Spy Out the Land

by Jeremy Duns

  ‘SUBJECT LEFT ARLANDA ON SK415, ARRIVING BRUSSELS 21.45. TRAVELLING AS HENRIK JANSSON, SWEDISH PASSPORT 88465602. BRITISH OPERATIVE FREDERICK COLLINS IS FOL LOWING.’

  He looked around again. The church was otherwise perfectly still, the sole movement motes of dust floating in shafts of sunlight.

  Morelius turned to the back of the notepad, where tiny numbers were listed in groups of five. He picked a line, then spent ten minutes encoding the message on a fresh page. When he’d finished, he crossed out the numbers he’d used and tore the completed message from the notebook. He folded the page in half, and again the other way, then reached for the pale green hymn book from the pew. He checked it was the right copy – there was a small pencilled asterisk on the bottom corner of the front page – and placed the piece of paper in the small pouch attached to the inside of the back cover.

  Then he closed the book and put it back in the pew. He stood, nodded at the altar reflexively, and walked back out into the street. On the next corner was a telephone booth, and he slipped into it and dialled a local number. He let it ring four times, then hung up and redialled. This time he let it ring twice before hanging up again.

  Less than a mile away in Södermalm, a young woman walked rapidly to the hallway of her apartment and fished some car keys from a bowl on the dresser.

  Chapter 43

  Rachel found the memorandum a few minutes after eight. It was just a couple of paragraphs long, but it told her everything she needed to know. Triumphant, she had dialled Sandy’s house, but nobody had picked up. She had got Tombes to keep trying, but after half an hour there had still been no answer. Deciding to bite the bullet, she’d prised the page away from its folder, placed it in her attaché case and marched out to her battered but trusty little Austin 1300.

  She had driven past the Harmigans’ house countless times, but usually averted her eyes from it. She knew it was absurd, but she found that if she ignored Sandy’s life away from her she could almost convince herself it didn’t exist. But she knew the address, a discreet square in Mayfair with its own padlocked garden. She felt like a Dickensian orphan with her nose rubbed up against the window just looking at it. She parked in an illegal spot opposite and ran up the steps.

  A woman answered the door a few seconds after she had rung the bell. Although she had never met her, Rachel knew at once that it was Celia Harmigan. She looked pretty much exactly as she’d imagined her: crimped hair, almost blue-black and falling to her neck, heavily kohled eyes in a pale face with a wide, almost masculine jaw, high cheekbones, a slash of red at the mouth, and a dark gown draped over her tall and terribly slender figure. Around her neck she wore a silver necklace with a striking pendant, long and thin and ending in a sharp tip, like the nib of a pen.

  ‘I’m looking for Sandy Harmigan. It’s urgent. I’m Rachel Gold, from the office.’

  Celia Harmigan’s lips parted slightly. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I know who you are.’ Her voice was lower pitched and more attractive than Rachel would have thought possible from her ghoulish appearance. Celia drew the door wider. ‘Do come in,’ she cooed. ‘You’ll have to wait, I’m afraid, as Sandy’s in a meeting.’

  Rachel stepped into the hallway. Here she was, then, in the heart of Sandy’s private world. It was, of course, immaculately tasteful. Directly ahead of her was a spiral staircase with gleaming banisters, and to the right an antique dresser and large gold-framed mirror. She suddenly had an image of her parents walking in, and cringed. Mum would have ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ like she had when she’d visited her rooms in Cambridge, and Dad would have nodded approvingly at Celia. ‘Nice pile you have. Very nice.’ And then at the first opportunity he’d have leaned in and whispered in Rachel’s ear: ‘Stay close to this lot, Rach – how the other half live, eh?’

  She dismissed the thought and took stock of the rest of her surroundings. To the right of the mirror a door was slightly ajar, a sliver of pale yellow wallpaper visible through it. Had Celia just come out of that room to answer the doorbell? Was that where the meeting was being held? And what bloody meeting? Sandy had told her he was going home to eat.

  ‘I just need to talk to him for a couple of minutes,’ she said to Celia Harmigan’s skeletal back. ‘Can he not come out?’

  The older woman turned, then leaned in so her face was hovering over Rachel’s. ‘I was wondering if you’d ever dare show your face in this house,’ she said. Her voice was as calm and polite as it had been before.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.’

