He was staking his life on it.
Behind him, the woman’s voice was suddenly raised and the two guards doing the final inspections looked up, like hunting dogs sensing prey. One of them stood on tiptoes as he tried to see better, as incongruous as a booted ballerina.
Breathe, Tom told himself. Act normally.
The guard held up his hand, stopping the line dead.
People at the back pushed on, not knowing what was happening. A shout came from behind as someone began elbowing through the crowd. As Tom turned, the woman he’d been talking to pushed him aside and ran for the gate, barged through and began to climb the steps to the walkway.
The sound of a shot brought the bridge to a standstill.
Tom watched her stumble, trip and fall. For a second there was ringing silence. Then the shouting began.
Rushing forward, the guard who hadn’t shot her gripped the screaming woman’s ankles and began bumping her back down the steps, only stopping when a West German guard ran forward, racketing the slide on his Browning Hi Power to slot a round into the breech. The two men glared at each other.
Then the East German shrugged.
‘Your choice,’ he said.
A GDR border guard appeared with a Praktica camera, and began photographing the woman to prove that she was still on East German soil. The crowd watching was as silent as a theatre audience. The West German guard who’d run forward glanced back.
He looked less certain of the situation.
‘You can’t have her,’ the East German said. ‘Although why would you want her? Still, if we must, we can wait here until she bleeds out …’
‘You’ll get her help?’
‘If you haven’t made us too late.’
The guard indicated that his colleague should haul the shuddering woman to her feet. He did so and dragged her away without bothering to look at the West German guard again. For a second, there was nobody ahead of Tom.
Nobody to stop him crossing.
Before Tom could take a step, however, a hand came down on his shoulder, and as he turned, he felt something jab his ribs and found himself looking into the eyes of a thin man, wearing a suit, wire-framed spectacles and a long black coat.
He had the long, elegant fingers of a pianist. One of them was curled round a trigger. Nothing in his gaze suggested that he’d hesitate to fire.
‘Major Fox,’ he said. ‘If you’d like to come with me …’
43
‘Your confession, Mr Fox.’
The Stasi colonel with the thin face opened a file, turned it the right way around for Tom to read and put it on the table in front of him. He added a pen, positioning it on the space at the top of the first page, exactly parallel to the first line.
‘I haven’t made a confession.’
‘We took the liberty of preparing it in advance.’
The man’s English was excellent and his shoes polished. He wore a gold Ruhla, with a sweep second hand, and a pin of the Patriotic Order of Merit.
Tom kept his hands to his sides and made no attempt to reach for the pen or read the neatly typed words in front of him. The thin man nodded as if to say this was exactly what he expected.
‘Take your time.’
The door shut behind him with a click.
My name is Thomas Fox and I confess to the murders of Sir Cecil Blackburn and Lieutenant Evgeny Zhebenev …
Lieutenant, not ex-lieutenant.
If Evgeny was still serving, what was he doing miles from home guarding an Englishman? Punishment, for the shit that he talked about? Reward for surviving whatever it was? Or was he simply a man doing his job?
Whatever that was …
Tom went back to watching a bluebottle climb a windowpane, never quite making it over the lip. After a while he forgot about that too and simply waited. Tom was good at waiting. Problem was, in his experience long periods of waiting tended to end with short bursts of extreme violence. Sometimes his, mostly not.
The colonel came back an hour later, picked up the confession, checked it hadn’t been signed and put it down again. His smile said he wasn’t remotely surprised. Sitting opposite Tom, he examined him as if from a distance. His gaze was hard, clinical. He could have been looking under the bonnet of a car, wondering what was worn, how long before a major piece needed replacing. There was nothing personal in it.
‘You’ve read your confession?’
‘The first line …’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘It’s absurd.’
The man’s smile was thin. ‘Too crude. Too clumsy. I said you wouldn’t sign it.’ He ripped the confession in two and extracted a second from his briefcase, positioning the pen as before. ‘You might like this one better.’
