Chelsea Mansions

by Barry Maitland

  ‘You think Beaumont was carrying his father’s remains?’ Sir Philip said.

  ‘No. Miles Beaumont died in 1956, at about the right age certainly, but of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the temple. There’s no sign of such a wound on our skull.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Well, it’s only speculation at this stage, but there was another diver fatality in that year, 1956 . . .’

  ‘If I may suggest, Chairman,’ Sean broke in. ‘What Chief Inspector Brock is about to raise may touch on national security, and some of our own concerns. I would request that this meeting be closed and the last comments of DCI Brock deleted from the record so that we and the police can confer.’

  Sir Philip looked a little put out. ‘Just when it was becoming interesting. Very well, Sean, if you insist. Commander Sharpe?’

  ‘We’re always happy to talk to our colleagues in MI5.’ Sharpe looked upward at the ceiling. ‘But we won’t suspend our inquiries for vague hints of national interest. We will need to understand Sean’s reservations, in detail.’

  ‘No problem,’ Sean said, looking unhappy. ‘Perhaps we might have a few words, after this meeting.’

  ‘Right.’ Sir Philip jumped to his feet, snatched up his papers and name plate and said, ‘Let’s leave them to it, shall we?’ and swept out of the room, followed by the others.

  ‘Well,’ Sean said, looking across at Sharpe and Brock balefully. ‘That was a fuckin’ ambush, yeah?’

  ‘Of your own making, Sean,’ Sharpe said affably. ‘Let’s have no more obfuscation, shall we?’

  ‘Very well. Care to tell me how your mind is working, Brock?’

  ‘In early 1956 a man called Lionel Crabb, nickname Buster Crabb, was summoned to a meeting with the First Sea Lord, Louis Mountbatten, who asked him to undertake a special mission organised by British and American intelligence agencies. Crabb was a war hero, a frogman who had fought against the Italian underwater forces attacking British convoys and naval ships sheltering in Gibraltar, but by 1956 he was retired, drinking too much, a bit out of condition. Nevertheless he agreed to do what was required of him, to carry out an underwater inspection and photography of a Soviet cruiser, the Ordzhonikidze, which was due to bring an official delegation of the top Soviet hierarchy to the UK in April. The ship was of interest to the British and Americans because of its extreme manoeuvrability, thought to be due to underwater turbines. On April the nineteenth Crabb dived into Portsmouth Harbour near the Russian cruiser, and was never seen again.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Ardagh looked bored. ‘Everybody knows the story. So what? How can you connect this to Chelsea Mansions, for goodness’ sake?’

  ‘In June of the following year some fishermen near Pilsey Island, about ten miles east of Portsmouth Harbour, found the badly decomposed remains of a man wearing a Heinke two-piece diving suit, similar to the one Crabb had been wearing. However the head and hands of the corpse were missing, and identification was difficult. Nevertheless, an inquest determined that it was Crabb, cause of death unknown, an open verdict returned.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘There’s very little information about what Toby Beaumont’s father did after the war. Toby told us he was in import–export, which sounds to me like a euphemism for spooks. I think he was involved in Crabb’s death, and Nancy Haynes heard about it from her mother, whose husband had been the American intelligence liaison officer on the case, just before she died. And Nancy probably thought it would be tremendous fun to go to London and tell Toby, whose father had been the senior MI5 man, and Mikhail Moszynski, whose father had been their KGB contact, about this fascinating bit of Cold War history that tied them together. Except that Toby idolised his father and would do anything to suppress the story, and Moszynski saw it as a way to blackmail Toby into selling him the hotel. How does that sound?’

  ‘A bit far-fetched,’ Sean said. ‘Why would the CIA and MI5 have the KGB involved?’

  ‘I don’t know, but that photograph of them together outside Chelsea Mansions proves they were. There have been theories that Anthony Blunt, the British Soviet spy, was involved in the Crabb story. Maybe Miles Beaumont was a Russian agent too. The first step will be DNA tests with Crabb’s relatives to see if that skull really is his.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Sean examined his fingernails. ‘You know that the files on Crabb are locked away, classified until 2057, do you? Speculations like this, flying around the Met, could make a lot of people very uncomfortable.’

