A Train of Powder

by West, Rebecca

  Not one of these restaurants was a mere nosebag. All of them were in the metropolitan nexus. Later Marshall and Kuznetsov were to eat in Kingston and in Wimbledon, and in such places a restaurant draws on a small, enclosed, local world, which will often find no clue to a stranger. But at these first six appointments the two exposed themselves to the scrutiny of a sprawling and well-informed system. At any one of them it was possible that people at the next table might be diplomats, or Embassy employees, and even probable that they might from time to time have attended a diplomatic reception. At any one of them the waiters belong to the upper circle of their profession, which has its own unwritten “Who’s Who,” far meatier than the printed version. At any one of them a table has to be booked. If Kuznetsov did the booking, it would be rash of him to give his own name, still more rash to give a false one; and if it were Marshall, the question might be asked at any moment, “Who is this young man who is going about with the second secretary of the Soviet Embassy?”

  It was so little surprising that Marshall had landed in the dock that it was very surprising. It was comprehensible enough that when Inspector Hughes of the Special Branch told how he had arrested Marshall and found the copied document in his wallet and searched his room in his parents’ home, there was no joy of the chase in his tone. Marshall’s counsel put it to him that the young man had a blameless record and had been given an excellent character when he left the Forces, and the Inspector drearily agreed. But he added with sudden and grim emphasis, “Better than normal.” It was not clear what he meant. It might have been that he had been nauseated at having had to watch for months this pitiable young man shutting himself up in a mousetrap. It might also have been that that character was framed in such strong terms of recommendation that, now Marshall had got into trouble, it appeared possible that at some point there had been fiddling with his papers. Perhaps without his knowledge, persons who wanted to plant him in the diplomatic wireless service had seen to it that he could produce a character which would make him seem an exceptionally desirable candidate. It was, after all, out in Egypt that it had first occurred to him to seek employment in that service.

  But that was dissolved in the general doubt. This oddly reckless pair had behaved in a way bound to arouse in any reasonably cautious person the suspicion that Marshall was a criminal; but it seemed not at all certain that he was going to be convicted of any crime. There were two counts of the indictment which related to the copy of the document which was found in his wallet. One charged him with unlawfully obtaining the information in the document, for the benefit of a foreign power; but the judge announced early in the trial that he was going to direct the jury to acquit Marshall on this charge, since it was information which had been given him in the course of his duties and he had made no effort whatsoever to obtain it. It was in fact the copy of a notice which was put up in each of the bays in which the radio telegraphists worked. Another count charged him with recording that information for the benefit of a foreign power, and there seemed little doubt that he could be found guilty of this offence, since an expert graphologist had testified that the copy was in his handwriting. But even this was not certain. Since it had been found in Marshall’s wallet, and there was no evidence that he had ever taken it out since he originally put it in, it seemed possible that he would be acquitted of that charge with its imputation of a desire to help a potential enemy, and that he would be charged again with the very much lesser offence of wrongly retaining the information. But the gravity of the case, the element in it which made his parents’ distress reasonable enough, lay in the three other counts, which charged him with having on three dates communicated information to Kuznetsov which could be useful to a foreign power. And there was not a particle of direct evidence that there had been any such communication at all.

  On the first date, April 25, Marshall had been seen to go to the Thameside town of Kingston. There he met Kuznetsov, lunched with him at the Normandie Restaurant, and went with him to a public garden by the river, where they sat on a bench for an hour and twenty minutes. Marshall was seen to take some papers out of his pocket, and he appeared to be explaining them to his companion; and he sometimes made a drawing on some paper laid on his lap, as if he were illustrating his explanations. If anybody halted in the neighbourhood of the bench he put away the papers; and when he left his friend and went home he looked nervous and worried. That was all the detectives could say. Nobody had overheard what he said or seen him give any papers to Kuznetsov.

  On the second date, May 19, Marshall met Kuznetsov in Wimbledon High Street, close enough to his home in Wandsworth, and spent two hours with him in a restaurant. But neither then nor on their last meeting, in King George’s Park on June 13, was a word of what they had said taken down by the detectives, nor did any papers pass between them.

  It seemed quite likely that he would be acquitted on these major charges until he went into the witness box to give evidence on his own behalf. There he damned himself. He was in all things a contrast to his parents. His swaying, fidgeting height shot up out of the witness box like the rootless saplings that grow out of the crevices of bombed buildings; it did not seem possible that he should have been the child of this amply made woman, this compact and vigorous father. The boy shifted from foot to foot as he testified in a high, weak voice, which the judge and the counsel found hard to hear. This reluctant trickle was different from the slow, full river of sighs and persuasive murmurs and passionate exclamations with which his mother had tried to suggest his innocence, or the cascade of words with which his father had tried to sweep away his guilt; and it was flowing in the opposite direction.

