot —”
“Not Logan.”
“No. Logan’s too old now. But —”
“You think these people are Nazi sympathisers, do you?”
Hedge hummed and ha’ed. “I really don’t know what to think. But there’s a strong probability that’s the case, though I —” He broke off. “One thing that occurs to me is this: if they want Logan, why can’t they get him themselves? Why get me to do it for them, Shard?”
“I’d guess they want to remain out of it. Clean hands and all that. They may not have much of an organisation for that sort of game. And they’ve got a hold on you. Mrs Reilly-Jacobs.”
“Oh, that’s such rubbish,” Hedge said, and almost said a lot more before he decided not to: unless and until he was forced to he shrank from telling Shard about the real threat to his future, it was all too nasty.
Shard asked, “Have you no clues at all as to these people’s identity?”
“No. Except that I did hear one of them being addressed as Todd.”
“Todd?” Shard paused. “Or Tod. One d.”
“Why do you say that, Shard?”
Shard shrugged. “Just a nickname. They won’t be fools, Hedge.”
“We’d better check it out in any case.” Hedge looked irritated at what he considered nit-picking. Shard asked if anything else at all had emerged.
“I took the Volvo’s number,” Hedge said. “I thought it advisable, you know.”
Shard said gravely, “Good thinking, Hedge. What was the number?”
Hedge had already brought out his notebook. “F 39 UCK,” he said.
There was a sense of humour around: but the men had taken a risk. As Shard remarked, no registration numbering committee would ever have passed such a combination of letters. Hedge angrily accepted that the number plates were false. He told Shard to send up the file on Logan alias Schreuder so that he could refresh his memory and then said that when that had been done Shard could go home.
“What about Logan, Hedge?”
“What about him?”
Shard said patiently, “Since he’s alive, we have to react, haven’t we? Never mind your kidnappers, we don’t want him within the Eastern Bloc, do we, and it’s still an Eastern Bloc of a sort —”
“Despite the freedoms — yes. Well, no. No, we don’t. Really, Shard, I’ve had rather an upsetting night. After all, I’m no longer young, you know. I need some time … but I think you’d better alert the Bonn Embassy that — that we have the matter in mind and — and instructions will follow.”
“When?”
Hedge was looking distracted. “When I’ve reported to the Head of Security, of course. I’ll do that in the morning. Meanwhile there’s no special urgency.”
“Isn’t there? He’s —”
“Kindly leave me to make the decisions, Shard. I am your superior officer, a fact that I shouldn’t need to remind you of.”
*
Shard arranged for the software on Logan to be sent up to Hedge. Then he left the security section, picked up his car from the parking lot and drove home to Ealing. Beth was already in bed. As he made himself a sandwich and a cup of strong coffee laced with whisky, Shard could hear Mrs Micklem snoring in the spare bedroom. He tried to shut his ears to the sound but without much success; Mrs Micklem’s snores were as loud as her voice. He reflected that a detective chief superintendent in his middle thirties really shouldn’t let himself be so bothered by a mother-in-law; but Mrs Micklem was a pervasive woman who had mentally never let her daughter go. Now it was the grandchild, young Stephen, aged three and a bit, who was in her web. If mother-in-law had her way, he’d be spoiled stupid. Already, war had been declared on that.
Shard went up to bed, got in carefully, trying not to wake Beth. He didn’t sleep for a long while. Hedge was on his mind. Hedge, he was convinced, hadn’t told him everything. And why did Hedge appear to see no need for hurry in regard to Logan? It would have been possible to have contacted the Head of Security at his home in the country, and Shard would have thought the re-emergence of Logan was big enough to rouse out the Prime Minister let alone a senior civil servant.
Hedge, he was convinced, was hiding something. And it seemed as though that something might well be personal. Not just Mrs Reilly-Jacobs, either.
*
In the Foreign Office, Hedge concentrated on his task. More or less … he found his memory all too clear. Francis Edward Moncrieff Logan had been his bête noir years ago and it was shattering to discover that the man was still alive.
