by Graham Ison
‘Well, and who’s going to kick off?’ The Prime Minister smiled — dangerously. ‘Sir Edward?’
The Director-General of the Security Service took a metaphorical deep breath. ‘We believe there may be a leak at the Foreign Office, Prime Minister.’
‘Oh dear!’ A slight frown settled on the Prime Minister’s brow. Mansell, seated further away, looked on with a bland expression on his face, hoping there would be no blame which could be attributed to him.
‘It’s rather a complex story, Prime Minister —’
‘Well perhaps you’d better start at the beginning.’
That had been Griffin’s intention, but he was trying to devise a way of minimising the French involvement, something he knew would displease the PM.
‘Towards the end of August the body of a young woman was found in Brittany which, at first sight, appeared to have been a straightforward drowning accident. However, the autopsy revealed that that was not the case. The woman was almost certainly murdered. After some time, she was identified as a Mrs Penelope Lambert, a personal secretary at the Foreign Office — secretary, in fact, to Robert Mallory …’
‘Do I know him?’
‘It is possible that you may have met, I suppose,’ said Griffin.
Mansell coughed deferentially. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, Prime Minister, Mallory’s in the New Year List for a K.’
Sir John Laker nodded miserably. ‘That is so,’ he said. It was just like Mansell to rub salt in the wound. The New Year’s Honours List need not have been mentioned at all. That was something that could have been dealt with quite adequately between officials — afterwards.
‘The British police were asked to help,’ continued Griffin, ‘and uncovered some rather unsavoury details about Mrs Lambert’s background and er — sexual proclivities —’
‘She was positively vetted, I suppose?’ asked the Prime Minister.
‘Well, yes, but —’
‘But not very satisfactorily, it would seem.’ The Prime Minister glanced at Laker.
‘I don’t think, regrettable though it is, that that is germane to the matter in hand,’ said Laker.
The Prime Minister tutted softly. ‘Really.’ The word came out flat, neither statement nor question. Laker felt uncomfortable.
Griffin struggled on. ‘To cut a long story short, an observation was mounted, based merely on some video-recorded evidence that Mallory was having an affair with his secretary — who, as I have said, was Mrs Lambert. It’s quite amazing —’
‘Doesn’t that sort of thing usually happen in the Foreign Office then?’ asked the Prime Minister tartly. ‘It seems to happen just about everywhere else.’
Laker sighed inwardly. He had been right to assume that this was not going to be easy. ‘During the course of this observation, Mallory was seen to go to a rather inferior public house in the back streets of Mornington Crescent where he was joined by a woman. Nothing took place between them —’
‘I should hope not — not in a pub,’ said the Prime Minister, mischievously.
‘I meant that nothing was seen to pass between them — like documents or photographs. It was just a quiet talk, so it seemed, lasting about twenty minutes. The woman was later identified as Eva van Heem — a second secretary at the South African Embassy.’
The Prime Minister looked from Griffin to Laker and back again, as if expecting either one of them to continue. ‘Well, is that all?’
‘So far, Prime Minister.’
‘Oh, I see. Well what exactly are you saying?’
‘It seems suspicious —’
‘Suspicious of what? He could be having an affair with this woman, as well as with his secretary could he not — or do you definitely rule out multiple affairs at the F and CO, Sir John?’
Laker smiled thinly. ‘Of course it’s possible, Prime Minister, but why go to Mornington Crescent to have a drink?’
‘Where do you suggest — the Athenaeum?’
‘No, Prime Minister, but she is South African.’
‘This Mallory — is he married?’
‘Oh, yes, Prime Minister, he’s quite normal —’
‘I was not enquiring whether he was homosexual,’ said the Prime Minister sharply. ‘I should hope that that sort of thing could be detected by positive vetting these days — if nothing else.’ This time it was Sir Edward Griffin who, quite unjustly, was the recipient of a censorious glance. ‘I was merely suggesting that if Mallory was married, and was having an affair with this woman, albeit a South African diplomat, then clearly he would wish that affair to remain clandestine, particularly as he is in the running for a K. And he must know that, as you seem to run a roster for honours at the Foreign Office, Sir John.’
