by Alan Judd
Hookey jumped up, his chest and stomach showered with ash and sparks after he had bitten too hard on his pipe. He brushed himself down vigorously. ‘Serves me bloody right. Pipes are like bikes: they can be managed with no hands but it’s better with one.’
Hugo laughed, Charles smiled. Hookey’s use of the plural was another reminder that the personal was becoming public, but Charles’s unease was mixed with relief. His anger had faded again and it was good to feel he was not alone, that it was not only his responsibility; although he still felt that he alone would bear the consequences.
Hookey abandoned his pipe. ‘Secondly, we should consider how this affects the case we were trying to build up. What do we do with your friend now that he has taken us by surprise? Back off, carry on as planned or look for a way of turning it to our advantage? I’ve no need to tell you which I prefer, so long as we’re allowed. Thirdly, since this is likely to take up more of your time than anticipated, Charles, Hugo will need to brief your course officer and secretary – not the whole thing, of course, general terms only – and get them to help with providing you with cover so far as your fellow students are concerned. Fourthly, there is the very important question of how it affects you personally, your family and your career. As for the latter, don’t worry. Do not worry. You may think it’s bad for your PV-ing status and a disadvantage being Sovbloc Red – but we’ll see you all right. It’s more the effect on you personally that we have to keep an eye on.’
‘You’re certain it’s true?’ Charles asked.
‘Pretty much.’ Hookey looked straight for a few moments, as if Charles had said something unusual. ‘They’re certainly capable of fabricating the whole thing and as such it would be an ingenious ploy. Quite apart from the possible bonus of recruiting you, which is of course their aim. Putting money in your bank account is the first step, worthwhile simply for the disruption it causes. Not to mention tying up some of our limited investigatory resources and distracting our attention from real cases. But I’ve never known them do anything quite like this before and my hunch is that they wouldn’t try to play this card here in London right under our noses, risking protest and expulsion, unless they really held it.’ He continued to watch Charles carefully. ‘It may seem unfeeling of me to discuss it as a kind of game like this, but that’s what it is, albeit a game with consequences. I’d like to pat them on the back and say, well done, boys, nice try, now let’s talk turkey. That’s what I would like you to be saying to your friend – appreciate you were given no choice, old boy, but no hard feelings, you did it well. Tremendous feather in your cap if it works, life-long difference to your career. Of course, I can’t accept but I like you and I want to help you. We could between us make it appear that I have accepted, I could get you information that my people would permit but which would seem like gold dust to yours. And in return you could help me, confidentially, of course. See what I mean?’ Hookey raised his eyebrows. ‘Play it back at them. But all that’s for later, if at all. We’d better concentrate on the immediate.’
‘The investigation,’ said Hugo. He wrote the word in capitals on his clipboard and underlined it.
‘Yes, Hugo,’ said Hookey. ‘Start with Martha. All things in this controllerate begin and end with Martha.’
Martha was a tall woman of around sixty with pendulous spaniel cheeks, an effect heightened by dangling black cord tied to her glasses. The glasses were elaborate, her lipstick and nail varnish thick and very red. She held a silver cigarette-holder theatrically in one hand and with the other wrote rapidly on a small card with a thin gold pen. The window was open but her small office was still thick with cigarette smoke. Behind her were three grey security cupboards, their drawers open and crammed with filing cards.
Hugo’s manner was obsequious. ‘Martha, may we bother you for one tiny moment?’
Her brown eyes, alarmingly enlarged by her glasses, looked at him without expression and took no cognizance of Charles at all. ‘Go away, dear, I’m dreaming.’ Her voice was deep and throaty.
‘Oh, sorry, we’ll –’
‘Don’t be a twit, Hugo. You don’t think I’d turn you away when you have a young man in tow, do you? I don’t meet too many these days.’
Her hand, when Charles shook it, was heavy and passive. ‘Tell Auntie Martha all about it,’ she said.
