The Desolate Garden

by Daniel Kemp

  The six members of the committee were not privy to the less humanitarian reason for Dimitriy's protests. That they were not solely public-spirited, but more based on revenge and jealousy…a dangerous combination for a man who never forgave or forgot.

  The Lebedovs had been relocated to Leningrad when Dimitriy was twenty-two, six years into his proposed elevation of becoming the youngest advising Political Officer to the Politburo in Moscow. He was two years senior to Paulo, whose path he often crossed. There were political meetings and discussions that the two both attended. Dimitriy, new to the city, watched everything and everybody with a view to doing exactly what he saw Paulo doing; cultivating favours within his clique of sycophantic friends. He wanted in, but Paulo refused.

  “Comrade, you seem to be well-acquainted with all members of our local congress. I am new to Leningrad and it would help me, not only to settle in, but also to make friends here if you helped me. I have seen you at many meetings that I have attended…allow me to introduce myself. I have ambitions in the political field.”

  “I heard you speak at the last conclave, Comrade Lebedov. Your type of Marxism, with your own brand of emphasis on the class struggle, is anathema to me. Too many times that has been bred in the houses of envy. Throughout history it has meant the replacement of one dictator by another, and still the poor are the oppressed. Lenin taught us more than that. He taught us to be self-reliant and supportive of one another, not adhering to an unjust philosophy of the idealism of consumption and production. We are practising communists not theorising about life, but living it. We have no room for you,” Paulo responded.

  Rejection planted anger into a Marxist heart, and after hearing the deliberations of the council on considering his recommendations for Paulo's future, the anger turn to hatred and, in turn, the pledge of retribution.

  “We find your objections puerile and fatuous, Comrade Lebedov. Comrade Sergeyovitch Korovin is well known to all of us here, and many within this great city. He is beyond reproach in the execution of his civil duties. We have considered why you have brought this to our attention and concluded that it is for your own selfish ends. Which is something a political official should not contemplate. Our recommendations are to be sent to Moscow, where you will report immediately. We believe that time to evaluate your position, and to meditate on your situation within the party, would be beneficial to all concerned.”

  By 1974, the increasingly disgraced Dimitriy was further away from the damning tribunal than Moscow, much further, than even they had imagined when they had passed their verdict upon him. He had become the principal political official in the town of Jakutsk, in Siberia, near what Russians call 'The Pole of Cold.' Here, deep in the permafrost, where jackhammers are needed to break the ground, local Yakuts say that if you shout to a friend who's standing a little distance away in winter, your words will be frozen by the wind and your friend will have to wait until the slight thaw of spring to hear what you said. Here, he burst his lungs screaming his protests, but he got nothing for his efforts, as the Yakuts would have told him, had he asked. The nightly prayers he had pleaded to his God to assuage that hunger and quench his thirst for revenge seemed to have been answered, when he came across a convicted drug dealer delivered from Moscow a year before his own exile.

  Dimitriy soon tired of the reports he read of the many poets and writers, academics and philosophers who had been abandoned and forgotten here since Stalinist days. There was no profit in such reading only boredom and frustration. His lethargy, however, was lifted after one assimilation class he took where he was approached at its conclusion.

  “Comrade Nikolaevitch Lebedev, I am a good communist and do not deserve to be here. I was forced to do some work for the KGB that I am ashamed of.” Dimitriy had heard many cries of innocence from the condemned but this one, with the mention of work for the KGB, was not the usual repetitiveness.

  “I was a student chemist in the University of Leningrad when I was first contacted by an officer who wanted more of a special medicine for his dying mother. He threatened me into supplying this with fabricated evidence, telling me that he would put that evidence to the local congress to have me barred from my studies. I graduated, and went into agricultural chemistry for the state industry in Moscow, where this same officer found me. This time he wanted an odourless, colourless substance that could be mixed with cocaine, a substance that would kill. He did not tell me who it was intended for, nor did he ask me to supply the cocaine. I extracted the potassium chloride from ordinary fertiliser and gave it to him. The next thing I knew was that I was being suspected of killing the head man of the KGB, and it was the same officer who was accusing me! His name, Comrade…I'm sorry, have I not said? No? It was Sereyovitch Korovin.”

