by Clare Carson
The dawn was creeping around the curtains. Five thirty. Good time to visit the Barrier Block. Junkies and muggers asleep. The wind had a cold bite, blew grit in her eyes as she braved South Lambeth Road. A ratty squirrel scuttled past clutching the greasy disc of a crisp in its mouth. The tramp who slept in the library doorway was already awake, he gave her his toothless grin.
‘You’re up early.’
‘So are you.’
‘It’s the Easterly, it gets under my skin. See if you can change its direction for me.’
‘I’ll give it a go.’
She toyed with the wind as she passed the Portuguese café, the car radio shop, the Italian bakers, concentrated. Ariel, the storm maker. Her mind caught a gust, swirled it around, bent it to her will and the wind dropped a little, the twitter of starlings stirring from their tower block roost now audible through its blasts. She turned and waved at the library tramp. He punched the air approvingly.
Stockwell was bleak and lifeless in the spectral light of dawn. Jack’s, the one-stop shop for addictions of all kinds, had its shutters down. No skateboarders riding the concrete waves of Stockwell Park estate. No meat wagons squealing around the streets of Brixton. The brown wall of the Barrier Block loomed; a grim fortress with tiny windows that looked like defensive arrow slits but were actually designed to protect the inhabitants from the noise of a proposed bypass. The bypass never materialized. The forbidding estate remained, squatted by dealers and psychos drawn to its dystopian atmosphere. Tom was mad not to have made more effort to secure his front door. And even madder to have revealed his lack of locks to her.
A concrete tower marked the nearest entrance. Second floor, he had said. She wouldn’t have taken the lift even if it had been working. Legend had it that somebody had been trapped inside for three days because the fire brigade refused to enter the building. She climbed the steps, peered through the cracks at a leafless sapling below; a crow loitered on the top branches, cawed its welcome to the day. First floor, second floor. A graffiti sprayed sign – Class War, all pigs are bastards – pointed to the flats. Through the first fire door, the second, third, fourth, strip-lights flickering, the thud, thud, thud of somebody’s bass vibrating through the walls. She looked over her shoulder. The exterior door had closed, cutting any natural light. She had better do this quickly because she was starting to feel claustrophobic. She reached number 58, knocked on the door. No answer. The letterbox was higher than she had expected; she had to stand on tip-toes to push her hand through. Good thing, she thought as she wriggled her arm around on the inside searching for the latch, that Tom didn’t have a dog. She stretched, strained, found the latch, twisted and entered.
Tom’s flat was actually a maisonette. Beyond the darkened entrance the front room was spacious and light with vast sliding glass doors to a balcony and beyond a clump of naked silver birches shivering in the breeze. The flat would have been fine if Tom had bothered to do anything with it, but he hadn’t. The room was a mess: scattered paperbacks, crumpled clothes, piles of dirty crockery, a slice of half-eaten toast and a trail of squashed baked beans leading to the kitchen. He might have donned a suit but he hadn’t dropped his teenage habits. She wasn’t sure whether that was reassuring or not, finding the last remains of her old mate Tom scattered across a carpet in a south London no-go estate. The room whiffed of Tom’s sweat, which Sam found distracting. She didn’t want to be reminded right now that she had slept with him.
The Amstrad was on a desk in the corner, the only ordered part of the room. She switched it on, stared at the humming machine willing it to hurry. She didn’t like being here, a trespasser. She felt sneaky, spying on her mates again. Even though he had asked for it. A grey light appeared, flickered, broadened. The cursor flashed. She typed and scrolled, scanned the list of files, picked two that looked promising: Karina; Spies and stuff. He really should be more security conscious, she thought as she saved the files to her floppy disk. She switched the computer off, checked she had left everything as she had found it and made sure his front door was firmly closed behind her as she left.