  Celia registered the look of apprehension on Rachel’s face and smiled. ‘Oh, don’t be scared, I’m not going to scratch your eyes out. A few months ago I might have, yes, when I still wasn’t sure if you were screwing him.’ She laughed as Rachel flushed. ‘Oh, come now. You surely didn’t think I wouldn’t find out?’

  ‘Please, I don’t know what you think you know, but—’

  Celia raised a hand. ‘I had you followed by a grubby little man from Shadwell. You were rather careful, I’ll give you that, but then of course you’ve been trained to avoid tails. But once he showed me the photographs, I felt strangely empty, actually. All that hatred I had built up for you just wasn’t there any more. “My rage is gone, and I am struck with sorrow.” Everything’s in Shakespeare, don’t you find?’

  Rachel felt the blood rush into her eardrums and something rising in her throat, a mix of shame and horror. This woman had seen photographs, of her . . . She wanted nothing more than to turn round and leave the house, but at the same time she was glued to the spot. She couldn’t leave. She had to speak to Sandy.

  ‘I think . . .’ she said, ‘I think perhaps you’ve misunderstood.’

  Celia Harmigan’s eyes flashed at her. ‘Oh, no, Miss Gold, I’ve understood perfectly. It’s an adventure.’ She said the word with a sneer, her nostrils flaring. ‘Perhaps he’s even convinced himself he loves you.’ Her eyes flickered over Rachel. ‘Well, I’m sure you’re perfectly . . . lovable. But he won’t leave me, do you understand?’ Her jaw tightened. ‘That won’t happen.’

  Rachel was conscious of a soft, padding sound somewhere nearby. The door across the hallway had widened and someone was coming through, a man, brogues stepping over the thick carpet. Sandy. She caught a glimpse of a polished conference table behind him, and the dim shape of several figures seated around it, the one directly ahead of her wearing a dark checked jacket. She couldn’t see his face, but she was sure she recognised the jacket from the COBRA meeting – it belonged to Harry Bradley. What the hell was he doing here?

  The door closed with a discreet click, and Sandy strode up to her.

  ‘Rachel? Has something happened? More news of Dark?’

  She looked up at him. Her head was still dizzy from the onslaught by Celia, whose face remained glacially calm, for all the world as though she hadn’t just confessed to hiring a private detective to trail her.

  ‘Yes,’ Rachel managed to get out. ‘Can we talk?’

  ‘Of course.’ Sandy took Celia by the arm and whispered something in her ear. She nodded, and glided towards the door. Sandy turned back to Rachel.

  ‘Wait in there,’ he said, gesturing to a door on the other side of the hallway. ‘I’ll be back in a minute and you can fill me in.’

  ‘What’s the meeting about? I saw Harry Bradley.’

  ‘Yes, I’m smoothing things over with the Yanks. It just came up, and I wasn’t near the phone.’ He touched her arm. ‘Sorry. I’ll be back in a minute.’

  She nodded and, half-dazed, walked into the room he had indicated, which appeared to be his study. It was a near-replica of his office, with the same clubby furniture and gleaming dark wood. There was a large leather armchair in a corner of the room and she walked quickly to it and collapsed into its embrace. She realised her hands were shaking. She took a deep breath and tried to think through what had just happened.

  Celia knew. All right. She knew. She had followed her, she had photographs, and she was staying by Sandy
anyway. And yet, despite the shock of this, her mind was already racing elsewhere. There was something else going on here. She had the peculiar feeling she had not just stepped into a private world, but a secret one. And something about it was wrong, somehow. She needed to grasp it before the thought left her. Yes, Celia knew about the affair, but leave that to one side. What was her role? Harry Bradley was here, and several others, apparently having some sort of conference with Sandy. This was strange enough in itself. But Celia also seemed to be involved in some way – she had just walked back into the meeting room and Rachel felt sure she had emerged from it to answer the front door.

  Did Sandy keep her so well informed of Service business that he let her sit in on meetings with the head of CIA Station?

