A Matter of Loyalty

by Anselm Audley

  ‘So who,’ Hugo said quietly, ‘signed off on it?’

  ‘It was authorised by the people in charge of the whole Bomb project.’

  ‘Who took the idea to them? Was it Rothesay? You? You were in charge.’

  ‘It most certainly was not me. I would never have countenanced such a thing. Nor . . .’ Vane tailed off, briefly lost for words. Too late. Hugo was one step ahead of him.

  ‘It was Dr Oldcastle, wasn’t it?’

  Scene 13

  Árpád was lost.

  It was one thing to ride. That he could do, even though he wasn’t used to the muddy English ground. To find his way was quite another.

  Ben had given him directions. Across the lower meadow to find a track, that he had done. Follow the path, he’d had no problem with that. There was a fork, take the right, go down across the main road. Pompey, it seemed, regarded all cars as the enemy. Árpád had nearly been thrown when one hove into sight on the road.

  The trouble had arisen on the far side of the road, where he came to something called a spinney. A clump of trees, Ben had said, but there were three clumps of trees. Paths went through, around, and to judge by the number of rabbit holes, beneath them.

  The track had been sunk so deeply he couldn’t see out of it, overhung with gaunt bare trees half-drowning in ivy. Now he was out of the track, in a shallow valley between bare hills, but he could see neither the Castle nor the town.

  Pompey whickered impatiently, his breath steaming in the chill air. There was something called a gallop to be found, Ben had said, on Castle land, where he could give Pompey a good run. Look for the white fences. But there were no white fences. This was a small landscape, compared to the plains of his childhood, which stretched away in the summer haze. Its hills and valleys were mere dimples compared to the great soaring peaks of the Carpathians, where he had wandered with his sister in the meadows. Even the woods were pocket-sized. Yet somehow it contrived to be a place of infinite variety and confusion. So many little paths!

  He heard footsteps, crunching on the frozen mud, a man coming down one of the paths. A farmer, perhaps, but no, it was a man with the look of town or city about him, in stout boots with a rucksack on his back. About fifty, grizzled, with eyes that had seen too much.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Árpád, ‘I am trying to find the gallops. Could you tell me where I should go?’

  ‘You want the path I’ve just come down,’ said the walker. ‘Keep straight on, all the way up. You’ll cross the gallops where the trees end. Fifteen minutes for me, less for you.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Árpád. ‘I was told to look for a spinney, this is a clump of trees, only it seemed there were three, and I could not tell which was meant.’

  ‘All of them, actually. Hayward’s Spinney, it’s called. Used to be one big copse, but most of the trees were cut down in the war.’

  ‘Ah. This I understand. So then I should have gone around to the right, at the edge of the field where there was no path, not ahead where there was a path.’

  ‘The bridleway runs around the edge of the field, by the fence. The path through the spinney is just a deer track.’

  ‘I see,’ said Árpád politely, although he didn’t see at all. It was quite mystifying.

  ‘You must be the Castle’s guest, the Hungarian,’ said the man, who seemed disposed to talk.

  ‘This is right.’

  ‘Is it strange, to be in the West?’ His tone was curious, as if he were interrogating a man from another world in one of Georgia’s books.

  Árpád thought a moment. ‘Very strange. I lived in America before the war, for my work, but then I still had a home to go back to. Now I have no home.’

  ‘Do you miss it?’

  ‘Very much. Now I hardly remember it, though. I was in the gulag, in Siberia, where in winter there is snow, in summer there are mosquitoes, and always there are guards who like to use their rifle butts. There also I think of my home, of the plains in the spring, of my father’s horses.’ He shrugged. ‘I cannot go back. I have served my time in the Soviet prison. I shall go to America, where there are also plains and horses, but where friends do not disappear in the night.’

  ‘You never thought it would be a better world? People over here did. Still do. No more class system, no more men with money and titles owning everything, the way the Castle does here. You’re lucky, you’re seeing the way the other half live here.’