  Sharpe said, ‘Who else is party to your speculations, Brock?’

  ‘DI Kolla, and a Canadian consultant, John Greenslade. He’s signed the Official Secrets Act. It won’t go beyond them, provided I’m satisfied that we’ve got to the truth.’

  Sharpe turned to Ardagh. ‘Well then, what do you think?’

  Sean sighed. ‘All right. Let’s get together again later today. I’ll tell you what I can.’

  They met again in Sharpe’s office at five thirty. This time Brock brought Kathy, and Ardagh too was accompanied, by Vadim Kuzmin, who gazed around the room with the keen eye of a public servant picking up clues of status in the size of the desk and the quality of the leather chair behind it.

  Sean cleared his throat. ‘I’d like to warn you that we may discuss matters that are covered by the Official Secrets Act 1989.’

  Sharpe said, ‘What about Mr Kuzmin?’

  ‘Vadim has signed the Act, Commander. He is a consultant to MI5 and MI6. I’d like to invite him to speak.’

  Kuzmin continued looking around the room. ‘Do you have a drinks cabinet, Commander Sharpe?’

  Sharpe frowned. ‘I do.’

  ‘I’d like a small Scotch, if you don’t mind. Just as it comes. No ice or water.’ Then he added, when Sharpe got to his feet, ‘But not too small.’

  ‘Anyone else?’ Sharpe glowered at them. Kathy and Sean shook their heads, but Brock said, ‘I’ll keep Mr Kuzmin company.’

  Sharpe handed out the tumblers and sat down again.

  Kuzmin tasted, nodded approvingly, and began. ‘One day, when Mikhail was down in the cellars, directing the men working on the latest building stage, I made a joke. “Mikhail,” I said, “what is going on? Is this where the bodies are buried?” He looked shocked and hurried me away upstairs. “What do you mean?” he said. “What have you heard?” Eventually I persuaded him that it was just my little joke, and he relaxed and told me a story. When his father Gennady was in his final days in the Marlinsky Hospital he was haunted by bad dreams. During his life he had had many dark experiences. For two and a half years he had endured the siege of Leningrad and witnessed terrible things—bombing, starvation, cannibalism—and he had killed Germans. But there was one death in particular that bothered him, not in St Petersburg, but in London. He told Mikhail of a house in London where he had murdered a man with his bare hands. The house was Chelsea Mansions, he said, and the body was still there. By this stage Gennady had returned to the Orthodox faith, and he was convinced that the victim’s body would rise up and drag him to hell if it was not given a proper burial.

  ‘Mikhail said that this was why he had bought the house, to carry out his father’s dying wish. But although he had torn the building apart, he had found no body, and he had become convinced that the old man was delusional.

  ‘Then, from nowhere, an American woman comes to him and tells him that she also is Gennady’s child, and Mikhail’s sister. She too has been told old stories by a dying parent, stories of a love affair in San Francisco and of spies in London, and of something secret and terrible that happened in 1956, the year she went to London with her parents. This woman has photographs to show Mikhail, including one of Gennady and her family standing outside the house where this secret thing happened. It is the house belonging to the man who took the photograph, an English spy, and Mikhail recognised it as Toby Beaumont’s house, the only part of Chelsea Mansions that he had not been able to acquire.

  ‘Mikhail told me about this the same day the woman told him. Un
fortunately he had already spoken to his mother about it. She was very angry, and he wanted me to calm her down, but when I went to see her she said it was all lies and wouldn’t discuss it. Later I went back to her room to speak to her again and found her with Sir Nigel Hadden-Vane. She seemed to be demanding something from him and he looked very agitated, and she slammed the door in my face when I made to go in.

  ‘The next day I had to go to Russia on business, but when the American woman was murdered Mikhail phoned me in Moscow and told me that he was afraid that his mother might be responsible, to avoid disgrace for Gennady. I thought this could be possible, arranged for her by Sir Nigel. Then when Mikhail was killed I thought he must have quarrelled with Sir Nigel, who had had him killed too.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell us,’ Brock said.

  Kuzmin shrugged. ‘I had no evidence. It was only a theory.’

