The Cilla Rose Affair

by Winona Kent

  She went to tear it off. What had Gino been talking about? she wondered. Large vans. Men at workbenches, fashioning things with hammers and screwdrivers. Was it something Harry was up to?

  Even after what Ian had told her, she found it difficult to believe that Harry—her Harry, who brought back bottles of liquor and scent for his staff when he breezed in from his travels abroad and never complained when they showed up late for work because he was just as guilty as the next person and knew they’d make up the time without being asked—it was difficult to believe that Harry would knowingly be mixed up in something as dishonest as what Ian had described.

  Still, she had been asked to sign The Act, and she had been told certain things by Ian’s father—things about Harry’s friends, most notably that woman, Nora Darrow, who was always jetting off somewhere or other.

  Maureen would be the one to talk to about that. Maureen was up on her gossip. She liked to think she was Nora Darrow’s best pal.

  Harry must have known whether his groups were legitimate or not, she reasoned, because it was Harry himself who rang up to double-check the departure times with the airlines, and if nobody was actually booked, then there’d be no record of them in the reservation system.

  Which meant he was only saying he was doing it to prevent her or Maureen from making the call.

  She tore the invoice off the printer and took it back to her desk.

  “Right then,” Maureen announced. “I’m off to the bank. Hold the fort down for a quarter of an hour, will you?”

  Sara waited until the office door had swung shut behind her.

  Then, she sat down, and opened the model railway enthusiasts’ file.

  Twenty seats on Northwest Airlines from London to Minneapolis to Las Vegas.

  Looking up the number for Northwest, she dialled, and waited momentarily in the queue. A reservations agent with an American accent identified herself.

  “Good morning,” Sara said. “It’s Young and Dailey, Romilly Square. I’m just double checking some bookings. Can you have a quick look in your computer for me…? Thanks.”

  Victor hurried across the road, adjusting his watch strap, buttoning the jacket of his suit. He was late for work, and not in the best of tempers.

  “Oy!”

  He ignored the shout, and carried on to the corner.

  “Oy! You! Mr. Barnfather!”

  The voice was uneducated, an eastender accent belonging to someone who cared very little for the niceties of polite society. Victor pulled up short, and waited for the young man with the wild hair and the Nazi swastikas and the torn denim jeans to approach.

  “Jogged your memory at last, have I, Mr. Barnfather?”

  Victor remained unsmiling. “It’s Kevin Darrow, isn’t it?” he said. He did not like Nora’s son, trusting him only minimally, and his maleficent acquaintances not at all. “What do you want?”

  “Got a little message for you from mother.”

  “Do you, now? And what has Mrs. Darrow got to say for herself, Kevin?”

  “You step into this alleyway with me, Mr. Barnfather,” Kevin said, with a grin, “and I’ll tell you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Friday, 06 September 1991

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Robin inquired, as he waited for his father to negotiate his way out of the car—a task which was taking him considerably longer than usual, due to the bandaging and the sling, and of course the painkiller he’d been injected with shortly before releasing himself from the Casualty Ward over the sternest of medical objections. “Do you want some help?”

  “I’m quite fine,” his father assured him, from the passenger seat. “No assistance is required.”

  Robin turned the road atlas sideways. Navigation had never been his strongest point, and his propensity for getting lost was worse when he was required to drive. He considered it somewhat of an accomplishment to have located the hospital on the first try.

  “Where is it you’ll be staying tonight?” His father had managed at last to climb out of the car.

  “I consider it a very grave intrusion into my personal affairs to tell you that.”

  “I consider it an absolute necessity,” Evan replied, handing him a notepad and a pencil from the glovebox. “Gentlemen who have narrowly missed being eviscerated by underground trains ought never to question the wisdom of their elders when it comes to their personal safety.”

  Begrudgingly, Robin wrote down the name of the hotel and its telephone number, tore the paper off the pad, and passed it back to his father.