  ‘This is true,’ Árpád said. ‘We have no class system, no aristocrats or bourgeois any more. They are all dead or in camps, and so are their wives and children. Instead, we have the Party bosses. They live in the best houses, with the best cars, but they are always in fear, perhaps they will be purged. In my country now, as in Russia, a man cannot be sure of anything, whether he is a janitor or the head of the Politburo. One moment Beria is the new tsar, the next he is dead. So each tries hard to be the most zealous, the most loyal, the most brutal, because he is afraid.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like paradise to me.’

  ‘You were in the war, perhaps?’ Árpád said.

  The stranger shook his head. ‘Only on the home front. Fireman, I was. Didn’t believe in killing ordinary working Germans, even if they were fighting for the Nazis. Plenty of lives to be saved here.’

  ‘It was a bad time,’ Árpád said.

  ‘That it was. Well, I shan’t be keeping you. Straight on up there, quite simple, you can’t miss it.’

  ‘This is good. I am not used to all your paths, to these hedges and bridleways and so on, there is nothing like this in Hungary or America.’

  ‘Best network of public paths in the world, we’ve got,’ said the stranger with pride. ‘If you’re on a right of way, there’s nothing farmer or gamekeeper can do, doesn’t matter how cross they get. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Árpád. ‘A good day to you.’

  ‘And to you.’

  Árpád turned Pompey and headed for the gallops. There was a good view, Ben had said, you could see for miles and miles. ‘A bit like your plains, maybe, if not nearly so flat.’

  Árpád very much wanted to see this view.

  Scene 14

  As luck would have it, Hugo emerged from Vane’s office just in time for Jarrett to bear down and haul him off outside, into the privacy of a cold wind.

  ‘What are you doing here, Hawksworth?’

  ‘Background interviews,’ said Hugo equably.

  ‘We’ve settled that question, thanks to you. Ingham’s the man, quite clearly. Just heard from MacLeod. One of his sergeants has a possible match for the anonymous tip-off. Local petty criminal and black marketeer. The sergeant has looked the other way on one or two occasions when things were a little blurred, and in return this fence of his has given him a tip or two about more serious goings-on. Strictly anonymous, of course.’ Jarrett still didn’t quite look pleased. Anonymous tips clearly offended his sense of order.

  ‘Do we have anything to put him in the right place at the right time?’

  ‘There’s a lay-by where Long Combe Road joins the London Road. Screened by bushes, woods on the other side. Favourite place for illegal activity, so I hear. One of MacLeod’s men thought there was something going on there the last day Rothesay was seen, but by the time he got out to investigate, all he found was tyre tracks.’

  ‘I see. You’re happy with this.’

  ‘Can’t say I’m happy, but in my line of work, you take what you can get. It all fits. I dare say Rothesay riled Ingham too far. Lured out into the woods by a man with no intention of fighting fair. Bullet in the back of the neck, body weighted down in the river. Ingham’s a resourceful and desperate man, he knew what he was doing. Would have worked, too, if those floods hadn’t come along. We’d all have thought Rothesay had taken himself off to Moscow.’

  Hugo found it difficult to imagine the dapper Rothesay, now a respectable scientist in his fifties, even taking up such an invitation from Ingham.


  Jarrett brushed the point aside. ‘Dr Rothesay lived a highly irregular life, just like Ingham. There are too many connections for this to be coincidence.’

  ‘And the sleeper agent?’

  ‘Rothesay fits the profile.’

  ‘Rather a coincidence that he dies in a purely private quarrel just as we close in on him.’

  ‘I shouldn’t say so. Treason puts a great deal of pressure on a man, profoundly unnatural thing to do. I shouldn’t say Rothesay was so very stable to begin with. Wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge. There’s always the chance that Ingham was doing it deliberately, orders from Moscow.’

  This was news to Hugo. ‘Moscow usually treats its foreign sources well, and Ingham’s security checks turned up no Communist connections.’

  ‘I’m having that looked into. Found an old associate in London who says Ingham had a thing about working men’s rights in the thirties, got himself involved in more than one labour dispute which wasn’t his business. Even talked about going to join the International Brigades in Spain. Scotland Yard is checking his Foreign Legion story with the Sûreté, just to be on the safe side. More for neatness than anything else. If it turns out his story isn’t true, we’ve got a lever on the Soviets. What are these background interviews all about, then?’

