“Glad to hear it. One of our two most ancient and prestigious universities is shaping up to be a hotbed of intellectual communism, if that’s not a contradiction in terms.” Knightly looked around, gathering approval. When he’d collected sufficient nods, he pushed on: “Now, a certain amount of flirting with ‘socialism’ doesn’t ruffle many feathers. A weary but indulgent sigh would be our response. That’s youth for you. Privileged youth that has only a cerebral conception of the working man and his needs and rights, and he grows out of it if ever faced with the gritty reality. No. This is more serious. It’s a well-funded and organised assault on the British way of life. They already have daily newspapers in their pay and the next line of attack is through our intellectual institutions. The universities which are, even as we speak, educating and forming the country’s future leaders are being fed a radicalised version of their philosophy. But in palatable form. No burning flags, no resounding anthems, no High Street marches and proletarian nonsense of that sort to worry anyone. Café communism is the fashionable term for it, I believe . . .”
The foreign secretary interrupted. “Come now, Knightly! The tea shops and coffee houses of an ancient city at the heart of England are, we are asked to believe, the hatcheries for pernicious, destructive philosophies?”
“Oh yes, Sir John! ‘Two lumps and a splash of Bolshevism with your café noir, sir?’” Knightly enjoyed teasing the minister. “But, I’ll allow—this frivolous picture does demean and distract from the truth. We have to recognise that the disease runs deeper and higher than the chirrupings you hear at café and refectory tables—the rebellious views of callow youths are always with us. I remember exchanging much the same sort of rubbish with friends over a cup of Earl Grey in the Daisy Tea Rooms back in ’97 when we were callow youths. We can ignore it! But some of us will remember the Trinity College Two . . .” Encountering blank looks all round, he’d explained further, “Ten years ago. The Office had to open a file on two Trinity men in high positions—one of them a professor and himself a student of Ernest Rutherford’s at the Cavendish Laboratory, the other one an economics tutor. Unashamedly, outspokenly Marxist, the pair of them.”
“Great Scott!” the foreign secretary made the connection. “Are these men still in place? If they got together and combined their skills and knowledge, they could make and market an atom bomb! Sell it off to the highest bidder! Wasn’t there something in the news recently . . . ?”
“The fourteenth of April last year.” Howgrave-Graham supplied the facts. “Nineteen thirty-two was an outstanding year for Cambridge science. Annus mirabilis, The Times called it. Two gentlemen at the Cavendish split the lithium atom with a proton beam. Cockroft and Walton.”
“Knowledge worth having, I’d have thought. Especially to anyone interested in war work. These communist chaps, I ask again, are they still out and about in Cambridge?”
“Yes indeed,” confirmed MI5. “Still in post. The economist, one Maurice Dobb, holds meetings for fledgling communists at his home: somewhat appropriately called ‘The Red House,’ north of the river. The physics professor is still working at the Cavendish.”
“God help us! This physics feller—do we have evidence of Russian sympathies?”
MI5 replied after a suspenseful pause through lips tight with amusement or embarrassment. It was hard to tell. “Professor Piotr Kapitza is Russian. By birth.”
“A Russian! What the deuce is he doing exploding atoms in an English laboratory in the middle of an English city? Has the country gone mad? Someone must defuse this jackanapes. At once.”
“He has an outstanding talent, I’m afraid,” MI5 explained ruefully. “Born in St. Petersburg and educated there as far as they could accommodate his genius. When he’d outgrown Russian resources, he came to England. We set him up with the best facilities the world has to offer, and he and his team—who themselves are of various nationalities—have achieved some remarkable results. His boss Ernest Rutherford, the driving force of all this, is, you will remember, a New Zealander by birth, educated in Canada.”
“Oh, Rutherford? Then it’s most probably in safe hands. It’s well known he can’t be doing with any of that communist rubbish. I’m told he always has a stern word or two to say to his new assistants on the subject when he takes them on. Besides—he’s Lord Rutherford now, you know. Baron, is he?”
