The One a Month Man

by Michael Litchfield

  Next morning, I gave veteran spook Sean Cassidy a call on his mobile. After the mandatory preamble when two people haven’t been in touch for a few years, I said, ‘I wasn’t sure if you were still a paid servant of HM government.’

  ‘Not long to go now,’ he said, without enthusiasm and exaggerating his Belfast accent. Sean had been recruited into British Intelligence during the worst of the terrorism in Northern Ireland. He came from the Roman Catholic community of Belfast, but he’d never had any sympathy for the IRA, although his father had been a staunch Republican. Ironically, his father had been killed by a bomb blast and his mother had lost both legs in the same act of terrorism, for which the IRA had boastfully claimed responsibility. For ten years after the explosion that blew away his father and left his mother in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, Sean had worked as a double agent, trusted by the hierarchy of the IRA because of his father’s Irish patriotism and anti-British fervour. When the peace deals were being negotiated, Sean was brought in from the cold and had been desk-bound ever since as a handler, naturally specializing in Northern Ireland antiterrorism. Promotion had been his reward for putting his own life on the line, night and day, for so many years, willingly betraying his parents’ culture and political religion because of their obtuse bigotry.

  ‘I want some help,’ I said.

  ‘You won’t get anything that might jeopardize my pension,’ he said, immediately on his guard.

  ‘What I’m after is really low-grade stuff.’

  ‘Says you,’ he said, sceptically. ‘Don’t forget, I know you of old.’

  ‘I’ll explain and then you can decide.’

  ‘Oh, I will, rest assured. OK, let’s hear it.’

  ‘Are you recording this conversation, Sean?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You’ve answered my question,’ I said. ‘So I’ll be circumspect.’

  ‘You mean you’ll lie.’

  We could have circled the issue endlessly, so I stopped the roundabout.

  ‘I want to talk Cold War days.’

  Although he stayed silent, I sensed that the tension was seeping from him in the manner of a slow puncture.

  ‘London, some thirty years ago,’ I said. ‘There was an attaché at the Soviet Embassy who wanted to defect.’

  ‘Didn’t they all! Name?’

  ‘That I don’t know; that’s where I hope you come in.’

  ‘Before my time, dear boy.’ Sean was no Irish Mick. His education had been polished at Trinity College, Belfast.

  ‘Of course I know that! Long before my time, too. Your files may be closed, but never shredded. Apparently, this guy was small beer. Not much use to your lot or your sister agency.’

  ‘So we told him to sod off?’

  ‘Something like that. But his overtures would have been documented. After rejection, he hired an escort girl for a weekend jolly and, while fucking her senseless, he proposed to her.’

  ‘Proposed what, exactly?’ said Sean, the way spooks always played games.

  ‘Betrothal.’

  ‘And she accepted?’ he asked, astonished.

  ‘For a price.’

  ‘Good old-fashioned entrepreneurial spirit at work there. I assume you have her name?’

  ‘Tina Marlowe.’

  ‘So what exactly do you want from me?’ he said, seeking clarity.

  ‘Firstly, confirmation.’

  ‘Secondly?’

  ‘The sequel. The Soviets would have caused a ruckus. They’d have wanted their man back – dead or alive.’

  ‘Despite the fact that he was the lowest denomination currency?’

  ‘Pride, old boy,’ I said, mimicking Sean. ‘Ownership. He belonged to them.’ Back to relationships – a different sort from those strung together by emotion, but shackling was still a central issue.

  ‘It was probably untangled at diplomatic level,’ he reasoned.

  ‘And that’s exactly why I’ve come to you.’

  ‘Let me get this clear in my head: you want the name of the attaché? You want the outcome of the loveless wedding? Anything else?’

  ‘Yes. Where they settled, if at all.’ I wasn’t going to take Cullis’s account as gospel. ‘The Russian is only of relative interest to me. I’m seeking Tina Marlowe.’

  ‘Which is unlikely to be her name now.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Up to a point, this should be a soft pedal for me,’ he predicted. ‘However, the point at which my tracking ends may not take you far enough.’

