Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “And you do?”

  “Shall we say I have come to?”

  “And you question what has been done? You question the achievement?”

  “Let me ask you . . . You’re a child of the Cold War. It’s your world. What do you think thirty-five years of espionage has achieved? Are we a safer world? Are we one inch nearer to Moscow? Does a single Russian soldier stand one inch beyond the spot he stood on in May 1945?”

  Why hesitate? He surely knew exactly what I was thinking. “I think it’s all a game that wasn’t worthwhile, that achieved nothing. And if you now tell me that this is not stalemate, it is equilibrium, I shall say horse-puckey.”

  “So you think I wasted me time?”

  “You did ask.”

  “Well. At last we see eye to eye.”

  I left, clutching a new foolscap summary of the book he still intended to write.

  Inspector Plodder was on my doorstep. I’d sat in the back of a cab and read. Plodder had nipped ahead of me in his cop car and stood waiting, while his thug of a sergeant sat at the wheel of the car.

  “You turned over my flat so soon? I’ll be mightily pissed off if you trashed my hi-fi again.”

  “Haven’t been in.”

  “Such restraint.”

  “You’ll be showing it to me all the same.”

  “Yep. I will. In my office. Tomorrow.”

  “Nine o clock.”

  “Noon. I have to get it typed up first. There’ll be a copy waiting for you. Smile at Mrs Buckett, you might even get coffee.”

  “Glad you’re being sensible, son.”

  Yeah. Two hundred quid sensible.

  He read it through. So slowly that his coffee went cold.

  His opinion might matter. His judgement didn’t. Bentinck had delivered much more – thumbnail sketches of all the old missions he’d told me about, enough to ring alarm bells – but Plodder would not be the judge of that. He could see spilled beans, but he’d no idea how big a crisis this might amount to. He’d have to take this back to SIS.

  “I’ll need to keep this.”

  “S’okay. It’s a copy. I have the original. Don’t ask for it. You’re not getting it.”

  He weighed this up. He knew damn well he had what mattered, got up from his chair, knocked back his cold coffee in a single gulp and crammed his hat back on.

  “I could make you, you know that.”

  After he left, the Buckett came in and plonked a small tin on my desk – Fuller’s Full Strength Laxative Sugar – “No nasty aftertaste!”

  “He asked for two sugars, so he got ’em. I ’ate coppers.”

  Imagine this. A month has passed. We are into autumn. The rain is pelting down against the windows of Syd’s capacious office.

  Around the table are Syd, me, Nathan Wolowitz, Jenny Broome, the Deputy Treasury Solicitor and a Mr Briggs, who has described himself merely as being from the Ministry. He doesn’t say which ministry, but it’s a phrase the rest of us take to mean spook.

  Syd has made it clear that neither Jenny nor I should speak. He introduces himself as being . . . “in the words of Bismarck, an honest broker”. The matter is between the government and Nathan. Between the government and Roger Bentinck, whom I have advised not to attend, as I’m worried about words like “arselickers” and “bunch of utter fucking gobshites” clouding the discussion.

  Nathan Wolowitz rarely made house calls. His man picked him up at home in the Bentley, drove him to the office and drove him back. He was not known to visit, but when he did it was an imperial procession. In my office two flunkeys and a chauffeur sat sipping what I hoped was unlaced Buckett-brewed instant coffee.

  Nathan had not yet spoken. He was fond of nods and gestures and seemed sparing with words.

  The DTS spoke first.

  “I’m afraid we can’t sanction publication of this.”

  Nathan addressed his reply to the spook.

  “Why so?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t go into detail. Official Secrets Act and all that. You have signed the Act, I believe, during your time in Allied Propaganda during the war, and of course, needless to say, Mr Bentinck has signed it.”

  Nathan looked briefly at Syd as though the two of them were cued.

  “Then I await your court order so restraining me. I bid you good day, gentlemen.”

