The Dark Chronicles

by Jeremy Duns

  *

  There was some space for him behind the seats. Not much, but it might be enough. I put the bag on the passenger seat and set to work. First, I tried to squeeze him in with his knees folded to his chin. When that didn’t work, I used a series of swift downward strikes until his legs broke at the knees. That helped me push him to the floor, at which point I heard a thin, sharp crack, which must have been his spine. An image suddenly flashed into my mind of the look on his face when he’d seen the gun. I forced it away. It wasn’t Chief I was doing this to – it was just a lump of flesh that would soon become part of the soil, as we all did at some point… And as I would too sooner rather than later if I didn’t focus.

  I took off my coat and draped it over him, partly so he wouldn’t be seen on the road, more to hide his unmoving stare. Then I walked around the car, stretching my legs, feeling the rain on my forehead, trying to rid my mind of bullets and broken bones and formulate a workable strategy to get me out of this hole. I had a rendezvous with Vanessa at midnight. Miss it, and I’d have some awkward questions to answer later on. Make it, and it would avert suspicion, although the idea made me queasy inside. The last person I wanted to see now was Vanessa – let alone use her as an alibi. I snapped out of it. I wasn’t about to be hanged because of an attack of qualms.

  I climbed into the front seat and put the key in the ignition. The house was in my rear-view mirror, dark and deserted under the sliver of moon. I had a sudden memory of school: holidays when I’d stayed behind, the gloom of empty dormitories in the dark.

  I started her up, and began to move off slowly.

  *

  Winding through the empty lanes at about twenty miles an hour with the lights dimmed, the urge to push the pedal and leave it all behind was almost overpowering. But I couldn’t yet risk it. I didn’t want to wake people up.

  I’d gone about ten miles when I came to a call box. I parked on the verge, went in and put in a collection of sixpences. Nothing happened. I cursed and was just about to hang up when I got through.

  ‘Yes?’ said a gruff voice.

  ‘Something is going to fall like rain,’ I said. ‘And it won’t be flowers.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Oh, Christ.

  ‘Something is going to fall like rain – and it won’t be flowers.’

  There was a long pause, and then a resigned ‘Righty-ho’ and he hung up. It’s only when you’re forced to rely on emergency measures that you see all the holes in them: a straight-faced ‘Please pass the message on to Sasha that I need to meet at location four in two hours’ would have sounded a deal less suspicious to anyone listening in. And what the hell had Auden been going on about? I wondered. Why would flowers fall like rain? Wouldn’t rain be the more likely turn of events?

  The spy games concluded, I climbed back in the car and set off again. I carried on weaving through the lanes until I reached the turn-off to the A32, and then put my foot down. It had already gone half ten, and it was going to be very tight getting everything done and still making Ronnie Scott’s before midnight. I tuned the radio to some rock music on one of the pirate stations. I could barely hear it at this speed, but all I wanted was some noise. As the car tunnelled through the night, I wanted something chaotic to churn beneath it all, to keep me conscious that the soft years were over.

  There was no way back.

  *

  I wound the window down to let some air in.

  He was already there, which was a good sign. A no-show would have left me with all sorts of difficulties. I had given myself two hours from placing the call, but that was the absolute minimum: standard procedure was four hours, with an intricate set of checks and double-backs I’d developed over the years, but that clearly hadn’t been possible tonight. This was an emergency, and I was working to a very tight deadline – Vanessa would be arriving soon, checking her coat, ordering a Cointreau – and it had been tempting to take a few more shortcuts on the security. I comforted myself with the fact that it was a Sunday night, which was probably the safest time of the week. I finished my cigarette, then got out of the car and walked across the street.

  *

  There were fewer people than I’d hoped for: some old men playing mah-jong; a couple of dockers. I breathed in the smell of fried rice, pork and incense. This was location four, the New Friends restaurant, one of the last surviving vestiges of the old Chinatown. A waitress with impossibly thick eyelashes drifted towards me, but I nodded in the direction of the man hunched over a table in the corner, and she moved off again.