  ‘But it may drop me at a useful crossroad.’

  ‘True,’ he conceded.

  ‘How long will it take you?’

  ‘Depends what’s in it for me?’

  ‘How about a kiss on the bum if you deliver within a couple of days?’

  ‘And if I wrap it up for you by tomorrow?’

  ‘Just a big thank you.’

  ‘I’ll deliver tomorrow.’

  Sarah, working from our laptop, made speedy headway. For several years the national records’ office of births, marriages and deaths had gone online. Although she had only Tina’s name, that was sufficient. She didn’t even need to know the year or location of the marriage, which were bonuses for the search. And there it was before her eyes: Tina Marlowe joined in wedlock with Sergi Cornikov at Marylebone Register Office on 3 July 1979. His age was given as thirty-four; she was twenty-one. A fascinating feature was the groom’s address. Apparently, without inhibition, he’d actually used the Soviet Embassy. There was no reason to doubt the Paddington address ascribed to Tina; that appeared to be a neat fit. So we had the Russian’s name well in advance of Sean’s contribution, but this information didn’t assist us one jot in learning anything of the wedding aftermath. Sarah Googled the name Sergi Cornikov, but it didn’t produce a single hit.

  I haven’t the patience for treading water gracefully, but alternatives were limited. We were in the cramped office I’d been allotted in Oxford, where there was just enough room for us to sit next to one another at the desk, staring at the computer-screen, tapping in key words and clicking on ‘Search’, and bombing out. Like playing Patience and becoming more impatient by the minute.

  ‘Something doesn’t quite stack up for me,’ Sarah said, idly, filling in space.

  ‘Let’s hear it,’ I said.

  ‘Tina was a victim of the so-called “One-A-Month Man”. She was traumatized, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally,’ I intoned.

  ‘She couldn’t articulate her feelings with her parents because she was emotionally frozen, all of which is well-documented, routine reaction to such experiences.’

  ‘So?’ I said, somewhat inanely.

  ‘So what strikes me as unnatural, to put it mildly, is that she could possibly have turned to whoring. I’d have understood if she’d been turned off men for ever. Or had become a serial killer of men. Wouldn’t that be more natural and understandable?’

  ‘Nothing so strange as folk and the human psyche,’ I said, perhaps a shade too glibly, because Sarah nailed me with a look that was sharp enough to impale me to the stucco wall behind us. ‘Maybe she wanted to make men pay,’ I added, giving the subject the serious consideration that it warranted. ‘Pay literally. Hit them where it hurts men most; in the pocket. More painful to many than a kick in the balls. Who knows? This is Freudian territory, where we’re not qualified to roam. Leave the head-digging and mental excavations to the shrinks. It’s not our job to trawl the murky, labyrinthine corridors of the human brain, which too often are more polluted than a sewer. Understanding and interpreting behaviour isn’t really our remit; we merely act upon it and that’s hard enough. If murder is committed, we catch the killer. It’s up to others to make sense of it; more often the nonsense of it.’

  ‘That’s not entirely true,’ she argued, always ready to joust.

  ‘No?’ If I sounded huffy, I was.

  ‘No. We have to provide a plausible motive and that demands getting inside heads.’r />
  ‘Yeah, but with the help of other experts, specialists in that area of expertise. We sub-contract to shrinks, the brain-benders.’

  ‘OK, but don’t you find it odd that, after all Tina went through and how she froze out her parents, she could so soon drift on to the game and then marry a punter for money?’

  ‘Well, if it was claimed she’d married a punter for love after just one dirty weekend with him, I’d have found that harder to swallow. Look, we’re not machines.’ I tried not to lecture, but I was. ‘You can’t calculate in advance how our chemistry is going to interact with other elements.’

  ‘I see what you saying,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘Such as with shock.’

  ‘Exactly. A mother can lose her only child in a road accident and the first thing she says is, “Oh, goodness, I haven’t put on the dinner! My husband will be home in half an hour and I won’t have a meal ready for him.” Cold as an Arctic winter. And she can remain that way for months.’

