The Secret Servant hm-1

by Gavin Lyall

  He put his arm around the boy's shoulders and they walked back through a gap in the ramshackle bathing huts onto the pebble-strewn seafront road and Maxim's car.

  After a while, Chris asked: "Do you have to keep on taking exams in the Army?"

  "Yes – them, or something like them."

  "Ugh."

  "Well, you could always become a tramp, or even go into the Air Force."

  "Daddy!"

  They were laughing by the time they reached Maxim's parents' house. There was a message to ring George.

  15

  The Massons' bungalow was a rambling affair thrown together by a speculative jerry-builder just after the First World War. It had been built for summers of tennis, cocktails and open sports cars. Under the snow, fifty years later, it looked like a group of Army huts that had melted together. Maxim drove cautiously up the thirty yards of driveway, already squashed into rutted ice by other vehicles. At the top there were four parked cars and a plain van. He just squeezed into a space beside the rickety wooden garage that was two cars long instead of wide. Odd, that.

  It was also odd that there didn't seem to be a front door, just french windows that had curtains drawn across them. But a uniformed policeman hurried out of a kitchen door wanting identification. Maxim took time finding his ID card, looking around at the perfect snow on the tennis lawn, at the bulging laurels and evergreen shrubbery.

  Agnes was sitting at the kitchen table, which was covered in mugs, milk bottles, cups and teapots. She still had her sheepskin jacket on, and her face looked stale. "Hello, our 'Arry. Do you want a cuppa as well?"

  "If it's going," Maxim said automatically, and sat down, unbuttoning his car coat. She poured him a mug of tea. The whole room, which wasn't very big, looked slightly askew. Somebody had moved the refrigerator, the dishwasher, gas stove and a cupboard and not quite got them back in line. Deeper into the house, he could hear mutterings and tappings as the searchers moved on.

  Agnes passed him a mug. "In a while they'll be testing the floorboards and stripping paper off the walls. Some of the plaster, too."

  "Have they found anything?"

  "Enough to be sure he was on the take from Moscow. What did George tell you?"

  "Just that he was the man Zuzana Kindl was telling me about."

  "Yes." Agnes gave him a brief history of Rex Masson's work at MI5. "He must have handed the file back to the bad fairies and jumped off that same night while you were explaining yourself to the Special Branch in Buckinghamshire. He'd have a crash escape all planned…" she shrugged inside her sheepskin jacket, which barely moved. To Maxim the house seemed quite warm, and he wondered briefly who paid for it now. And for the stripped wallpaper and plaster. Whose house was it, now?

  He sipped the lukewarm sweet tea. "We don't know how or where?"

  "The first flight he could get. Berlin or Vienna for choice, but any capital with a sizeable Russian embassy. There's no point in trying to find out. In six months time, when they've taught him to sit up and beg nicely, he'll surface in Moscow and give a press conference telling how sickened he was with the work he had to do for his fascist imperialist bosses here. And then he'll settle down in a nice little concrete flat and a small summer dacha outside Moscow – not too far outside – with a Party card so his wife can go to the head of the queues and he can buy the latest Juilliard Quartets at the foreign currency store and then just sit there and drink himself to death. Because that's all he's got left. All he's left himself."

  She sounded very vicious.

  "How old was he?" Maxim asked, then wondered why he'd said 'was' about a man who was presumably still alive.

  Agnes gave him a tired smile. "Just the right generation, maybe the last of them. He was up at Oxford in the late forties, when Moscow still had some sex appeal. With the kids at the universities today, you couldn't give them Russian communism with a free pound of Mexican grass. They're into Chile or black Africa… I suppose even China's unfashionable now that they're playing footsie with America. More tea?"

  "No thanks. What are you doing here when you're not playing mother?"

  "Keeping an eye on the service's interests and telling George what's going on. I assume you'll do that now."

  "I don't know. Is there anything going on?"

  "Go and have a look. One of the coppers says he knows you."

  As Maxim turned away, Agnes added: "Have you got your gun this time?"

  "No. Why?"

  "Oh, nothing," She grinned privately into her teacup.