  He was pushing the remains of a chow mein around his plate and nursing a cup of tea. His postage stamps, our usual cover for conversation, were already neatly laid out on the table.

  I seated myself beside him. I’d last seen him six months ago. His beard was a little greyer, his paunch a little wider.

  ‘Hello, Sasha,’ I said.

  ‘Hello, Paul. I hope this is good.’

  He was irritated at being called out to an emergency meeting: he’d grown accustomed to routine, as had I, and had started to believe he had a right to lead a normal life.

  I pushed the barrel of the Luger into his thigh.

  ‘Not here,’ I said. ‘Not enough cover.’

  He quickly shuffled his stamps together, left some money on the table and followed me out to the car.

  *

  The streets were mainly one-way, and there were long gaps between the lamps. But I knew where I was going. I circled round the back of the restaurant and found the Horseferry Road turning.

  I looked across at him. He wasn’t doing a good job of hiding his fear: he couldn’t keep his eyes still and rivulets of sweat licked his forehead. I put the gun away. I didn’t want him to give the answers he thought I was looking for – I’d had enough of that.

  ‘What happened?’ he said.

  ‘Radnya.’

  It was the name Moscow had known me by for over twenty years, the name he had sat and encoded after every one of our meetings. The name I hadn’t known before tonight.

  He swore in Russian.

  ‘Who?’ he said. ‘How?’

  Who had betrayed me? How had I learned of their betrayal?

  ‘Anna.’ It answered both questions.

  This time I got a different reaction: shock, and a seemingly overwhelming sadness. Apparently I’d underestimated his emotional range.

  ‘I think you should explain,’ he said, which was lovely. I composed myself as I dipped the headlights for an oncoming car.

  ‘How long have you known she was alive?’

  He looked down. Always, then.

  ‘I never lied to you, Paul. You must—’

  ‘Don’t Paul me,’ I said, and I felt the anger rise. ‘No, you never lied, old friend. Just omitted a few things.’

  ‘You’re forgetting,’ he said, and his voice wavered as I took a corner at high speed. ‘We are both only pawns in this game.’

  That made me laugh. My life falling apart, and he was feeding me B-film lines. Judging by the expression on his face, I was sounding a touch hysterical, so I carried on, out of spite. I felt sorry for him, too, of course: his longest-serving agent losing his nerve so spectacularly. But there it was – the taste of betrayal fresh in my mouth, and I felt sick with it and desperate to lash out. Perhaps I would use the gun again tonight. He deserved to die more than Chief. He had known of the plot – he had not only failed to tell me about it, but had continued to feed it to me.

  ‘We’re not pawns,’ I told him. ‘I told you at our very first meeting that I didn’t want any more games – I had enough of that with Yuri. If you had told me the truth then, I would have accepted it.’

  ‘No,’ he said, regaining his composure. ‘You wouldn’t have. That, too, is horseshit.’

  I ignored him. He wasn’t answering my questions, and I needed answers to them, now.

  ‘Why?’ I asked him, my knuckles straining against the steering wheel. ‘Why this way?’

  ‘It shouldn�
��t matter how you were recruited.’

  A few hours previously I would have agreed with him, if we’d been discussing some other poor fool who had been lured in like this: yes, a clever little honey trap, very nice, the means justify the ends, and all that crap. Very nice – in theory. ‘It matters to me,’ I said, barely able to control my fury. ‘The murder of my father matters to me, Sasha.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said after a moment. ‘But you must understand that he would have been seen as a dangerous enemy.’

  Yes, I understood, all right: eliminate a prime anti-Communist, and recruit his own son off the back of it. My code-name even gloated over the fact.

  ‘How did it work?’ I asked. ‘How many people were involved? I want to know the details.’

  ‘I don’t have them,’ he said. ‘I was shown your file before I left Moscow, but the matter of your recruitment had only a very brief description.’

  ‘Indulge me,’ I said. ‘I suspect it was fuller than the one I got.’