  ‘Following up a loose thread.’ Not that it seemed to matter much. The evidence against Saul was stacking up. Hugo didn’t want to believe the man guilty, his instincts said otherwise, but there was a point when you had to accept the evidence.

  Jarrett gave him a hard look. ‘I wasn’t informed.’

  ‘I only chanced upon it this morning.’

  ‘Out with it, then. You’re to keep me up to date with all developments.’

  ‘If I kept you up to date with every idea one of us has up at the Hall, Inspector, you’d tell us to shut up until we had something concrete to bring you. Sir Bernard gave me his approval to look into this further, and so far there’s nothing to change the story.’

  Jarrett turned and began walking back to the building, too fast for Hugo to catch up. ‘What’s taking you so long?’ he demanded. ‘Oh, that leg of yours. Bad luck, that was. Or good luck, I suppose, only to be lamed. Don’t look so surprised. I requested your file. I like to know about the men I work with. What they’ve done, what they’re capable of. You must be used to it, in your line of work.’

  Hugo was, but had rarely heard the knowledge used in so blunt a way.

  ‘You have me at a disadvantage, Inspector, as the Service neglected to supply me with its file on you.’

  Jarrett gave a short bark, almost a laugh, and stopped on the path. A technician scurrying between two buildings glanced curiously at them. ‘I’d have thought you’d know all about me from Miss Wryton by now.’

  ‘She hasn’t talked about you much,’ Hugo said. ‘And then only when pressed.’

  ‘Surprised. I saw a fair bit of her when she was engaged to Roddy Halstrop. Then again, she was something of a wallflower. No spirit, if you ask me.’

  Jarrett no doubt considered virtually all women wallflowers, since he didn’t let any of them get a word in edgeways.

  ‘I should say leaving your bridegroom at the altar takes a certain spirit.’

  ‘Funk. Pure funk. Halstrop was furious, of course, fit to burst. Took him off to a pub and poured a yard or two of porter into him. He saw it my way in the end. He’s got his eye on a political career, you see, and a politician needs the right sort of wife. Someone not afraid to work behind the scenes for him, play hostess to the right sort of people. Like your Valerie Grisewood. Asset to any man’s career, a woman like that. She’s got high hopes for you, I hear. Might find yourself alongside Halstrop on the green benches one day.’

  Hugo could hardly imagine anything he wanted less than to enter Parliament, except to have anything further to do with Jarrett or any of his friends. Certainly, Valerie had never broached the subject. Perhaps she was waiting for some more propitious moment. After all, one wouldn’t do that straight from the Service.

  Alternatively, Jarrett was just planning his life for him, the way he’d already planned his superior’s retirement. Hugo had to believe that this was simply what passed for normal conversation with Jarrett. There was no way the man could be this rude on purpose and still hold his current position.

  ‘Well,’ Hugo said briskly. Efficiency, after all, was Jarrett’s watchword. ‘I shan’t delay you any longer, we both have interviews to conduct.’

  Scene 15

  Oldcastle was his usual polished, expansive self. He leaned back in his chair, comfortable and confident, every inch the Head of Division. There were only three fountain pens lined up in the rack this time, the fourth nowhere to be seen.

  Oldcastle followed Hugo’s gaze. ‘I’ve lost the other one somewhere. Probably under a chair at home, although it’s a real nuisance. A good left-handed nib takes quite some finding.’

  ‘I shall ask if anything’s been handed in at the police station,’ said Hugo. He would indeed, on the off-chance that it had turned up somewhere odd.

  ‘That’s very decent. What can I do for you, Hawksworth? I’d offer you a brandy, but we’re on your time.’

  Hugo inclined his head. He wondered, for an instant, whether he should have brought Harriet along. Scientific interrogation was her speciality. Then again, better not to tar more than one reputation if this went badly wrong.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you about the accident which killed Adam Sørensen.’

  It took experience to spot the flicker of tension in Oldcastle’s body, the tightening around the eyes and the fingers, the very slight shift in posture. If Hugo hadn’t been looking for it, he might not have seen it.

  ‘I wrote a detailed report on that. I refer you to it, unless your classification level isn’t high enough.’

  A subtle warning: Are you in my league, Hawksworth?