Leaning forward, Tom shut the file.
‘Colonel Schneider,’ the man said, introducing himself.
When Tom opened his mouth, the man held up his hand. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘We know who you are.’
‘You know I can’t sign a confession.’
‘But you must … What if we promised to deport you if you sign? Although we wouldn’t mean that and you wouldn’t believe it. Why would you? You’re not a stupid man, Mr Fox. You know we can never release you. How could we? You’re a spy and a murderer.’
Tom opened his mouth again …
‘Yes, I know. You disagree.’
Colonel Schneider sighed and for a moment Tom thought he was going to say more. Instead he stared out of the window, watching something Tom couldn’t see from where he was sitting. Street life, to judge from what he said next.
‘You think people here are unhappy. You’re wrong. We give them jobs, housing, education, medicine, holidays, pensions … Most are happy enough. Why wouldn’t they be? They have friends, families, lovers, favourite cafés and films, favourite campsites, chalets and hotels, memories that matter.’
‘I didn’t kill Sir Cecil.’
‘You were photographed coming out of the building shortly after the murder. We know it was shortly afterwards because bodies retain their core temperatures and the pathologist was able to give us an estimate.’
‘But you don’t know when the photograph was taken.’
‘Shadows, Major Fox. I’m sure you realize that we can pinpoint the time a photograph was taken from its shadow. Besides, you were seen leaving. Frau Doktor Blackburn has identified you from a photograph. As for your second visit … Well, one of my men found you inside. That was you, wasn’t it? He said you pushed something into your pocket. Would you like to tell me what?’
‘He was wrong. I took nothing.’
‘Ah well, we can get back to that later. I assume you’re working with Henderson? Perhaps even for him …?’
‘Henderson?’
‘You think for a second we weren’t watching that café when Frederika met you? Of course we identified the other man. A good operator, by all accounts. Thorough. Efficient. Did he tell you about his time in the Niger delta? No? The locals were causing problems for European oil workers. Henderson didn’t have the resources to burn their village to the ground so he rounded them up at gunpoint and made them do it for him. One has to admire pragmatists.’
He glanced pointedly at the confession.
‘You’re saying Henderson would sign?’
The colonel smiled grimly. ‘A man of that calibre? I doubt he’d have let himself be caught. Rewrite it, if you don’t like the style. Say the British sent you and we’ll go easy. Better still, confess and claim asylum. You’ll find us sympathetic. We all knew London were never going to let Sir Cecil go home.’
‘Why not?’
Pushing back his chair, Colonel Schneider picked up his briefcase and headed for the door, which someone began unlocking before he’d reached it. ‘There are some things,’ he said, ‘which should be done that it would not do for superiors to order done … Abraham Lincoln said that.’
Tom looked puzzled.
‘Feel free to take your time.’
44
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‘Go away.’
Sir Henry’s shout echoed down the corridor of the West End theatre. The young woman raised her hand to knock again, decided not to bother and pushed her way into his dressing room instead.
‘I said …’ The old man looked puzzled. ‘Who are you?’
‘Hello, Sir Henry –’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I wanted a quick word.’
‘I’ll have you fired,’ he told her. ‘No one comes in here before a performance. No one. I need –’
‘Time,’ the young woman said. ‘To focus. Time to inhabit your part. I know, you mention it endlessly in interviews. You have a tendency to repeat yourself. Has anyone told you that?’
She wasn’t an assistant stage manager or any of those people. He’s realized that. They’d learnt to be polite. ‘How did you get in?’ he demanded.
‘The stage door.’
‘I don’t talk to journalists.’
‘Of course not. You have people to do that for you.’
She walked across to his dressing table and opened the case containing his pair of ivory-backed hairbrushes. A present from Olivier. He’d even had Sir Henry’s initials monogrammed in red on the back. Instead of taking a brush she lifted the velvet bed on which the brushes nestled, revealing a syringe and a handful of glass ampoules beneath.