*
SHE SKIPPED HOME. The tramp had already relocated to his daytime residence by the derelict employment office. She waved, ran on, reached the square – no joggers lurking – shoved the front door, straight to her bedroom, fired up her computer and jammed the disk in the slot. Karina. A transcript of the conversation Tom had relayed: Prague, London, Paris, how much she had loved Davenport. Sam cringed. She didn’t want to read it all again right now. The detail she needed was at the top: an address. Greenwitch. And then Downings – she knew it; water. Downings was the name of a mooring on the Thames near Tower Bridge. She’d walked past it a couple of times, attracted by the collection of brightly painted barges tied to the embankment, and noticed the sign. Greenwitch must be the name of a houseboat. Cool place to live, Tom had said. He was easily impressed, she decided, and then she realized she was feeling jealous, but she couldn’t quite identify whether it was because Karina lived in a houseboat on the Thames, or because Tom had obviously fallen for her.
She opened the second file she had copied: Spies and stuff. First heading – Eastern Bloc, and underneath brief notes on the Russian KGB and then a paragraph on its sometimes fraught relations with the satellite states and their secret services – the Czech StB and the East German Stasi. Boring background research. Her eyes drifted over the paragraphs and caught another heading – Torture. Her finger jammed the scroll key, panicking. Had Karina told Tom more than he was letting on? Fucking tortured. All he had was a few lines on interrogation techniques favoured by secret services everywhere. God, she didn’t need Tom to tell her about torture methods. She knew all this stuff anyway: sleep deprivation, noise, drive the victim nuts, and when they are reduced to quivering pulp, be nice to them. Offer them their favourite drink. The old good cop, bad cop routine. And finally, water torture. Underlined. She wiped her forehead, felt a headache building. Had Karina mentioned water torture? She forced herself to look at what he’d found out about water torture. One sentence underneath the heading. Water torture is a favoured method because its scars are as much psychological as physical. Nothing specific then. She breathed a sigh of relief, carried on scanning.
Right at the end of the file she spotted a heading that caught her interest. Red Army Faction. What had he managed to dig up about them? Ultra-left terror organization, use assassination, kidnapping and bombing to protest against what they see as the fascist foundations of West German state. Have killed thirty people including industrialists, judges, policemen and military. It is rumoured that members of the Red Army Faction have been sheltered and trained by the East German Stasi. She read the last sentence twice, processed it. A gang of West German anti-fascist terrorists were trained by the torture-using East German secret police. The Cold War was fought with smoke and mirrors; the battle-lines never clear. Then she remembered what Pierce had said about the Red Army Faction. I dealt with them. She sat with her head in her hands for a moment before she switched the computer off.
CHAPTER 21
London, October 1989
SHE WAITED UNTIL the evening and decided to risk the direct route, hoping the dusk would provide her with some cover. She thought about Tom as she walked towards Vauxhall, the air bone-achingly cold. Why had she confided in him? Bitter experience had shown her it was foolhardy to believe that anybody could be trusted. And yet she had revealed details about her father’s past to Tom, a bloody journo. She had given him a lead to follow. But she had wanted him to find out about Reznik. She didn’t want him disinterring Jim.
She reached the Vauxhall Tavern, passed the phone box, red and comforting. The sight of it made her want to talk to Harry. She had reasons to doubt some of the things he had told her, but she needed his help to stop Tom. She checked around; nobody apart from two men lounging on the grass behind the pub, smoking, despite the brass monkey weather. She heaved the door open, entered the kiosk, stared at the hookers’ cards stuck abov
e the phone. Some things never changed. The two oldest professions in the world. Sex and spying. And both relied on public phone boxes, anonymous spaces of communication where the caller could not be identified or traced. She lifted the receiver, dialled Harry’s number. The phone rang and rang. He’d probably gone for a pint. She waited for the answering machine to click, pushed the coins in the slot and listened to Harry’s Welsh accent on his answering machine. ‘Leave your name and number after the tone.’
She didn’t leave her name; he would recognize her voice. ‘I have a problem.’ Brain whirring, trying to explain the issue without dropping herself in it. ‘I’ve got this friend. He’s a hack. And I told him the story about... 1976. I probably told him more than I should have done.’ She stopped, eyes fixed on a card with a pair of buttocks scantily clad in lace knickers. ‘He got interested in the whole Czech connection and he’s been following the leads.’ Had she left too many details on the answering machine? ‘Anyway, I’m worried that he might be thinking about running some sort of story on it. I don’t know what or when. It might come to nothing. But I thought I should let you know.’ She hesitated again. ‘He’s called Tom Spiller and he works at the Sunday Correspondent.’ She put the phone down quickly, pushed the kiosk door open, slipped out, looked behind. She felt cheap, a nark, grassing on her mate Tom. She had no choice.
