The House of Rumour

by Jake Arnott

  ‘Would you care to join me for a drink?’

  She smiled.

  ‘You’re a naughty boy, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes. Come back to my place.’

  She didn’t waste much time once they were in his flat. She carried the collar and leash in her handbag. It often came in handy on occasions like these. Playing away from home.

  To finish she allows him to masturbate on her boots then lick them clean. He begs her to stay just for a little while longer. He wants to talk.

  He has been so lonely for so long. He needs to share something of his own secret life. He feels that she knows the code somehow, that she understands the double world.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asks her.

  ‘Vita. Vita Lampada.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He laughs gently at her cover name. ‘Like the Newbolt poem. “Play up! Play up!” ’

  ‘I’m on the game!’

  They laugh together now. She indulges him. A real gentleman, she decides. Only public-school boys ever get the joke of her name.

  ‘I’m on the game, too,’ he tells her.

  ‘Why, you naughty boy,’ she purrs. ‘Well, don’t expect me to pay you.’

  ‘Of course not. It’s another game I play. The Black Game.’

  ‘The Black Game?’

  ‘Telling lies and making up stories.’

  ‘What sort of stories?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.’

  ‘Naughty boy. Are you some sort of spy?’

  ‘I’m retired. Well, they never quite let you go. I’ve been pulled back for this wretched business at Spandau.’

  ‘Spandau?’

  ‘Look, I really shouldn’t be telling you anything.’

  ‘Like the Spandau Ballet?’

  ‘Yes, it was rather like a dance. A sort of quadrille between the Four Powers. You know, it was the last thing the wartime allies continued to do together. To guard an old man.’

  ‘I knew them, you know?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Spandau Ballet. They used to come to Billy’s and the Blitz. I preferred Danny Osiris and Black Freighter.’

  He frowns at her. He has no idea what she is talking about.

  ‘I used to be a bit of a New Romantic,’ she tells him.

  He smiles. And he feels compelled to answer:

  ‘I used to be a bit of an old romantic.’

  But he knows it’s a lie.

  He falls back into his armchair. Exhausted. Sated. He lets out a satisfied sigh. Now he feels he has finished his job, though little flashes of Hess run through his mind. The Spandau Ballet: what made her say that?

  ‘I’d better get going,’ she is saying.

  ‘Yes. I hope you don’t mind me not seeing you out. I’m rather tired.’

  He has already paid her. No need for that awkward ritual at the door.

  ‘See you again, perhaps.’ She grins and her eyes flash for a moment.

  And she is gone.

  She sees the briefcase in the hallway and says to herself, no, it’ll only get you into trouble. Her hand is already on the latch; she is ready to let herself out without looking back. But at the last moment she turns and grabs it, swinging it out of the door with her.

  Back in her little studio flat she lights the gas and turns the case out onto the hearthrug. A copy of The Times and an A4 manila envelope. She opens it and pulls out a sheaf of papers. A manuscript. She sits down and begins to read.

  12

  the hanged man

  My first job in the Service and my last. There’s always a danger of giving random events undue significance but it was hard not to see a pattern in the Hess case. His flight marked a curious apex in the rise and fall of the Third Reich; his death now becomes part of the Cold War endgame. But years of study have rendered little of substance or meaning. Perhaps he merely represents something of my generation of intelligence. A Secret Service tradition that went from fighting a war we had to win to facing off a war that we could never allow to happen. Now it appears that the latter game is over too. By all accounts the Soviets were finally ready to let him go. Then suddenly his suicide. Eric Judd calls Hess the Hanged Man, which seems an appropriately mysterious symbol. Because whatever you believe, there was an occult aspect to this case. After all, what ‘occult’ means is to be hidden or obscured.

  What you have to remember is that none of us involved in the affair ever knew the whole story. I for one was only ever told about a plan to reactivate our tame Nazis in the Link, that pitiful bunch of Fifth Columnists run by the Political Warfare Executive, and even that was quickly aborted when Joan Miller’s cover was blown. Everyone close to it picked up strange clues and hints that something very odd might have transpired but nothing could be proved or verified.