  He turned to me, the shadows on his face shifting shape as we passed in and out of the fields of each streetlamp. ‘You were admitted to a Red Cross hospital, where the agent you knew as Anna cared for you. Investigations established that you were the son of a leading British intelligence officer with links to fascist groups before the war.’

  I kept glancing over at him, because I needed to match the meaning of his words with the way he said them. If he sounded a false note – if he was lying – I needed to know. I couldn’t yet tell.

  ‘So a plan was drawn up.’

  ‘Yes. Anna was to persuade you of the rightness of our cause using her particular talents—’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I said. ‘Who killed my father?’ I asked. ‘Who pulled the trigger?’

  ‘That I do not know, Paul.’

  Narrow Street. I veered into it and Sasha lurched into the dashboard as we flattened a few cobblestones. Was this the truth – or more omission?

  ‘And Anna disappeared.’

  He shrugged. ‘There was nothing else about her in the file. Perhaps you can tell me what you have learned?’

  I debriefed quickly, leaving nothing out but embellishing nothing either. He didn’t say anything, didn’t react at all, even when I’d finished. He seemed to be more interested in the activity on the river: there were a couple of tankers moving silently about their business.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You did the right thing.’

  ‘The only thing,’ I corrected. ‘There wasn’t anything right about it.’

  He turned away from the river to look at me, and smiled thinly. He placed his palm on my shoulder, a pastiche of avuncular affection. ‘I understand your distress,’ he said, and it was all I could do to stop myself reaching for the gun again. ‘That is something I can’t help you with. You must look in your soul and examine the reasons things were done in this way. In time—’

  ‘What do you know about Slavin?’ I asked him. I didn’t have any time – that was the bloody point.

  ‘Slavin?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You remember – the KGB officer whose defection is threatening my life.’

  ‘Only what you have just told me: that he is attached to the Soviet Embassy in Lagos. Considering the strategic importance of Africa, and Nigeria in particular, I imagine he is regarded highly by Moscow. But that is all I know, I’m afraid – that and I count my blessings that my services are required here, surrounded by beauty and art, whereas Comrade Slavin has the ill fortune of being posted to one of the world’s most inhospitable cities during wartime.’

  I looked over at the dirty black river and wondered about Sasha’s definition of beauty.

  ‘Forgive me if I don’t share your sympathy for him,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so self-pitying, Paul! You have enjoyed more than your share of luck tonight. You weren’t spotted by Henry Pritchard, for example. Although, of course,’ he added, ‘you will now have to be especially wary of him.’

  Yes. Yes, I would. ‘The control, at one remove from the action, may be able to offer the agent fresh insight into problems he faces in the field.’ It was from the Service manual, but I imagined Moscow had some similar gibberish printed up. I resisted the urge to tell him that it had already occurred to me that I might now have to be especially wary of Pritchard.

  ‘Still, I don’t think there’s any need for you to worry yourself unduly,’ Sasha was saying. ‘Slavin will be dispatched tomorrow.’ He gave a short chuckle.

  I told him that nobody was going to lay a finger on Slavin, and after he had recovered from the savagery with which I had spat this out, he politely asked me why not. He even managed a sliver of bewildered amusement in his tone – I didn’t like that. I wanted him scared.

  ‘Volkov,’ I said. ‘It’ll look too much like it.’

  Konstantin Volkov had walked into the British Consulate-General in Istanbul in 1945 and asked to defect. He’d had information that would have blown Philby, but Philby had wangled his way into getting the job to fly out to interrogate him, and he’d taken enough time doing it for his handler to send some goons in to take the Russian and his wife back to Moscow. This was now known, thanks in part to Philby himself, who had published a slippery little volume of memoirs revealing just enough to push my colleagues into further paroxysms of paranoia. If Slavin suddenly disappeared, it would be clear he had been silenced by the double, and as the only men who knew about Slavin’s allegations were Lagos Station and Heads of Section, that would narrow the field considerably. I had to get out to Nigeria as soon as possible, because I couldn’t run the risk of someone else interrogating Slavin before me. But if anything happened to him, either while I was there or on my way out there, it would narrow the field to just one.

