Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  Koller had decided from the start that the tube was to be his getaway. He already had a ticket for Victoria station, one stop along the line from Sloane Square. He waited a little under two minutes for a train, elbowing his way well into the crowd, his left hand pulling his lapel over his gun. A middle-aged woman, shopping-bags in both hands, objected to his shoving and tutted. ‘Some people,’ she said.

  He turned his back to her.

  A man in a dark blue uniform came rushing on to the platform and the terrorist watched, knowing that he had only three shots left and no escape; perhaps he could take a hostage and force his way to the exit. The woman with the shopping-bags might do. But as the man got closer he saw that his hair was lank and long and that he was holding the flat cap of a private security company in his right hand. When his train pulled out it was still a little under five minutes since the bomb had gone off and the first police sirens were sounding in the streets above.

  In Cadogan Gardens any further part Alfred Gold might have taken in the proceedings came to an abrupt end when, coming out of his full turn, he collided and dented the driving-side wing of a maroon Citroen crawling by the burning Jaguar. At almost the same time Gold’s radio link came to life. He picked up the mike, gave his call sign and asked his control to tell the emergency services to come to Cadogan Gardens where a man had been shooting at him, a car was burning, and somebody appeared to be badly injured. When he had said it once he had to say it again because taxi dispatchers are amused to receiving this type of message. This time he mentioned the injured person first. He could now see through his left window that it was a young woman. While he was saying all this the driver of the Citroen, a sixty-ish, florid-faced man wearing an RAF tie, came to the driver’s window. ‘Do you mind telling me what you think you’re doing?’ he snapped. Gold ignored him and repeated his message. Slowly, the red-faced man began to comprehend that something very untoward indeed had happened in which the traditional role of the outraged injured party would not be at all appropriate.

  When the cabbie had finished speaking they went together to examine Emma, who was lying very white and still on the pavement. Her hair and clothing were slightly singed. The plastic and foam components in the bombed car, particularly the seat stuffing, continued to give off choking black smoke.

  ‘We’d better get her out of here in case the tank hasn’t gone,’ said the red-faced man. He was scared, but determined not to let the side down. He wasn’t to know the tank had already exploded. Nor was Gold.

  They picked her up, the red-faced man at her shoulders and Gold holding her legs. They half-ran with her like that, the older man in his sheepskin coat and brogues, trotting backwards, looking over his right shoulder and breathing hard. The girl was very heavy. It reminded him of a rear gunner he had helped carry out of a crashed Lancaster once a long time ago. Deadweight.

  When they had covered what they judged to be a safe distance they put her down on the pavement as gently as two out-ofbreath men could. As they did so her hair fell away from her face to reveal eyes blue and lifeless and a gaping wound in her right temple. Blood trickled downwards over her cheekbone to her jaw. They looked back and saw that their route from the burning car was blazed in little drops of blood.

  It was at that moment that Toby arrived on the scene. He was an imaginative man. When he heard the explosion he didn’t think there goes another faulty gas main. He thought it was a bomb. When afterwards he heard the faint crackle of gunfire he didn’t think they were car backfires or that the residents of Belgravia were rehearsing for the Chinese New Year. He thought they were shots. He turned up gasping for breath in jeans, sweater and tennis shoes without socks, having sprinted round the corner from Cadogan Square.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. ‘Is she bad?’

  ‘I think she’s dead,’ said the red-faced man bluntly, feeling for her pulse. He was a doctor.

  ‘Do you know her?’ asked Gold. He sensed that this was something more than just morbid curiosity.

  ‘She’s a very close friend of mine,’ said Toby, leaving no doubt as to his exact meaning. ‘She’s just left my place. I live round the corner. What happened?’

  In a couple of sentences Gold gave him his version of events. The doctor vaguely took in the gold wedding-band on Emma’s left hand, but didn’t take much notice. It could mean anything nowadays.

