Material so secret that its very existence had been kept from the Soviets.
Malcolm Bryant scribbled himself a reminder note.
We made our first call on the Draxes on a beautiful afternoon in early May. Mr Frampton had polished the Wolseley until the whole world was reflected in its lustrous enamel, we had all dressed up, and as we purred through the Stag Gate into Charborough Park I felt like a character from a novel by Charlotte Bronte.
‘Welcome to our humble home,’ Admiral Drax said as he handed me out of the car. He had dressed in what he called his ‘Charborough kit’ – grey flannels, a Harris tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a soft brown country hat, a battered Meerschaum stuck in his top pocket.
‘False modesty does not become you,’ I said with mock severity. ‘This – ’, I gestured to the stately mansion behind him, lapped by its emerald lawns and with its windows glittering in the sunlight, ‘this would take anyone’s breath away.’
The tea things had been laid out on the patio and we sat in the warm sunshine getting to know each other. It was quite a party. Three of the four Drax girls were there, as was the local doctor and the rector of St Mary’s and his wife. Peacocks strutted around the tea table, Soames the butler hovered in the background, and plate after plate of scones, cakes and sandwiches arrived to keep the children happy.
‘Norma, you must come and see my surprise,’ Kathleen said, getting up and taking my arm. ‘It’s called the Hanging Tree, and I’ll guarantee it will give you goose bumps.’ The Hanging Tree was at the point where the manicured gardens gave way to the wildness of the Park itself, a huge and obviously ancient oak lying on its side like a tumbled giant. It was still alive, its tortured, tangled branches covered with a misting of fresh green leaves.
‘It’s very, very old – well over five hundred years old,’ Kathleen said. ‘It was toppled by a huge storm that swept in from the Channel sixty years ago. When they came to have a look next morning, they saw that the upturned roots had dragged human skeletons and bits of armour out of the ground. The police had to investigate of course, and they found a score of bodies, all very old indeed. The bits of armour identified them as members of the Bankes family and their retainers, and it was clear that they had all been murdered. Probably hanged from the tree itself.’
‘That must have been a bit rich for the Bankes, on top of blowing up Corfe Castle,’ I said. ‘How did they react?’
Kathleen grimaced. ‘They’d just made up their differences with us at the time, but of course the discovery caused the row to break out afresh. The Bankes did a little historical sleuthing and discovered that the murdered men must have been members of a group which had visited Charborough Park after the Civil War and simply disappeared.’
‘Is the row still going on in earnest?’ I asked.
‘It’s childish, I know, but yes, the feud is still very real even today. I saw Mary Bankes at the library in Bournemouth yesterday, and the silly woman actually joggled me as we passed each other. But I’m just as stupid. On the way out I said to the librarian – loud enough for Mary to hear – “Can the Bankes actually read?” It’s a disease, Norma. Hatred is a disease.’
We stood beside that awful old tree and I suddenly shivered. ‘There is a man who hates Denis and me,’ I said. ‘I think he used to love me, but it has turned into hatred. He’s hurt us once or twice in the past, and I feel sure he’ll try again one day. It’s not a nice feeling.’ I don’t know why I mentioned Malcolm, but Kathleen took my hand and smiled so warmly that I was glad I had.
‘You’re safe in Almer Manor,’ she said. ‘I think there is a spirit in the Manor that won’t allow anything bad to happen there. Don’t you sometimes feel it? As if there’s just a whiff of fairy dust floating in the air.’
I remembered the first night we’d prowled around the Manor by torchlight, and nodded my head in agreement.
After tea Reggie – he insisted on being called Reggie – took the five of us on a tour of the house. Our first stop was a huge oak chest in the hallway, carved with the Drax arms and sealed with a ferocious-looking bronze padlock. ‘Behold – the Drax family fortune!’ Reggie said. He produced an ancient key, unlocked the padlock, and threw open the vast old chest.
It was empty except for a small pyramid of mothballs.