  “Thank you,” Evan said. “Now go and enjoy yourself.”

  It was Victor who had unearthed the empty station underneath Romilly Square, selecting it from a list of subterranean installations he had been required to rate in terms of their potential vulnerability at the height of the Cold War.

  Since London Transport had no immediate plans for the station, the powers behind Seasound Radio had moved quickly to lease the topside buildings for the legitimate end of their business, while, underneath the surface, the abandoned passageways were being adapted for quite another purpose.

  Nora disliked Romilly Square. It was cold and dark and dirty, and seemed to her to be in a permanent state of near-collapse from the 1941 blast damage that had never been completely cleared away.

  She followed the circular stairway down to the access tunnel, then stepped across to the passageway that was the main storage area for her inventory. She switched off her torch: the lights here had been left on, casting murky shadows over the ruined walls. Somewhere over her shoulder she could hear water trickling.

  The wooden crates, she noted, grimly, that had been stored there for the past few months, were nowhere to be seen.

  “I’m surprised you have the gall to show your face.”

  She spun around. “Victor. You startled me.”

  “You really do astound me, Nora. After the foul-up you made with the Harris boy. Bringing him here. Whatever possessed you, you foolish woman?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Nora answered, quietly. “It was Kevin. If I’d known, Victor—you must believe me—” She stopped. “Who told you that was what had happened?”

  “Who do you think?” Victor said, glaring at her. “Harris himself. After he received the information firsthand from his son. After his son had found his way back to the surface. I’m intensely curious, Nora, about what you propose to do now.” His voice had taken on a distinctly icy tone.

  “I think we ought to leave the country until it all blows over. Disappear.”

  Victor gave her a wan smile. “We?” he inquired. “So far, as I recall, there’s nothing to link me to any of this except you. Your word is what they’re relying upon, Nora. Your sworn testimony.”

  He produced from inside his suit jacket a gun—an old German Walther he had inherited from a distant uncle, not easily traced and certainly quite disposable—and levelled it at Nora’s heart.

  “But we could go to Moscow,” she stammered. “We’d be welcomed with open arms—”

  “And how long,” Victor said, evenly, “do you suppose either of us would last there, Nora? I’m certainly not prepared to put up with their sorry standard of living. I can’t even begin to imagine you trying to make do. You ought to remind yourself, my dear, there will shortly be no more Soviet Union. The powers that be are more concerned with their blue chip investments abroad than with our outdated doctrine. They don’t give a damn about old spies who’ve outlived the politics of the Cold War in the west. To them we’re nothing but a couple of aging anachronisms. I’m quite content here, Nora, and if your death clears the way for me to retire from MI5 with a golden handshake and full pension, so be it. I believe this is where we must take our leave of one another.”

  “Wait!” she pleaded. “Please—wait. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this, Victor. I haven’t spoken to anyone—”

  “No? What about Harris? Don’t even bother trying to squirm out of this one, Nora. I know
everything.”

  Nora was stunned. “What?” she whispered. “What can Harris possibly have told you about me?”

  “Only that you were questioned by Special Branch—”

  “I haven’t been!” she protested. “I was in Sutton yesterday and my car battery failed. I was helped by a man from the RAC. He’s the only person I’ve been speaking to, Victor.”

  “And, Nora, that you’ve agreed to exchange your testimony for more lenient treatment in the courts.”

  “Another outright lie!” Fuming, she raised her hand to strike the gun away, to end the nonsense. “It’s a trick!” she exclaimed—as a long, rumbling shudder coursed through the tunnel—a train, she thought, at first—but a train would not have sent the overhead lights swaying, and a train would not have caused the passageway to shake and the floor to tremble, sending Victor stumbling sideways on one leg, so that his shoulder hit the curving plaster wall.

  Victor struggled to his feet. The overhead lights righted themselves. The shadows stopped dancing.

  “What was that?” Nora whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Victor replied warily. “But I have no intention of remaining here to find out. Goodbye, my dear.”