  He told an incredible story of how he had come to know Kuznetsov. He said that when he had come back from Moscow he had found that he had failed to return a pass issued by the Soviet government which all British Embassy personnel had to carry in case they were stopped in the city. Though it had been issued to him by the Embassy officials, he did not hand it back to the Foreign Office, and accounted for this absurdly, by saying that he “did not want to involve the Foreign Office” if he should have handed it back before he left Moscow. He returned it to the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens, and not by post. He took it himself, and when he explained the purpose of his visit to the doorman, he was taken in to see Kuznetsov. He implied that this was the first time he had ever met him; but it is to be noted that Kuznetsov had been sent from London to Moscow the previous autumn and had been there during the last three months of Marshall’s service in the British Embassy there. With him he had a conversation which immediately engendered a feeling of friendship. “We found,” he said in his statement, “we had a good deal in common and we looked at life in the same way. I told him I was still working at the Foreign Office and we agreed to meet again.” He gave the duration of this conversation as a quarter of an hour.

  In his statement he also said, “I gave him my address and told him I could not possibly meet him at home as my parents would not agree to such a proposition.” Since he had also asserted that this friendship with Kuznetsov was of a perfectly innocent and personal nature, unconnected with the passing of information, he was cross-examined as to his reason for making that remark. He answered, “I told him that because my people’s political views are opposed to my own.” Neither the prosecuting counsel nor his own counsel had asked him whether he was a Communist, and it had not appeared in his statement. His vague complaint of feeling a social misfit at the British Embassy had not been accompanied by any avowal of Communist sympathies, and most people who had seen a vision of him being snubbed by arrogant diplomats and had thought of him as spying out of resentment against this humiliating experience saw him as doing it impetuously, as a young clerk who has had a talking-to from the boss might buy the Daily Worker for a few mornings. The authorities had in fact had no suspicions regarding him. But he had now made it quite plain to the jury that when he went to see Kuznetsov he had already championed the Communist cause so definitely that it
had caused disputes at home. The voices of his parents, asserting that he took no interest in politics but was absorbed in his records and his film magazines and his silk mats, sounded through the memory and now seemed touching and sacred.

  Marshall made two more serious slips. He claimed that for the most part he had talked with Kuznetsov on political subjects: on the Russian way of life, on the division of Germany, on the war in Korea, on the unrest in Malaya. He explained that when he was sitting with Kuznetsov on the bench in the public garden at Kingston, he had been showing him papers on which there were written “general summaries of the news” and that the drawing he had shown him was “a map of parts of Russia in connection with the division of Germany.” This was, of course, heart-rending stuff. It would be unlikely that the second secretary of the Soviet Embassy, an able and experienced man of middle age, should have spent an hour and twenty minutes listening to “general summaries of the news” and looking at maps of Russia set before him by any radio telegraphist of twenty-four—least of all by this radio telegraphist, whose every word betrayed a simplicity of mind so great that its effect was as disconcerting as complexity; whatever he said he made the listener think back along winding routes in search of the naïve misapprehension on which his view was based. The attorney general suggested to him that on the papers there had been written the call signs of a number of wireless stations, and that the map he had drawn showed wireless circuits. This he denied, and he was asked again if he maintained that all he and Kuznetsov had talked about was Germany, Korea, and Malaya. Tossing his long head, he answered in a tart and reedy tone, “Yes, and we exchanged cultural information on Moscow.”

  This perfect specimen of Daily Worker English dashed and depressed the court. Such words would come naturally only to a young man who had taken a linguistic tan from exposure to the fierce rays of Communist prose; and it takes time to get a tan. This had, of course, no evidential value, and it should have had no effect on the jury, though God preserve any of us from saying “sibboleth” for “shibboleth” quite so clearly when we are on trial. But Marshall’s third slip was something which the jury had properly to take into account. When he was asked about the copy of the secret document found in his wallet he said, pouting, that he knew nothing about it. Peevishly he insisted on oath that he had not written it, that he had never transcribed the notice which was put up in his bay, and that he had no notion of how the copy came to be in his wallet.

  He had asked the court to clear a high hurdle. To accept his story one would have had to believe that the police had obtained this document and specimens of Marshall’s handwriting and given them to a reliable forger to make a copy which could be fathered on Marshall, and then, after taking all that trouble, had planted it on the wrong man. For they would have had a watertight case had they found it on Kuznetsov, but instead they found it on Marshall. It might be argued that the police shrank from the delicate international situation which would have been created had they found evidence that a Soviet diplomat had been acting as a spy; but they had shown no signs of shrinking from that hazard; they had, on the contrary, been advancing towards it with every sign of delighted appetite. They had, after all, searched Kuznetsov, after he had announced that he was second secretary of the Soviet Embassy, as they blandly said, “before this information could be checked.” It was quite impossible to swallow Marshall’s story; and it was no surprise to anybody that the jury found him guilty of the charge of having copied the document.