It was clearly a much-practised jape, and the children laughed as they were meant to. But I found it a little sad. Reggie was one of hundreds of English landed gentry who were fighting tooth and nail to cling on to the heraldic properties that had defined their families for centuries. The new government’s tax on unproductive land, and soaring death duties, were grinding the landed gentry into the dust. Reggie and Kathleen had loved Almer Manor, but had sacrificed it in order to keep the Park and all that it represented.
We climbed Charborough Tower, a folly built during the Draxes’ affluent years, and looked out over the rolling countryside. This was where the heroine of Two in a Tower had fallen in love, and where Thomas Hardy himself had caught the influenza from which he had died. It was also here where officers of the Dorset Volunteers had posted lookouts to warn of any landing by Napoleon Bonaparte.
History was everywhere, just waiting to be touched.
History had very nearly touched Reggie up here, too. He told us the story propped up against the stone parapet, his Meerschaum puffing Turkish smoke out over the Dorset countryside. ‘The Draxes have suffered from a scarcity of male heirs for generations, so when my son was born I came up here on the double to raise the family standard. We hadn’t flown a flag in ages and the cord had jammed at the top of the flagpole, so like an ass I shinned up the post to clear it. I’d just come down when the whole bag of tricks – banner, rope and the flagpole itself – toppled gently over the side and crashed to the bottom. The flagpole was rotten to the core. Ten seconds earlier and I’d have gone with it.’
‘A case of heir today, gone tomorrow,’ Denis smiled.
We sat in the thin gold sunshine for quite half an hour, mesmerised by the sea of trees beneath us and the hills and dales, copses and neatly quartered fields that stretched to the misty horizon. Almer Manor lay like a tiny doll’s house just outside the walls of the park, its apple orchard ablaze with blossom and daffodils picking out the curve of the driveway. My heart was suddenly racing, and I had to steady my breathing to contain the happiness that welled up in my breast like a tidal wave.
We really were home and safe at last.
In his musty London office, Malcolm Bryant was also happy. Happier than he had been in ages. He sat at his desk contemplating the pile of yellowing Ultra message forms on his blotter, and smiled. Across the room, his assistant also smiled. Ann Last had felt sorry for Malcolm, dragged back to London at the whim of the MI5 mandarins and thrust into the boring, arcane world of ciphers, presumably as ‘punishment’ for some imagined sin. But Venona was proving to be far from boring. In fact, from a poisoned chalice it had been transformed into the Holy Grail of the Intelligence world almost overnight.
Venona had unearthed an extraordinarily successful Soviet spy network – a network that had tentacles stretching into the highest echelons of the US and British Governments. It had even penetrated Project Manhattan, the West’s most secret undertaking. Manhattan had produced the atom bomb that had knocked Japan into submission, and the thought that the Soviet Union was trying to steal its secrets had put Washington and London in a flat spin.
And then, just weeks before, cables had been decoded that suggested the worst of all possible scenarios – that there were Russian double agents at the very heart of Western Intelligence. Orders had gone out to give Venona the highest possible priority, and to identify and catch any traitors it uncovered at all costs. Something close to paranoia was sweeping the usually stolid corridors of Leconfield House, MI5 headquarters in central London. Anyone resisting Venona, or even showing reluctance to cooperate with it, was automatically suspected of being a spy.
Malcolm had flexed his Venona muscles th
at morning – with hugely satisfying results. He had visited Mrs Davis, custodian of all wartime Ultra messages, and demanded the London–Melbourne traffic for the period 1942 to 1946. The thin-lipped woman who met him at the counter had sniffed. ‘You will need to go through the proper channels, I’m afraid. I will want the proper signatures, and I will need at least a week’s notice before I could even think of releasing . . .’
‘I don’t have time to go through the proper channels, Mrs Davis,’ Malcolm had said crisply. ‘I need those messages within the next half hour. If I don’t get them within that time, I will have no alternative but to note that you have had time to tamper with the documents. I hope for your sake that I don’t have to do that.’
Mrs Davis had opened her mouth in protest but Malcolm had held up a peremptory hand. ‘I need them for Venona, Mrs Davis. If you feel you need confirmation, please have a word with Mr Hollis. But it had better be a very quick word.’