  Sixteen years passed for Dimitriy in his squalid isolation, watching many of the radicals who had been committed to his care for re-education into the communist regime, pass on from this life. One such inmate was the only one whose death he regretted, and that was not for the life that had gone. It was for the life that was going; his own, never having had the opportunity to present the evidence that died that day in front of the abomination of a man far away in Moscow. Korovin was finally out of reach of Dimitriy's damning, accusing, letters.

  In them, he told of the conversations that he had with Paulo's man from Moscow, whilst eating the foul and rancid meat, drinking from the contaminated still, and smoking anything that would burn between his blue, thinning lips. The intense, unendurable cold was the thing that eventually had dulled his protestations, but it had taken many years of tolerating frozen and bent fingers before his pen stopped, and he accepted that nobody was interested. He died the same year that Paulo was expanding his life, an embittered morose man. However, he left his mark, albeit a small one. Paulo might well have put himself forward as the first to recognise the validity in the accepted truth that, 'oak trees grow from tiny acorns'.

  Most of us are indifferent to the ways of others in this life. To those not included in this generalisation, some are mildly curious, while others are positively nosy. Curtain-twitchers, gossips, the sort that prefer maligning the ones that live differently to themselves but there is another variety, employed in one secret agency or another, throughout the world. Within the KGB ranks languished the majority of the greatest inquisitive minds the world has ever seen. However, they were arrogantly neglected by their pompous principals, who were more interested in conformity than confrontation. For Paulo, this was fortunate, otherwise he may have had the full weight of the Sixth Directorate on his back instead of the minor department, manned by an Army Colonel and two subordinates. The destination where most of Dimitriy's acorns had found a home.

  “Keep it simple,” Colonel Vladimir Sokolov told them. “You only have to look at what he has done for us to know there is no truth in it. One liar to another, no doubt. This Lebedov has form in that direction. Nevertheless, it will do no harm to look gently. Be careful! It will be your careers on the line, not mine. He has powerful friends, this Korovin.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Wistful Ducks on Ponds

  “You know that I believe everything Tanya told us, and I believe she knew no more, don't you?” Judith announced. We sat with our own thoughts as we returned to her house, which I had now designated the derisory Kennel. As to who was the principal resident housed within, Hector, or myself I'm not sure! It had crossed my mind to keep what Tanya had told me to myself, secretively, again trying to discover the killer's identity on my own. However, it was an impractical idea when I first set out on that road, and nothing had altered to make it easier. Circumstances, if anything, were stacking up against me.

  “Tanya thinks that George is working with his father and spying for us. I think she's right; he's certainly in contact. He's got the Lutheran Bible and takes copies of the plates, the one Peter sent me to make contact with. That means George must be with 'C' on this, and running Paulo together.”

  “She's a sneaky one, the old girl, isn't she? Wante
d you all alone for that one, eh? Anything else you feel you should confess, Harry? Like written confessions to the murders, or something similar?”

  “No, ha ha, but there was a photograph taken by the Berlin Wall. Tanya thought it was taken on the wrong side, but there was no evidence,” I declared.

  “Nor is there anything to back up your belief that Peter and George are together on this. Remember what Paulo said to you when you told him of Trimble's involvement? He said it was old-school, that method of leaving things in churches, and no doubt sounded surprised?”

  “A little, I guess, but I could be wrong,” I answered.

  “I don't think you're wrong, H. Nor do I think that Peter knows about George. George is winging it, Harry, flying solo; and, if I'm right, he hasn't got a parachute, hoping that if he needs one, he can use his dad's. I'm staying up for a while, Harry. I'd invite you to share a dram or two, but I won't. I need to speak to Haig privately, so if you don't mind toddling off to bed, I'll see you later.”