Hugo explained that they wanted to identify Igor, though not why, showing her the photographs and rough dates of his known travels. She looked for a long time at the photographs. ‘It won’t be easy, I’m afraid. You’ll have to give me time. Difficult.’ She looked at Charles. ‘In more ways than one, I daresay. I’ll ring you, dear.’
‘Real character,’ Hugo said, the door barely closed behind them. ‘Knows everything that is known about Russian illegals. Igor’s almost certainly an illegal, or at least a natural cover officer, because they wouldn’t use an officer under official cover and attached to an embassy to follow your father around the world. Look odd. They’d use someone under natural cover with a reason for travelling. If Igor can be i/d’d we’ll be one important step closer to confirming what was going on. And if anyone can do it, Martha can. That was one of Stalin’s pens she was using.’ They were going down the stairs to his floor and he paused while his stomach hardened and his lips compressed. ‘Said to be, anyway. Only she and Hookey and the Chief know how we got it. Thing is, whether your mother was in on it with your father, or not. She’s got quite a past – Martha, I mean. SOE in Norway, mistress to a squadron of Polish pilots who all got killed, that sort of thing. Since then a hundred years of illegals.’ They had reached his office door when a hand-bell rang loudly from near the lifts back along the corridor. Hugo fumbled hastily in his pockets. ‘Gosh, the trolley. Got any money?’
Charles mechanically handed over a pound note and Hugo ran without a word along the corridor. Men and women issued suddenly from doors and clustered round a trolley of sandwiches, cakes, sweets, biscuits, chocolates and soft drinks that was pushed out of one of the lifts by a cheerful girl. Charles remained outside Hugo’s locked office. It had not occurred to him that his mother might be involved. Hugo’s casual reference showed how obvious the possibility would seem to others. The thought filled his head like the sound of the hand-bell a few seconds before.
Hugo reappeared with sandwiches, crisps and a can of fizzy drink that Charles associated with children. He fumbled for his keys. ‘Pay you back when I get to the bank. You’re not a trolley man, then?’
‘Never seen it before.’
‘’Course, you don’t have one in training department. Essential in Gloom Hall. Keeps us all going, except for those killed in the rush.’ He opened the door and laid out the food on his desk. ‘We’d better decide what to say to Gerry and Rebecca and then I’ll have to draft something for MI5. Also for the Foreign Office, just to keep them informed. Though maybe we don’t have to tell them yet. Perhaps we should. Not sure. Have a seat.’
Charles remained standing. ‘I hadn’t thought about my mother being involved.’
‘Always more angles to these things than you think.’ Hugo opened his sandwiches.
‘Perhaps I should ask her.’
‘I should wait a while, if I were you.’
‘Why?’
‘In case she was. Is.’ He bit into cheese and pickle, his earlier sympathy evaporated now by the excitement of having angles to consider, complications to be pointed out, difficulties to be discovered. ‘Have a crisp. You’d better get on with your revised write-up. Funny, I had a feeling the other one was a bit, you know, economical. Would’ve said something if Hookey hadn’t jumped in first. Now I can base my draft on your revision. We shall probably have to open a top secret annex to the file.’ He swallowed and looked pleased. ‘I shall do a minute.’
Hugo liked minutes. He wrote a number during the next few days, careful, often lengthy documents, drafted, worked on, redrafted, encased in layers of security protection and subject to restricted handling procedures. Addressee lists were drawn up
, reduced, expanded, debated, modified and discussed, all in the interest, he explained, that Charles’s secret was known only to those who really needed to know.
‘Rest assured that no one – absolutely no one – will hear anything about this unless they really need to. Quite apart from the security considerations, it would be awful for you personally if it became a subject of office gossip. Personnel will let us know if there’s so much as a whisper.’
‘Personnel will know about it, then?’
‘They need to.’
‘People say they’re the leakiest part of the office. Source of most gossip.’
‘Not on something like this.’
Gerry and Rebecca were briefed to give weight to the PV investigation cover to explain any absences on Charles’s part. Rebecca, Hugo said, had had a Sovbloc posting before her last and was used to this sort of thing. She was quite a favourite of Hookey’s, he added, with a wink that might have been deliberate.