  ‘My God,’ said Toby when Gold had finished. He crouched down beside Emma. Ht didn’t know what to do. He had an idea he should kiss her, but the lifeless eyes looked too reproachful. Then he saw for the first time the hole in her head caused not, as he supposed, by a bullet but by a glass splinter from one of the Jaguar’s windows which had bored into her brain. He began to feel sick and had to turn away and swallow hard several times.

  Some time later, when Emma was being loaded into an ambulance, her face covered by a grey blanket, he asked a policeman: ‘I suppose I’d better tell her parents?’

  The policeman said that they would do it if he liked, but it would be better coming from a friend. Toby was about to say he had never met them when it occurred to him that it probably would be better coming from him, otherwise there might be a lot of embarrassing questions asked about what Emma was doing in Cadogan Gardens. Of course, all their friends would guess exactly what she had been doing, and even if she had not they would never believe him, but the person he most wanted to assure was that poor rugger-bugger husband with his fists like jam-jars. His story would be that Emma had simply come round for a few minutes after shopping to ensure that his flat would be available for them this weekend as promised. That should do for Mister Dove, he thought. Once he had sorted this out he allowed himself to grieve for the death of his friend and occasional lover.

  The first police car was on the scene less than five minutes after the explosion, which was not bad going through the rush-hour traffic. It was a Q car, an unmarked police car crewed by uniformed, unarmed policemen who had received a radio message to go to Cadogan Gardens from where there were reports of a bombing and a shooting. This was in response to a 999 call from the publisher, who had staggered bleeding into his flat and called first the police and then the ambulance before almost passing out with pain and shock.

  As the Q car cut through Chesham Place they were advised to interview a Mr Alfred Gold, taxi driver, who claimed he had been shot at, and that the Bomb Squad and Special Patrol Group had also been alerted. The woman controller added that the gunman was still thought to be in the area and they should proceed with caution. One of the policemen produced his truncheon and examined it like a man who had just been given a booby prize.

  By the time the Bomb Squad had arrived and it had been decided between them and the Special Patrol Group - who, like the Squad, discreetly carried arms on all occasions - how much of the area should be cordoned off, almost eight minutes had elapsed. During this time the fire brigade arrived and started filling what was left of the Jaguar full of foam. It took another two minutes to establish from eyewitnesses that they were looking for a blond-haired man wearing a grey sports jacket who was last seen heading in the general direction of Sloane Square underground.

  London Transport’s underground railway network has a total of 278 stations. There are entrances and exits from Wimbledon to Watford Junction, from Ealing Broadway to Epping and Ongar. Approximately twelve minutes after the explosion the London Transport police and the Metropolitan police who together patrol these stations were asked, at the height of the rush-hour, to watch all stations for a blond-haired man in a grey sports jacket. They were told not to approach him because he was believed to be armed, but to radio for assistance on their personal walkie-talkies. They were not told how to accomplish their task with a force that any day of the week was one thousand men under strength.

  And, in any case, it was much too late. Koller was leaving Victoria station and bound for Bayswater in a taxi at least four minutes, and more like five, before the police, who are always present at that station, were asked to try and
check the torrent bursting from the underground for this particularly dangerous fish. Several blond gentlemen were netted and thrown back. One unfortunate Swedish professor of social sciences, who had left his hotel without his passport and was foolish enough to take offence about being questioned while going about his lawful business, spent three hours in custody. The Metropolitan police has its fair share of xenophobes.

  Koller got the taxi to drop him off a few streets away from the cabinet minister’s daughter’s flat. He walked to a pub around the corner and telephoned her from there to come and pick him up. He didn’t want to take the risk of walking the streets on his own, not even short distances, before he had changed his appearance. There was no sense in taking unnecessary risks. That was what amateurs did and it was why they were caught.

  As she drove to the pub in her mini Ruth heard a news flash over the car radio about the bombing. When she arrived he was sitting in a corner of the bar with his back to the wall, smoking a cigarette and sipping a cognac. She noted with some satisfaction that he looked slightly dishevelled. His hair needed combing, his face was a bit smudged and the top button of his jacket was done up in a way that made it hang badly when seated on a bar stool.