  ‘I’ve been apprised of its contents. I shall go to London to read it, if need be. Of course, I’m not a scientist, but my interest today isn’t chiefly scientific.’ It would be interesting to see whether Oldcastle tried to pull the wool over Hugo’s eyes, to misdirect him on the scientific front.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘In your report, responsibility for the accident is placed on Dr Sørensen, for carelessness, and on Dr Rothesay, for proposing a dangerous and untried technique. In spite of which, Dr Rothesay suffered no adverse consequences.’

  ‘He was far too valuable a theoretician to lose.’

  Hugo began scribbling things in his notebook, words to remind him. There might come a moment when he needed to quote something verbatim, and he didn’t want to draw Oldcastle’s attention to any particular answers. ‘Did your staff share your opinion of the accident?’

  ‘Several of them were interviewed in the course of preparing the report. I do recommend going to read it if you can. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find it much easier to take in than having me explain it to you now in dribs and drabs.’

  ‘In general, did they share your opinion?’

  ‘I should say so.’

  ‘Did any of them think otherwise? Dr Rothesay, for example?’

  ‘Rothesay was glad to be moved into a purely theoretical position. He grumbled, of course, that was his nature. We took it in our stride rather.’

  ‘Who did he grumble to?’

  ‘Colleagues, mostly.’

  ‘Could he have grumbled to anyone outside Foxley?’

  ‘I imagine he told his wife, if that’s what you mean. There’s always a certain tendency to confide in one’s nearest and dearest, security or no security. We do try to discourage it where we can. Inspector Jarrett, I feel, would like the Los Alamos setup, all of us stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no access to anything.’

  Hugo commented, ‘Klaus Fuchs had no trouble getting word to his Soviet controllers from Los Alamos, so I don’t imagine it would be any better here. Worse perhaps, with a city nearby.’

  ‘Indeed
. Bad for morale, too. Good for a man to feel he’s part of the wider world. Tensions can build up rather in a place like this, if you know what I mean.’ Oldcastle was beginning to relax, little by little. He had clearly decided this was about Rothesay, nothing to do with him.

  ‘When he grumbled, did he have his own explanation? Another culprit, perhaps, a story of how he was hard done by?’

  Oldcastle smiled. ‘Don’t we all have such stories?’

  ‘So he did.’

  Oldcastle’s thumbs twiddled around one another. ‘I think so. I suppose you could reconstruct it, if you talked to everyone in the department. You’d find the usual cocktail of scientific resentments, I suspect. Not enough resources, not enough time, the project directors weren’t sympathetic.’

  ‘They must have been, to give him the go-ahead. I suppose he could be persuasive when he chose.’

  ‘He had a good theoretical reputation.’

  ‘How did he convince them?’

  ‘You understand, making a British Bomb has been a key priority of both this Government and the last. With the Americans freezing us out of their nuclear programme, we’ve had to make up a great deal of ground on our own, with limited resources.’

  Hugo had fenced at school, and a little at Oxford. Foil, mostly, the lightest and most delicate of weapons. This was pure foil fencing, the slow back and forth, the twitch of blades, lunge and parry, riposte and counter-riposte, all in little flicks of the wrist.

  ‘So Rothesay sold this to the top brass as a way to make up lost ground.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘And it was Rothesay who persuaded them of this, was it – who got them to devote the necessary resources?’

  Oldcastle picked up one of the fountain pens and twisted it around in his fingers. A rather more active fidget than any so far, visible to Miss Fitzgibbon through the glazed door.

  ‘Who was in charge of making it happen?’

  ‘That was Dr Vane, I imagine you’ve already talked to him.’

  ‘I have,’ said Hugo. He was almost certain the devoted Miss Fitzgibbon would be in shortly with an urgent matter requiring Oldcastle’s attention. It was time to change tactics. ‘I was attempting to establish whether Dr Rothesay might have felt unjustly blamed. Which he was, wasn’t he, Dr Oldcastle? He wasn’t the one who whispered in Whitehall ears, persuaded the powers that be to divert funds to your department. He wasn’t the one who cut corners, used unsuitable equipment and half-trained staff. Yes, he wanted the scientific fame which had eluded him so far, and you were quite willing to give him that. It was a sound proposal.