  Beyond the kitchen was a badly-lit corridor with doors on both sides and two men rolling up the carpet. But the mutterings seemed to come from an open door opposite. Maxim went through a dining room with heavy tables and chairs all pushed out of place, and opened a door on the far side.

  It was a big low-ceilinged room, the one with the french windows at the front end, and windows on both side walls. The fourth wall was mostly a wide fireplace with a basket grate and the ashes of a log fire. It was rather cluttered, originally with knick-knacks of furniture – small tables, pouffes, standing lamps along with several soft chairs, a sofa, an upright piano – but now also with five plain-clothes policemen. One of them got up from where he'd been poking the floor beside the piano and came towards Maxim grinning and holding out his hand.

  "It's Major Maxim now, isn't it, sir? I don't suppose you remember me." There was a sly challenge in that: an Army officer is supposed to remember people. The man was very square and solid, with short fair hair, a snub nose and a slight Welsh accent.

  "Ferris," Maxim said. "Sergeant Bill Ferris. You were instructing at Hereford when I started my first tour with SAS. Parachute Regiment, weren't you?"

  Ferris was delighted. "I told you Mr Maxim never forgot a face, didn't I"? They shook hands. "It must be all of twelve years ago, at that."

  Maxim tapped Ferris's stomach. "That's something I don't remember."

  Ferris grinned again. "In Special Branch we don't do so much doubling up and down hills as I used to." He introduced Maxim to the other policemen; most of them were sergeants, and Ferris the only inspector. They shook hands politely, then faded back to their work, one of them taking Ferris's place down by the piano. They were pulling at the floorboards, probing the walls with large needles, carefully dismantling the standard lamps.

  "Take your pick, sir," Ferris waved his hand at a collection of objects on a small table. There was a torch battery, a talcum powder tin, a large table lighter, silver cigarette box and a few others.

  Maxim hesitated. "If I choose right, do I get my hand blown off?"

  "This isn't Aden, sir. Nor Londonderry. Just pick one."

  Maxim chose the talcum tin. Ferris unscrewed the cap, sprinkled a little powder to prove it worked, then screwed the cap back on and gave it an extra twist and push. The tin slid apart, a tin within a tin. The powder was held in a narrow central compartment, with empty hiding places on either side.

  "Beautiful work," Ferris purred. "Beautiful. Moscow Centre does a lovely job. But of course-" he went on showing the secret compartments in the torch battery, the table lighter and all the others; "-they've always had a tradition of craftsmanship. I don't say Russian make good artists, mind. But they're craftsmen. I read the other day about a Russian who carves little temples and things out of bits of ivory that you can only see under a really powerful glass. He makes a cut in between his heartbeats, the article said, to keep his hand steady. They give his work to visiting VIP's and people."

  As a policeman, Ferris had flowered surprisingly. Maxim remembered him as a very plodding instructor in communications. And that reminded him. "Have you found any radio gear?"

  Ferris looked up, shocked. "Oh no, sir, Moscow Centre wouldn't use radio these days. Not in this country, anyway."

  Maxim felt he'd made an indecent suggestion by mistake. "Sorry. But then how did he get in touch with his friends in Kensington Palace Gardens?"

  "I thought you knew something about that already, sir." Ferris lo
oked sly again. "The dead letter box on the train, wasn't it?"

  "That was only a one-way street. He wasn't sending anything."

  "Then any other way. There could be a thousand. He could think of a few for himself, I expect, him being so much in the business already." Maxim realised that Special Branch wasn't totally dismayed at MI5 being caught in the wrong bed. "Of course, most of what he'd be passing on would be film, undeveloped 110-size film cassettes. You see?" He held up the talcum tin again. "Just the right size, made for it. He'd photograph some documents in his office, then leave this at some drop. It isn't suspicious to own one of those pocket cameras, now everybody's got them. But he couldn't exactly take it down to the corner shop to be developed, now could he, sir?"

  "Hardly."

  "The trouble we take to make it easy for other people's spies." Ferris sighed. "We invent these cameras and button-sized microphones and put copying machines in every office… Did you know that in Russia every typewriter has to be registered with the police and they take a sample page from it, in case you start spreading those samizdats?'

