by Len Deighton
‘I don’t keep mentioning him,’ I said. ‘I mentioned him once. You said you didn’t remember him.’
‘I don’t want to quibble,’ said Dicky. ‘The point is that his wife has been making a nuisance of herself lately. She cornered Morgan when he was in the FO the other day. Started on about a pension and all that kind of stuff.’
‘His widow,’ I said.
‘Verily! Widow. I said widow.’
‘You said wife.’
‘Wife. Widow. What damned difference does it make.’
‘It makes a difference to Jim Prettyman,’ I said. ‘It makes him dead.’
‘Whatever she is, I don’t want anyone encouraging her.’
‘Encouraging her to do what?’
‘I wish you wouldn’t be so otiose,’ said Dicky. He’d been reading Vocabulary Means Power again, I noticed that it was missing from the shelf behind his desk. ‘She shouldn’t be button-holing senior staff. It would serve her right if Morgan made an official complaint about her.’
‘She wields a lot of clout over there,’ I reminded him. ‘I wouldn’t advise Morgan to make an enemy of her. He might end up on his arse.’
Dicky wet his thin lips and nodded. ‘Yes. Well. You’re right. Morgan knows that. Far better that we all close ranks and ignore her.’
‘Jim Pettyman was one of us,’ I said. ‘He worked downstairs.’
‘That was a long time ago. No one told him to go and work in Washington DC. What a place that is! My God, that town has some of the worst crime figures in the whole of North America.’ So Dicky had been doing his homework.
I said, ‘This is not official then? This…this not encouraging Prettyman’s widow?’
He looked at me and then looked out of the window. ‘It’s not official,’ he said with measured care. ‘It’s good advice. It’s advice that might save someone a lot of trouble and grief.’
‘That’s what I wanted to know,’ I said. ‘Shall we get the heading for the D-G’s report?’
‘Very well,’ said Dicky. He looked at me and nodded again. I wondered if he knew that Cindy Matthews – one-time Mrs Prettyman – had invited me to a dinner party that evening.
‘And by the way, Dicky,’ I said. ‘That lion looks very good on the floor in here.’
Mrs Cindy Matthews, as she styled herself, lived in considerable comfort. There was new Italian furniture, old French wine, a Swiss dishwasher and the sort of Japanese hi-fi that comes with a thick instruction manual. They’d never faced the expense that children bring of course, and I suppose the rise in London house prices had provided them with a fat profit on the big house they’d been buying in Edgware. Now she lived in a tiny house off the King’s Road, a thorough-fare noted for its punks, pubs and exotic boutiques. It was no more than four small rooms placed one upon the other, with the lowest one – a kitchen and dining room – below street level. But it was a fashionable choice: the sort of house that estate agents called ‘bijou’ and newly divorced advertising men hankered after.
There were candles and pink roses on the dining table, and solid silver cutlery, and more drinking glasses than I could count. Through the front window we could see the ankles of people walking past the house, and they could see what we were eating. Which is perhaps why we had the sort of meal that women’s magazines photograph from above. Three paper-thin slices of avocado arranged alongside a tiny puddle of tomato sauce and a slice of kiwi fruit. The second course was three thin slices of duck breast with a segment of mango and a lettuce leaf. We ended with a thin slice of Cindy’s delicious home-made chocolate roulade. I ate a lot of bread and cheese.
Cindy was a small pale-faced young woman with pointed nose and little cupid’s bow mouth. She had her wavy brunette hair cut short. I suppose it was easier to arrange and more suited to her senior position. Her dress was equally severe: plain brown wool and simply cut. She’d always been brimful of nervous energy, and arranging this dinner party had not lessened her restless anxiety. Now she fussed about the table, asking everyone whether they wanted more champagne, Perrier or Chablis, wholemeal or white rolls, and making sure that everyone had a table napkin. There was a tacit sigh of relief when she finally sat down.