“Indeed, he is, sir. Baron Rutherford as of two years ago. Member of the House of Lords, President of the Royal Society and countless other honours,” Howgrave-Graham murmured.
“Mmm . . . I shall have a word with him. Look here—it’s this Kapitza chap who concerns me—any signs of . . . um . . . extracurricular activity?”
“Oh, yes. Lots! He’s a sociable type. Charismatic is the word often used to describe the charm he exudes. Witty, warm, an egalitarian, gives generous encouragement to the younger generation. Everyone loves him. He runs a lively association called ‘The Kapitza Club’ that meets on Tuesday evenings after dinner. The world’s best scientists make their way there to join in the discussions. As popular as the Kit Kat with some, I’m told. But they are vastly more choosy as to membership, of course. I hear they stopped Einstein at the door before someone realised . . .”
Joe only just held back a: “Sounds fun!” response to that.
“May I ask what measures we have in place?” Trenchard demanded. “We do have measures in place?”
“We have inserted penetration agents at both locales,” MI5 was pleased to reveal. “Watchers who alert us to the professor’s movements, contacts and, indeed, his plans to some extent.”
“Plans? What’s he planning?” Trenchard’s eyebrows signalled alarm.
“We know that he’s planning a trip back to his home country next summer. Nothing concealed or furtive about our breezy professor. He’s applied for the usual travel permits in the regular way.”
The foreign secretary was shocked. “What nonsense is this? I haven’t been informed! Are his travel documents in order? He must be stopped!”
“I’m afraid, Sir John, you will, like the rest of us, be told to reach for your rubber stamp and lengthen his lead. The chap’s Russian! He can go back to Mother Russia if he so desires. Indeed, he takes his family to St. Petersburg—or Leningrad, as we have to say these days—every summer holiday. We are not a concentration camp or a gulag. Permission for his exit will be granted, and this comes from the very highest level of government.” Knightly cast a glance full of meaning and perhaps warning at the commissioner. “Not a job for the police force, Trenchard. You must sit on your hands.”
“Nonsense!” came the rumbling objection.
To deflect a harmful altercation, Joe relieved his boss of the need to rattle his sabre. “Quite agree! The security service and the minister surely need no reminder that the police decide when it’s a job for the police and our decisions are scrutinised and judged by our courts of law. The Met does not exist to serve government. We retain the right, indeed, to arrest members of the government should the need arise. We serve the people. And I, for one, wait with bated breath to hear how I may best do that. I’ve heard nothing yet to make me decoke my pistol and polish my knuckleduster.”
“Make a note, Sandilands,” said the commissioner. “If the Law, in its idiocy, allows this walking disaster to return to a foreign, politically hostile and unstable country, we shall at least need to be satisfied that he is not taking anything of value away with him. Equipment, notebooks, blueprints . . .”
“We can’t check the contents of his head, unfortunately,” MI5 pointed out. “But I’m sure in this particular case there’s no need to get hot under the collar. He always comes back, you see. He managed to get out of the Russians a document guaranteeing him free passage out of the country whenever he wished to leave. He won’t stay. Nothing to keep him in Russia. They have nothing in the way of equipment. You simply can’t get the helium liquefiers up there, you know.”
Howgrave-Graham flashed him a look which said, “Don’t push it, Joe!”
The MI5 man made an effort to reassert his authority over the group. “Be that as it may . . . that is not the principal reason for calling this meeting today. Something more serious has reared its head. The Trinity Two and their tea party chums are not our immediate concern. Merely background. A little local colour . . .”
“Red . . .” sighed the foreign secretary.
“Their inclinations are, if not excusable, at least containable. Inside ivory towers where perversions belong. But, gentlemen, pernicious notions have been leaking out from Cambridge. And from a hitherto unsuspected source in that town. Deliberately spread, perhaps? They have reached the corridors of power. Next, the front pages of the London newspapers. After that, into the streets.” MI5 had an aversion to the press. And a sinister knowledge of the private lives of the barons who owned the papers.