‘Carlos, mein Herr,’ Gerry said when Charles returned to the offices of Rasen, Falcon & Co., ‘you must say if there’s anything we can do to help, with the others or whatever. Anything.’
‘Thanks, I shall.’
‘Becky will type your course work for you.’
‘No she won’t,’ said Rebecca. ‘I’ve got enough on my plate. Anyway, the others would realise and it would look odd. But I’ll do anything else for him.’
Gerry’s pliable features became an elongated question mark. ‘Rrreally, Rrrebecca? I never knew.’
‘You’d be surprised.’
‘More than,’ said Charles. ‘I’d be delighted.’
‘So long as you promise never to call me Becky.’
His occasional absences passed without comment. The others were either surprisingly tactful or had enough to keep them busy. There was a wearying succession of paper exercises, with much typing, as well as the usual lectures and case histories. Subjects of gossip went rapidly in and out of fashion and for a day or two it was Rebecca and Gerry who held pole position.
‘I reckon they’re bonking,’ said Desmond Kimmeridge over tea and biscuits. ‘All this French Kisser talk is a cover. Don’t you think, Charles?’
Charles pictured them outside the wine bar in Battersea. ‘Could be. Not sure.’
‘Sure you’re not reading your own desires into others?’ asked Christopher Westfield, his mouth full of biscuit. ‘You’re jealous, Desmond.’
‘Of course I am. Fervidly. I’d rather she fancied me. Wouldn’t you?’
‘As a married man, no. But yes.’
‘We all do, you see. She’s our mother-figure on the course. Oedipus and all that. We subconsciously want to kill Gerry, too. Meanwhile, one has to do what one can to console oneself elsewhere.’
Christopher nudged Charles. ‘What about you? Strikes me you need something to go with that old heap of a car. Better still, something that doesn’t go with it. Something better, younger anyway.’
‘Not much doing at present.’
‘So Roger says. He says you’ve never brought a woman back to the flat but that you’ve started sloping off mysteriously. She married?’
It was a useful suggestion. ‘Something like that.’
Christopher nodded and swallowed the last of his tea. ‘The world is full of married women.’
The next topic was a plot to kidnap Maurice Lydd during one of the final exercises at the Castle. His questions designed to draw attention to himself, his assiduous cultivation of important lecturers and the fact that he usually got off early because of his shorthand and speedier typing annoyed everyone.
‘The plot,’ said Ian Clyde, behind a fog bank of cigarette smoke, ‘is to nab him on Exercise Trumpet, the one before the course dinner. Apparently, it’s a routine filling and emptying of – of – what are they called? – DLBs, thank you. Delivery – I mean, dead – letter boxes. In the dark, you see. We work in pairs, one finding and filling it, then instructing the other by telegram on how to empty it. Simple, really, don’t know why we’re bothering. Alastair saw the plan on Rebecca’s desk when she was on the phone. So whoever’s paired off with Golden Balls will instruct him on where he has to be and when and we’ll be able to nab him.’
‘How?’ asked Charles.
‘Bag him. In a diplomatic bag if we can nick one large enough. Then bring him back, making ourselves sound like the KGB or IRA or something, and empty him onto the mess floor.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s Lydd. Always so infuriatingly pleased with himself. Thinks he’s got golden balls. Main worry is we won’t be able to nab him because he’s so bloody greasy.’
When he next slipped away, Charles was taken to MI5 in Gower Street by Hugo. ‘This justifies a car,’ Hugo said. ‘There’s a bag-run over there, anyway. We’ll cadge a lift.’
In all but the hottest weather Hugo travelled with his British Warm, brown trilby and heavy rolled umbrella. He carried all three down in the lift, putting on two while they waited in the basement garage.
‘New Ford ’specially for you today, Hugo,’ said a man in overalls, wiping his hands on a rag. ‘No misbehaving in it.’ He looked at Charles. ‘Not that there’s much to tempt you this time.’
