by James Philip
The note pressed into Enoch Powell’s infirm, shaking hands dealt exclusively with this last calamity. It was the Foreign Secretary’s private office’s précis of the British Ambassador in Dublin’s much longer report of a meeting with the Irish Prime Minister, the Irish Minister for External Affairs and the Chief of Staff of the Irish Defence Forces earlier that day. The Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West seemed to only glance at it before handing it back.
“You cannot trust those people in Dublin,” he concluded, now painfully levering himself to his feet. “For all we know the IRA men they have sent to these shores to kill and maim are Sean Lemass’s own men. The Irish sheltered the people who planned last year’s attack on Balmoral. Ever since the war they’ve been pump-priming the conflict in Ulster. A Government which does nothing to stamp out vipers in its midst is as culpable as the criminals themselves when others suffer the fatal bite.”
The two Cabinet Ministers stared at him.
“The Home Secretary,” he added, turning towards the door, “was, I think, about to quiz me about matters pertaining to ‘Hut Six’,” he finished, his right ‘good eye’ momentarily glinting with rueful amusement.
Roy Jenkins blinked worriedly at Tom Harding-Grayson.
“What was all that about?” The latter inquired when they were alone.
“Oh, nothing,” the Home Secretary scowled. “The IRA thing is much more important...”
The Foreign secretary had spent most of his adult life in the higher echelons of the Civil Service and was not the man to allow a politician to get away with changing the subject that easily.
“The IRA ‘thing’ is only important because this is the first we’ve heard of it, Roy. What the Devil was Enoch talking about?”
Both men remained standing as the Home Secretary briefly recounted the affair of the four senior GCHQ Directors remanded in Her Majesty’s Prison Gloucester, and the intercepted and thus undelivered letter to the Prime Minister which had landed them in hot water with MI5.
“Margaret hasn’t seen this letter they sent?”
“No. The Security Service intercepted it and the case file was only copied to my private office two days ago.”
Tom Harding-Grayson pulled up the chair vacated by Enoch Powell and gestured for his younger colleague to sit with him before the guttering embers in the grate. The room was not cold but neither was it warm, for a Cabinet Minister in Margaret Thatcher’s Administration was entitled to exactly the same coal ration as a man in the street.
“I have to get back to Corpus Christi in a minute,” he groaned. “Things are looking bad in the Mediterranean and Margaret, and well, the Prime Minister is not herself. Leaving that aside,” he shrugged, “once things have quietened down again, if they ever do, somebody’s head is going to have to roll at GCHQ!”
Chapter 16
23:51 Hours
Friday 3rd April 1964
Archbishop’s Palace, Mdina, Malta
The British had not known what to do with her. The harassed and understandably shaken young officer who had listened to her account of what had happened when she had confronted Arkady Pavlovich Rykov and his KGB friend pointing guns at Admiral Sir Julian Christopher, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, had decided that she was insane and she had entirely sympathised with him. Julian Christopher had died of his wounds by then, Arkady Rykov’s wrecked corpse was spread across half the room and the KGB man on the floor had still not recovered consciousness. Actually, she had been a little surprised when the man on the floor had actually moaned and attempted to raise himself off the bloody flag stones; she thought she had hit him hard enough to kill him. She had killed a lot of people that day but could not remember exactly how many. Things had happened so fast and she had been so angry!
The two big Redcaps who had been with her ever since her arrest had finally stopped fingering their Sten guns; but periodically they threw her uncertain, vaguely shocked looks. Because they were British they had looked away both times she had had to use the toilet bucket. They were an odd people – the British – pragmatic, phlegmatic, not often deliberately cruel, sometimes callous without knowing it, and personally, frequently but not invariably, decent. Her grime-streaked, tired, twitchy minders had been as decent towards her as humanely possible once they had got over their initial disbelief. They had even adjusted the old, rusty handcuffs that still manacled her wrists in front of her so they no longer pinched off the circulation to her left hand. Now she sat on the stone floor in the corner of the bare-walled cell with her back resting on unyielding cool limestone. In olden times this room beneath the Archbishop’s Palace might have been a storeroom or a dungeon, or perhaps the sleeping place of some unfortunate noviciate patiently waiting his turn to slowly progress higher in the Bishop’s retinue.
Wherever one went on Malta centuries of history spoke to one through the stones beneath one’s feet and the ancient landscape through which one passed. Here in the Citadel of Mdina, the Dark Age and Medieval capital of the main island, perched several hundred feet above sea level with – from the ramparts – an unfettered three hundred and sixty degree view of the entire Archipelago, it was easy to live a life in touch with, and touched by the presence of countless past generations. She had hoped to find peace in Mdina; to hide away in the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, to forget her own history, to disengage with the madness of her life. That had been a schoolgirl daydream shattered in a split second by the Margo Seiffert’s murder; and here she was sitting in a cell beneath the ramparts of Mdina in a stinking blood-smeared pale blue nursing smock, watched over by two Royal Military Policemen who had every reason to be terrified of her.
“Might I have a sip of water please?” She asked hoarsely. If she had been in a KGB cell the request would have earned her a savage beating.