“Oh, come now! From the secret, claret-sipping enclaves of Academe to the raucous beer-swilling crowds of the . . . er . . . Tottenham Court Road, that’s quite a stretch, Knightly,” Sir John objected. “The man in the street doesn’t give a tinker’s cuss for anything the scholars of our universities might be thinking.”
Lord Trenchard’s secretary however, was, Joe acknowledged, the most far-sighted and the most level-headed man on the Force. Bold, too. He now responded, beating Joe to the comment by a short head. “I think, sir, we would do well to remember the outcome of the Oxford debate of February this year . . .”
“We were all, even we beer-swillers, startled—no, shocked to the core,” Joe picked up the baton. “This seems as good a moment as any to remind ourselves of the motion the Oxford Union set itself: this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.”
“The motion being carried by 275 votes to 153,” supplied Howgrave-Graham, who didn’t even need to refer to his notes. He looked at Joe, quietly inviting him to advance further. Further down the path that leads to the chopping block, Joe thought. Ah, well. In for a penny . . .
“Not fight? We ex-soldiers were ashamed of the younger generation,” Joe could speak for the common man, he reckoned, being the commonest man at the table. “Our brightest and best young men, the future leaders of our country, by an overwhelming majority had declared themselves pacifists and traitors. The sensation created was tremendous. It was published worldwide. All the Empire watchers took due note: The Irish, the Japanese, the Russians, the Germans . . .”
His words triggered a response from Sir John. “Useless, of course, to try to explain to Johnny Foreigner that it’s just an English game—debating—and not to be taken as a serious statement of British foreign policy. They may leave such things to me,” he finished with a sly smile.
“The Greeks would have understood, naturally.” Joe had discovered that at such meetings any reference to the Greeks elicited an understanding nod and raised the stakes of the man who’d invoked their authority. “But modern men were only too happy to take it literally. Wilfully so, I believe. People tried to explain ‘whimsicality.’ A thankless task! Objectors spoke up against the lack of spirit and the disloyalty. They were hissed and heckled! Churchill, the old warrior, gave his views. He was stink-bombed! ‘No, we meant it!’ came the shout from a war-weary, undernourished and contrary nation. And they did! At that moment, they did. For once, the educated élite was speaking for the common man and woman. I understand, but I don’t condone. It’s a national disgrace, I agree, and has set a dangerous precedent. This is an age of fast communications and jittery politicians and we have to allow that the distance from the lecture hall to the street is not as wide as once it was.”
Joe saw that all eyes were on him. He’d been pontificating. Getting above himself. “Though, to its credit,” he added in an attempt to lighten the proceedings, “Cambridge University did threaten to pull out of this year’s boat race against Oxford.”
Dry snorting guffaws greeted this.
“Good for them! But too late to undo the damage. Sandilands has it right! A young friend of mine was hiking across Germany this summer,” Trenchard made his down-to-earth contribution. “Very embarrassing! Of course, the one thing every German he met wanted to know was: ‘Is it true? That you English have gone soft?’”
MI5 confirmed the fear expressed. “Just what the Fascist nations want to hear, of course. That Italian lout, Signor Mussolini, chortled that the Oxford men had just shown that ‘Britannia is just a frightened old lady!’ And he took it as a cue to redouble his attempts to infiltrate Abyssinia. Arms are being shipped in and stock-piled, a fort is going up as we speak. The man greets every British protest with a two-fingered salute, a reference to the Oxford debate and a hollow laugh.”
With the imagined sound of Italian derision ringing in their ears and creating a unity of purpose, the meeting seemed to be coming swiftly to a resolution.
Practicalities had followed thick and fast.