A single drop still hung from the needle.
‘I do understand,’ she said, ‘why you need those last few minutes alone.’
Taking an ampoule, she broke its glass neck and slid the needle of the syringe into the morphine below. When the syringe was half full and the ampoule empty, she broke another and repeated the process, placing the fully loaded syringe in front of him.
‘There you go,’ she said.
He made no move to touch it. Instead he stood up, walked to the door and opened it. ‘I don’t talk to journalists and I don’t pay blackmailers.’
‘Do you get many?’ she asked, sounding interested.
‘Get out,’ Sir Henry said.
‘You don’t mean that,’ she said.
He opened his mouth to shout for help and then shut it again.
‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘I have to ask. Were you expecting me?’
He was. It showed in his expression. Somewhere in the back of his mind he’d known something like this was coming.
‘What tipped you off?’ she asked. ‘The fire at the cottage in Wiltshire? Colonel Foley’s tragic suicide …?’
Sir Henry hesitated. ‘Robby Croft’s fall. Report said he’d given that boy right of way. Robby never gave anyone right of way.’
‘No, I don’t imagine he did.’ Taking a Kleenex from its box on Sir Henry’s dressing table, the young woman removed her fingerprints from the syringe and put it back in front of him.
Sir Henry shook his head.
‘Why drag this out?’ she asked.
‘You can’t make me.’
‘Of course I can.’
He looked at her.
‘And I will,’ she said, ‘if necessary. But let’s look at this. You’re a national treasure. A knight of the theatre. You’ve performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and had a part on Coronation Street. Your charity work is legendary. You also have granddaughters aged twelve and fourteen. Such an impressionable age. Do you want them to remember you for this?’ She gestured at the posters on his dressing room wall. ‘Or for headlines, sensational revelations, the fact their grandfather died in jail?’
‘They’ll say I killed myself.’
‘If you don’t, they’ll say far worse.’
He knew that was true. She could see it in his face.
‘Only it won’t come to trial,’ she told him. ‘Put baldly, you have a choice. Do this now. Or I can come back after the performance with two men to hold you down. Can you do it? Go out on stage knowing that awaits?’
‘My audience –’
‘Will be shocked and saddened, and later, after we’ve told the papers how brave you were in the face of a cancer that you’d kept secret, and for which morphine brought relief, they’ll understand. They’ll be impressed.’
She nudged the syringe towards him and this time he nodded, his fingers trembling as he undid his cuff. Her face was impassive as she watched the tearful old man position the needle and slide it into his vein.
45
The interrogation room in the Volkspolizei station was spartan: a wooden table with two chairs on one side, and a single chair, Tom’s chair, on the other. The walls were white, a bulb hung in a metal lampshade overhead. A mirror on one wall might be two-way or there to improve what little light there was.
Scraping back his chair, Tom walked to the mirror.
His reflection floated on its surface rather than behind. Two way, then. Squinting, he tried to see shadows but the room behind was too dark for show-through. He thought it had to be about midday.
The pen he was meant to use to sign his confession was a Heiko, with a gold-plated nib and swirling blue Bakelite barrel. Not quite the Mont Blanc that Caro gave him one Christmas but better than the pen Charlie used at school. Maybe Colonel Schneider was right. What you grew up with was what you knew. Jobs, housing, education, medicine, holidays, pensions … It didn’t sound that bad a life, didn’t sound that different. In many ways it sounded better than bits of his own.
After a while, Tom did what he’d told himself he wouldn’t – opened the rewritten confession and began to read. He had no intention of signing it, but might as well know what he was refusing to sign.
He’d expected this confession to be as stilted as the first. It was surprisingly reasonable, however. He confessed to having been sent by London to kill Sir Cecil but insisted that he was simply obeying orders. He bore no personal animosity towards Sir Cecil or the GDR. He was a soldier. He did what he was told. London would deny this but that was the point. Her Majesty’s government needed deniability. Everyone knew they’d never let Sir Cecil go home …
That ‘Her Majesty’ was a nice touch.