  ‘You’re safe,’ said Sasha. ‘Didn’t you come through with flying colours last time? Nobody would ever seriously suspect you.’ He patted the leather upholstery pointedly. ‘Your cover is impeccable.’

  ‘You’re making me blush,’ I said. ‘But my last experience of being questioned was notably different, I think, don’t you? I hadn’t, for example, just killed the Head of the Service. If Slavin is mysteriously shipped off in bandages moments before I arrive in Lagos, I’ll either spend the rest of my life in Pentonville or end up dangling from the end of a rope.’

  ‘Let us be perfectly clear, Paul. What is it you are asking of me?’

  ‘Keep your thugs away. Let me deal with Slavin.’

  He took a sharp intake of breath, and gave a quick shake of his head. ‘It is far too dangerous.’

  ‘Reassuring to hear that you care, but I’ll be the judge of that.’

  ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘It’s non-negotiable.’

  He gave me a long look. ‘They won’t let me.’

  ‘Then don’t tell them.’ I leaned a little on the last word – his incessant passing of the buck was beginning to irritate me.

  ‘I can’t do that. There is another option, you know—’

  I gave him a cool look. ‘The flat in Moscow? Pissing away the rest of my life on cheap vodka like Philby and the others? No thanks.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you. I wish I could, I really do, but it’s not in my power—’

  I took the next corner, up a ramp to a space in front of someone’s lock-up, ‘Millwall FC’ scrawled across it in blue spray paint. I pulled the brake and drew the Luger, then faced my comrade down the barrel.

  He’d shut up now.

  I leaned forward and placed the nose against his forehead.

  ‘It’s in your own interest,’ I said. ‘If they take me into the rubber room – which I can guarantee you they will if anyone touches Slavin before I get there – I’ll give them everything I have on you before I bite down on the capsule.’

  His expression remained blank – he didn’t think I had enough on him for it to matter.

  ‘They mightn’t find you, of course,’ I
said. ‘You mightn’t even be here by then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If I come under suspicion, Moscow will almost certainly recall you.’

  It had a more benign ring to it than ‘dispatched’, but it amounted to the same thing. His breaths had started coming short and fast now, and I thought I could see the logic gradually penetrate.

  ‘All right,’ he said, finally. ‘You’re on your own.’

  ‘When’s your next report?’

  Hesitation. I twitched my finger a fraction.

  ‘The second, barring emergencies.’ He managed a smile, and I liked him a little for it. It brought to mind the Sasha I had known and worked with for so long.

  But, then, that Sasha was a liar.

  The second: that was ten days away. We drove on in silence for a few minutes, and then I pulled up at a yard filled with blackened barges. A sign on a wall proclaimed that ‘DOGS LOVE VIMS’. The dirt in the air from the coal-loading wharf upstream was everywhere, impregnating the lamp-posts and the buildings, and the smell of tar and water was suddenly pungent. ‘Your chief’s body,’ Sasha said suddenly, as I drew to a halt. ‘You didn’t say what you had done with it.’

  I’d been wondering how long it would take him. I nodded at my coat behind his head. He glanced back over his shoulder and swore violently in Russian. ‘You’re going to dump him in the river.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We are.’

  *

  I parked the car close to the edge and we carried the body down, wrapped in the blanket. I took the arms, Sasha the feet, and we shuffled along to the end of the lock, stopping every couple of minutes – he kept complaining that it was tricky to keep a firm hold. Finally we were there, and we lowered Chief onto the moist gravel.

  Sasha clapped his hands together, looking for a moment as though he would make a comment about the recent cold snap. I prayed he wouldn’t – I didn’t want to lose control altogether.

  I began scouring the ground for stones and suggested he do the same. When I had a handful that were large enough, I stuffed them into Chief’s pockets.