It was a planned evening. Cindy always planned everything in advance. The food was measured, the cooking times synchronized, the white wines were chilled and reds at the right temperature. The rolls were warmed, the butter soft, the guests carefully prompted and the conversation predictable. It wasn’t one of those evenings when you can hardly squeeze a word into the gabble, the guests stay too late, drink too much and lurch out of the house excitedly scribbling each other’s phone numbers into their Filofax notebooks. It was dull.
Perhaps it was a tribute to Cindy’s planning that she’d invited me on an evening when Gloria did a class in mathematics, part of her determination to do well at university, and so I went along to dinner on my own.
The evening started off very sedately, as evenings were likely to do when Sir Giles Streeply-Cox was the guest of honour. A muscular old man with bushy white Pickwickian sideburns and a florid complexion, ‘Creepy-Pox’ had been the scourge of the Foreign Office in his day. Ministers and Ambassadors went in terror of him. Since retirement he lived in Suffolk and grew roses while his wife made picture frames for all the local watercolour artists. But the old man was still attending enough committees to get his fares and expenses paid when he came to London.
It was the first time I’d ever seen the fearful Creepy close-to, but this evening he was on his best behaviour. Cindy knew exactly how to handle him. She let him play the part of the charming old great man of Whitehall. He slipped into this role effortlessly but there was no mistaking the ogre that lurked behind the smiles and self-deprecating asides. Lady Streeply-Cox said little. She was of a generation that was taught not to mention the food or the table arrangements, and talking about her husband’s work was as bad as talking about TV. So she sat and smiled at her husband’s jokes, which meant she didn’t have much to do all evening.
There were two Diplomatic Corps people. Harry Baxter, a middle-aged second secretary from our embassy in Berne, and his wife Pat. She had a heavy gold necklace, pink-tinted hair and told old jokes – with punch-lines in schweizer-deutsch – about bankers with unpronounceable names.
When Cindy asked Baxter what exciting things had been happening in Berne lately, old Streeply-Cox answered for him by saying the only exciting thing that happened to the diplomatic staff in Berne was losing their bread crusts in the fondue. At which both Streeply-Coxes laughed shrilly.
There was a young couple too. Simon was a shy young chap in his early twenties who’d been teaching English in a private school in Bavaria. It was not an experience he’d enjoyed. ‘You see these mean little German kids and you understand why the Germans have started so many wars,’ he said. ‘And you see those teachers and you know why the Germans lost them.’ Now Simon had become a theatre critic on a giveaway magazine and achieved a reputation as a perfectionist and connoisseur by condemning everything he wrote about. With him there was a quiet girl with smudged lipstick. She was wearing a man’s tweed jacket many sizes too big for her. They smiled at each other all through dinner and left early.
After dinner we all went upstairs and had coffee and drinks in a room with an elaborate gas fire that hissed loudly. Creepy had one demi-tasse of decaffeinated coffee and a chocolate mint, then his wife swigged down two large brandies and drove him home.
The couple from Berne stayed on for another half-hour or so. Cindy having indicated that she wanted a word with me, I remained behind. ‘What do you think of him?’ she said after all the other guests had left.
‘Old Creepy? He’s a barrel of fun,’ I said.
‘Don’t take him for a fool,’ Cindy warned. ‘He knows his way around.’
I had a feeling that Creepy was there to impress me with the sort of contacts she had, the sort of influence she could wield behind the scenes in the Foreign Office corridors if she needed a show
of strength. ‘Did you want to talk to me?’
‘Yes, Bernard, I did.’
‘Give me another drink,’ I said.
She got the bottle of Scotch from the side-table and put it in front of me, on a copy of Nouvelle Cuisine magazine. On the cover it said, ‘Ten easy steps to a sure-fire chocolate roulade’. She didn’t pour it, she walked across to the fireplace and fiddled with something on the mantelpiece. ‘Ever since poor Jim was murdered…’ she began without turning round.
I suppose I guessed – in fact dreaded – what was coming because I immediately tried to head it off. ‘Is murdered the right word?’ I said.
