by Graham Ison
“It all went wrong.”
“How so?”
“I fell in love with him.” She looked first at Tipper, assessing, with feminine intuition, a greater degree of sympathy there than in Gaffney. “KGB officers aren’t supposed to do that. But Peter was the first person I’d ever met who was artistic, kind and loving… and sympathetic. I’d never experienced any of that before – never.” She looked down at the floor, playing with the wedding ring that once again adorned her finger.
“Whatever made you take him down to Bere Watton?” It was the one error that Julia had made that had intrigued Gaffney from the moment he had discovered what Tangle-wood was being used for. It was the enigma: the one mistake that a professional of her caliber should never have made.
She shook her head, doubting briefly her own capability. “I should never have done that. But what else could I do? I couldn’t have taken him to Surrey; he would have found out immediately who I really was. Anyway there were all those eyes watching. And they have long memories; I could almost hear them saying that Julia Hodder’s single again – watch your husbands. I couldn’t have made a move without the whole village knowing and watching and wondering. I suppose I moved too quickly. If I had spoken to my controller, I could have had him set up a new place, a new identity. But with Peter working for MI5, I knew, deep down, that it would be short-lived: a passing happiness. And that was what I wanted most of all. I was tired of the whole business. I wanted to be a real wife; a family was out of the question, of course; I told you that.” Again, the brief look of sadness. “But at least I had hoped for something out of life.”
“How did you engineer the escape of Nikitin, Gesschner and Dickson?” Gaffney thought that it was time to bring her back to the mainstream of the enquiry. There would be time for self-pity later on.
The brittle professional took over again. “It was easy. I arranged for them to go to Bere Watton. They stayed there for a month or two, and then they flew out in the ordinary way, through Heathrow; with new identities. Nikitin and Dickson went to Moscow, via Delhi or Geneva, and Gesschner went to Berlin. It is very simple, you know.”
“Then why didn’t you do the same thing?”
She smiled at the naivete of the question. “I couldn’t very well go to Tanglewood, could I? It was in the hands of the police.”
“How did you know that? It wasn’t in the papers, or on television.”
“I guessed what had happened. It was pure luck, too, but I went to Peter’s flat in Fulham. I met your policeman; a nice young man, very attractive.” She smiled; Gaffney looked sour. “The fact that he was a policeman and there in Peter’s flat was a danger signal, and when he told me that Peter was away and wouldn’t be coming back for some time, I knew that something had gone wrong – badly wrong.”
“But why Dover? You were making for France, weren’t you?”
She nodded. “That was my second mistake. I was pretty sure that Peter couldn’t be in too much trouble. He hadn’t told me anything – that would have come later, perhaps – and he certainly couldn’t have suspected anything about Tanglewood; that was too well disguised—”
“So long as he didn’t read the books,” said Gaffney drily.
She laughed at that and reached across for Gaffney’s lighter. “I had this idea that I would go to France and wait for him, and that we could settle down there and be happy.” Her face puckered momentarily and Gaffney thought that she was going to cry. “An impossible dream. There would have been no chance, not with his job. When you discovered Tanglewood, I knew in my heart that it was all over. But I still hoped – hopelessly. But he would never have trusted me, not after Geoffrey. And you can’t build a happy marriage on suspicion.” She suddenly looked very sad. “Not that 1 would know,” she said.
*
“I am instructed by the Director of Public Prosecutions to offer no evidence against Major James Armitage, sir,” said counsel.
The magistrate mumbled something incomprehensible, and quite probably uncomplimentary. Then he looked up at Armitage, standing in the dock of No 1 Court. “You are discharged,” he said grudgingly. He would never understand the machinations of the Security Service as long as he lived. “Next,” he said, surveying the brassy prostitute who now stood in the dock.
*
It was a whole week before John Gaffney received the note. A week during which Julia Hodder’s communist upbringing, her adherence to the ideology of the Soviet Union – ingrained since birth – and her KGB training struggled with her love for Peter Selby and her new-found loyalty to a country she had at first despised, but had since grown to cherish.
It was a week during which she sat in her cell at Rochester Row, emerging daily for a debriefing with Grierson, and waiting for the decision of the Security Service whether or not to recommend that the Attorney-General should waive the prosecution.
She waited and wondered and worried. Worried that, after all, they would imprison her and throw away the key. It was what the KGB would have done. At first, her training rejected absolutely what she was contemplating. No matter what they did, she should not betray her own. But she knew that if she didn’t, she would never be safe from them, perhaps not even then. If they ever got her back they would cremate her alive; that was the rule and she knew the rules.
It was that thought, more than anything else, which caused her to write the note.
Gaffney stood in the doorway of the cell. “You wanted to see me?”
She was sitting tightly bunched, legs crossed, left hand cupping her right elbow, and exhaling cigarette smoke in nervous little puffs. “I wanted to tell you the name of my controller.” She looked directly at Gaffney. “It’s John Carfax.”
“Really?” Gaffney’s mind immediately attempted to assess this latest twist, trying to estimate if it was a further example of Soviet disinformation from a woman he had never trusted; a bid perhaps to salvage something for the KGB from the wreckage. “But why?” he asked. “Why should the KGB have two spies in MI5?”
She smiled impishly. “Mr Gaffney,” she said, “You can never have too many spies in an organization like MI5. Carfax is due to retire next month. The KGB are great planners; I was put in position ten years ago to cater for his going. Then Geoffrey killed himself…” A brief sadness crossed her face, but it was the look of the professional at a plan gone wrong.
“So you went after Peter Selby as a replacement?”
She nodded. “As you say, I went after Peter Selby.” She stared pensively at the floor. “I’d allowed for everything but my own emotions.”
“But he’s still here – Carfax; why didn’t he escape as soon as you were arrested?”
She smiled tolerantly. “You have to know the KGB to know the answer to that, Mr Gaffney. Do not be taken in by Mr Gorbachev and his glasnost; nothing has changed. When I was a child, I belonged to the Komsomol, the communist youth organization.” There was a faraway look in her eyes. “We wore white skirts and white blouses with a red, triangular scarf, and from the very first we swore to love the Soviet Union, to live, to study and to fight according to the teachings of Lenin and the Communist Party. John Carfax would not imagine for one moment that I would betray him; that, in the KGB, is unthinkable. It would certainly never have occurred to him that I would trade information for freedom.” She stood up and paced the cell. “He knows that there is no freedom. I will either die in prison; or I will die out there.” She gestured briefly at the high, wired window, then turned to face Gaffney, a brittle smile on her face. “There aren’t many options for a spy, are there?”
*
It came as no great surprise to Gaffney to learn, six months later, that a widow called Margaret Donaldson had been found dead in her house in Inverness, or to learn that the Procurator-Fiscal’s report to the Crown Agent stated that she had committed suicide. But Gaffney, and the few others who knew that Margaret Donaldson was Julia Hodder’s cover-name, wondered…
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