Illegal Action

by Stella Rimington

  “Oh, Vladimir,” said Simmons with a dull nod.

  “Go on. How did he first contact you?”

  And twenty minutes later he had heard all about it: Rykov’s approach, the meetings with his predecessor, Andrei, during Jerry’s days at the Dorchester, what they’d wanted to know, and what Simmons was getting paid. He first denied receiving any money at all, then seemed to realise this made him look even worse.

  Throughout, Michael Fane took careful notes. He did not want Jerry to know he was recording everything on a tape deck in the top desk drawer. And in any case he wasn’t sure it would capture Simmons’s low monotone.

  Finished at last, Simmons looked tired.

  “Good,” Fane said, doling out a titbit of praise. “Was Andrei your only other contact?”

  Simmons nodded quickly, but Michael remembered Brian Ackers’ maxim that for spies, truth was an abstract notion better not put into practice. “Have another think,” he ordered. “Who knows what you might remember?”

  Simmons stared back at him, but coldly now, the earlier dead look to his eyes replaced by ice. For a second Michael felt uneasy. There was something unnerving about this man, he thought, as if pressure was building inside that quiet shell, just waiting to explode. But Michael knew he mustn’t back off.

  “Tell me, why do you think Vladimir is so interested in Brunovsky?” he asked.

  “How should I know?” replied Simmons with a shrug.

  “Are you the only one watching Brunovsky?”

  Simmons’s eyes widened slightly. “What do you mean?”

  “Has Vladimir got anyone else keeping tabs on him?”

  “Not as far as I know,” said Simmons stiffly.

  “All right,” said Michael. “I’ll want you to look at some more pictures next time to see if you can recognise anyone else.”

  “Next time?” A fatalistic note had returned to Simmons’s voice.

  “We’ll meet in ten days.”

  “Where?” he demanded.

  “Here.” He hadn’t checked, but he was sure the brigadier would allow it. “If anything else occurs to you in the meantime, you can call me on this number.” He scribbled the number down and passed it over. “I already have yours.”

  Simmons pocketed the slip of paper without looking at it. “Is that all?” he said stonily.

  “For now,” said Michael Fane.

  Simmons stood up abruptly and left without saying a word. As the door closed behind him, Michael felt a mix of relief and elation. In a minute he would go and see the brigadier, but he sat for a bit, savouring his feeling of accomplishment. He could see now why Liz Carlyle and Peggy Kinsolving, and yes, even his father, grew so involved with their work.

  He thought again of Simmons. I’ve got him where I want him, thought Michael. He’s not even going to try and lie to me.

  As he left the building Jerry Simmons was seething. It was bad enough to have been found out—bloody Vladimir and his insistence on Hampstead Heath, he thought furiously. He might as well have chosen Piccadilly Circus.

  Even worse was being played like a fish by this fresh-faced twerp. If his name’s Magnusson, thought Jerry bitterly, mine’s Marco Polo. He’d do what he had to do—“Magnusson” wasn’t exactly leaving him a choice, no more than Rykov had. No, he wasn’t going to tell the kid any lies. Yet as Jerry remembered the gun he’d seen in Brunovsky’s safe, he didn’t see any reason why he should tell the whole truth, either.

  19

  Your turn,” said the old lady, Sonia Warschawsky, encouragingly.

  Liz took a step forward and peered at the painting. Once she would have said it was a picture of a horse and left it at that, but she knew better now. “Let’s see. It’s a modern painting but the expert handling of paint gives it a sensuousness that is very old-fashioned. It’s full of references to earlier painters—the chiaroscuro light and shadow of the field is straight out of Vermeer.” She stood back contemplatively. “And the anatomical precision of the horse is pure Stubbs.”

  “Excellent,” said Sonia. “Give me another week and I’ll make an art critic of you.” She gave a high clear laugh that belied her years and elegant appearance. Sonia was tall and slim, remarkably upright for a woman in her eighties, with silver hair held back by an ivory cameo slide, startling blue eyes, a nose as sharp as a cutter’s prow and that great asset called “bone structure”—in her case, high cheeks and a small but sturdy chin. She wore a green tweed suit that had certainly been purchased before Liz was born, but, having come originally from a Paris salon, found itself, forty years on, in fashion once more.