  He levelled the gun and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet went wild, embedding itself in the wall. Victor aimed again, but before he could fire a second round, another shudder rolled through the tunnel, beginning at the far end and building to a series of strong jolts as it travelled to the other.

  The shock waves threw him to the ground and sent the Walther skidding away, out of reach.

  As Nora stumbled towards the stairs, the floor heaved and the ceiling cracked, and an avalanche of sand and gravel surged into the passageway, followed by a torrent of cold water—and a menacing hiss.

  “What is it?” Nora shrieked. “What’s going on?”

  “Gas,” Victor gasped, battling the river of ballast and mud. “There’s an acoustic madman loose beneath London. Where the hell are the stairs?”

  Bewildered, Nora crawled towards the far end of the passage. “This way.”

  The tunnel exit was dark, its lights extinguished. She stood up. There were no stairs. The ceiling had collapsed and a wall of debris blocked the way out.

  Nora lurched around. “What did Harris say to you? What other lies did he tell you about me?”

  Victor’s eyes searched the swaying shadows for another escape.

  “Victor.”

  “That you’d been compromised by the discovery of those weapons and you’d agreed to cooperate. That you’d handed over the Jackson papers.”

  His words were accompanied by a long, low, rolling boom—a powerful swell of sound that reverberated deep inside their bodies and jarred their very bones. The tunnel heaved and contorted and cracked.

  “It’s not true!” Nora shouted, grasping Victor’s arm. “I still have the diary! He’s making it all up!”

  “And why would he do that?” Victor countered, shaking her away.

  “To trick you—to make you believe I’d turned against you—”

  A third jarring shock wave pitched them both to the ground. The overhead lights swung violently, flickered, then dimmed. Glazed bricks crumbled and, behind the cracking plaster, rivets popped and the cast iron skeleton of the station fractured, sending water spewing through the fissures, and dirt and mud and sand, and great slipping streams of liquid London clay.

  Victor groped through the mud, seizing Nora by the hair. “What does that diary say about me?”

  “Why?” Nora gasped.

  “You claimed there was nothing about me in the journal. You were wrong. There’s an entire page devoted to me. What does it say?”

  “Jackson followed you to Hampstead Heath. He witnessed one of your meetings with Kasparov. He listened to your conversation. And he trailed you to a drop in Kilburn, and after you’d gone he found half a dozen rolls of undeveloped film, which Kasparov retrieved a quarter of an hour later.”

  She pushed Victor away.

  “You ought to be thanking me for keeping that diary from Evan Harris, you idiot—not accusing me of trying to destroy you. I’ve probably saved your bloody neck.”

  “Listen to me,” Victor seethed, gripping Nora’s wrist, pulling her to her feet in the slime. “Never, ever, in my life, did I meet Oleg Kasparov on Hampstead Heath. We rendezvoused in cars—safe cars—that had been driven about London for three hours at a time to dryclean them. And never, Nora, ever, did I make drops in Kilburn. When Kasparov requested information I complied by leaving it at the top of Box Hill. That was our agreed dead letter drop. Overlooking Dorking. In the bloody trees. And no more than two rolls of film were ever handed over at any one time. It was a rule we had, Nora, a hard and fast rule.”

  “What are you saying?” she said, faintly, pushing the wet hair out of her eyes with her fist.

  “I’m saying the Jackson diary’s a bloody forgery. I’m saying you’ve been had.”

  “But it can’t be—”

  Her words of protest were lost in a final, shuddering underground convulsion. The tunnel walls bucked and buckled and groaned, and a slough of muddy water crashed down their length, drenching Nora, swamping Victor, plunging the passageway into sudden silence and utter darkness.

  “Victor…?”

  It was very quiet in the tunnel, and very dark. Nora reached out with both arms, touching nothing.

  “Victor?” she said, again, but there was no answer.