One Redcap handed his Sten gun to his partner and stepped close, holding out his own canteen. She took it clumsily; her hands were numb from the weight of the cuffs. The water was warm, brackish but it slipped down her throat like a vintage wine. She almost emptied the vessel.
“Sorry, I was thirsty,” she smiled apologetically.
“That’s okay,” the man grunted, taking back the canteen. He stepped away, retook possession of his gun from his partner and resumed his watching brief.
Rachel had made no move to engage her guards in conversation. If they had to shoot her she did not want them to feel any worse about it than inevitably, they would. It was better if they thought about her as the mad woman who had strolled about Mdina with an AK-47 sowing a trail of death, and somehow ended up in the room in which Julian Christopher had died in the moments before the last Soviet invaders had thrown down their arms in surrender.
She was resigned to her fate.
The worst had happened; never again would she have to pretend she was somebody that she was not. The girl who had been a sewer rat in the ghetto at Lodz, who had killed her first fascist at the age of thirteen – with a knife, twisted in his guts – and lived a lie ever since was not afraid of dying. She just wanted to sleep and to not dream her dreams. The October War had driven her a little mad, as it had most people, she supposed. The trouble was that she had inhabited her shadow world for so long that she had become estranged from what was, and was not, normal. How else could she have become so fascinated, besotted, so easily taken in by a monster like Arkady Pavlovich Rykov? She had known who and what he was all along; she had been hunting him for a year before she finally caught up with him in that US Air Force hospital at Incirlik just after the night of the war! But for the war her mission would have been to quietly slit his throat from ear to ear that first day; and but for the cataclysm she would have done exactly that without a qualm. But then he had started babbling about Krasnaya Zarya in his sleep and she had known that if she executed him she would never learn any of the secrets that were capable of tormenting the mind of a man as deranged and inhuman as that of the KGB�
�s legendary – some said mythical - Head of Station in Istanbul. The man’s legend was such that many people simply did not believe he existed, that he was an intellectual construct of some drunken MI6 or CIA bigwig desperately attempting to explain away his organisation’s latest disasters.
But she had always known he existed and unlike the idiots in London and Langley; she had actually seen him twice. Once in Hungary in 1956 she had stood three metres from him as he executed students – men and women, none of them yet in their twenties – outside a burning secret police building in Budapest at the end of the uprising. Five years later she had almost walked straight into him on street in Beirut; she had been following another target, not broken stride. It had come as no surprise when later she had been asked to find him again and end his career once and for all.
Back in 1956 Arkady Rykov had been Major Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov, a Political Officer attached to the Political Directorate of Lieutenant General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s 8th Mechanized Army. Fyodorov was the name he took with him to Istanbul in 1960; she had never found out what he was doing in Beirut in 1961. In Budapest she had been a dirty-faced nobody in a badly fitting Red Army mechanic’s overalls given a rifle and told to ‘kill rebels’. In Beirut she had been dressed like a movie star, her hair raven black with Rayburn shades hiding her eyes as she paraded down the Corniche dressed like a film star, a model, or a very high class prostitute. The monster had once asked her where he had seen her before but her legend – over the years she had been the kept woman of a dozen rich and powerful men and had travelled widely in Europe, the Mediterranean and the near east – had kept her safe. That they might conceivably have crossed paths before was unlikely but by no means implausible. Her legend had always had a ring of truth, of impenetrable authenticity because in a way, it was true. Anybody who had watched her life – not even necessarily from afar - during the 1950s right up until just before the October War would have taken her for exactly what she seemed to be; an international courtesan living off the largesse of her wealthy and powerful and very appreciative admirers.
Arkady Pavlovich Rykov was no more the monster’s real name than Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov; although, oddly near the end she was sure that he – whoever he was – had known that time was running out and that this had somehow, in some perverse way, partially reconnected him with the person he might have been had he not become Josef Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria’s pet assassin...
The cell was lit by a single feeble electric bulb hanging from a cracked ceiling rose near the entrance. A thin brown electric cable snaked through a hole drilled in the ancient wooden door frame, up the wall and across the roof to the fitting. She squinted at the light bulb and in her hunger and exhaustion her vision blurred, and her thoughts wandered.
“Miss Pullman!”
She blinked into the face of an ashen, unshaven man in a torn and dirty army battledress who was squatting on his haunches directly in front of her. He stank of sweat and freshly disturbed earth and he still had streaks of camouflage paint on his cheeks.
“My name is not Clara Pullman,” she said, forcing a grimace.
“Oh well, never mind,” the man replied.
He wore a Captain’s stars on his collar tabs beneath his battledress and spoke with an accent straight out of Eton College.
“My company has taken over the security of this area of the Citadel. The thing is nobody is exactly sure why you are being held here?” He did not wait for her to try to explain. “In any event, several of your friends from the hospital where you work have made strenuous and most persistent representations to me to be allowed to visit you.”
She stared at him in confusion.
The man turned to the two Sten gun toting Redcaps.
“Why is this woman handcuffed?” He demanded in disgust.
“She had them on when we took charge of her, sir. Nobody told us to take them off...”