  ‘Then it hits her and she crumbles into a nervous breakdown,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Delayed shock can play cruel tricks. It’s a tripwire, camouflaged, out of sight, waiting to give the vulnerable a fall. There’s no template for human nature; no norm. Tina’s terrifying ordeal could just as easily have driven her to promiscuity as into the man-hating camp.’

  ‘It still takes some believing, though.’

  ‘The suspension of disbelief is mandatory if you’re going to be a successful cop.’

  ‘I thought that applied only to fiction.’

  ‘Fiction has to be plausible. We deal with the implausible. Think about it. The plots to most of the cases that have tested us to the limit have been too improbable for the crime-fiction genre.’

  These ruminations dominated the remainder of our day, mainly because there was nothing else to do until we heard from Sean. Even our pillow talk that night was an extension of the topic that had teased our brains for more hours than it deserved.

  Next day, Sarah and I were just preparing to leave the police station for an early lunch, around noon, when Sean came between us, via my mobile.

  ‘Are you alone?’ he enquired, his voice muffled, the way spooks are always so secretive, even if the only information they have to impart is what colour socks they’re wearing.

  ‘Yes,’ I lied, for the sake of expediency, winking at Sarah.

  ‘OK, well, I’ve bottomed it out for you. The attaché’s name was Sergi Cornikov.’

  I didn’t tell him that I already had the name. Spooks sulk very easily, especially if they feel upstaged or undermined.

  ‘He’d made several overtures to our agency,’ he rattled on, his tone hush-hush, as if he had a hand cupped to his mouth. ‘But he didn’t have enough to trade with, apparently. He said he could get hold of some really sensitive stuff, but he seemed so desperate that the opinion was that he was too unreliable, an unstable wild card.’

  ‘You mean it was feared that any information he eventually passed on might be made up, just to please you folk?’

  ‘Something like that; pleasers are notoriously bad risks. It was tempting, though, if only as a PR exercise. The publicity could have been used to embarrass the Soviets.’

  ‘Did his people have any idea he’d made an approach?’

  ‘I’ll come to that.’ Typical of a spook, he wanted me hanging on breathlessly for the punchline, even if there wasn’t one.

  ‘After the wedding in London, the couple went to ground. For a few days the Soviets said nothing, then reported Sergi a missing person. A week later, he allegedly phoned his embassy to say that he’d fallen in love with an English girl and had married her. The Soviet ambassador demanded that Sergi be hunted down and returned to them. He accused British Intelligence of having conspired with Sergi, encouraging him to defect. The ambassador said the wedding should be annulled because it was nothing more than a fraudulent stunt and Sergi would be packed off to Moscow, where he would face the consequences for being a traitor, possibly imprisoned for life or even shot.’

  ‘There’s no record of this in the media,’ I said.

  ‘That’s because it was never filtered into the public forum,’ Sean explained. ‘It was restricted to the diplomatic airways, which became red hot.’

  If the pun was intended it didn’t resonate in my ear. I had an urge to remind Sean that Tina was my only interest and I wasn’t concerned with Sergi’s fate, but I was reluctant to offend him, especially as he was doing me a favour that was unlikely ever to be reciprocated.

  ‘How was it settled?’

  ‘I’m coming to that,’ he said, reprovingly. ‘Because the Soviets apparently were so keen to retrieve their lost property, our boys delighted in taunting their opposite numbers, pointing out that the attaché had legitimately married a British girl on UK soil and he was entitled to stay.’

  ‘Was that the end of the stand-off?’

  ‘Not a bit of it. Sergi was suddenly hot property.’

  ‘Simply because the Soviets were throwing a wobbly?’

  ‘But of course! We weren’t interested until they started stamping their feet.’

  ‘Then your predecessors realized he must be a bigger fish than first thought?’

  ‘I reckon it was more bloody-mindedness than anything else. The Soviets’ pride had been punctured. Our natural response was to further prick and prod that tender spot.’

  ‘So your lot went after Sergi?’

  ‘The fear was that the KGB would hunt him down first and kill him, to make an example, setting a benchmark, so it was imperative that our side got to him first.’