  She got to her feet again and walked around the small space thinking, her eyes taking in the bookshelves as she did. It was a fairly predictable collection, she saw: leather-bound editions of Dickens and Hardy sprinkled with some non-fiction about the Second World War. All very respectable, but she doubted Sandy had much time for reading. She stopped as she reached a spine that read ‘HARMIGAN’ in large typeface.

  Intrigued, she picked it from the shelf and saw the title. Safe Conduct. Of course, his memoir. She’d read a cheap paperback edition of it years ago, but the film stuck out in her mind more – it had become a staple of Sunday afternoon television. The edition she now held in her hands was a hardback, a first edition by the look of it. The jacket featured a striking watercolour of a man creeping along some docks, presumably representing Sandy on his mission in Saint-Nazaire. It was a key scene in the film, too, she remembered. Beneath the title, a line of blocky text read ‘The Most Extraordinary Memoir to Emerge from the War’. The back cover was taken up with a black-and-white portrait of the young author, his dark hair severely parted in the style of the day as he gazed confidently at the camera. He’d been a handsome devil, and hadn’t he known it.

  She opened the book and it fell open at the illustrations, most of which were photographs of him throughout his life. There he was training with his parachute regiment as a sombre-looking 21-yearold, followed by a snapshot of him in the back of a Sunderland flying boat, a jaunty smile and his thumbs aloft as he prepared to fly into Norway. What a war he’d had, and now he was here in Mayfair with that harridan . . . She flicked the page over and stopped short.

  It was a photograph, sepia-toned and grainy like most of the others. The sun shone down on a group of men seated in a stone courtyard. Bamboo poles were visible behind them. In the centre of the group Sandy peered out from beneath a straw hat, wearing a white shirt, baggy trousers and some pointed leather slippers, his face deeply tanned. To his left was a younger man, Asian, with delicate features, and to his right was another white man wearing shorts and holding an old-fashioned pistol. The caption read: ‘Irregular warfare school, Kelantan, December 1958’.

  The man directly to Sandy’s right was Tom Gadlow.

  She closed her eyes and tried to picture the photograph anew. It was something she had done for many years, since a day in shul when she was in her teens. It had been a warm morning and her mind had been drifting. She had glanced up and seen a woman seated a few feet away who she hadn’t recognised. Then with a start her features had somehow rearranged themselves and she had realised it was her aunt, Hannah. But that fraction of a moment when she had seemed a stranger had troubled her. She had always been very close to Auntie Hannah and previously would have sworn she’d have recognised her anywhere, at once. The moment had taught her that even if you thought you knew something or someone completely, early impressions could shape your perception of them and as a result you could miss things – data – that had been sitting there in front of you all along. You had to look at everything through fresh eyes, especially if you were convinced you already knew the full story.

  Over the years, the creation of such ‘Auntie Hannah moments’ had become part of her working methodology. Sometimes when she was looking at ciphers she tried to visualise them in her mind as concrete images, floating pictures she could travel around and examine until the solution eventually presented itself to her. But now her mind stubbornly refused to co-operate – she remembered the photograph of Gadlow, but however hard she tried she couldn’t manage to summon it up as a detailed image and felt overcome by frustration.

  There was a noise from just outside the room and Rachel opened her eyes with a start. She quickly shut the book and replaced it in the shelf, then turned to the door as it swung open. Sandy stood there, his hands clasped together expectantly.

  She smiled faintly, wondering whether she should ask him about the photograph or tell him that his wife had followed them and claimed to have photographic evidence of their affair. But what would be the point in either case? She had to think things through first, away from here. Right now she felt out of her depth, and almost claustrophobic. So instead she just nodded and with an effort dragged her mind back to the reason she had raced over here in the first place.

  ‘I think I know why Dark has gone to Brussels,’ she said.

  ‘Excellent. What have you found?’

  She smiled, despite herself, at the flattery. ‘Well, he’s been there once before, but it was nearly fifteen years ago and it was a very brief diplomatic mission, smoothing relations with the Sûreté after one of our agents was caught trying to frame a government minister in a honey trap.’

  ‘I remember that. Johnson, wasn’t he called? Quite a palaver.’