The smokers had vanished. She headed under the railway bridge, heard footsteps echoing, glanced over her shoulder. Jogger. She kept walking. He was breathing down her neck, brushed past too close, banged her arm, edged her against the slimy tunnel wall.
‘Oi. Mind.’
He didn’t turn. Oh god, she clocked. Brush past. Tradecraft. She stuck her hand in her coat pocket, touched a piece of paper. Jesus. He’d dropped a message in her pocket. She removed it. A scrap, with a message scrawled in black biro. Don’t trust Harry. The words winded her, and for a second she thought she might faint. She caught her breath, ran along the tunnel, reached Vauxhall Cross, scanned Albert Embankment. He had disappeared. Don’t trust Harry. What kind of a message was that? Harry had warned her that he was out of favour with the new boss and now here was a spook from MI5 – Harry’s own organization – telling her not to trust him. She felt dizzy with uncertainty. If she couldn’t trust Harry, Jim’s closest mate, who could she trust? She lurched to the nearest bench, flopped down, stared at the scribbled writing again, still feeling dazed. Don’t trust Harry. And then she felt angry. She had her own reasons for questioning Harry’s opinions, but she was hardly going to trust the judgement of some jogging spook who barged her against a wall and dropped a note in her pocket. She ripped the paper, dropped the pieces in the nearest rubbish bin.
She passed her usual meeting place with Tom at the South Bank. The lights of the embankment cast her shadow against the concrete walls, creeping along behind her. She reached the once grungy Gabriel’s Wharf, now inviting with its bustling cafés, and wondered whether she was overreacting to Tom. Who cared about the activities of a bunch of spies in the seventies anyway? History. Cold War all but over. Maggie’s power waning. The state, secret or otherwise, hardly existed any more. It was all big business and private finance these days; buying futures, selling services, property development. Even the old meat factory, the OXO tower, looked as if it was about to have a makeover; fenced off, gaping skips waiting. She reached Rotherhithe Street, a darkened canyon between brick cliffs, iron walkways spanning the narrow gap between the wharves, newly scrubbed cobbles underfoot. A pseudo-French restaurant boasting foie gras on its menu was just stirring for its evening sittings, and next door, a shop selling parmesan in expensive lumps was shutting for the night. It made her grumpy, this fake Mediterranean of south London; made her feel like a grubby outsider in her own backyard with her pen-stained overcoat and monkey boots. Not glamorous enough. The daughter of a spy. Not even a James Bond MI6 kind of spy, but a squalid police spy with her own dodgy track record of hanging out with potheads and protestors. She felt more at home in the underbelly of London, strolling the dirty mud banks of the Thames, and no, she didn’t care if the city was changing all around her – stuff the suits, the free market, the end of the Cold War – she didn’t want to change her ways, she wanted to stick to the old rules. Say nothing. Tom’s investigative skills had been useful, but she was right to spike his story.
The London Docklands Development Corporation, a sign announced, had constructed a bridge across the inlet at Butler’s Wharf. She clanked over the steel grids. Halfway across she caught sight of the sloshing gorge below and was hit by an unexpected dizziness, vertigo, tugging her down and under the river, dirty water filling her mouth and nose. Drowning. Getagrip. Getagrip. Breathe. She lifted her eyes, fixed her gaze on the bricks of the wharf on the far side, shuffled across the bridge, leaped the last few feet and leaned, panting, against the bricks. She rested there for five minutes or so, unsure what had hit her, the trigger for the panic. Water torture. She shouldn’t have read Tom’s file. She shook her head, ducked under a stone lintel leading to an unlit narrow alley between the river’s wall and a derelict warehouse. The outer rim of the redevelopment mania. She followed the alley around and reached the gated jetty, peered through the iron bars at the huddle of houseboats moored along the shore, hung with bunting and flags, shrubs and trees in tubs on their long flat decks. The mooring looked like a waterborne version of the square in which she lived with Becky – down-at-heel and alternative, not a trace of buffed stainless steel in sight. She pushed the gate. Locked. She could climb over it, she reckoned. She checked behind, searching the recesses of the alley, couldn’t see anybody, and was about to grip the iron bars when she heard laughter and spotted a couple strolling arm in arm along the jetty on the far side. She pulled into the shadow of the wall, waited for the clink of the lock and stepped forwards.