  He got up slowly. English manners made them rise at once. Nathan was maybe five foot four, they towered over him, but he’d wrong-footed them already. They’d not expected to be shown the door in less than two minutes.

  “Mr Wolowitz, you surely don’t want to go to court over this?”

  “Yes. That is exactly what I want. If I do not go to court then you, an unelected official and a secret policeman, will be allowed to decide what is in the public interest. I’d be happier with the courts deciding that . . . in public, such is the public interest.”

  When they’d gone, Syd passed the single malt and said, “Jack, you have the list?”

  I had. One sheet of A4 with the names of twelve other publishers who’d agree to say that they, too, intended to publish Bentinck and to share the legal costs.

  Nathan glanced down it.

  “Magnus Reiter? We haven’t spoken in years. Peter Shaw? I should have said he would not deign to piss on me if I were on fire. However . . . perhaps the matter is bigger than the men. You must have done some silver-tongued persuading, young man.”

  I had, but it was no time to boast.

  Syd said, “A common front, Nathan. When it’s all over I’m sure normal service will be resumed and we can all go back to hating each other.”

  Jenny Broome didn’t wait for normal service. Syd whisked Nathan off to lunch. She stood on the pavement in Henrietta Street and called me a shit.

  “Jack, what I wanted was a book. What have I got? A fucking lawsuit. You promised me the Fifth Man. What have I got? A fucking lawsuit.”

  “There’s a principle here, Jenny.”

  “Principle my arse. It’s just another boys’ game. Why don’t you stick to pissing through that damn thing instead of trying to think with it?”

  Well, that was me put in my place.

  The next thing, having scarcely recovered from the utter contempt of our putative editor, was to get Bentinck into the papers. If they were taking us to court, they would be doing so in the spotlight.

  The Buckett came to see me. She knew my phone was searing hot from all the Fleet Street hacks that had called me in the last two days.

  “Don’t let it go to your head,” she said.

  I was not aware that I had.

  “It’s not about you. It’s about him. The agent is never the star. That’s the author.”

  Okay. Where was this leading?

  “They’re pestering you for interviews. Don’t give any. Get all you can for Mr Toad, but none yourself. You’re not the star . . .”

  “I heard you the first time.”

  “You’re just a facilitator. You put people together, you make a connection, you take your 10 per cent. Literary agent, estate agent. Not a deal of difference.”

  “What about secret agent?”

  She told me to go fuck myself and left.

  Well, that was me . . . and yadda yadda yadda.

  There were dues to be paid. Tony Marks got first crack at Mr Toad. Bentinck was relaxed with him. He’d talked to him on half a dozen occasions about Maurice Oldfield. What he could talk about this time was limited: his motives for doing what he was doing; his conflict with the government over it; but not what he was actually going to say in the book.

  It went well. Tony was not the brightest bear in the woods and once or twice I stepped in to suggest a question to him, but apart from that I didn’t speak. If you look at all those photographs now, there’s usually two men in suits: Bentinck in a good bespoke that fitted, and some hack in an off-the-peg that sagged; I’m the figure usually half-cropped off by the frame – the one not wearing a suit.

  After half a dozen suc
h interviews Bentinck’s suit was fine, but the man sagged.

  We went back to his house. He was muttering to himself about Rachmaninoff . . . or it could have been buggeroff . . . a confusion only solved when he fired up the hi-fi and stuck on Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto in D minor by Vladimir Horowitz. For once someone I’d heard of. He’d come out of retirement a few months ago to take up performance again at the age of eighty-two. The papers had been full of him.

  “First LP I’ve bought in years,” Bentinck said. “Pour the booze after side one, will you? I need to get me feet up . . . God, I hate the Press” . . . and his “fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em” was just audible over the brass that opened the piece . . . sounded like a French horn to me . . . but what did I know?

  We sipped Scotch in silence between the first and second movements. After the third . . . well that was when he’d usually talk at length, about the music, about his time in the field, whatever was uppermost in his mind.