  I couldn't resist. “Shall I wait in your bed, or in the single one you've given me? Mine would be more intimate, don't you think? You could fall asleep on top of me!”

  “I wish you'd be more serious, Harry, and less flippant. It's for your sake that I'm doing this.”

  “You are aware that it's five in the morning, Judith? I doubt he'll be best pleased, or take your call. But if he does, don't tell him that you're lonely…it will ruin my reputation!”

  “Bye bye, Harry. Sweet dreams.”

  I had been in and out of the bathroom, when I heard her speak into the telephone.

  “It's Judith Meadows for Sir David. Mark it Highly Sensitive at the top,” she demanded authoritatively

  I wasn't that tired but hadn't bothered to shave, preferring to simply lay and think about all that had happened since the Sunday of my father's death. That wasn't the only thing that filled my head and kept me from sleep. The other was the trill of the blackbirds in their morning chorus, soon to be joined by the single ring of the downstairs phone.

  “Get up, Harry, and make yourself presentable. He'll be here in thirty minutes.”

  As permanent First Secretary to the Foreign Office, Sir David Haig warranted an apartment in town for the occasions that required him to remain in London, such as war or the immediate threat of it, and perhaps the assassination of the Monarch. Political scandal that could overthrow the elected Government would not be on his list, nor normally the murder of an Earl and his youngest son but, to his annoyance, these were not normal days. He was far too important for trivialities to upset his family life in Oakley Green, just outside Windsor, with his wife and two dogs and his favourite Michelin-starred restaurants in nearby Bray.

  Life in London was not as bad as it used to be in the old fashioned, sparsely appointed flats in Dolphin Square let out to his predecessors along with scruffy under-employed spooks on compassionate leave or plotting to overthrow regimes still worth overthrowing. Nowadays he had the converted once hospital in Marsham Street to reside in. At five in the morning, a twenty minute drive from the Kennel of Clapham.

  I could smell coffee being prepared, and in the kitchen, from where all the commotion was coming from, a loaf of bread was being sliced, ready for toasting and the spreading of marmalade from the jar that stood benignly beside it. Grey coloured cups and saucers, that I had not seen before, were being dusted, and knives in white lace napkins rested on three plates, arranged around a cut-glass butter dish, a nicety I had not been privy to before.

  “Very artistic, Judith. Part of your apology for dashing my invitation to sexual bliss, is it?” I yawned, and therefore lost the impact I hoped my sarcastic remark might convey.

  “I will seriously have to consider adding 'delusional' to my assessment, H,” she scornfully retorted, before adding, caustically, “No more impudence…now is not the right time. Do go somewhere else, you're in my way here. And if you have to smoke in the lounge, open a window.”

  Duly reprimanded, I sulked away, muttering loudly enough for Judith to hear, “I hope he brings that Goddess to brighten the place up.” I made my own tea in the mug I had previously been allocated on my arrival at the Kennel, as David sipped his strong smelling coffee and Judith buttered his toast. He set about explaining why his presence had been necessary both at Marsham Street and here on this sunny spring morning, now mysteriously devoid of songbirds, except the one being fawned upon.

  “Judith feels that you should be brought up to date and given information that I was unable to declare yesterday in my office.” He had come alone and I can't say that he had my full attention, as I expected another deluge of senseless facts with no distractions over which to fantasise.

  “She says it will help you to focus and concentrate more fully.” There goes that psychoanalytical mind of hers on its travels, again, I thought.

  “Twelve days ago, the Friday before your father was killed, I received a message marked Garden. It did not go through the normal channels of SIS first. In it, were the names of two specific high-ranking officials of the European Parliament's Trade Committee, listed as being operatives in the pay of the Russian Mafia. It contained photographic evidence of money changing hands for, what we confidently believe, was information into the research that you were involved with; petrochemicals. The men were the same Willis and Howell who met your late father at Harrogate, when Peter Trimble introduced them to him, and the intervention into the company you're now employed with was first discussed. They were both arrested immediately, and Judith and I feel that was the reason your father and brother were killed; not as revenge, but as a way of finding out how Garden passed on his messages to us, or to me in this particular case. The idea must be to uncover Garden and stop further information coming our way…perhaps implicating someone closer to home.”