  Born in the twenties into a wealthy French-Russian family, Sonia Warschawsky had in her young days moved easily through Europe, visiting members of her extended family in great houses and charming holiday villas, meeting artists and musicians, speaking fluent English, French and Russian, a child of aristocratic interwar Europe. She had been staying with her grandmother in the South of France when the Second World War was declared and suddenly privilege ended. In the panic of June 1940, she escaped to England with some of her young relatives on a Dutch merchant ship, probably the last ship to leave France for England. After the war, her formidable intelligence, her cultured background and her family influence had got her to Girton College, Cambridge, and in Cambridge she had remained, eventually becoming a don at Newnham, where even now she occasionally taught, still full of opinions, energetically and often tartly expressed.

  “That’s enough for now,” Sonia declared. “Let’s have some tea.”

  They left the gallery of the Fitzwilliam and went to the museum’s café in a covered courtyard. This was Liz’s first sortie out with Sonia since she had arrived in Cambridge three days before. She felt like a learner driver on an inaugural run with her instructor.

  On the previous Thursday, a courier had rung the bell to her flat in Kentish Town, and while Liz was still blinking the sleep from her eyes he had handed over a large Jiffy bag. Inside she’d found three illustrated histories of art, and she had spent the weekend going slowly through their pages. On Monday, when she’d taken a taxi from the station and dropped her bags off at the Royal Cambridge Hotel, Liz not only knew when Gainsborough had been born, she could name half a dozen subjects of his portraits.

  Sonia lived alone, ten minutes’ walk from the city’s central cluster of colleges, in a small Victorian house of yellow brick. It had a large bay window and a white wooden trellis by the front door, on which an iceberg rose was already beginning its springtime climb.

  She made it clear from the start that she knew Liz’s line of work, though she accepted at face value that Liz was called Jane Falconer. “The brief I’ve had,” she said on the first morning, as they sat down in her sitting room by the bay window, “is to give you a crash course in art history, with some special tuition on modern Russian painters, especially Pashko. Is that correct, Jane?”

  Liz nodded. “Yes.”

  “And as I understand it,” Sonia said with a sly smile, “it’s not so much what you know that will be important, but what you seem to know.”

  Liz smiled. “A Bluffer’s Guide.” They both laughed and the ice was broken.

  They soon established their working routine. Sonia sat in one corner in a rocking chair, while Liz took over an old Knole sofa, surrounded by her books and notes. On the walls there were dozens of drawings and pictures, most landscapes of English scenes, but with the occasional Russian subject—a small portrait of Tsar Nicholas, an aquatint of the Hermitage. Similarly, the many bibelots that dotted the side tables and mantelpiece were mostly English, but there was a black lacquer box, with a hand-painted scene in gold, which especially attracted Liz, and several miniature icons.

  They worked chronologically, trying to cover a century a day. Sonia talked while Liz took voluminous notes. She was a spontaneous, gifted teacher, given to aphorisms that Liz could use:

  “The Norwich School is Constable moved to Norfolk, and suffering in the journey” “The thing to remember
about Pissarro is that he is simply Cézanne without the genius” “Turner is the first Impressionist. He prefigures Monet in two key respects: light—and more light!”

  Every two hours or so, they took a break, retreating to the small kitchen at the back of the house, where Sonia would make tea, and they’d sit for a quarter of an hour at the small pine table and talk about anything but art history.

  Sonia spoke freely and fascinatingly about Europe between the wars but about her life after she reached England in 1940 she was more reticent. She said she had spent the war near London, and gave just a hint that there might have been an intelligence connection—she mentioned Bletchley once as if she’d known the place. And that was all. Liz knew Sonia had married—Warschawsky was her married name—but she did not know what had happened to her husband and didn’t want to press, especially as Sonia seemed to sense that Liz herself did not welcome many personal questions.

  It was the Easter vacation, so the Fitzwilliam café was crowded with parents and children. Finding a corner table at last, Liz went to get tea and scones. “I’ve been admiring your ring,” she said when she returned with a tray, pointing to the large oval emerald, set in silver on gold, and surrounded by old, dark petal-shaped diamonds.