Tom was rereading the line about obeying orders, when the door was thrown open and a Soviet general stamped in, flanked by two KGB sergeants. Without hesitating, the man closed the gap, lifted Tom by his throat and sucker-punched him under the ribs.
Soviets?
Breath left Tom’s lungs and he jackknifed forward.
The next strike would have ruptured his throat if Tom hadn’t twisted sideways in time. It still knocked him from his chair. A boot stamped for his head, scraping his face and catching his ear. He fought to stay conscious and failed. When the room returned Colonel Schneider was back; although he might as well not be, for all the attention the Soviet general paid him.
‘I’m told you speak Russian,’ the Russian said. He swung a kick and Tom rolled out of its way, clambering unsteadily to his feet.
‘Da, nemnogo.’
‘More than a little, I’m told.’
Tom shook his head.
‘You’re a spy …’
‘I’m an army officer.’
‘Not here you’re not. Here you’re a spy and a murderer.’
‘You’re Moscow’s rezident?’
‘See. How would you even know about KGB Heads of Station if you weren’t a spy? You killed them both.’ The Soviet’s simmering fury indicated that this was personal in some way. Perhaps he’d known Sir Cecil. Maybe Evgeny had been a source of his. Something dark was driving that anger.
Colonel Schneider stepped forward and the rezident ignored him.
‘With respect, Comrade General. This is not the way to handle it.’
‘You think your way is better?’ The rezident gestured contemptuously at the confession and the pen that rolled from the table to the floor. ‘You think for a second he’s going to confess unless he’s forced to?’
Walking behind Tom, the rezident stepped in so close that Tom could feel the heat from his body. He waited for a blow to knock him sideways but the man simply stood there. Out
of sight and silent.
Colonel Schneider seemed to be holding his breath.
And then, sighing, the rezident walked to the other side of the table, took a chair, put his elbows on the table and stared at Tom.
‘Do yourself a favour,’ he said. ‘Sign.’
‘Your friend told me to take my time.’
Reaching into his jacket for his ID, the rezident flipped it open and turned it so Tom could see the photograph and read the name below.
General Gregori Rafikov.
The KGB shield occupied the top-left corner. The insignia of the Soviet Union filled the top right. The photograph had been taken years before.
‘I’m Russian,’ General Rafikov said, ‘he’s East German. It would be stretching a point to call us friends.’
‘We’re comrades,’ Colonel Schneider said.
The general smiled thinly.
‘As you surmised,’ he told Tom, ‘I run HQ Karlshorst. You should know that under a long-standing protocol, KGB agents in Berlin have full authority. That is, we have exactly the same authority as we have in Moscow.’
Colonel Schneider’s face tightened.
‘You’re being held by the Kriminalpolizei,’ Rafikov said. ‘I’ve suggested that their First Deputy Minister pass you to the Stasi. I don’t actually understand the delay. Anyone but a fool can see this is a state-sanctioned assassination.’
He glanced at Colonel Schneider.
‘Apparently, senior people in the GDR disagree. Still, that’s not your concern.’ Checking his watch, he said, ‘Lunchtime. How convenient. If Colonel Schneider would like to give me a few minutes to myself …’
For a second Tom thought the colonel would refuse.
Instead he turned on his heel and marched from the room, shoulders stiff with anger, his junior officers trailing behind. The door shut with something that wasn’t quite a slam. At a nod, one of the rezident’s men bent Tom double and cuffed his hands below his knees, cold metal biting into his wrists. Then he lifted Tom into his chair and stepped away.
Putting on a single black glove, General Rafikov pulled a spring-loaded cosh from his pocket and put it on the table. The cosh was small, the leather so old it was cracked and black. The spring curved slightly to one side.
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