  It’s true that after the capture of Hess in Scotland, Commander Fleming did issue a memorandum recommending Aleister Crowley as an advisor in his interrogation. But there is certainly no record that the Great Beast played any part in a scheme by elements within the Service to lure Hess over. And if any of the files of Operation Mistletoe ever see the light of day, they will probably merely hint at a vague disinformation campaign that used faked paranormal material to provoke the superstitious elements within the enemy. It was certainly part of our broader strategy. The Political Warfare Executive eventually employed its own astrologer, the rather absurd Louis de Wohl, who was given a captain’s rank on the understanding that this was a mere payroll technicality. He caused great embarrassment to our department when he was spotted in Piccadilly, sporting a very shabby uniform that he had acquired for himself. The colonel in charge of our section said he looked ‘just like an unmade bed’.

  In the spring of ’42, Fleming came to Political for a liaison meeting. He was putting together a special commando unit for intelligence gathering. It was then that he told me about the queer book titled Swastika Night that he was certain had in some strange way predicted Hess’s flight to Scotland. He had even interviewed the author, who turned out to be a woman writing under a male pseudonym.

  In 1985, an American publisher, the Feminist Press, reissued Swastika Night and revealed its author as Katharine Burdekin. I got hold of a copy and found that there was indeed a reference (on page 87) to a character called Hess leaving the Nazi inner circle and travelling to Scotland. It seemed an odd coincidence.

  The next time I saw Fleming was in Normandy in ’44, just after the D-Day landings. I was with a reporting unit at Carteret where the Allied armies were regrouping before advancing to the north-east. He was with this commando squad he had formed, the 30 Assault Unit. He called them his ‘Red Indians’. I remember that bloodhound expression on his face. Handsome, dashing, keen for the fray. His battledress just a bit too clean and well tailored.

  We got a chance to inspect the huge rocket installations the Germans had left behind: vast concrete bunkers, launch pads and gantries. We walked around dismantled missile parts, nose-cones and finned engine assemblies. In retrospect it was like the setting of one of his books. As we picnicked on K-rations amid futurist ruins, I asked him what he intended doing after the war. I nearly choked on my Spam when he replied: ‘Why, write the spy story to end all spy stories.’

  For a moment I had a vision of him telling some imaginative account of Operation Mistletoe. I was professionally appalled but personally intrigued by the possibility of someone making sense of one of the greatest mysteries of the war. Perhaps it would make sense only as fiction. Maybe Fleming had worked out some sort of key to it.

  It was a full ten years before his first book came out. I scanned it for any obvious clues but soon realised what a futile task it was to chase after hidden meanings in novels. Granted, the figure of ‘M’ in Casino Royale is clearly Maxwell Knight: everyone in the Service knew him as such (Fleming even gives him a Chief of Staff named Bill, just as Knight had). This was telling since really Fleming had dealings just with Knight over Mistletoe. And Joan Miller is certainly the template for the
attractive assistant that Bond flirts with. Most playful of all was the obvious use of Crowley as inspiration for the villain Le Chiffre (French for cypher). But then this would hardly be the first time the Great Beast had been turned into a fictional character. And there was nothing else in the book that even hinted at any solution to the puzzle of Operation Mistletoe. I have to say that I was more than a little disappointed.

  I was by then married to Clarissa Devereux, the third daughter of the Lord Marshalsea. It had been a brief engagement, just after the war when everything seemed hopeful. It’s shocking to think now how innocent we were, especially of sexual matters. Soon after our honeymoon I was posted to Kuala Lumpur as Security Liaison Officer to the Colonial Special Branch. It was the time of the Malayan Emergency and I was co-ordinating psychological warfare and propaganda strategies in the counter-insurgency against communist terrorists.