  “When my mother fled Russia in 1921, she left with the clothes on her back and this ring. She was so poor that she was going to have to sell it to pay her rent, but fortunately she met my father first.” She gave a light laugh. “He was French—I spoke Russian and French before I knew English.

  “But enough about the past,” she said briskly, putting her cup down. “I was wondering, would you like to have supper at my house tomorrow night? I have some friends coming—they’re Russian. Well, Anglo-Russian. Like me.”

  “I’d love to,” said Liz.

  Sonia nodded. “Good. Now perhaps we can have a look at the Monets. Don’t look so worried—there are only four of them.”

  At her hotel on Trumpington Street, Liz went to reception to ask for her room key. Behind the counter the manager, a diminutive man with a red bow tie, smiled at her. “Did your friend find you?”

  “Sorry? What friend?”

  “There was a lady asking for you.”

  She’d told no one she was in Cambridge—not even her mother, since she could always reach Liz on her mobile. In Thames House, Brian Ackers knew, and Peggy Kinsolving and Michael Fane and possibly also DG. Geoffrey Fane in MI6 knew but that was all. Peggy was the only woman and certainly she would never call at the hotel.

  “Hold on a minute,” said the man when he saw the puzzled look on Liz’s face and retreated into the back office. When he returned he was accompanied by a plump girl with hennaed hair and a silver stud adorning one side of her snub nose. She was chewing gum and looked distinctly put out. “Camilla spoke to the lady,” said the manager.

  “That’s right,” she said. “About an hour ago. I told her your room number and she went up to see if you were there but you were out.”

  “You didn’t give her the key?”

  “No. Of course not. We’re not allowed to give keys out to anyone except the registered guest,” said Camilla huffily. The manager nodded in confirmation.

  “Did she leave a message?”

  Camilla shook her head. “No.” She looked quickly at her boss. “I offered but she said not to bother. She just wanted to know if you were in.”

  Liz said sharply, “What did this woman look like?”

  Camilla seemed to think this an odd question. “Just normal,” she said.

  “Old or young? Tall or short?”

  “She looked ordinary. Just, like, middling.”

  “Exactly what did she say? Can you remember?”

  “She said, ‘I’m looking for Miss Falk.’ That’s all.”

  “Falk? My name’s Falconer.”

  The girl shook her head. “No. She said Falk. I’m positive.” She added impatiently, “Because of the actor—you know, Columbo.”

  Liz looked at the man in the bow tie. He shrugged, helpless in the face of the gum-chewing girl’s incoherence. “Is there a Miss Falk staying in the hotel?” she asked him quietly.

  He went and consulted the screen on the counter. “No, there isn’t. And you are the only lady on her own.”

  “Oh well,” said Liz, since it was clear from the girl’s glum face that she wasn’t going to be of further help. “Doesn’t matter.”

  She took her key and went up to her room. There was a thin line between alertness and paranoia, especially in Liz’s line of work, and to stay sane it was important to keep on the right side of it. Gormless Camilla had been categorical that she had not handed out a key but nevertheless Liz opened the door cautiously and stood looking carefully at her room before going in. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed, so shrugging off her uneasiness, she went into the bathroom to get ready for the evening. It wasn’t for a second or two that she noticed that her sponge bag, which she was sure she had left on the dressing table in the bedroom, was now on the bathroom shelf. All its contents had been taken out and arranged beside it in two neat rows. Except for one thing. A bottle of mouthwash had been dropped in the bath. It had formed an unpleasant red stain.

  20

  Like the guests, supper at Sonia’s was an Anglo-Russian mix. They started with cold borscht that Sonia made a point of calling beetroot soup. “Delicious,” said Misha Vadovsky. He was a slight figure who walked with a cane. When he spoke, in fruity tones redolent to Liz of the BBC of her childhood, his Adam’s apple moved in and out like a pair of bellows.

  His wife, Ludmilla, was a tiny woman who wore black orthopaedic shoes. She had been an undergraduate with Sonia at Girton—“About a millennium ago,” her husband declared tartly.