She rounded on me. ‘Two men wait for him and shoot him dead? Six bullets? What do you call it, Bernard? It’s a damned bizarre way to commit suicide, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, go on.’ I dropped some ice into my glass and poured myself a generous drink.
‘I asked about the funeral. I told them I wanted to go and asked them for the fare.’
‘And?’
‘It’s all over and done with. Cremated!’ She used the word as if it was an obscenity, as perhaps for her it was. ‘Cremated! Not a word to me about what I’d like done for my husband.’ Her voice was bitter. As a Catholic she felt herself doubly wronged. ‘Oh, and there’s something for you.’
She gave me a cardboard box. I opened it and found a pile of papers about ancient Mesopotamian tomb inscriptions. It was all neatly arranged and included ones that Fiona had worked on. I recognized her handwriting. ‘For me?’ I said. ‘In Jim’s Will?’
‘There was no Will; just a letter Jim had left with his lawyer. Things to be done after he died. It’s witnessed. It’s legal they say.’
‘Are you sure he wanted me to have it? I was never interested.’
‘Perhaps he wanted you to send it to Fiona,’ she said. ‘But don’t give it back to me. I’ve got enough on my mind without all the tricks and puzzles of the Ancient World.’
I nodded. She’d always been sarcastic about Jim’s hobby and I suppose I had too.
‘I’ve been trying to find out more exactly what Jim was doing when he died,’ she said and there was a significant pause.
‘Tell me.’ I knew she was going to tell me anyway.
‘I started with the money,’ she said. I nodded. The Foreign Office handled our budget. It was one aspect of our work that she might have been able to pry into.
‘Money?’ I said.
‘The money that’s supposed to be missing. The money you went to Washington to ask Jim about.’
‘Just for the record, Cindy, I didn’t go to Washington to ask Jim anything. That extra little job was dumped upon me after I got there.’
She was unconvinced. ‘Maybe. Maybe not,’ she said. ‘When we’ve got to the bottom of it you might find that it was all arranged right from the start.’
‘That what was arranged?’
‘Having you in Washington at the right time to do that “little extra job”.’
‘No. Cindy…’
‘Mother of God! Will you listen to me, Bernard, and stop interrupting. The fund that Jim arranged. There was a lot of money laundered through a couple of banks in Gibraltar and Austria. Backwards and forwards it went so it’s damned difficult to trace it. It seems to have ended up in an account in Germany. All that money was moved and invested six months before your wife defected.’
‘So what?’
‘Before!’
‘I heard you.’
‘Don’t you see?’
‘See what?’
‘Suppose I told you that this fund was set up by your wife Fiona? Suppose I said that this was a KGB slush fund?’
‘A KGB what?’ I said rather more loudly than I intended. ‘And Jim could sign? You told me Jim could sign.’
She smiled knowingly. ‘Exactly. That was the cunning of it. Suppose Fiona set up the funding of a KGB network and used SIS money and people to operate it? Do you see the elegance of it?’
‘Frankly, no,’ I said. I wasn’t going to make it easy for her. If she wanted to sell me her crackpot hypothesis she’d have to take me through it theorem by theorem.
‘Financing a secret network is the most difficult and dangerous part of any secret operation. You don’t have to be working on your side of the river to know that, Bernard.’
‘Yes, I think I read that somewhere,’ I said. But sarcasm wasn’t going to stop her.
‘Don’t be stupid, Bernard. I know how it all works.’
I drank her whisky and didn’t answer.
‘I must have a cigarette,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to give up but I must have one now.’ She got an unopened pack from a brass bowl on the bookshelf and took her time lighting up. Her hands were shaking, and the flaming match emphasized the movement, but that might have been because she craved the cigarette. I watched her with interest. The people in the Foreign Office knew things that we never found out about until it was too late. She said, ‘If Fiona set up a clandestine bank account and had our own people run it under strict secrecy, it would be the best and most secret way to supply funds to enemy agents, wouldn’t it?’ She was calmer now that she was smoking the cigarette.
‘But if you have found out about it, how secret is that?’