  ‘And it left you in control of Mikhail’s fortune. Did you tell Sean Ardagh here about your theory?’ Both men were silent. ‘You both knew about the connection between Nancy Haynes and Mikhail Moszynski after they were murdered, but you said nothing to us.’

  ‘We decided that it wasn’t relevant to their deaths,’ Sean said.

  ‘No,’ Brock objected. ‘You were terrified that it might lead us to the truth about what happened to Lionel Crabb back in 1956. So terrified that when you heard Kathy was in America asking about a picture of Nancy on her sixteenth birthday in London, you hopped on the first available transatlantic plane to drag her home.’

  Sean looked as if he’d bitten into something sour. ‘We had two priorities. The first was to protect Vadim, who is a particularly valuable asset of ours, and is rather vulnerable at the present time. The second was, yes, to avoid reopening an old scandal that still has the power to cause trouble.’

  ‘I think you’ll have to explain that to us,’ Sharpe said.

  Sean shifted in his seat. ‘Before the war, Nancy’s father—Ronnie Elgin was his name—was a commercial attaché in the State Department who was also clandestinely involved in gathering foreign intelligence. When Gennady Moszynski visited San Francisco in 1939 with a party of Soviets, Ronnie cultivated him, and even encouraged the infatuation that he saw developing between the Russian and his wife, Nancy’s mother. Although a committed communist, Gennady was an idealist; he believed in a brotherhood of nations and was appalled by what Stalin had done during the thirties. The three of them promised to remain friends, and after the war Ronnie made contact with Gennady again, and they exchanged low-level commercial information, with the aim of improving understanding between their two countries. Then, in 1956, after Krushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin, they had the chance to meet up again in London, hoping that the Cold War might be coming to an end.

  ‘Ronnie was also friendly with his UK counterpart, Toby Beaumont’s father Miles, who had joined MI5 after he left the army at the end of the war, and he facilitated their meeting in London.

  ‘But Miles was ambitious. He wanted to persuade Gennady to give them much more. He argued that the time was right, that the old Stalinist hardliners in the Kremlin were being challenged by Krushchev, and he wanted to offer Gennady a prize to gain his masters’ trust.

  ‘Now through his old diving friends he had heard that MI6 had hatched a risky plan to send a frogman down to investigate the cruiser that brought the Soviet leaders to the UK. The whole project was flawed. Apart from anything else, MI6 weren’t supposed to operate within the UK, that was our remit, and there was a lot of bad feeling about it in MI5. It seems that Miles Beaumont got it into his head to turn the tables on MI6 and betray the plan to Gennady. The Russians captured the frogman.’

  ‘Commander Crabb,’ Brock said.

  ‘Yes. According to what Gennady told Mikhail, they took him to London, to the basement of Miles’s house, where Gennady was supposed to carry out an initial interrogation of Crabb, before he was smuggled back to Russia on one of the Soviet airliners that had come over for the visit. But Gennady was too rough. Crabb died. They buried him there in the basement. Later the body was exhumed, and all but the head and hands were removed and dumped in the sea near Portsmouth, as you said, Brock.’

  ‘Did Miles Beaumont have authorisation from MI5 to do this?’ Sharpe asked.

  ‘Hell no. He did it completely off his own bat. He was a bit of a loner, by all accounts. An arrogant bastard. He never reported it afterwards.’

  Brock was watching him closely. ‘But it was discovered?’

  ‘After a while,’ Sean said reluctantly, ‘suspicions were raised.’

  ‘There was a cover-up.’

  ‘All the same, this is old history,’ Sharpe said. ‘Is it really so vital that it’s not made public now?’

  ‘That an MI5 officer arranged the kidnapping and murder of an MI6 officer by the Russians? Toby Beaumont thought so, and so do a number of other people who were around at the time.’

  ‘Well,’ Sharpe said, ‘you’ll have our cooperation.’

  ‘We’d appreciate it.’

  When Ardagh and Kuzmin had gone, Sharpe gave a little smile. ‘Money in the bank, Brock. He’ll have to pay for our silence.’

  Brock drained his glass. ‘Case closed then.’