He had the messages in his hands within twenty minutes, and brought them back to the cubbyhole office he shared with Ann as a hunter brings home a prize stag shot on the run.
‘What I want you to do,’ Malcolm said thoughtfully, ‘is to have a good read of all this stuff and sort out any messages which in your opinion might have been of interest to the Soviets back in those days.’ There were several hundred messages in the pile, each requiring to be decoded and all stamped ZIP or ZYMOTIC in the characteristic purple ink used by MI6. A quick glance at the cover-notes – single-sentence summaries of the contents of each cable – had shown that most of them dealt with Germany’s turbulent relationship with Japan. Diplomatic traffic would have been of only lowgrade importance to a Russia fighting for its life, but amongst the dross there might just be gold.
Ann Last took a bundle of messages back to her desk without a word and set to work immediately. A small, fine-boned woman in her forties, Ann had been a fixture at Leconfield House almost since MI5 had moved in. Initially a stenographer and record keeper, as soon as her quick intelligence and photographic memory had been recognised she was made a desk officer. Her job for years had been humdrum but vital: to trawl through all the material flooding into MI5 and to make the links that turned raw intelligence into useful information. It was rather like working day after day at an endless jigsaw puzzle, but it was a game Ann enjoyed – and had a genius for.
It was a job that over the years had given her immense power: not only did she have a finger in virtually every intelligence pie but she also knew precisely where all the skeletons were buried. As she began to read through the Ultra decrypts, the thought of that power came into her mind. She was determined that Malcolm was not going to be pushed around anymore. It wasn’t anything banal like affection, this determination that Malcolm would have her whole-hearted support – Ann was a policeman at heart, and she had recognised in Malcolm a colleague cut from the same hard, uncompromising cloth. For twenty years she had seen perfectly good MI5 bills squandered. Traitors had been identified, evidence assembled, but then – nothing. The results of sometimes years of investigation thrown away by an agreement amongst gentlemen. A formal shaking of hands, a discreet resignation, perhaps a fabricated story for the press, and yet another traitor let off. No doubt to laugh up his sleeve at the lily-livered morons who ran Leconfield House.
At times she had almost suspected treachery at the very top of the service to which she had dedicated her life, and the anger she had felt at the very thought made her burn and tremble.
‘If we catch someone, we’re not going to let him slip out of our grasp, are we?’ she asked abruptly, and Malcolm had looked at her with cool, certain eyes.
‘No. On my life, we won’t,’ he said, and Ann Last believed him.
Chapter Forty
Summer crept up on Almer Manor quietly, without fuss or fanfare. At first Denis and I woke to a pink haze of apple blossom from the trees just outside our windows, then to the delicate green of spring. Imperceptibly, as the days passed, the leaves on the apple trees darkened to lustrous green, the skies behind them deepened to azure blue, and the sun lit the bedroom with bars of gold. Delma brought us our tea and the papers at seven, and we would lie abed, reading and dozing and listening to the larks, until childish voices in the walled garden warned us it was time to face a fresh new day.
June, July and August 1949 seem in memory to have been a blaze of endless sunlit days and long silver twilights. I remember so well the smell of fresh-cut lawns, the taste of the tart little apples we harvested, and the gentle murmur of pigeons on the afternoon air. If I could only exclude the pain of what was to happen, I know that I would remember those days as the happiest of my life.
We had no pressing duties – our investments ensured that we would never have to work another day in our lives – but our days were nevertheless full and busy. Denis worked in his study for an hour or so each morning, talking to his brokers on the phone, adjusting his share portfolio to take advantage of an improving world economy. My task was to run the house, and with Mrs Frampton’s help it was a pleasure. We’d meet over a morning cup of coffee in my sewing room, and I’d approve the menus for the day and perhaps become involved in some little drama from the village. Mrs Okeford might need an operation on her hip, and I’d make some small contribution, or Jack Gillingham might have been arrested for something or other he hadn’t done, and I’d arrange for him to see our lawyers in Bournemouth. And then we would simply chat, happy in each other’s company, the world an easy and dependable place around us.