Laker remained silent; the Prime Minister could be very perverse on occasions.
‘So what happens next?’ The Prime Minister raised an eyebrow.
‘We are mounting a full-scale enquiry, naturally.’
‘Naturally. With the assistance of Special Branch — the full assistance, I trust.’ The Prime Minister had great faith in Special Branch.
‘Of course, Prime Minister.’ Laker hadn’t much alternative. He would have preferred not to have to wash the Foreign Office linen in public — albeit a restricted public, but as it was the Metropolitan Police who had alerted them to a possible scandal, he had no option.
‘I wish to be kept fully informed.’ The Prime Minister stood up; the interview was over. ‘And I think it might be a wise precaution if Mallory’s name was removed from the New Year’s Honours List, Ronnie, at least until this matter is resolved, don’t you?’
‘But isn’t that rather condemning him in advance?’ asked Laker.
‘An honour is an honour, Sir John, not a reward for promiscuity, whatever you may think at the Foreign Office. There have been enough errors in the past.’ The Prime Minister smiled — a fleeting and ingenuous smile. ‘Anthony Blunt, for instance.’
It was raining when they left.
Chapter Thirteen
John Gaffney put a home-made ‘Engaged’ sign on his door and closed it. ‘If I don’t do that, I have everyone imaginable traipsing in and out of here. Sit down, Hector.’
Hector Toogood lowered himself into an armchair and, pulling a bunch of keys on a chain from his pocket, unlocked his heavy leather government-issue brief-case. ‘Not good news, I’m afraid,’ he said, riffling through the pile of papers.
Gaffney waited implacably, a half-smile on his face.
‘It would appear,’ continued Toogood, when he had found the piece of paper for which he had been searching, ‘that our Mr Mallory heads a section of the F and CO that monitors the economics of South Africa, and in particular, the effect that sanctions are likely to have if imposed by us, and that are already imposed by the USA.’
Still Gaffney made no comment.
‘And in order to do so, he has advance knowledge of what is likely to be withheld next by the Americans, and what we’re thinking of.’ Toogood looked up, quizzically.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Gaffney, turning his swivel chair slowly from side to side. ‘I’m only a simple policeman, but I suspect that that sort of information might be of inestimable value to the Pretorian Guard.’
Toogood did not find the pun amusing, and confined himself to nodding seriously. ‘Indeed it would.’
‘If they’re getting it,’ said Gaffney. ‘Is there any evidence that they are?’
‘No. Not so far.’
‘Can we be certain?’
‘No we can’t. That’s the next part of the operation.’ He consulted his papers again. ‘We’ve put an intercept on his telephone —’
‘Office and home?’
‘Er — home. No point in putting one on his office phone. He wouldn’t dare pass anything from there …’
‘Don’t be so bloody naive, Hector. He quite likely would — just on the assumption that you lot would think that he wouldn’t.’
‘But surely —’
; ‘But surely nuts! Think about it. Anyway, what are we doing — playing at this or not?’
‘I’m not sure that the DG —’
‘Oh, balls! Hector, for Christ’s sake. Either we’re going to do this job properly or I’m not going to play.’
‘All right. We’ll put it on his office phone, too.’ He scribbled a few notes on his papers, and looked up again. ‘Now — surveillance …’
‘Yes?’
‘We’ve got two teams. One is dogging his every footstep, and the other is waiting in case he gets a call in the middle of the day —’
‘On his office phone!’
‘All right, John, you’ve made your point.’
‘What about planting — have you planted anything yet?’
Toogood looked pensive. ‘That’s more difficult. Mallory is pretty shrewd, and by all accounts he’s damned good at his job. If we’re to feed in some false information — see if it comes out the other end, so to speak, we’ve firstly got to get someone to prepare it who’s right on the ball. If we don’t Mallory’ll smell a rat. But to get someone who’s well enough qualified we’ve got to widen the circle a bit. That lets someone else in on the secret.’
‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, Hector, and you’re right — if you feed any duff information in, he’ll spot it in an instant.’
Toogood nodded gravely. ‘I suppose we could wait to see if he actually handed anything over to this woman.’
‘Catch him in the act, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
Gaffney shook his head. ‘Too risky. Suppose we followed him to a meet on the one day he had nothing? That would blow it completely. It would warn him off, and then we’d never get any evidence. What’s more they’d have to give him his bloody knighthood. And that would absolutely choke the Prime Minister, from what Carfax was saying.’
‘I’ll have to speak to the legal adviser about it. I’m sure that to feed something in like that would be regarded as acting as agent provocateur.’ He paused. ‘Wouldn’t it?’
‘Not unless that was the only evidence you intended to adduce. But in our case it would be a means to an end. It would enable us to interview him — under caution — search his house, his desk, and go over his bank account with a fine toothcomb.’
‘Mmm!’ Toogood still looked doubtful. ‘I think I’d better speak to the LA all the same.’
‘There is the little matter of a murder, too,’ said Gaffney quietly.
‘Do you really think he had anything to do with that, John?’
Gaffney spread his hands. ‘In this game, Hector, you never make judgments without evidence — although you do sometimes play hunches. But C1 Branch have been told to lay off until we’ve finished messing about. But the French won’t be too happy with the delay. Trouble is, we can’t tell them why we’re holding back. Still, I suppose we’ll just have to play it by ear, as usual.’
‘You know we haven’t got very much on him, have we? Just one meeting with a South African girl who happens to work at the embassy.’
‘A very attractive girl by all accounts,’ said Gaffney.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘It could just be a case of cherchez la femme. After all, we know for a fact that he was screwing his secretary.’
Toogood swallowed. ‘Er — yes, I suppose so.’
*
A whole fortnight went by. The log of telephone calls made to and from the Mallory’s home, and the calls to and from his office telephone, ran into pages. They were closely analysed, but merely confirmed for the most part what the police and the Security Service knew already, that Lady Francesca Mallory was having an affair with Sean Pearce. And was quite happily — and knowingly — sharing him with her daughter. Ironically there was no further evidence of Robert Mallory’s infidelity, but Gaffney, with all the cynicism of his trade, knew that it had to come sooner or later — and it did. It was not the telephone log that revealed it, but the surveillance log. On the first occasion it happened the watchers were very nearly caught out.
Leaving the office a little later than usual, they were surprised to see Mallory usher his secretary, Kate McLaren, into his official car. They knew that she lived in Hampstead and presumed that Mallory was dropping her off; not far out of his way home to Chalfont. Nor were they surprised when the car stopped outside a fashionable pub in Hampstead; again the watchers made a presumption — this time that Mallory was buying his hard-working secretary a drink. That seemed quite reasonable a reward for her having worked overtime.
One of the watchers did the nearest thing to a forward roll out of the following vehicle, and nonchalantly strolled into the pub after them. They were not there. But watchers are experienced at their trade, and one of the truisms upon which they work is that if the quarry is not where you think, then clearly it is somewhere else. Abandoning all pretence of discretion, the watcher quickly checked the men’s room, working on the assumption that he might be there, and that she equally could be in the ladies. He wasn’t.
Quickly he surveyed the inside of the small pub. There was a door at the back. He got outside just in time to see Mallory and Kate McLaren walking swiftly up the small street that met the rear of the pub at right angles. The watcher saw them round a corner and reached the junction just in time to see Kate McLaren putting her key into the door of a flat over a mews garage. Then she and Mallory went inside.
By the time they emerged, an hour later, the watcher had established from control that the flat was Kate McLaren’s private address. She and Mallory walked back down the street, in through the door of the pub, and out again through the front door. Then they got into the car and drove off, round by the road, stopping in front of the very flat they had left only minutes previously. Mallory dropped her off without so much as a pecked cheek.