  FORTY-ONE

  Toby Beaumont gathered himself up and stood rigidly to attention—like a prisoner of war, Brock thought, that’s how he sees himself now, ready to give his name and serial number and nothing else. But he looked exhausted; prison was doing him no good, the effort involved in maintaining his front becoming too hard.

  ‘I brought you some reading matter,’ Brock said, and placed a small parcel of books on the table between them. He watched Toby open the package and peer at the titles: a new history of Napoleon’s campaigns, a reprint of Richard Burton’s 1855 book, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah. Toby looked pleased, until he turned over the third book, The Buster Crabb Mystery.

  ‘You’ve probably read that one,’ Brock said. ‘I imagine you buy each one as it comes out, wondering if they’ve finally discovered the truth. Well now they have, Toby, thanks to Nancy Haynes, though we won’t be reading about it. Like you, they prefer to keep it buried.’

  Toby’s expression was unreadable behind the dark lenses.

  ‘Tell me about your father. He must have been a remarkable man.’

  Toby remained silent.

  ‘I’m told he wasn’t a team player.’

  ‘He was a team leader.’

  ‘Why did he kill himself?’

  Toby sniffed, but didn’t answer.

  ‘Did he change his mind about what he’d done? Did he realise that he’d never be able to explain to his friends how he’d betrayed a fellow officer to the Russians? Was he riddled with guilt at how it had turned out, once that brute Gennady got his hands on Crabb?’

  Toby still said nothing.

  ‘It was while you were away, fighting on the Suez Canal, wasn’t it? I wondered if there was some connection. So I checked your army record, and discovered that you weren’t up at Catterick Camp on the twenty-sixth of April 1956 as you said. You were on leave.’ Brock leaned forward. ‘You were there, Toby, weren’t you, at Chelsea Mansions when they did it? You were part of it, helping. And I wondered if your father killed himself out of a feeling of guilt for having involved you? Or was his suicide the price they demanded, when they finally worked out what he’d done—the price to keep you out of it, to let you continue in your military career?’

  Toby took a deep breath and spoke in a low voice. ‘It’s a matter of loyalty, Brock. In the end that’s the most important thing, loyalty to your kin.’

  Brock rubbed his beard thoughtfully. ‘Apparently an unknown woman looked after Crabb’s grave for twenty years after he was buried. His family denied it was any of them. I wondered if it might have been your mother.’

  Toby got abruptly to his feet. He picked up the first two books, but left the one on Crabb lying on the table, and turned and marched away.

  FORTY-
TWO

  Brock ducked his head through the low doorway of the old pub, steadying the tray of drinks in his hands. Across the dappled lawn, in the shade of a large oak tree, he saw the three of them around a table, heads together, discussing a photograph. They had met at one of Suzanne and Brock’s favourite country pubs on the way to Battle, and Brock paused for a moment in the sun and took a deep breath, thinking what an enormous relief it was to be out of London, like escaping from an airless room.

  Suzanne was making a great fuss of John, teasing information out of him, gauging his temperament, clearly enjoying his company. Yes, within ten minutes she’d decided that she genuinely liked him, Brock realised, and it made him aware that he hadn’t even reached that stage yet. With anyone else he would have formed his assessment long ago, but with John he was lost, the burden of old memories too great.

  He had at least made his apologies to the lad, for the Crabb business, and most of all for doubting his judgement about the authenticity of the letter. He felt ashamed of himself, remembering how he would have felt if his father had dismissed him like that.

  Watching them now, laughing easily together, John’s hand on Kathy’s arm, Brock thought how open and exuberant he looked. It seems, he thought, that I have things to learn from this young man.

  Suzanne turned her head and saw him standing there and gave him a smile and a wave. He set off across the grass towards them.

  It was that night I heard the ghost in the chimney. I was tucked up in the old-fashioned hotel bed, so high off the floor, unable to sleep. On the small table beside my pillow was the present that Uncle Gennady had given me, his war medal, the most precious thing he owned, he had said. I thought how strange it was that he had given it to me, and with a tear in his eye, but Pop had just smiled when I asked him, and said that he was a Russian, a very emotional race, given to spontaneous, generous actions.