The children had their lessons between ten and twelve, and I’d sometimes pop in to see how they were going. Morning lessons were ‘the humanities’, which in Win Heppenstall’s book meant painting and drawing, or discussing local history, or perhaps a lesson on natural history. I remember that one project was to find out whether the aggressive grey squirrels from America had taken over Bluebell Woods from their ancient English cousins, the red squirrels. The project gripped all our imaginations, and we’d walk up to the woods day after day, trying to spot the shy little creatures and to count the numbers of each species. The woods were very old – they had been mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 – and we were thrilled when our surveys showed that the squirrel population was still overwhelmingly English. Something precious had been conserved, and our hearts were gladdened.
Win also organised educational trips to Lyme Regis, where the beach was rich with fossils, and Denis and I would sip tea in one of the fashionable seaside tearooms as the scavenging party did its work on the pebbly strand. Another reason to visit the area was that the Duke of Monmouth had landed there just before the Battle of Sedgemore, and Win would declaim the story of the ill-fated Protestant rebellion as the children sat spellbound on the sea wall, gulls screaming about their heads.
Win did her ‘serious’ tutoring – reading, writing, arithmetic and Latin – in the afternoons, with only the two boys involved. They had some way to go to meet the entry requirements for Taunton, but Win was confident they would make it. These sessions lasted from two till four, and about three thirty I would begin to see a boyish face appearing at the schoolroom window, peering down longingly as afternoon tea was assembled in the walled garden.
Afternoon tea under the apple trees became a precious tradition. Denis and I set out the long chairs about three o’clock, and read and dozed until Mrs Frampton brought out the tea tray, loaded with sandwiches and cakes. Then, like some predictable conjuring trick, the children would appear, first little Frances, sleepy-eyed from her rest, then the boys, ebullient with pent-up energy. After tea, it was cricket, with Denis bowling and each child taking turns to defend the gnarled trunk of an apple tree. It is strange how different one’s children can be. Tony had all the natural sporting ability in the world, but was bored stiff by the game, flicking the ball negligently wherever he liked until boredom completely overcame him and he couldn’t be bothered any longer. Bobby loved cricket with a passion, and crouched over the bat with a worried frown, playing his forw
ard defensive stokes with copybook precision but spectacular lack of success. Frances had Tony’s athleticism, but also a fighting spirit that made her try doubly hard because she was the youngest and a girl and didn’t even know how to hold the bat.
‘When I’m picked to play for England I’ll teach you how it’s really done,’ Bobby would say loftily, and Frances would stick out her tongue and smash the next ball clean over his head for six.
Ann Last could hardly contain her excitement. She waited with affected indifference while Malcolm hung up his coat and hat, pedantically adjusted the piles of paperwork on his desk into precise bundles, and finally sat down to begin the day’s work. ‘Found anything of interest?’ he asked. ‘I must say my lot so far has contained nothing but rubbish.’
Ann came over, laying sixteen message forms on his desk, each once stapled to a typed decrypt. ‘These are Ultra cables sent to Australia. They contain copies of traffic from German High Command to commanders on the Eastern Front. Eagle classification. In terms of important intelligence they are pure gold, Malcolm.’
Malcolm picked up the first flimsy piece of paper, turned to the decrypt, and read it carefully. His hand was shaking before he had finished. It contained detailed orders concerning the movements of Field-Marshal Eric von Manstein’s Army Group South during the decisive Battle of Kursk in mid-1943. It was information of the highest possible importance – the sort of information that can turn a battle from defeat into victory.
Why had it been sent to Australia?
‘What did the cover-note say?’ Malcolm asked.
Ann picked up the message. ‘Military traffic, European Theatre. For background information only,’ she read.
Malcolm picked up the next message, and then the next. They were all the same – first quality military intelligence of no possible relevance to Australia in 1943.
In the Mouth of the Tiger Page 87