  The other couple were called Turgenev-Till, an Anglo-Russian alliance of surnames which Sonia seemed to find very amusing. “Oscar taught at the Courtauld for many years,” she had told Liz that afternoon. There was a mischievous glint in her eye. “He is a descendant of the great writer, which his wife, Zara, will tell you before she gets her coat off. Though some have been unkind enough to remark that Oscar is a rather remote descendant.”

  For supper, they sat around a dark, round oak table in the small dining room. As the light of the spring day faded, Sonia lit two tall church candles in wooden candlesticks. Next to Liz was an empty place, which Sonia explained—“Dimitri rang. He’s missed his train and will be a little late.”

  Liz reckoned that the combined ages of the assembled company added up to four centuries, but the conversation proved remarkably lively. They talked and reminisced and joked about subjects from Stravinsky to rap, about Russian writers Liz had never heard of, and about the comparative merits of Sancerre (which Sonia served with the main course) and Saumur. It was all so deeply cultured, thought Liz, but without the slightest affectation. The gentility of English intellectual life from a bygone era.

  But there was something different about them too, Liz felt, something setting them apart from, say, her mother’s intensely music-loving friends in Wiltshire. And she realised what it was—a persisting Russianness they seemed happy to retain. As if, in the melting pot the UK had offered these descendants of émigrés, part of them had refused to melt.

  Misha Vadovsky mentioned a service he and Ludmilla had attended at a Russian Orthodox church in London. “They are ruining that church. I tell you, soon there will be a complete takeover. Sixty years members of my family have attended service there, but I predict not for much longer.”

  Oscar tried to joke with him. “You mean, you’ll take your business elsewhere.”

  “Business is precisely the problem.” He sounded bitter. “The likes of Pertsev think a church is just another piece of real estate. The largest donor gets the title deed.”

  Ludmilla remonstrated. “Oh, Misha, don’t be so serious.” She turned to Liz and explained. “The oligarchs. Misha gets furious with them when they throw their money around. I think you just have to laugh. They have so much money and ab
solutely no idea what to do with it. In the next generation I’m sure they will establish foundations and do good works. But not yet.” She giggled. “Now it’s spend, spend, spend.”

  “It’s disgusting,” said her husband.

  “Shush,” Ludmilla reprimanded him. “Don’t be a sourpuss. It gives the newspapers something to write about. Every week I read a new article on their excesses. Or their wives’. Diamond-studded mobile phones. Taps of real gold in the lavatory.”

  “I ran into Victor Adler in London,” said Oscar. “He told me the most marvellous story.”

  “The man’s as bad as those oligarchs,” declared Misha crossly. “He may mock them behind their backs, but to their face he acts like a courtier at Versailles, sucking up to the king.”

  “Let Oscar tell his story,” his wife said sharply.

  “Victor is Victor,” said Oscar, seeming to acknowledge Misha’s complaint. “But it’s still a funny story. Apparently one of these oligarchs wanted to buy a house in Eaton Square. He commissioned some estate agents but then forgot he had employed them. Being Russian he charged in and approached the owner directly, only to be told the house was under offer. ‘How much?’ he demanded. Seven million pounds. ‘I’ll give you £10 million.’ Sold.

  “Three days later Knight Frank ring and say they’ve lost the house. ‘What house?’ You know, the one in Eaton Square. We offered £7 million as you instructed, but some lunatic went and offered £10 million.”

  While they were laughing there must have been a knock at the front door, because Sonia suddenly stood up. “There’s Dimitri,” she said. Liz assumed this late guest would be another Anglo-Russian septuagenarian, so she was surprised when a moment later Sonia returned with a man no more than forty. He was tall, with a handsome face and a shaggy mop of black hair that he brushed back with an impatient hand. He wore a grey polo neck sweater, dark slacks and sharp-toed boots.

  “Come and sit down next to Jane,” said Sonia, “and let me get you some supper.”

  Immediately Liz found herself engaged in animated conversation with the new arrival. He looked exotically Russian: high Slavic cheekbones, black eyes and long eyelashes that would have seemed feminine if he had not been such a powerful-looking man. He spoke good English, with a strong guttural accent, and had the gift, rarely found among English men in Liz’s experience, of making everything she said seem worth listening to. He talked without inhibition, but his bluntness was refreshing, and when he told Liz how pretty her dress was, the remark sounded genuine rather than smarmy or flirtatious.