  Tonight he said, “Forgive me, dear boy, I must to me pit.”

  And he went upstairs, leaving me to switch everything off and let myself out. I turned down the volume and played the piece over again, helped myself to a can of creamed rice pudding from his stash and left half an hour later.

  It seemed to me that I had watched a kid’s balloon go pffft.

  The next time we met was about ten days later. He rang me. I could no longer get him on the phone and I had assumed he’d left it off the hook because he was getting hack-pestered.

  “Tonight, 8.30. You bring a record.”

  First time he’d suggested that. Perhaps he was finally certain I would not show up with the Incredible String Band or the Grateful Dead or whatever generic term stood in his mind for all the bands he’d never heard of.

  I took him a novelty . . . not that I mean a joke. I mean I tried to take him something that might otherwise never have occurred to him: Debussy Preludes. Okay, I knew he had them. I’d seen Walter Gieseking’s version from the fifties gathering dust in his vinyl stacks. I took Debussy’s own version, from God-knows-when. A “gem” I had found in Harold Moore’s shop.

  After the custard, Bentinck said.

  “How did they do it? He never made any records. Conducted a lot, but he never recorded, and if he had they’d sound like crap.”

  “Piano roll.”

  “What?”

  “Debussy made piano rolls. Someone has found a way of playing the roll and recording the sound. It may be a machine, but effectively it is Debussy’s music as the man himself played it.”

  “Amazing,” Bentinck said without a trace of pleasure. “O brave new world that has such people in’t.”

  And I got ne’er a word more out of him.

  More dues. I owed Jenny Broome lunch at the Ivy on Syd’s ticket. There was no way she would not collect.

  “And how is the man of the moment?”

  I wasn’t sure if she was talking about me or Bentinck. She read my mind.

  “I don’t mean you. Of course I don’t mean you.”

  “Mr Bentinck is . . . down. Pffft.”

  “Really? Can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “It surprised me. It’s as though he’s lost interest. After all this time. As though he can’t be bothered anymore.”

  “Try this on for size, Jack. Did it ever occur to you that your Mr Toad might be a ringer?”

  “A what?”

  “Oh God, you’ve never read a word of Edgar Wallace have you? Zero for Lit 101, Jack. A ringer. A fake. A plant. A . . . double agent, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Jenny, I’m really not following you here.”

  “Suppose he’s still working for SIS. Suppose he is a plant. A cat put among the pigeons. Put there to flush out the Left in London publishing. Well, you gave him exactly what he wanted, didn’t you? A list of every left-of-centre publisher in London who’s prepared to take on the law, the government, the Establishment. He’s won, hasn’t he? So why wouldn’t he lose interest? Why wouldn’t he give up?”

  “Everyone knows who’s who in London publishing. What was there to be learnt?”

  “Everyone in London publishing thinks Left and lives Right. They read the Guardian, and then they vote SDP. They give to Band Aid, but they worry more about the catchment area for the local schools. It’s a quantum leap from making all the right sympathetic noises about the deserving poor to actually defying government. What have they gained? They know the sheep from the goats now.”

  “And me?”

  She was stirring her soup now, not quite looking me in the eye, but I knew when the eyes lifted she’d fire point-blank.

  “You? You were his dupe.”

  “Okay. Okay . . . and why wouldn’t he dump me?”

  “Eh?”

  “He hasn’t. I admit I see less of him, but he hasn’t dropped me. Just at the point when you say there’s nothing more to be gained.”

  “He told you he’d name the Fifth Man, didn’t he? Well, has he? No . . . and he’s never fucking going to. He’s used you, Jack . . . and you, as ever, have used me.”

  It is a happy man who sits before a pudding menu with his company credit card. Alas, that day I never got to. Come to think of it I was lucky I didn’t end up with onion soup dumped over my head. Jenny liked to freeload. To storm out of a lunch I was paying for must have stung.