  ‘Had a busy day then, luv?’ she said.

  Dove was in Frenchie’s in Dean Street and he was beginning to feel drunk. He had started the evening on kir - it was Emma who had introduced him to the syrupy mixture of white wine and blackcurrant cordial - but had long since grown tired of it and gone on to beer. De Gaulle’s proclamation, a copy of the one some Free French officers had nailed behind the bar in the 1940s, swam in and out of focus. The voices of the other customers seemed to be getting louder, like a rising sea, but were totally indistinct. They were the usual mixture of journalists who wrote for small but prestigious weekly publications: actors, songwriters and poets obliged to review each other’s poetry to make a living. Black and white photographs of old stars from the boxing ring and the music-halls punched and weaved, smiled and almost kept the whole world smiling too, tap-danced madly up and down the bar, but could not disguise the fact that Emma was not there. And the worst thing about it, said Dove to this friendly cast for the twentieth time, is that I’ve no bloody idea where to start looking for her. No bloody idea at all. I don’t know any of her friends. His mood was mercurial. One moment he was anguished and the next enraged. How could she have done this to him? Where was she? (And with whom? No, mustn’t think that. That’s silly.) Was she all right? - that was the important thing.

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, where is she?’

  People looked round. Conversations stopped for a second or two, people looked knowingly at one another. Aghast, Dove realised he had spoken aloud. He pushed his way through the throng to the lavatory, but came back again quickly in case she arrived and left during his absence.

  Ten minutes before closing time he went upstairs to the payphone and dialled the vast number of digits that connects Soho with rural Kent. It was his last resort. He really hadn’t wanted to do it because he was sure they would not know anything and he would only make a fool of himself. After this, he told himself as he listened to the whirrs and clicks that preceded the ringing sound, I’ll try the police and the hospitals.

  Emma’s mother answered. He knew there was something wrong right away because she said: ‘Is that Stephen?’ Usually they avoided using his first name.

  6. A Theft

  Death embarrasses us, Dove thought, we have forgotten how to pay homage to it. We simply tidy it away, the great unmentionable of the age.

  It was almost over. Emma’s coffin was moving towards the red velour curtain beyond which lay the cremation ovens manufactured by the local gas board and exported all over the world. In India, the Hindu mourners gather around the funeral pyre of sandalwood to see the body curl and burn when the ghee and camphor is ignited. Here, thought Dove, the ovens that reduce coffin, shroud, hair, flesh and most bone to ashes are hidden from us lest the horrid disposal should destroy with it what shallow faith we may possess. As the coffin disappeared and the last prayers were murmured, he remembered that he had once met a builder whose job it was to reline the brickwork in the ovens: he had told him that sometimes his men discovered the odd femur that had resisted the flames.

  He was astonished at his objectivity. At first he had been consumed with grief, unable to sleep, unwilling to shave or eat or take the simplest decision. He had not noticed the passing days. A week might have been an afternoon.

  Perhaps this is what happened, he thought, as they filed out of the chapel of rest into a rain-shower. You only had so much grief to give this side of sanity and afterwards the mind froze, the senses anaesthetized so that you could prod and probe, bludgeon memories and, in the end, even observe the final rites without pain. But there was something else too, something which cut him off from the other mourners, for he had emerged from the pain and uncertainty having made an important decision. He was going to kill the man who had deprived him of Emma.

  The first person he saw outside was Toby. He was struggling into a trench-coat. Dove walked over and helped him on with it. Toby seemed to flinch and Dove put it down to the disturbing effect of the service. The last time he had seen him had been at the coroner’s court where they all sat on hard wooden benches, crushed in between reporters and the relatives of the principal in the next case, and heard the coroner intone: ‘Murder by person or persons unknown.’

  Funny, he thought now, how Emma should have begun and ended with Toby. That it should have been Toby’s flat they were going to spend the weekend in.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ asked the advertising man.