‘What d’you mean, this time, Don?’
The exchange provoked hearty laughter. When the car and driver appeared from the workshop at the back, Hugo took off his hat and coat. ‘Great character, Don,’ he said as they drove up the ramp. ‘Been around about a hundred and fifty years. Used to be the Chief’s driver in about 1806. All sorts of derring-do in Europe, post-war. Likeable villain. Get on his right side and he’ll look after your own car here. What do you drive?’
‘Rover.’
‘Good.’
‘Quite an old one.’
‘Better. Now, the chap we’re going to meet, Bernard Kent, one of their top people, hates us. There are a few fuddy-duddies over there who do, just as we’ve got a few cowboys who hate them, but there really isn’t much of that sort of thing now, if there ever was. Though you do come across it now and again, in both services. Regrettable, silly, all fighting the same wars, serving the same interests, after all. Not much of it, fortunately.’
Charles nodded.
‘Though, I must say, they are as a whole pretty dour and stick-in-the-mud. Terribly territorial. And some, like Bernard, just can’t stand us. You’ll see.’
Charles did not see. Bernard Kent was a big, pale, quiet man occupying a director’s office with a long, highly polished table. He was unsmiling but his manner was not unfriendly. Charles’s write-up and Hugo’s accompanying letter were on the table. ‘They’re putting you through the wringer on this one,’ he said as they shook hands, then paused while his secretary delivered coffee and biscuits. ‘The important thing from our point of view, as from yours, Charles, is of course to establish whether what is said about your father is true. That’s going to take some time. The secondary question is to decide what it tells us about the man you call Lover Boy.’ There was an edge of distaste to his voice. ‘It appears from what you say here that he straightforwardly avowed his KGB provenance. Very unusual thing to do in a western capital, especially here where they know we’re pretty ruthless at kicking them out. We must be very sure before we re-categorise him. This sort of thing affects a man’s entire career throughout large parts of the world, postings, visas, everything, whether he’s aware of it or not. And you say he hasn’t tried to recruit or use the prostitute?’
‘No.’
‘So it’s a private initiative? He’s going off the rails?’
‘Seems so.’
‘Foolish boy.’ At the end Bernard summed up the main points, dutifully noted by Hugo. ‘As you’re doubtless aware, Charles, this now has to be a Security Service investigation,’ he concluded. ‘I must therefore ask you to do nothing more with Lover Boy until we’ve got somewhere with our enquiries. That may, as I said, take some time. Meanwhile, please come over if there’s anything you want to discuss or if there�
�s anything –’ he hesitated, choosing his words – ‘from your family background or from your memories of your father that you think would have any bearing on it, either way. It’s bound to be a difficult time for you, at home and at work. I hope your future won’t be too much affected. Good luck with your course.’
In the Gower Street foyer Hugo once again put on his coat, adjusted his suit and shirt cuffs and positioned his hat. ‘See what I mean?’ he murmured, his back to the guards.
‘Not really, no. I thought he was quite friendly. I can see he could be formidable, though.’
‘Well, he put the kibosh on our operation for a start. That’s not very friendly.’
‘But from their point of view –’
Hugo nodded. ‘Exactly. Got it in one. That’s the trouble.’ He stepped purposefully and immaculately onto the street and looked about proprietorially, forgetting his umbrella.
Charles collected it. ‘It’s very heavy. What’s it made of?’
Hugo didn’t answer until they had crossed Gower Street and were heading briskly towards Tottenham Court Road. ‘Swordstick.’
‘It’s a swordstick?’
Hugo nodded, looking firmly ahead. His trilby was the only one in sight and walking with him made Charles as self-conscious as if he had been wearing it himself. However, possession of a swordstick gave Hugo an almost romantic appeal. ‘Are they legal?’ Charles asked.
‘Depends what you do with them.’
‘Didn’t the first chief, the original “C”, have one? Take it on operations and so on?’
‘That’s not why I have one. No delusions of grandeur. In fact, not even sure I’d want the job if offered it. Life-long headache, if you ask me.’