The whole problem had to be eradicated. But tactfully. Flash-bulb arrest scenes and public trials at the Old Bailey would unsettle an already anxious country. What with bloody old Ireland to the west, the Red Menace from the north and now this alarming Fascist state growing like a cancer to the south and east, the British public had enough to worry about. The suspicion that their own society was crumbling into immorality right under their feet would lead to collapse of confidence, disorder and riot. If ever calm was called for it was now. This was no case for a squad of Sandilands’s heavy brigade. The Branch should be held back and only used as a last resort. Could all then agree that for the time being the matter should be put in the hands of the assistant commissioner, who’d shown repeatedly in the past his ability to bring such nefarious activities to a discreet end?
They could.
It was not until this moment that, belatedly, a name was put before Joe.
“Pertinax. That’s our—now your—problem, Sandilands.”
Joe had the unsettling feeling that the meeting had suddenly come to a rolling boil. All the flummery about the Trinity Two and their high jinks was merely scene painting and now there swaggered on stage the central character. The charismatic physicist and the hospitable economist did not merit direct action from Joe apparently, apart from ensuring customs checked their luggage for blueprints, but this new presence seemed to bewilder and alarm the company to the point where they were handing him the information in short, sharp blasts. Pertinax was a hot potato being hurriedly passed from hand to hand:
“Not a university man, though he graduated from Trinity.”
“Rich. A man of influence.”
“Origins uncertain. Could be Russian?”
“Potential for mischief enormous.”
“Possible connection with this Kapitza bunch? We need to know. Sandilands, that’s where you come in,” MI5 said decisively.
The hot potato had landed in his lap. “Do we have any facts about this chap? All I’ve heard so far is speculation,” Joe said calmly. The potato moved on round the table again.
“Known to be a generous contributor to the new laboratory they’re all so pleased with up there. That’s a fact. Oh, yes! Hand Sir Gregory a request for microscopes, spectroscopes, dynamos and all the other paraphernalia and chances are that he’ll get out his chequebook. Could it be that he—or some other Johnny—has the lab in his pocket? If so—precisely what expertise are they buying from these gents in white coats?” Knightly was getting into his stride.
“We know they’re using enough electricity to power a large town and with all the stainless steel equipment, the freezers, the liquefiers, the cookers, they might well be searching for the secret of the perfect Victoria sponge! We’ll give you what we have. Over to you, Sandilands! Tell us what you propose and what we may supply.
”
Final landing of overcooked vegetable. Four pairs of eyes turned on him, waiting to see him flinch.
“Shopping lists,” he said firmly. “I shall need to know exactly what has been supplied to the laboratory over the last five years and I shall need at my elbow an expert to help me to make sense of them. I’m assuming, sir,” he spoke to Knightly, “that you have a man in place on the inside . . .” He waited in some suspense for the nod.
“Let’s call him ‘Hermes’ for the purposes of this discussion, shall we?” Knightly smiled, pleased with himself.
Howgrave-Graham chuckled. “God of science and guide into the underworld? Is that what you have in mind?”
“Indeed!”
“I shall need to meet him. Organise this however you will. At some point I shall have to have access to the building. I’m quite familiar with Cambridge. I’ve seen the Cavendish from the outside. It’s a fortress. An elegantly architected but formidable fortress. I shall need a Hermes as my guide into, through and out of the Temple to Science. As for Milord Pertinax . . .” Joe smiled to see the varying degrees of anxiety and alarm flicker over their faces. “We are already acquainted. I have met the man. I shall remind him, for he has most probably forgotten, that the last time we met he gave me an open invitation to visit him at his Cambridge seat. Last, but not least—though I’m sure I shall think of a further hundred things I need—a dozen or so signed arrest warrants to tuck away in my briefcase wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
At this point, the commissioner had given the table the benefit of his rare but sweet smile. The company had begun to relax, sighs and grunts accompanying slurpings of cold coffee from the bottoms of cups. Only Joe’s back had remained rigidly straight. He put his hands under the table and clasped them together to stop the trembling.
“With the brief that Sandilands is to find out what the Pertinax nuisance is up to and make him stop it,” had been the commissioner’s blunt stipulation.
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