  ‘Better,’ said Dove. ‘And you?’

  ‘I think I’ll be all right in a minute,’ said Toby, his nervousness fading a little. ‘When do you go back to work?’ It was all he could think of saying.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Dove. ‘Not immediately.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ve taken some leave of absence. Having a bit of a holiday.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Toby. ‘Help you get over it.’ He almost added that Emma would have approved, but decided this was not the occasion to appear to have any sort of intimate knowledge of her. Instead he asked: ‘Where you going?’

  ‘I’m not sure ... Middle East probably.’

  ‘Terrible cuisine,’ said Toby automatically, ‘but the weather should be good. Lots of ruins and things.’

  ‘Yes, modern and ancient. Well, thanks for coming.’

  Toby saw with immense relief that Dove was holding out his big right hand and grabbed it like a drowning man. The teacher was mildly surprised at the passion in his grip.

  ‘Not at all ... least I could do ... keep in touch,’ Toby was muttering. Then he turned and fled, striding out towards his car, never looking back.

  There was a kind of wake at the Brigadier’s home afterwards at which a few selected ‘chums’ gathered to offer the Brig. and his lady their final condolences for the loss of their daughter over a glass or two of sherry or Scotch.

  A lifetime of foreign postings had thoroughly deracinated the Brigadier, and the old house in the West Country, with the crowded family vault in the village church, had long since gone. They had bought a home in Kent because friends and contemporaries had settled there. You could usually get a foursome together for bridge and find a chum to walk out with a gun, if you didn’t mind wood-pigeon and rabbits. Only foreigners and jumped-up scrap-metal merchants could afford pheasants nowadays.

  ‘I hear you’re taking a holiday,’ the Brigadier was saying. He was a tall man with close-cut, iron-grey hair who had a habit of swaying backwards and forwards on his heels, as if he had been caught in a gentle breeze. He was speaking in the nearest he could get to his normal voice, gruff and dipped, in a quite unnecessary attempt to soothe Emma’s mother, whom tranquillizers had already reduced to a state of cow-like docility.

  ‘Yes. I don’t feel much like work at the moment,’ said Dove.

  �
��Well, if you take my advice you will,’ said the Brigadier. ‘I intend to plunge straight back into it. Takes your mind off it.’

  Since he left the army he had done something in the city. Dove was never sure what. He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Don’t brood, Stephen. Emma wouldn’t have wanted that.’

  ‘You’re probably right. It’s just that I don’t feel like plunging back into teaching at the moment. Perhaps I’ll plunge into something else.’

  Damn, thought Dove. That was rude. All those plunges. He hadn’t intended it to come out like that. In fact, he would have preferred to tell the old soldier exactly what he had in mind, win his approval for once. But it was impossible to do this if he was serious about it, and Dove was very serious indeed. Apart from any other considerations, it would undoubtedly interfere with the theft he was going to commit in the next few minutes. So all he said was: ‘No, I’m not going to brood. I’m just going to have a quiet little think about things.’

  The Brigadier wasn’t at all put out by Dove’s outburst. He felt rather sorry for him. He had never been brought up to cope with these things, coping was the thing, and therefore was going to pieces. Otherwise, as far as the Brigadier was concerned, Dove remained a totally incomprehensible human being because he was entirely foreign to his experience.

  He strongly suspected that the social stratum Dove sprang from spent the years from 1939 to 1945 either in ‘reserved occupations’ or served in some earth-bound capacity in the Royal Air Force, probably as wireless mechanics. He also had the feeling that he might never see Dove again and he was not particularly sorry about it. Desperately he signalled for a chum to come over and rescue him from this painful conversation. After a preliminary reconnaissance the chum told Dove that it was his duty to go back to work, an act he equated with advancing towards your objective after your best friend has been shot beside you. The Brigadier said he could not have put it better himself. After a little more of this Dove excused himself and went upstairs, leaving the two old men to talk about him.