  ‘I assume the operation was successful?’

  ‘Sergi and Tina were in a boarding house in Weymouth, an old-fashioned seaside town in Dorset.’

  ‘I know where Weymouth is on the map,’ I said, indignantly. ‘Signed in as Mr and Mrs Smith, no doubt?’

  ‘No, Mr and Mrs Sergeant.’

  ‘Not very smart,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t have taken the Russians long to have matched Sergi to Sergeant.’

  ‘But we won the race.’

  ‘Three cheers for the Brits!’ I said, sardonically. Anyone would have thought Sean was talking about winning Olympic gold. ‘Was Sergi taken into protective custody?’

  ‘No, that would have involved your lot, almost certainly resulting in publicity. All police forces are leaky ships when it comes to confidentiality.’

  How very true, I thought, sadly.

  ‘He was taken to a safe house.’

  ‘What about Tina, his beloved wife?’ I said, mockingly.

  ‘She wanted to go her own way, to sod off with her loot.’

  ‘You’re intimating that she was restrained.’

  ‘I wasn’t around in those days, remember. I’m relying on files, old sepia reports.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ I said sympathetically, doing my utmost to show gratitude and to placate him.

  ‘It appears that she was advised to hang around, just in case the KGB tried to get at Sergi through her. Sergi had told his embassy that he’d married an English girl. They may have unravelled the marriage details in a matter of minutes. If they were already snapping at Sergi’s heels, they could have been close to bagging him. There was also the possibility that they might have had Tina in their sights, too.’

  ‘Are you talking literally now?’

  ‘No. I mean they might have seized Tina if she’d broken loose and then they’d have tried to broker a swap for Sergi.’

  ‘So she was moved into the safe house with Sergi to continue cohabitating as husband and wife?’

  ‘For a while, yes.’

  Sean ignored my sneering aside. ‘Sergi demanded protection.’

  ‘Cheeky bastard! The mess was of his own making. I wouldn’t have thought he was in any position to start making demands. After all, you’ve already stressed he was of no use to you spooks.’

  ‘Top brass decreed we had a moral responsibility.’

  I manufactured a contemptuous la
ugh. ‘I fail to see where morality came into this.’

  ‘He couldn’t be thrown to the wolves. Neither could Tina.’

  ‘The taxpayers might have thought differently,’ I said.

  ‘Whatever the rights or wrongs, Sergi was given a new identity.’

  ‘What about Tina?’

  ‘She, too.’

  ‘I trust you have the minutiae for me?’

  ‘Sergi became Paul Barker; very Western. Not a hint of East European in it. He was provided with a council flat in Milton Keynes, a bank account, a job as a hospital porter and a plausible legend.’

  He knew that I was au fait with spook-speak. Legend stood for a fake background and biography.

  ‘Tina was given the pseudonym Juliette Trayner, a single woman whose parents had died in a road accident when she was a child and she’d been brought up by grandparents.’

  ‘What about accommodation for her?’

  ‘A bedsit in Brighton; rent paid for three months in advance.’

  ‘So she’d bagged a bonanza for getting into a bogus marriage and then the state forked out for her pad! What incentive is there for leading a decent life, like mine?’

  His chuckle was unforced, I believe. ‘If you’re decent, I’m a saint. You’re a hard man, Mike. Tina had been through a lot. One could argue she deserved a break.’

  ‘Along with thousands of other young women who’d had it tough but had steered clear of the gutter.’

  ‘Pointless being judgmental now,’ said Sean, always one for homespun philosophy.

  He was right, of course. All that I was now hearing was declaring null and void almost everything related to me by Cullis.

  ‘Was she found a job, too?’

  ‘Yep, in marketing, with a hotel chain.’

  ‘Handy for hooking.’

  ‘Give it a rest, Mike,’ he protested, still affable, though.

  ‘What about the marriage?’

  ‘Just left on the books.’

  ‘Not annulled?’

  ‘That would only have drawn further unwanted attention to it, requiring explanation to lower echelon bureaucrats and possibly opening up the proverbial can of worms.’