  Fifth Man? Worm to catch a sprat?

  Jack Turner? Sprat?

  Jack Turner? Twat?

  The Buckett was standing in my office door, looking at me. I’d no idea how long she’d been there. The ashtray was poised in her left hand, the fag equally poised on her lower lip.

  “You was miles away.”

  “Was I?”

  “Penny for them.”

  What? A penny for my thoughts? Endearment from this fucking Essex harridan? Did I look that bad?

  A week or so passed.

  The usual call to music came.

  I went.

  I have no recollection of what was on the turntable.

  I watched Bentinck without hearing. The face that once had relaxed under music now had a line scored down the forehead to pinch the flesh together right between the eyes.

  When whatever it was had finished, I said, “You’ve given up, haven’t you?”

  One eye opened before the other, sized me up without the head turning.

  “Perhaps. I’m tired, my boy. Oh so tired. And I find myself ill at ease as a cause célèbre.”

  “Then what was the point of it all?”

  “The point was to make a point. The one thing we haven’t managed to do. Spin it again, Jack.”

  Suddenly it all added up.

  Sprat. Twat. Dupe.

  I could call him out right now . . . You set me up . . . You used me . . . You betrayed me.

  I didn’t. I put the record on again, his eyes closed and I slipped out silently before side one had finished.

  The next summons, he said, “What do you have post-Stravinsky? I find I have next to nothing?”

  I said I was really very busy right then, but I’d look.

  I didn’t.

  Sprat. Twat. Dupe.

  Another couple of weeks passed.

  He sent me a postcard. A photo of a man walking away from the Brandenburg Gate on the Soviet side – coincidentally the same photograph used as the cover of the new James McVey spy novel. And on the back . . .

  Jack, dear boy . . . ?

  It was Christmas 1986.

  We had lost our court case, embarrassed Her Majesty’s government worldwide, made a reluctant celebrity of Bentinck . . . but we had not published a book. What we had done was boost the “integrity” of London publishing with a common cause that was topped only by the stand against the fatwa on Salman Rushdie a couple of years later.

  The week before Christmas a small book arrived in the mail. I received books every day. Opening a book package was hardly a priority.

  The Buckett slapped a pile of envelopes on my desk, but flipped
the package and put her finger on the name on the back – one word, Bentinck, and a post code. After all these months.

  He’d had it privately printed and was sending it out as a sort of Christmas card. Making his point. The note inside hoped I was well and added that he’d also sent copies to Jenny Broome and Nathan Wolowitz.

  Thirty seconds later Jenny was on the phone.

  “Well . . . that’s the end of that then, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so. Jenny . . . I didn’t know he was going to do this.”

  “Yeah, right. Jack, the next time you have a fat toad from MI6 who tells you he’ll name names . . . take him somewhere else, will you?”

  It was the evening of the next day. I was last out again, so the direct line rang on my desk.

  “Jack? It’s Molly. Could you come over to the Boltons right away?”

  “What’s wrong? Is Roger ill?”

  “No. He’s dead.”

  * * *

  He was in bed.

  Old-fashioned enough to wear a nightshirt.

  It seemed he had died in his sleep, a book on the counter-pane, the reading light still on when Molly found him.

  “Have you called anyone?”

  “Just you. There’s no hurry. Is there?”

  “I suppose not. And . . . and . . . nothing suspicious?”

  “Let’s not go there, as they say these days. Roger’s health was appalling. Penny to a pound he died of natural causes . . .”

  “There are people who might find this very convenient. And just one day after he finally gets the book into print.”

  She took my head in both her hands, made certain my eyes were looking into hers.

  “Don’t even think it. You hear me? Don’t even think it.”

  We opened the Laphroaig and a tin of custard in Bentinck’s honour.

  We sat in silence. I’d have put on music for him, but I had not the first notion of what I should choose.

  After a while, Molly said, “Roger was a crap husband, you know.”