  Clarissa took to the tropics at first. It was a big adventure for both of us and for a while it seemed like paradise. She spent a good deal of time and energy making our house beautiful. Most expat residences tended to be a little dreary, filled with gimcrack furniture, gaudy ornaments, tiger skins and the like. She supervised the decoration herself and made our bungalow bright and spare with clear lines. We had a long spacious veranda and a well-tended garden. Beyond it wild and lush foliage thickened along the bank of a broad and gently flowing river. Clarissa loved the astonishing natural world that surrounded us. When we could she liked to trek through the pathways in the jungle, to bathe in a nearby river pool so clear that one could see the golden sand of its bed.

  But security was very tight for most of the time we were there. The communists were targeting rubber planters. Barbed wire went up around our little compound. She began to feel trapped. Clarissa had a charming obsession with Eastern mysticism but she soon found that colonial society was actually quite dull and suburban. Once the novelty wears off one can feel trapped in a sort of exotic boredom. I had my work, of course; I was absorbed by it. But Clarissa grew tired of the languid routine, the dreary cocktail parties.

  It was all very disappointing for her and I couldn’t help much. There had been a spark to our marriage at first, but that’s all it was, a flicker that could so easily go out. I tried everything I could but I don’t suppose anyone would find my company particularly exciting. Intelligence work does tend to make men dull and introspective.

  She began a prolonged flirtation with a handsome veterinary surgeon attached to the Commissioner-General’s office. Alan Munro was charming, sensitive and, above all, interesting. He knew most of the native fauna and could describe it exquisitely; he played the piano and read poetry. After six months of this I finally challenged her. I couldn’t blame her for having an affair but in my professional pride I could not bear being deceived.

  ‘But, darling,’ Clarissa assured me, ‘Alan’s queer. I thought you knew that.’

  I did not but the thought of it suddenly unsettled me. Clarissa noticed it almost at once.

  ‘This business about Alan has really upset you, hasn’t it?’ she asked me later. ‘I didn’t think that you were particularly anti.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘What then?’

  I couldn’t say. It was a sense of uncertainty, something disjointed and fugitive. Like a fragment of encrypted intelligence. An awkwardness developed in our relationship. We bluffed our way through our time in Malaya, keeping up appearances and following the pattern of a well-bred marriage. There were other postings: to Beirut, Cairo, Berlin. But each move in the Service seemed to consolidate the distance between us. Clarissa spent more and more time back home. When I finally returned to London, what was left of our shared life had all but reduced to the politeness of strangers.

  Quite by chance Clarissa had seen something of Fleming in town. She was an old friend of his wife; Ann Fleming, née Charteris, granddaughter of the 11th Earl of Wemyss, once widowed, once divorced, now on her third marriage, a formidable creature of London society and its most impressive hostess. Her parties brought together the elite of cultural and political life. She was elegant and imperious, with a sharp and outrageous tongue. Clarissa confided to me that she found Ann more than a touch frightening.

  The Flemings had set up house in Victoria Square and on the night we were invited there the guests included Cyril Connolly, Lucian Freud, Hugh Gaitskell and Teddy Thursby. But no sign of Fleming. As it got late the drawing room became packed with people. I found myself standing out in the hallway. Clarissa was in the heart of the throng, looking on as Ann Fleming told a joke to James Pope-Hennessy. I heard the front door slam and someone brushed past me, calling a terse greeting to the hostess, then turning to mount the staircase.

  ‘Come and join us, Commander!’ a voice shouted above the drone.

  The man sighed and shook his head. As he looked up I saw it was Fleming.

  ‘Good Lord, Trevelyan,’ he said. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘I was rather hoping to see you.’

  ‘Sorry. I can’t abide these gab-fests. No place for our sort of talk. Come to lunch at Boodle’s.’

  We made a date and he thundered upstairs. I wandered back to the doorway. Ann Fleming was telling everybody about the routine at their house in Jamaica.

  ‘Well, darling, I’m in one room, daubing away with a paintbrush, and he’s in the other, hammering out the pornography.’