  The general necessity for public trials can only be realized when a particular necessity forces the judge to clear the court for part of a trial. The remainder never quite makes sense, just as the face of someone whose eyes or lips are hidden is not really a face. All the evidence regarding the contents and importance of the secret document which had been copied, Marshall’s work, and the meetings at Kingston and Wimbledon, were given in camera, and the counsel’s speeches showed a corresponding evasiveness. So, too, was the judge’s summing up, which was delivered on the morning of the second day, after a night which, it could be seen, had been sleepless for the Marshall family. They were all much more markedly themselves than they had been before: the father went about with his jaw protruding and his fists carried clenched and forward, as if ready to spar with the spirit of the Old Bailey; the mother was Volumnia; the son, dutiful and vigilant, followed them like a stretcher-bearer. The judge’s summing up lasted till noon, and then the jury retired. It was obvious that they would take some time to consider their verdict, but Mrs. Marshall stayed in court, splendidly but not self-consciously grouped with her other son, while her husband stood in the corridor and sipped from a glass of water, as if it were poison he were forcing someone else to drink. There was certainly reason for them to hate someone, after their son’s appearance in the witness box. For he had not been rehearsed. Even had he been wholly innocent of the charges, it must surely have occurred to Kuznetsov that he was a dangerous friend to an employee in the British Diplomatic Wireless Service, and that some day the boy might be questioned about the acquaintance; and he might have warned him to keep silent about his Communist sympathies. If Marshall were guilty, then Kuznetsov’s negligence was even more shameful. He should have been warned that if any copies of documents were found on him he should admit to having copied them but deny having shown them to anybody, thus getting away with a lesser offence and enabling kindly people to think that he might be a credible witness and speaking the truth when he denied the graver charges.

  After an hour the jury came back and the foreman announced that they had found a verdict of guilty on all four counts that remained, but added that they wished to add a rider, as the British call a recommendation added to a verdict. Riders are not encouraged in the English courts, for they are felt to be an encroachment on the constitutional powers of the judge to pass sentence according to his own unfettered discretion, so the judge replied that it was preferable that a plain verdict of guilty or not guilty should be returned, and the prosecuting counsel concurred. But the foreman gently insisted. “We ask,” he said, “that the prisoner be shown the utmost mercy. We feel that he has been led astray.” The object of their pity was shifting his balance from one foot to another, pouting his lips and biting them back, and giving every now and then a simultaneous toss of his head and slight twist of the hips, and indeed it was unbearable to think of the full weight of justice descending on him.

  The judge announced that he would hear some further details of the case and give sentence after the luncheon adjournment, and with a shrug Marshall turned to go down the steps inside the dock to the cells. Mrs. Marshall ran forward and beat on the glass panel that surrounds the dock, calling to him, “Keep your chin up, boy.” Marshall looked at her. It was the first time during the trial that he had looked at any of his family. He gave her a faint smile and made a motion, faint also, of his hand towards his father and his brother, then turned back to the warders and went down the steps. A family who were in a position to say to a son, “We told you so,” but had not said it, might find itself greeted in just that way by their son when their prophecies had been so completely justified that he was far too humiliated to thank them for their forbearance.

  As Mrs. Marshall left the court she cried, “There is no British justice.” She protested again when she came back after the adjournment, and the court was cleared again, to enable the judge to hear some evidence about the contents of the secret document which had its bearing on the problem of how much leniency he might show. She turned her back on the door and took up a stand beside the dock, with a defiance not the less genuine because she knew she would be led away. So in the Balkan mountains the superb sheep dogs often stand in the way of an automobile till the last minute, registering hate of the modern things though they know quite well that at the last minute they will have to yield. She went out, and the day became tinged with farce; for it is farcical when a member of the Secret Service is called to give evidence and is being so secret just at that moment that he canno
t be found. Then we were all in court again, and Marshall was asked if he had anything to say before sentence was passed on him. With childish irony he replied in his unresonant voice, “I have. The learned jury in their wisdom have found me guilty of the offences with which I am charged but I still say I am innocent.” He thought he was parodying the pompous jargon of the law, and had an impression that the word “learned” is sometimes used at trials, and so it is; it is sometimes applied to judges and to counsel, but it is never applied to the jury, for the whole point of juries is that they are unlearned, they are chunks of laity. The mistake was a measure of the lightly furnished state of the boy’s mind.

  The judge then told Marshall that he had been found guilty of grave offences but went on to say that he was prepared to assume that they had not been committed for the purpose of gain. This was probably correct. Marshall said in his evidence that when he and Kuznetsov dined together Kuznetsov paid for the meal and he paid for the drinks, and if, as he said, they drank wines, this might be the heavy end of the load. He was a spender, far beyond the habit of his kind. Foreign Office employees are paid well for Moscow duty, and while he was in Russia his salary and allowances amounted to more than a thousand pounds a year, on which he paid no tax. This would be double, or more than double, the sum on which most of his neighbours in Wandsworth would be keeping their families. There were few opportunities for spending money in Moscow, so most of the employees sent large remittances home to their families. But Marshall did not do much of that, not because he was ungenerous but because his parents had no feeling that he ought to contribute to their upkeep. Some time after he returned to England it became apparent that his father was going to be prevented by the injury to his back from going on with his odd jobs, and then he told his mother that he intended to make her a regular allowance. She objected, “I don’t like taking your money, boy,” and he answered, “Don’t be silly, Mum, you might just as well have it. If you don’t take it it will all go on records and books.”