“You can bloody well take them off now!” The officer lurched to his feet, shaking his head. “I don’t know what the bloody world is coming to these days!” He muttered almost but not quite under his breath. “And somebody empty that bloody latrine bucket! It stinks like a pig sty in here!”
This said he stalked out of the cell leaving the Redcaps and their prisoner staring, open-mouthed at his retreating back.
Neither of her guards had keys to the handcuffs.
Both men were grumpily apologetic about that.
Apologetic but sensibly still somewhat cautious while they remained in her immediate proximity. She backed into the farthest corner of the room so that one of the Redcaps could safely retrieve the foul smelling latrine bucket.
“I suppose you wouldn’t believe me if I said I was really quite a nice person?” She queried, entirely rhetorically. The way the Redcaps had been looking at her the last few hours she took it for granted that they had heard about the trail of death she had left across the Citadel the previous afternoon at the height of the battle. “Yesterday was the first time I’d killed anybody for ages,” she added, wanly. Afterwards, she realised this was probably not the most reassuring thing she could have said or a thing that was remotely likely to set either man at his ease. Feeling a little dizzy with tiredness, with her head aching and with her mind churning with doubt, guilt and not a little self-loathing, her shoulders sagged. “The last time I did anything like that was when I was fighting with the partisans in Poland twenty years ago.”
The two Redcaps stared at her like she was mad.
But she needed to talk, to confess her sins.
“I was thirteen when I killed my first German.”
“Miss Pullman,” the older of the two Redcaps growled, “you don’t want to be telling the likes of us anything. I don’t know if you did what they said you did yesterday or whether that’s any reason for you to be locked up. But I know you don’t want to be talking to us about it. Not if you know what’s good for you.”
She leaned against the wall, slid slowly down onto her haunches.
Old habits die hard; you never turned your back on a guard.
“My name is not Clara Pullman,” she said dully. “I was christened Rachel. That was in Lodz. The Germans were sloppy when they drove us into the ghetto. Skinny boys and girls like me, slipped in and out every night. Of course, they killed us if they caught us. But before they caught us we started killing them. That’s what you do with Nazis. You can’t argue with people like that; you can only kill them.”
The older of the Redcaps motioned for his partner to stay outside the cell. His large frame blocked the door. He made no attempt to back out and lock that door. There were flecks of grey at his temples and a thoughtful world-weariness in his dark eyes as he listened, watching the woman like a circling hawk.
“Lodz? So you‘re Polish, miss?”
The woman nodded.
“My mother was Jewish. Not religious, you understand. Just Jewish, so she could never forget she was not like everybody else,” she twitched a grimace to accompany the revelation. She had always shared her mother’s otherness and her sense of not ever wholly belonging wherever she was. “The Soviets took away my father when I was eleven. I never saw him again. When the Germans came they put us all in the ghetto. There was nothing to do, nothing to eat. Killing fascists became our play. One night I slipped out of the ghetto as I did most nights; the next morning the SS had put up new roadblocks, new barbed wire and I couldn’t get back inside. I never saw my mother after that day.”
“Rachel?” The Redcap mused. “That’s a nice name...”
“So was ‘Clara’. I liked being ‘Clara’. In fact I liked being Clara Pullman so much I forgot who I really was.” She hesitated. “No, perhaps not. In my head I’m still that skinny thirteen year old Jewish girl on the run from the Germans.”
“How did you survive back then?”
The woman looked at the Redcap with new respect.
That was adroit; the way he suddenly changed the whole tenor of our little chat! May
be he was more than just a Redcap, maybe he was a real policeman like Marija’s dead friend Jim Siddall?
“I joined the resistance,” she replied lowly, aware of the cool, clammy air for the first time and feeling the chill of it sinking into her bones. “I didn’t look Jewish, I was a kid and I could get into and go places the adults wouldn’t dare go near. I became a courier, later I became an assassin. I had a natural gift for it and in time of war, people recognise these things.”
She shut her eyes, rested the back of her head against the unyielding stone wall behind her. She felt so tired, things were blurring, and her thoughts were horribly transported into a past she wished so desperately to forget.
“One day my luck ran out, of course. I was captured. I thought they would torture me and shoot me; all they did was beat me up. I was skin and bones; they thought I was a boy so they didn’t rape me. They sent me back to the nearest Gestapo field headquarters but there was a big Soviet offensive about then and I ended up in a train – well, a cattle truck – on the way back to Berlin. I was left for dead at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp when the SS marched most of the other inmates to their death ahead of the advancing Red Army. I looked so dreadful even the Russians didn’t rape me until two months later.”
The Redcap sucked his teeth, remaining silent.
Outside in the corridor there were women’s voices.
Chapter 17
21:15 Hours
Friday 3rd April 1964
Holyhead, Isle of Anglesey
Seamus McCormick dropped the tailgate of the old Bedford lorry – which was decked out in the camouflage livery of the Black Watch – stepped back and stood easy. The young subaltern commanding the bored, tired, disinterested Territorials searching the cars and lorries which had parked up in the inspection area as they came off the ferry from Larne, obviously did not see the point of checking Army vehicles. Nevertheless, the officer, a pale kid who looked like he was just out of school was still trying to do everything by the book.