  "Really?" Maxim knew that already.

  "It is a fact. And-" Then one of the policemen called him over. Ferris said. "Excuse me," and went back to the suspect floorboard beside the piano.

  Maxim watched for a while, then got bored. The operation had the leisurely thoroughness of an old lady doing embroidery; a proper house search like this could easily last a week. He drifted back through the dining room to the corridor, where the other two policemen had finished rolling up the carpet. They looked at him, but said nothing.

  If the Massons had had children, they didn't live at home any more. There were four possible bedrooms, one of which had been turned into a study and another which had no clothes or character and was obviously a spare room. Then husband and wife each had a room, with a linking door. He was fumbling among the clothes in Rex Masson's built-in cupboard when Agnes came quietly up behind him.

  "How are you doing, Sherlock?"

  "You know my methods – and they don't seem to do any good. I can tell he went in a hurry. I wouldn't walk out on a wardrobe like this." The clothes were all good quality, most of them tailored, and the shoes expensive.

  "If you're moonlighting for Moscow you can afford to be a snappy dresser. I doubt he'd risk even coming home. Just ring her and tell her to meet him. He can't have known how much time he had. She left behind a lot of good stuff, too."

  "Was she in it with him?" Maxim went on rummaging.

  "You can't tell. All that gimmickry – the talcum tin and the cigarette lighter and so on – that came from his room or the study. Philby's wife didn't know. But you get some husband-and-wife teams as well."

  Masson obviously had the habit of putting tickets – theatre, car-park, cinema – into his outside breast pocket. Half the jackets in the closet had some. And once, in his first Latin lesson, the young Harry Maxim had noticed that the adjectives had the same endings as the nouns to which they applied. Perhaps he, he alone, had spotted this and for him Latin was going to be easy! Perhaps putting ticket stubs in your breast pocket was a sure sign of treachery. Life should be that simple.

  "D'you notice anything about the house?" Agnes asked. "Taking everything together?"

  Maxim stopped and looked around and tried to remember. Overall, the house was rather dark and worn; the furniture wasn't expensive, the central heating radiators were the heavy old-fashioned kind you found in barracks and schools – big enough to sit on (it was supposed to give you piles or chilblains, he couldn't remember which). But the clothes…

  "He spent his money on things he could take with him," he decided. "Not on the house. What car did he have?"

  "A five-year-old Renault 12. She had an eight-year-old Mini. That's right: he was always going home to Moscow in the end."

  "I suppose they always have to."

  "Sometimes faster than they expect," Agnes said grimly. "Those bastards are not going to like the Moscow clothing shops."

  In fact, the house did have a front door, but as it was set at ninety degrees to the sensible, it was invisible from the drive. And since the uniformed policeman wasn't guarding the house in any serious sense, Mrs Barbara Masson walked up to the door and let herself in on her key before anybody had seen her.

  She stood in a tiny hallway, lined with coats, between the two big rooms and asked loudly: "And just who on earth are all of you?"

  Agnes came quickly across the dining-room. "Hello, Barbara. We're us. Plus Special Branch, of course."

  "I do hope, Agnes Algar, that at least you've got a search warrant."

  "Oh yes, we're all being very legal. We even brought our own tea and sugar and milk. That's standard procedure on occasions like this."

  Mrs Masson put down the suitcase she had in one hand and the airline bag she had in the other and slowly knelt down between them and began to cry and cry and cry.

  16

  "He said we were going on just a short trip to Vienna and the service had said I could go. I've been on these things before. It's something about a couple looking less suspicious than a single person. That's right, isn't it, Agnes?"

  "That's right." Agnes spoke very gently.

  "He said he wouldn't have time to get home, it had all been arranged at the last minute and that I should pack for both of us. He told me some special things he wanted." She was lying flat on her bed, staring at the ceiling. The room was darkening as evening crept in, but nobody moved to turn on a light. Maxim had found her a drink and Agnes had rummaged out a packet of tranquilisers from the bottom of her vast handbag, and Inspector Ferris had been chased back to his mouseholing. Now they just listened.