  She nodded. ‘We looked at every scrap of paper about it in the files, but it looks like a dead end. So I approached it from another angle, trying to put myself in Dark’s shoes now. He doesn’t know who’s taken his family, but we know from the Finns that he’s convinced they were African. So if I were him, I’d want to start by finding out more about that. But he’s at a serious disadvantage. He was always a Soviet expert – he knows bugger all about Africa. In fact, it turns out he has only visited the continent twice: Egypt when he was a child, and Nigeria in 1969.’

  ‘The Wilson incident.’

  ‘Yes. And when he was in Lagos then, the Head of Station was none other than Geoffrey Manning. Who moved to Brussels three years ago.’

  Harmigan rolled his eyes at the mention of the name. ‘Christ! That crank. But would Dark know about his new mission in life?’

  Rachel took her bag from her shoulder and drew out a single piece of paper. She unfolded it and passed it to Sandy, who eyed it sceptically.

  ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘About halfway down,’ she said, unable to keep the glint of triumph from her eyes. ‘It’s a translation by BBC Monitoring of a documentary about Manning, broadcast by Swedish radio last year. Conducted in his flat in Brussels.’

  Harmigan walked over to the armchair and seated himself in it, crossing his legs, then started reading the paper. Rachel watched nervously.

  ‘It’s the country’s most listened-to programme—’

  Harmigan raised a hand. Thirty seconds passed before he looked up at her. He was smiling.

  ‘Well done. I knew I could rely on you, my dear. Yes, this is it. He must have heard it and thought “Hello!” And now he’s remembered, and off he’s gone. Very well spotted. Now let’s think. Actions.’ His eyes travelled around the room as though seeking inspiration from it. ‘We need to send another signal to Brussels right away. Tell Thorpe to wait for Collins, and as soon as he arrives to drive him straight to Manning’s – is he still at this address?’

  Rachel gave a small nod.

  ‘Good. Tell Thorpe to hold back himself, though. I don’t want the Station directly involved in this.’

  She nodded again, but didn’t move or otherwise respond. The moment stretched out between them. Finally, she glanced over at the bookshelf.

  ‘I had a look at your memoir while I was waiting for you.’

  He tilted his head and smiled. ‘Oh? Awful load of crap, I’m afraid. The film was rather better.’

  ‘There’s a pho
tograph in it of you with Tom Gadlow.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s at a training school in Malaya. You never told me you’d worked with him in the Far East.’

  He smiled again, but now more coldly. ‘No. I haven’t told you lots of things about my life, I’m sure. It’s hardly a secret, as you can see. It’s been public knowledge since that book was published in 1961.’ He tilted his head back and examined her. ‘And I’m not sure I much like your tone, my dear.’

  She stared at him, weighing his own tone. He didn’t appear nervous, but then it would take a lot to catch Sandy off guard. He was the definition of unflappable.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But you can see why—’

  ‘I’ve told you before to resist this temptation of seeing conspiracies behind every corner. There was no reason to tell you this. None. I was briefly in SOE with Philby during the war, too. And Dark, for that matter. So was half the Service. You can play that sort of connect-the-dots all day long, but the result is you’ll conclude that everyone is some sort of double agent.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Edmund went barmy pursuing that sort of thinking. I suggest you steer clear unless you want to end up in the sabbatical game, too.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘Getting carried away.’

  He gave a curt nod. ‘Accepted. Now can you get back to the office and send that signal to Brussels? We don’t have time to mess around on this. Dark is due to arrive –’ he checked his watch – ‘within the next forty-five minutes.’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ she said. ‘But aren’t you putting a lot of faith in this Collins chap? What if Dark gets away from him?’

  Harmigan cocked his head and sighed. ‘I imagine I’ll consider involving the Station if it comes to that. But let’s not go through this again, Rachel. I told you why I need you here—’

  ‘Think about it, Sandy!’ He flinched, and she realised it had come out more aggressively than she’d meant. She tried again, lowering her voice. ‘Think about it. Dark’s desperate to find out who took his family. He evidently believes he can get some answers from Manning. He’s a crank, yes, but a well-informed one. Dark will leave Brussels the moment he has his take from Manning and head for wherever it indicates. So let’s think a step ahead. Say he manages to do that without Collins stopping him. To figure out where he’s gone and why, we’ll need to find out what it was he got from Manning. Are you sure you can rely on this Collins to do that?’