‘Oh hi,’ she said.
The woman – red dyed hair twisted and pinned, nose ring, grubby overcoat not unlike Sam’s – examined her quizzically. Sam smiled. ‘I’m just visiting Karina on the Greenwitch.’
The woman fell for it, held the gate open as she passed through, the walkway juddering below her feet. She tried to keep her eye from being drawn to the water swirling around the jetty’s supports, stared at the far side of the river; Tower Bridge, St Katherine’s Dock and the blackened brick wharves that lined Wapping High Street. It was reassuring that this river view had been captured by what appeared to be a bunch of hippies, not property developers. Although the price they paid was the lurching sensation from being moored on the tidal waters of the Thames. She grabbed the railing at the side of the walkway, unsteady, caught sight of a red Chinese paper lantern hanging above the door of a far barge. In the lantern’s glow she could make out a mural on the cabin wall – a green face surrounded by tendrils of seaweed hair; the Greenwitch. She found her way around the nearer barges to Karina’s home. One foot on the jetty, one on the deck – a second of fear as she spotted the water roiling beneath her feet before she regained her balance, crossed the deck to the cabin door and rapped.
‘Hello, is Karina there?’
A smoky voice came from inside. ‘Hello, who is it?’ The faint trace of a Czech accent, despite the years Karina must have spent in London.
‘Um...’ She stalled. Hesitation was good in this situation, she didn’t want to appear confident or threatening. Nervousness, she had discovered, wasn’t a bad cover; easier to exaggerate her anxieties than disguise them. ‘My name is Sam.’ Tradecraft for beginners: use your real first name and fake the last. As Pierce had done and, she supposed, as Jim had done too. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Henry Davenport.’
‘Henry? Henry Davenport?’ A note of alarm in her voice.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’
Silence, apart from the lapping of the Thames and the squawk of a gull. And then her voice again. ‘You’re on your own?’
‘Yes.’
She felt eyes scrutinizing her but couldn’t see a face. The cabin door
opened a crack.
‘Come in.’
Karina was more attractive, less artificial, than Sam remembered from those brief glimpses all those years ago; blonde side-swept hair and curving cheekbones like a character from Doctor Zhivago. Scruffy jeans and jumper, nothing fancy. Thirty-two, if she was born in 1957, as she had told Tom. Her eyes had a hardness to them, which made Sam wonder whether she was quite what she seemed. She had a sudden doubt about Karina’s story – what if Karina had lied to Tom? Perhaps she had been working with Reznik all along, and she was the one who had betrayed Pierce. Perhaps she was working for the StB or the KGB, and had passed information back across the Iron Curtain. She didn’t look like a spy. Or maybe she did.
The interior of the barge was dark, lit by a hanging storm lamp, that swayed with the motion of the boat and washed a tawny pool across the wooden floor. The room was long and low, window benches along one side slung with silver mirrored cushions, and on the other, a stack of canvases against the kitchen cupboards. Karina was a painter. She gestured at the window bench. Sam made a space among the cushions and calculated the angles of her story again, wondering whether she needed to adjust her lines for the possibility that Karina was a spook.
Karina had her back to a window on the far side of the barge, Tower Bridge glinting behind her head.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Sam.’
‘So you know about Davenport?’ Her voice was eager.
Sam nodded. ‘You called him Davenport, not Henry?’
‘He didn’t like Henry.’
‘Oh. I see.’
‘And why did you come here?’
She said, ‘I know Tom, the journalist who talked to you.’
‘How did you find me? How did you know my name?’
‘I was the person who gave him the information about Davenport.’