The Oktober Projekt

by R. J. Dillon

  The muscles in his neck protested as Nick concentrated on the body of a woman her brown hair matted and stuck to her face, naked in an upright chair. Nick put her in her early forties, but it was difficult to tell. One of her hands was reduced to a black stump by the flame from what Nick guessed must have been a blowtorch that had also charred the chair’s foam. The other hand hung lazily over the side, its nails missing. Nick’s eyes came back to her slender face scored with the tip of a sharp knife, across her neck a savage gash that had almost completely severed her head. Tied in another chair opposite, her lover Giles Motram also naked and brutally abused sat equally dead.

  Nick found his way back through the hall the terror on the woman’s face printed in his mind, more of the same suffered by Lubov’s family in Moscow. Jamming open the kitchen door with his foot, he lit a cigarette.

  ‘How is it?’ The Brigadier wanted to know.

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘What d’ya mean?’

  ‘Bad, both dead.’

  Deciding to investigate himself, the Brigadier made for the door only for Nick to block his way. ‘It’s a crime scene,’ he said.

  ‘Yes… yes, of course.’ The snow had increased and coated the Brigadier’s shoulders.

  ‘You’d better wait at home for the police, there’ll be questions.’

  On this jigsaw piece of isthmus, murder seemed too surreal to contemplate and the Brigadier nodded solemnly as he strode off for home. Who would expect this carnage here reasoned Nick, where flat, rich cropping fields had a sprinkling of retirement villas mixed liberally with farms growing nothing but debt. Uncertainty beat away inside Nick, his temples throbbed and his face burnt. Ringing Rossan, Nick explained in Service code that they had a major project to deal with, nothing less than a full structural redesign and they’d require a full team. Rossan could begin by informing the architects, which in Service terms meant the local police.

  As the night slowly wound on losing its grip, the house became a scene of ceaseless activity. Detached, his role nothing more than a flâneur, Nick took everything in as he moved from room to room as different teams went about their work.

  As more Service experts arrived, a female CID officer who’d identified herself to Nick as DI Jameson ‘his liaison’, reported what she had so far, which amounted to nothing that Nick didn’t already know.

  ‘The scene is secure and I have carried out a risk assessment,’ she droned officiously.

  ‘I’m sure Motram and his friend would approve,’ said Nick.

  ‘From an initial assessment I think we can classify this as a double murder,’ she announced. ‘Though it may be some time until we can ascertain the exact relationship that existed between victim one and two, and the perpetrators.’

  ‘It’s probably safe to rule out them being good friends.’

  ‘Is it?’ She refused to respond more than was absolutely necessary in case she made a politically incorrect appraisal or summation thought Nick, or she fears breaching the absurd regulations on equality and diversity that she resolutely adhered to, even in cases of death. The way she stood stiffly her eyes cold and small, she made it perfectly clear she didn’t like Nick, didn’t care for what he did, though she hadn’t been told what he did, only that he asks and he is given full access and answers. ‘I think it’s time I checked on progress again,’ she said, walking off.

  But she fared little better wherever she strode on her progress review. Rossan’s hurriedly assembled teams, men and women roused from their beds, treated Jameson as an unsavoury gatecrasher with insolent stares and stinging asides that eventually forced her to set up a command post on the drive.

  Nick mooched between rooms waiting for Rossan to arrive. A stocky Service doctor came and went, smoking and sharing his flask of tea with Nick like a human St. Bernard. Gradually Rossan’s serious men and women eased the bungalow apart; all these scenes fixed like deep splinters under a membrane in Nick’s memory as Service specialists taped, collected and photographed each room, all the details logged and annotated meticulously, their white hooded suits giving them a spectral presence.

  ‘Work of a sadist, I’d say,’ the doctor said, returning with more tea. Nick had shared other dead bodies with men like him. Cheerful and reflective, he mumbled to an invisible associate at his side; traces of Motram or his lover’s flesh on his clear gloves, a few smears of ash on his rolled white cuffs.

  When Rossan turned up most of the search had been completed. ‘Nothing of real significance,’ he told Nick in the hallway. ‘What I can’t understand is why they’d do that to them?’

  ‘Because they got to him before we raided the maisonette and Lauvas’s house.’