  Over lunch Fleming confided to me that it stung a little that Ann and her literary friends rather looked down on his novels. And despite achieving some commercial success, he felt trapped by his own creation.

  ‘He began as a sort of empty alter ego,’ he said of his central character. ‘I mean, I even gave him a slave name. But now he’s becoming the master.’

  He shrugged and made a small wave of the hand, indicating that we should change the subject. He lit another cigarette. I noticed then how much he was smoking. He seemed constantly wreathed in fumes, smouldering away.

  He wanted to talk about the Rote Kapelle or Red Orchestra, a series of anti-Nazi espionage rings that had operated in Germany in the early years of the war. He was working out the background for a Russian character in his new book, a spymaster who would have had dealings with the Red Orchestra. We discussed the theory that one of the networks was a Service operation to get Ultra decrypted information about Operation Barbarossa to the Soviets in a way untraceable to our code-breaking system and in a form that might not be dismissed by Stalin as British disinformation.

  ‘This would have been just before the Hess flight,’ I said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Perhaps the Service was also using the Red Orchestra to send messages to the Deputy Führer.’

  Fleming smiled.

  ‘That’s an amusing idea,’ he said, as if it were an idea for one of his plots. ‘A faked astrological chart giving him the most auspicious time for his mad mission. A soothsayer insisting that he must go now, before it was too late!’

  We laughed.

  ‘Of course,’ Fleming went on, in a lowered tone, ‘there was a Gestapo round-up of all the astrologers a month after he landed in Scotland. It was called Aktion Hess.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. So if you were to find somebody who had been picked up in that and had a connection to the Red Orchestra, then you might be on to something.’

  He gave me that bloodhound look of his. One was never really sure how serious he was. After lunch we wandered out on to Pall Mall: a bright boozy day, a truant afternoon. Fleming broke into a wheezing cough. All at once he looked haggard, his noble face drawn and blotched, his blue eyes dulled to grey. I stupidly asked if he was all right.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he snapped, lighting up another of his hand-made cigarettes. ‘He’s killing me, that’s all.’

  I didn’t know what he meant but laughed almost out of politeness. As we parted, he told me that he was off to his place in Jamaica the following week.

  ‘You must come and visit some time,’ he cal
led out as a parting shot.

  At this point my career in the Service was on the rise. I’d just been promoted to section chief of a new department at Head Office. A more permanent job in London meant that Clarissa and I had to decide what we were going to do about our fragile marriage. I begged her to let us give it another try. We got a charming flat in Cheyne Walk with a view of the river. Clarissa once said that she liked to watch the tide go out, because it gave her the promise of escape if things went wrong.

  Then she got pregnant. It was like a miracle. It seemed as if everything now would be all right. She had desperately wanted a child and this finally seemed to prove my worth as a husband.

  When she miscarried I couldn’t help feeling that this was some dreadful judgement on us both. She had an awful time of it and for a while she was quite ill. I felt helpless, overwhelmed by grief and guilt. In a pitiful way it brought us closer than we had ever been. But only for a while. Once she had recuperated Clarissa grew cold and distant to me. And I became anxious in her presence, wary of any kind of intimacy.

  I threw myself into work. There was plenty to do. A comprehensive restructuring of a Service that had been riddled with defections, double agents, security leaks. In an atmosphere of rivalry and suspicion all the best intelligence officers were keeping their heads down. And when there wasn’t quite enough to keep me occupied at Head Office, I pursued my amateur obsession with the Hess case and Operation Mistletoe. My senior position gave me access to all manner of files and documents.

  In the meantime Clarissa got used to my coming home late. She knew that the Service insisted I be on call at all hours. I’m sure she suspected I occasionally played away, just as I presumed she had an opportune affair now and then. Discretion was our unspoken rule. I tried not to even think about what my wife might be up to. And what I did hardly counted as infidelity. I hadn’t even planned it.