Hedge’s thoughts went right back. Heinrich Helmut Schreuder, born in Potsdam in 1910 when Kaiser Wilhelm had been on the throne of Germany and King George V had been about to succeed as head of the British Empire, had been a soldier of fortune, with a dabbling hand in many enterprises, all of them shifty. He had spent a good deal of his time in Britain and had come to know the country and its people well. In Germany, he had been for some years a member of the Nazi Party and had become friendly with the Party leadership to the extent that Adolf Hitler had placed a good deal of trust in him. When war had broken out he had been in Britain and had been of immense and immediate use to the Fatherland as an agent; the Fatherland knew that already he had volunteered his services to the British, having neatly changed his identity to that of Logan with a past history to support it. The British security services, being in a state of flux, had failed to check his credentials as closely as they might have done; and in Germany he was known as a patriot, a good Nazi, and a man with very many contacts inside the British Isles.
Logan had become a double agent, a fact that the British authorities never did discover until after the war was over. He had passed invaluable information to his Berlin masters and had thereby been responsible for very many British casualties. In the war’s early stages, in the period of the ‘phoney war’, he had provided information that had led to the sinking by a German U-boat of the Athenia filled with women and children making for safety in the United States; similarly he had had a background hand in the penetration of the boom at Scapa Flow by Kapitanleutnant Prien, whose torpedoes had sunk the battleship Royal Oak.
However, it had been long after the war that Logan alias Schreuder had impinged upon Hedge. Logan had sought refuge in the Irish Republic, living there under yet another pseudonym. From the far west of Ireland, in Connemara, Logan had pulled many strings. He still had his contacts in Britain and in West Germany. Logan was a born manipulator, a born agent. He had that friendly manner, that kindly face. He had charm, and some very unexpected persons fell victim to it, Hedge being one.
Many years ago now. It had been back in the ’sixties, when Hedge had been a more junior, but up-and-coming, member of another Whitehall department — the Ministry of Defence. There ha
d been information that Logan had needed; by this time Logan was engaged in the arms trade with an interest in nuclear weapons. He had world-wide connections and a lot of money behind him. Among the customers of his principals were Libya, Iran, Syria, China, and the USSR plus some South American countries.
Hedge had been remarkably naive, remarkably foolish. He had an expensive life-style, expensive tastes that his Whitehall salary did not meet. Champagne tastes with a gin income. He had taken Logan’s money — had taken bribes. Certain information had been passed to Logan. Nothing, of course, that in Hedge’s own view could have been prejudicial to the national security — Hedge had his standards — but which was useful to Logan’s business interests. And, innocuous as it might all have been, Hedge, had anything ever emerged, would have faced charges under the Official Secrets Act, then disgrace, loss of pension rights, and a few years behind bars.
And still could.
Sitting at his desk, Hedge gave a shiver of fear. It was a nasty situation. And why was fresh pressure being placed upon him by way of false revelations about Mrs Reilly-Jacobs?
Why bother? They already had quite enough on him.
The one hope was that they simply didn’t know about what had gone before. If that was so, then they had better not find out.
It was absolutely necessary to play along with them now. Absolutely essential.
But what was he to tell Shard? What was he to report to the Head of Security? Those wicked men had given him his instructions very clearly, and in basis they were simple enough. As he had already told Shard, they wanted Logan out from East Germany — or apprehended before he left the West — and then he was to be handed over to them. The second part was obviously the hard part. Not only hard to bring about, but very hard on Hedge personally: with Logan in their hands they would be dead sure to find out about the bribery, and then they would have Hedge right over a very nasty barrel.
So what was the answer?
If he didn’t go along with them, scandal would break. And once the press had got onto that, there was no knowing what else they might dig up, how far back into Hedge’s past they would go. And if he did go along with the kidnappers — though how he had no idea currently — his secret would be laid bare by Logan.
The Logan File Page 2