She had an answer. ‘Because Fiona defected. That upset everything.’
‘And you are saying that Jim went to Washington because Fiona defected? That Jim was a KGB agent?’
‘Maybe.’ That was the weakest link: I could see that in her face. ‘I keep thinking about it. I really don’t know.’
‘Not Jim. Of all the people, not Jim. And even if you were right, why the hell would he run to America, the heartland of capitalism?’
‘I only said maybe. More probably Fiona fooled everyone into thinking it was official. How could they guess it was money for the KGB?’
‘But the money is missing,’ I pointed out.
‘They can’t find the account,’ she said. ‘The whole damned account. And they are only guessing at how much might be in it: one estimate said four million pounds. No one in the FO or the Department will admit to knowing anything about it. The cashier knows the money is missing but that’s all.’
‘That only means that he doesn’t have the right piece of paper with an appropriate signature on it. That’s what the cashier means by money missing.’
‘This was real money, Bernard, and someone got their hands on it.’
I shook my head. It was beyond me. ‘Did you get all this from “our man in Berne”?’ I said, referring to the Baxters.
‘They’re old friends. He knows his way around but he hasn’t got anywhere so far.’
‘But there must be a departmental record of who was named as the account holder.’
‘Yes, Jim.’
‘And who else?’
She shrugged. ‘We don’t even know where the account is,’ she said and blew smoke hard through pursed lips. ‘I’m not going to let it go, Bernard.’
‘What will you do?’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘The Deputy D-G is very energetic these days,’ I offered. ‘You might find some way of talking to him.’
‘How can we be sure it doesn’t go up that far?’
For a moment I didn’t follow her. Then I did. ‘Working for the KGB? The Deputy? Sir Percy Babcock?’
‘No need to shout, Bernard. Yes, the Deputy. You read the newspapers. You know the score.’
‘If I know the score it’s not because I read the newspapers,’ I said.
‘No one is above suspicion these days.’
‘You’re going to talk to Five?’ And already I was wondering whether it was better to jump out of the window or ring for an ambulance.
She was horrified at the idea. ‘MI5? The Home Office? No, no, no. They’d know nothing about our Central Funding. And I work for the Foreign Office. That would be more than my job’s worth, Bernard.’
‘So what else can you do? You’re not thinking of trying to lobby the C
abinet Office are you?’
‘Are you saying that you won’t help?’
So that was it. I drank some of my whisky, took a deep breath and said, ‘What do you want me to do, Cindy?’
‘We’ve got to go through the files and find the orders that created the account.’
‘You said you’ve tried that already,’ I pointed out.
‘But not in the Data Centre,’ she said.
‘The Yellow Submarine? Jesus Christ, Cindy! You’re not serious. And anyway you’re not allowed there.’ I could have bitten my tongue off.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But you are, Bernard. You’re always in and out of there.’ I’d walked right into it. I took a good mouthful of booze and swallowed it quickly.
‘Cindy…’
Hurriedly she explained her theory. ‘The computer will have it in cross-reference. That’s how computers work, isn’t it? Instead of me rummaging through hundreds of files, we’d only have to give the computer one hard fact to access everything.’
‘And what hard fact could we give it?’
‘Jim. Jim was a trustee or a signature or something. Key him into the computer and we’ll get everything we need.’
So this was why I’d been invited along. And Creepy was there to reassure me that Cindy had friends at court, just in case. ‘Well, wait a minute, Cindy,’ I said as the full awful implications of it hit me.
She said, ‘We must see who else had access to it before they are murdered too.’
It was then that I began to think Jim’s death had deranged her. ‘You think Jim was murdered because he was a signatory to the bank account?’
‘Yes. That’s exactly what I think, Bernard,’ she said.
I watched her as she lit a cigarette. ‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ I promised. ‘Maybe there’s another way.’
‘The Data Centre is our only chance,’ said Cindy.
‘We could both be fired, Cindy. Are you sure it’s worth it?’ I asked. Having been warned off by Dicky I wanted to see if she had an explanation.