  ‘It just doesn’t make sense,’ said Rossan, handing Nick a membership card in a clear evidence bag.

  The card declared Giles Motram to be a privileged member of the Brazillia Casino, Hamburg. ‘They tortured him to find out if he’d talked to us,’ said Nick, handing the bag back.

  ‘If he did, then I assume we would have a contact record of it.’

  ‘Would we?’ wondered Nick, sensing that Motram may have seen something or someone that he could never be allowed to reveal. ‘He was terminated to protect the main asset.’ Tell the senior ex-officer I have discovered three of them, tell him three, remembered Nick. Galgate and Motram made two, leaving me one more; another of Moscow’s loyal servants, the main asset who has to be safeguarded at all costs.

  ‘If you need me, I’ll be persuading Jameson that we really don’t hate her.’

  So Nick lingered. Cross-legged in an adjoining room a female officer diligently wrote up her report, her knees pulled in to let the steady procession past, Nick storing the details; this was genuine Pinter, real theatre of the absurd. Away from the grey house the snow rolled down into a waiting greedy sea.

  A bustle in the hall, a dark hurrying shape scooting past the dusky wallpaper and Aubrey-Spencer moved towards Nick with an angry roll of his shoulders. His eyes, dark and intense read the scene with a fieldman’s quick understanding. Attending him a senior uniformed officer who took a full assessment with one glance, said something in a respectful growl and abruptly left. Someone switched on a lamp and a sleepy bulb lit the hall as the doctor nodded to Aubrey-Spencer and went off to rinse away the victims’ skin.

  ‘A walk if you will,’ declared Aubrey-Spencer, clutching Nick’s arm to guide him out into the snow. ‘You and I, right now.’

  Below Nick in the semi-darkness a wild sea hammered pebbles up the shore, a pale light fluttered on the horizon like dirty washing on a line; and dawn had forced the sky and sea apart as weak light flooded into the crack. They walked without feeling the cold, nipping brandy from Aubrey-Spencer’s silver hip flask every couple of yards. Out to sea Nick saw the lights of a passing ship wink at nothingness and fade out of sight; along the road gulls curled round the tops of street lamps for warmth. In the town a church clock hit a quarter as a milk float jingled somewhere out of sight. Ahead on an obelisk carved to the dead of two wars, a police officer stamped his boots on the bottom step to keep warm; the sporadic chatter from his radio drifted towards them adding to the unreality. Completely absorbed by his own troubled thoughts, Aubrey-Spencer stared into the distance, unconcerned that the snowy grass was soaking his trousers and shoes.

  ‘What do we make of this?’ Aubrey-Spencer demanded at last.

  ‘Think Moscow discussed it with me?’

  ‘I did not mean that, Nicholas. Bailrigg appears to think that I am someway responsible for a part of this and I have to make amends. The PM and Foreign Secretary are climbing the walls, the PM requires this to be tidied up fast so we limit any damage to our reputation. I’ve had my quota of bollockings thank you very much.’

  ‘Motram was on the GRU’s books, the same network as Galgate, run by Brigita or her husband.’

  ‘Which leaves us one more, the principal,’ he said.

  ‘Three is a magic number,’ said Nick, a TV jingle for a phone company playing in his
head.

  ‘Lubov implied as much to that fool Bensham,’ Aubrey-Spencer admitted. ‘I had always appreciated Lubov’s true value when I was Chief, so too did Hayles. If anyone was going to get close to the Oktober Projekt then it would be from the flank, a position the GRU stubbornly believe to be impenetrable. Lubov may have been an accountant, but he was a GRU accountant, one who had been so grievously overlooked for promotion that he simmered with resentment. Hayles and Rafford simply intensified his bitterness, bought his heart and soul. I decided to let him run on a long leash, see where his auditing took him. He produced nothing of great value, but I preferred it that way.’

  ‘You ran him as deep cover, letting his handlers believe he was being serviced as collateral if we ever needed to make a deal?’

  ‘Humour me, Nicholas if you please,’ Aubrey-Spencer suggested, upping the pace.