  “Could it be a set-up, the money, and Willis and Howell?” I asked, fully attentive.

  “Unfortunately, no! In 2007, my office received direct warnings about leakages from fields in which this country excels: your industry, in scientific development, and in pharmaceuticals. A couple of years ago, strange occurrences happened to both Willis and Howell. Willis's car was broken into and his briefcase, which he had inadvertently left on display, was stolen. Then, Howell was arrested in Dresden for being drunk whilst driving. He had benevolently given his driver the night off, and he too had department material with him. Both of them explained the situations admirably and, after due consideration, were allowed to continue in their jobs. The consideration that we gave to the situation was driven by Peter. He thought rightly, in my assessment, that by allowing them to continue, the damage could be limited by the observance of their contacts. Interrogation would then reveal what had been divulged.”

  I interrupted the nonsense I was listening to. “So you had them and let them go, and because of that you're telling me that my father and brother lost their lives. Is that it?” I angrily accused not Haig, but Judith, looking directly at her for the answers.

  “It's not as simple as that, Harry. It never is,” she answered apologetically, as I detected a deep sense of regret in her voice.

  “Well, tell me how complicated it got, then!” I directed my accusations at Haig, as images of trench warfare came into my mind. With eyes wide open he climbed the bloodstained wall, and over the parapet he charged all in the cause of freedom from tyranny or, in this instance, if not the great sacrifice made by so many in the Great War, protection of our resources.

  “Look, Harry…these things have to be judged on merit. We never had enough on either of them to make a case. All Garden had was suspicion at first, until two weeks ago when he was certain. You've got to realise that we sponsored their original idea in involving ourselves in that company. We were willing to go the extra mile with them because we trusted them, and we didn't want to believe anything different. Peter did say, on record, that he had personal concerns over the acquisition, but not over their particular involvement. We all made mistakes, Harry. We all do.”<
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  “No one could see it happening, Harry. Not even Elliot, when he found those ledgers.” Judith and I were on our own once more, ambling aimlessly across the Common with Hector running free ahead. The regret I had detected whilst Haig had been present resurfaced, but this time, with an added explanation.

  “If we had the gift of foresight, maybe we would be more circumspect in certain relationships we make or conclusions we come to. I'm about to spill my heart to you, Harry…so don't mock me, or make any contentious remarks, please.” We had stopped at a hollowed seat-shaped trunk of a fallen tree, a place she chose to disseminate her life to me, trying to make her own sense of it all. The sun was on our backs, but that was not the only source of warmth for me. Being the special guest to her hidden revelations warmed me more.

  “I met Tony at university, about twelve years ago, now. He was younger than me by six months, and I called him 'Toy' for short. We were both in groups that seemed to gel together regularly. To be honest, I fancied his mate more than him, but he was never interested. Got off with someone else I forget her name…well, that's not true, but it's to cover my shame, just in case you couldn't control yourself. He was like you, in someways. He was not quite so flippant, but untroubled and unconcerned, certainly. Another similarity was his branch of discipline chemistry. The two of you would have got on well, and would have had lots to discuss, Maybe you two would have built your own atom bomb in that laboratory of yours. That's what he was really interested in, you see, bombs, and how they were made. He joined the Territorials whilst still at uni and was away every fourth weekend on courses, or what he called 'his banging weekends'. He would tell me of the sophisticated American equipment he would use; remote-controlled machines they could send into situations instead of men, and how the British Army were to get them. And, of course, the body armour they were promised, but never got. It was all done to calm my fears, my anxieties for his life, although he seemed to have none. He was a good-looking man with exuberance and energy, exciting to be around, with an enticing personality and intelligence. I fell in love, Harry. I couldn't do anything else.