The chauffeur didn’t care — he was on overtime. Charlie Markham would have been furious, but he never got to find out.
But nothing turned up to prove that Mallory was a spy, just that he was human — and immoral. John Gaffney looked upon Lady Francesca Mallory in an entirely different light. Good luck to her was his pithy comment.
The next meeting between Toogood and Gaffney was two days later.
‘I may have to revise my previous ideas about Mallory and the murder of Penelope Lambert,’ said Gaffney.
‘Oh?’
‘Our enquiries at the Foreign Office — through your contact there — have revealed that Mallory was away from the office for a long weekend in August: Friday to Monday inclusive.’ He smiled. ‘It was the same weekend that Penelope Lambert was in France — and was murdered.’
‘Good Lord! Was it a conference or something? I know he spends time away — EEC stuff, and that sort of thing.’
‘’Fraid not, Hector. We’ve checked. He was definitely on leave.’
‘Do we know where he went?’
‘The address he left was that of a small hotel in Ayrshire. He mentioned to someone that he was spending the weekend golfing.’
‘Oh well —’
‘But he didn’t.’
‘You’ve checked?’
‘Naturally,’ said Gaffney. ‘We are quite professional, you know. Anyway, it’s unusual to go on a golfing weekend on your own, I’d have thought. Taking a chance on getting a partner, surely?’
Toogood looked doubtful. ‘It’s a bit thin, isn’t it? There could be all manner of explanations for that. It might just be plain resentment at the Foreign Office needing to know where their senior officials are when they’re on leave.’
‘Spoken like a true civil servant, Hector. We have to do it all the time.’
‘He could have gone anywhere,’ said Toogood, reluctant to read anything suspicious into Mallory’s weekend away. ‘He could have changed his mind at the last minute.’
Gaffney nodded slowly. ‘That’s possible, but it’s a strange coincidence that it’s the same weekend as the one on which the attractive Mrs Lambert met her death. And she
was his secretary, don’t forget.’
‘And he was having an affair with her, John. Do you think he’s got another woman somewhere?’
‘Well we know he has now — Kate McLaren. But it’s unlikely that his affair with her started before she came to work for him — which was after Penelope’s death, of course. And there’s always Eva van Heem.’
‘But even so, why should he have murdered her — if he did?’
‘That we don’t know — not yet.’
‘Aren’t you assuming rather a lot?’ asked Toogood.
‘I’m not assuming anything. We know Mallory was away from his office for the same weekend as Penelope Lambert, and that he left an address in Scotland where he was supposedly staying for a golfing holiday, but never arrived.’
‘Could have changed his mind at the last moment — or perhaps he didn’t make a booking and couldn’t get in when he got there. It was August, after all.’
‘He didn’t —’
‘You’ve checked!’ said Toogood resignedly.
‘We’ve checked, yes. Mind you, that’s not positive. There are a lot of people milling around in Scotland in August, and the proprietors of the hotel can only say that they turned away a lot of people. They don’t remember Mallory.’
‘Well then —’
‘But the Strathclyde Police have been very thorough — they always are — they’ve checked every other hotel in a wide area. He didn’t stay at any of them.’
‘Wasn’t that a bit risky?’ asked Toogood.
‘What?’
‘If he gets to hear that enquiries are being made about his holiday arrangements?’
‘They weren’t.’
Toogood raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
‘We’re not complete fools,’ said Gaffney, but he was smiling as he spoke. ‘They said they were looking for someone else, and examined the registers. Police do have the power, you know.’
‘Does any of that help? Our case, I mean.’
‘Probably not. I’ve passed it to C1. Not that they can do anything about it at the moment. It must be very frustrating for them — having a murder enquiry they can’t get on with. By the way, Hector, is there any chance that your watchers can get a photograph of Mallory?’