  The sky was filling with colour; an unseen hand had slashed the black canvas and a glorious deep orange seeped into the wounds. Nick took more brandy and the alcohol cleansed his head, seeing for the first time the shabbiness of the resort. Guesthouses in lurid pinks and blues; arcades for rainy days, rock stalls in flaking white and a theme bar, this one a Western Saloon with ranch doors painted by unconvinced English hands. A foul-weather shelter with an overturned bench and sand streaked glass sat hunched in front of them. It came at a point where the promenade broadened out; next to it a telescope had been ripped off its pedestal and the mounting held up a torn rusted knuckle.

  ‘Perhaps I became too complacent,’ Aubrey-Spencer declared in a rare show of contrition. ‘After I was hoofed out as Chief, I was damn sure that Lubov wouldn’t be wasted, so I became a privateer, running Lubov from what little cover I could muster in my JIC capacity.’

  ‘You joking?’

  ‘I most certainly am not,’ said Aubrey-Spencer. ‘Hayles and Rafford handled him between them. Hayles on trips to Moscow to flog his fake maps, Rafford to drum up Russian clients for his adult playground.’

  ‘And RUS/OPS hadn’t any clue that Lubov was performing such a sterling service?’

  ‘Of course not, do grow up.’

  A slipway ran into the sea opposite them, and waves washed shingle noisily against its concrete braces; an entire army slogging up the beach. Nick didn’t feel inclined to answer and laughed into the wind.

  ‘Then Bensham came along,’ Nick volunteered after a pause.

  ‘Damn fool should never have got within a mile of the Service,’ declared Aubrey-Spencer with venom. ‘Lubov had played ball with a string of handlers, not giving them any reason to rock the boat. He’d also given us an insight of the Oktober Projekt, but warned us that London couldn’t be trusted, something rotten was going on. He wanted more time to make all the connections but panicked when that fool Bensham threatened to retire him there and then. He tried to get word to me through Bensham, but the fool ignored his request for a meeting with a senior ex-officer.’

  ‘So you let me walk into Moscow unprepared?’ Nick said, but Aubrey-Spencer simply glared.

  ‘There were three of them, remember, how was I to know which three?’

  Aubrey-Spencer climbed over an ankle high brick wall into a car park partly claimed by the sea, gulls and paper cups bobbing on its choppy waves. A police Range Rover blocked the car park entrance, a second unmarked Volvo V70 sitting by an official Service car parked in a far corner overlooking the sea, by its door an Assistant Chief Constable in the middle of a phone call.

  Dear God, thought Nick; I was sent to Moscow to test my loyalty, well, thanks very much. ‘But you soon narrowed down the field,’ proposed Nick.

  ‘With Lubov knowing that Bensham was going to blow everything, he wanted rid of what data he had. Jamie even flew out to Moscow for a crash meeting, but there was no hide nor hair of Lubov. They had a fallback, a dead-letter box where Jamie found a garbled note about a phone, some iPod and a girl. By the time Rafford tracked her down she had somehow corrupted the files. None of this need to have happened if it hadn’t been for that damn fool Bensham. Where do we recruit these people from nowadays?’

  Four anglers in chest waders and weekend waterproofs had piled out of a Jeep with a small boat in tow. Gathered round the Range Rover blocking the entrance, they were in the middle of a heated debate over access, pointing to the sea. But Nick ignored their plight as his mind started to retrace the route he had followed since Moscow; a solution to finding Lubov’s traitor in the Service had long been gathering in Nick along the way. Drawn together in Moscow during the restless days and nights of his captivity, pushed into a direction by Angie’s death, dragged in another by Aubrey-Spencer; he had formed it clearly without pedantry with no affinity to emotions or previous relationships. Now in the perfect calmness of an English morning, it seemed inadequate. Silent, he stared at everything and nothing.

  Gulls floated on the cold air too light to be real, lifting and dropping freely. The anglers, having reached a compromise were attempting to reverse their flimsy craft between a boulder wall.

  ‘And do you have your final suspects after all this?’

  ‘Rossan from the start I considered clean. Bailrigg hasn’t got the head nor the spine for it, so that leaves a gallant band of three. Now Nicholas, eyes to the front, no loose talk and I’ll keep in touch through Redman,’ Aubrey-Spencer declared.