  Barbara Masson had a very English elegance and the face you see in society magazines: lean, high cheekbones, a slightly large mouth and very good teeth. That sort ages well, and the silver in her long fair hair suited her. She could have worn pearls to hose out the pig-sty and not look overdressed.

  "What special things?" Agnes prompted.

  "Oh, two of his newest suits and his favourite ties – quite a lot of them, I thought, and his new shoes and to be sure to bring his best cuff-links. And he wanted the two little cameras. It all sounded rather grand for a two-day jaunt, but I didn't suspect anything." Her voice was a Knightsbridge flute that frequently hit awoid fortissimo.

  "Two cameras?" Agnes asked. But of course Masson would need two, no professional dared trust only one. And he had certainly been a professional photographer.

  "Yes, one of them was mine, he gave me it. But I never really liked it. It was too small and fiddly. He borrowed it sometimes."

  "So you took both."

  "That's right. Well, when I got to Heathrow, he gave me a new passport. It had my picture in it, I don't know where he got that, and it said I was Margaret Franklin. I'd never seen it before, of course, but it had quite a lot of stamps and visas in it as if I'd got to all these places." She lifted her head to stare at Agnes. "I thought it was the service who'd done it, but it must have really been them? "

  "They're good at their job."

  "Yes." It was a sigh. Mrs Masson let her head fall back. "Actually, I was quite excited, being somebody else, somebody unreal. A bit like taking over from Sarah Bernhardt and making an absolute wow of it." She giggled and waved an arm in a gesture slightly unstrung by vermouth and tranquilisers and probably lack of sleep. An empty glass thumped onto the carpet but didn't break. Nobody moved.

  "We put up at a hotel down in the old city, but it was a modern hotel. We didn't get there until after dinner but it didn't really matter because we'd had one of those ucky airline meals. You have to eat them because there's nothing else to do on an aeroplane except get sloshed. Rex said he had to go out just to make a contact. He was gone, oh, about three-quarters of an hour when he came back he said he'd arranged a chauffeur-driven car for us to go sight-seeing the next morning. I thought that was a bit odd because Vienna was full of snow so heaven knows what it would be like outside. But at le
ast we wouldn't be doing the driving and the service was paying, so… In the morning he told me."

  "Before you got in the car?"

  "This was before the car even came. He told me to pack, and then he said we weren't going back to Britain, not ever again. We were going to Moscow instead. I just didn't believe him. I thought he was making some terrible joke. Then I realised we were only about thirty miles from Moscow – if you see what I mean."

  Agnes nodded. "The Czech frontier at Bratislava. That's probably where you'd have gone over. Did he say.. why you were going?"

  "He talked about half-baked socialism mixed with half-baked capitalism and governments that didn't dare take any decisions so that Britain was run by the civil service and the unions. I must say it's funny he was blaming the unions and here we were on our way to Moscow." Her voice was suddenly strained and bitter.

  Agnes said softly: "They don't have strikes in Moscow, Barbara."

  "I suppose not… But I wasn't really listening. It was all as if he'd said he'd been sleeping with somebody else for years… No, I really think it was worse. If he'd been sleeping around there would have been just part of him I hadn't understood. But this was all of him."

  Treachery, Maxim thought, is a balloon. It has to be complete or it's nothing.

  "And what did you do?" Agnes asked.

  "It's quite terrible how you fall back on clichйs. I just said: 'I'm leaving you, Rex. Good-bye.' And I picked up my bags and I walked out."

  "He didn't try to stop you?"

  "No. Nobody did. But why do you think he didn't wait until we were actually in the car before he told me where we were going?"

  "Maybe," Maxim said, "that after all the years when you didn't have a choice, he owed you one at the end."

  Mrs Masson lifted herself on one elbow and peered through the gloom at him. "Yes. Yes, I suppose you could be right. He wasn't an unkind man."

  Agnes said: "Also you couldn't have been dragged unwillingly through the Austrian frontier post. And so you flew back home?"