  Heart pounding, Nora felt her way along the wall, hand over hand, until she reached a place where some of the fallen debris seemed to give a little under the pressure of her fingers.

  She pushed again, and suddenly, with a creak and a crash, there was an opening.

  Clambering over the rubble, she inched forward, arms held out ahead of her. A few more steps, and her toes stubbed against something hard.

  She bent down and plunged her hand into the water. The hard thing was a ledge. She felt along it. No, not a ledge…a step.

  She stood upon it, and explored the water again. Another step.

  And another and another, going up.

  Nora fell forward and began to climb, scrambling on her hands and knees, out of the water, up, up—

  The water ended. The steps were dry and intact. She stopped, and felt for the wall she knew was there. She found the handrail, and stood upright.

  It was the way out.

  She’d found the way out.

  “I don’t suppose you lot down there would be at all interested,” radioed the special effects technician who’d been watching the progress of his work from an array of monitors in the back of one of the large utility vans, “but one of your little hamsters seems to have given you the slip. I’ve just seen her scampering down the road in the general direction of a very nice Jaguar. Was anybody planning to go after her…?”

  Ian hammered on the back of the special effects van. “Which way did she go?”

  “Thattaway,” the technician replied, jerking his thumb in the direction of Cambridge Circus. “Shouldn’t bother trying to catch up with her now, though, mate. She’s long gone.”

  Ian took a swing at the open door with the hard construction helmet he’d been wearing in the tunnel.

  The technician was in a more philosophical mood. “Never mind,” he said. “You’ve still got the other one. What did you think of the show?”

  “Fantastic,” Ian answered, gloomily.

  “It was, wasn’t it? Amazing what you can knock together with a little bit of money and some imagination. Do you know, I reckon if we’d had one more night, we could have made a runaway train burst through the tunnel wall for you. Still, never mind. Next time.”

  The tunnel, which only moments before had been disintegrating about Victor’s head, was strangely quiet.

  The water was draining away.

  There were voices, bright lights.

  Victor tried to run, but the floor was slippery; he lost his balance and skidded sidew
ays into the wall, which cracked with his sudden weight and crumpled inward, revealing its true composition: a thin veneer of hardened, quick-drying yellow foam sprayed over a shaped scaffold of wire fencing.

  Evan Harris extended his right hand. Begrudgingly, slightly bewildered, Victor Barnfather grasped it, and pulled himself up.

  “You seem lost for words, Victor. As you can see by the sling over my left arm, Nora’s hired man wasn’t a terribly good shot. And the woman you two sent round to my son’s hotel room this morning missed the mark completely: her crowning accomplishment was to assassinate a pillow.”

  The Deputy DG of X Branch glared at him, admitting to nothing.

  Evan patted his pockets and—after a fruitless search—discovered what he wanted hiding in the bottom of his sling; it was the diary he had shown to Victor in the murky depths of King William Street.

  “This is the genuine article, by the way,” he said. “What Nora arranged to buy for ₤10,000 was a copy. It was quite concise in every respect, but came with an added bonus—an extra page of entries devoted exclusively to you.”

  Victor was still glowering. “You made those things up,” he said.

  “Yes, we did,” Evan said, relishing his delight. “Actually, you’ve Emma Braden to thank for that. She concocted the stories, and we planted them. We knew that sooner or later you’d end up correcting the obvious errors. It was merely a matter of being there to record your words when the momentous event took place.”

  Victor nodded. The jumbled details of that night’s events were slowly sorting themselves into a pattern of logic.

  He’d been set up.

  “Diabolical, isn’t it, Victor?” Evan continued, enjoying himself. “We’ve had these plans in place—the rudimentary backbone of them, anyway, the location and the general program—ever since we discovered the building upstairs was part of an old Underground station. We’d have worked our way down here eventually—with or without Nora’s help.”

  “How long did it take you?” Victor said, brusquely, knocking aside a piece of the hardened foam wall. “Two months? Three?”