  As they drew near to the ACC, Nick could catch snippets of his conference. ‘…double murder, but nothing to raise undue suspicion. His neighbours can be told that he had stored something in there that might have constituted a health hazard hence the full turnout. You know the score.’

  Evidently someone did, for he snapped a smart salute in Aubrey-Spencer’s direction and returned to the warmth of his Volvo.

  ‘I put my neck on the line again, that it?’

  ‘For some people in our parish the truth is a sin in its own right,’ Aubrey-Spencer observed. ‘Remember the Eleventh Commandment, Nicholas, don’t get caught,’ he added, squeezing Nick’s arm in a farewell.

  ‘Or you,’ said Nick, slamming the door, banging twice on the roof as he stood back.

  With a curt wave Aubrey-Spencer sat back, appraising Nick as if he had only at this very moment come to see him for who he really was. Although the car was an automatic, Aubrey-Spencer’s driver still made driving a chore as they headed along the prom with a police car none too discreetly behind. No friends, no prisoners, decided Nick as Aubrey-Spencer’s car had a nasty brush with a cyclist at the bottom of the road. And every step forward will take me further from heaven he thought, splashing his way across the car park. Around him the morning wore a freshness unlike any other hour of the day; washed, unused, it smelt starched and untouched by any previous labours and for Nick it seemed to be heralding a new beginning.

  • • •

  The following morning Rossan collected Nick from his latest B&B refuge in a state of high dudgeon and anxiety. As Rossan drove, his mood filthy, the sun played hide and seek behind stiff blotches of cloud all the way to Peacehaven; thin shafts of sunlight lifting out the contours of a retirement retreat built to one wondrous haphazard plan.

  ‘Her mother found her and rang for an ambulance, but she refused to go to hospital, demanding to speak to you, only you, and gave them our emergency number. The duty officer called me and I promised he’d be posted to the moon if he breathed a word, assured him that she’s not having a complete and utter meltdown, she’s just being plain stupid,’ Rossan explained, parked on the east side of The Dell his mood revived to something close to tolerant. ‘When I spoke to her over the phone, she sounded as mad as a hatter, so I sent reinforcements and a doctor.’

  ‘Who’s with her?’

  ‘Danny, Lumb and Montford.’

  ‘No one else has been informed?’

  ‘Not a soul,’ Rossan said. ‘Her parents are pretty shook up,’ he added. ‘Retired missionaries and if anyone discovers I’ve broken every personnel protocol under the sun I’m finished.’

  ‘Let’s go
talk,’ suggested Nick.

  The bungalow was post-war built from smooth red brick, standing solid and firm with York stone mullioned bay windows. It was one of those places that would never change over the years, an architectural time machine, decided Nick as they parked behind Danny’s BMW. Overgrown fields flowed from the bungalow on three sides, tended until illness or age let them revert back to weeds and high grass that stretched away to a sharp peak of headland. A small market garden business left to rot with a cluster of wooden sheds, glasshouses and garages gently falling apart. One of them a brick coal store its door owed a coat of paint, held one end of a blue clothesline. Pegged along the line washing fluttering as neatly as semaphore flags in the needle cold wind; clothes for a couple surviving on slim pensions, all of them tumbled of colour and designed for comfort rather than fashion.

  ‘Where is she?’ Rossan asked as Danny opened the door.

  ‘Back room with Lumb,’ said Danny, letting them past. ‘Parents are in the front with Montford.’

  Nick heard the television before opening the door. Inside, Montford from internal security sat across from the couple, separated by a generation and a continent.

  ‘I’ve tried my hardest sir,’ Montford whispered, coming over to Rossan. ‘But I can’t really get through to them.’

  On the television a game show host exhorted a contestant to have another go; if only we could thought Nick, glancing around, taking in the statuettes, spears, clubs and shields vying with tribal masks for a piece of space. In no apparent order they summarised the couple’s lifetime as missionaries, members of some zealous tribe that must have saved souls in exchange for primitive goods. This is their horde for retirement he thought; a cluttered bungalow in an unfashionable resort with views of the sea and orderly avenues to comfort you right up to death. Now we’ve gone and broken the spell.

  ‘Your daughter is suffering from stress,’ Rossan said very loud, standing over the husband, hands snuggled into his coat pockets. ‘That’s why we’re here.’