The Diplomat's Wife

by Ridpath, Michael

  * * *

  Dear Philip,

  I hope your trip to East Berlin was interesting. If you have something to report to Mr Swann, I would be happy to pass it on to him. Can you get away to meet me this evening? I am staying at the Hotel Zoo, address above. It’s very close. Please telephone the hotel number to let me know when you can come. It’s important.

  And don’t let your grandmother know you are meeting me. I apologize for the necessity for secrecy, but I am sure you understand.

  Yours sincerely,

  Freddie Pelham-Walsh

  * * *

  So Freddie was in cahoots with Swann after all. No surprise there.

  It did surprise him that Freddie knew he had joined Emma in the east. It turned out the Stasi were not the only people watching them.

  But what to tell Freddie? Phil did have something to report, that Lothar was alive and living in a town in Spain. But to do that would be to betray his grandmother. Yet wasn’t he betraying his grandmother already by omitting to tell her about Swann’s interest in her?

  Could he trust Freddie? Sure, Freddie had been a government minister, but he had also been a communist. As had Emma, for that matter.

  Shouldn’t he, in fact, be telling Emma about Swann?

  The truth was, Phil didn’t know whom he could trust.

  He decided to see Freddie and play it by ear. If Freddie could convince him that he really did know Swann and would pass on Phil’s message to him, then Phil would tell him about Lothar. It would be useful to have British intelligence on their side in the next couple of days. But if Phil’s doubts remained, he would keep quiet for now.

  So he rang the number of the Hotel Zoo, which he had noticed stood a little further up the Kurfürstendamm, and asked to be put through to Freddie. There was no reply from Freddie’s room, so Phil left a message that he would meet Freddie in the hotel bar at 6.30 p.m. He didn’t leave his own name.

  He was sitting on his bed, staring at the phone, still wrestling with the problem of what to say, when it rang.

  He picked it up. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Phil! You’re still here!’

  Phil couldn’t help smiling at the sound of Heike’s voice.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You hinted you might not be going back to London after all, so I thought I would call you at your hotel on the off-chance. What happened?’

  ‘I decided to stay.’

  ‘And did you go to the east?’

  ‘I did. I actually surprised my grandmother in a taxi on the other side.’

  ‘How did she take that?’

  ‘She was a bit pissed off, but then she seemed happy.’

  ‘Great. Look, can we meet up this evening?’

  ‘I’d like to.’ Once again, Phil wasn’t sure what to do. He had promised to see Emma for dinner and it would be hard to ditch that, especially if he said he was meeting Heike. He could sneak out of the hotel afterwards. Or he could see Heike for a quick drink before he met Freddie.

  ‘Tell you what, I have to see someone at the Hotel Zoo at six thirty. Can you meet me before then?’

  ‘I can do that,’ said Heike. ‘How about that café in Tauentzienstrasse where your grandmother took us before? Half past five?’

  ‘That’s good. See you then.’

  Fifty-Three

  Phil had time to pick up his rucksack from the left luggage office at Zoo Station before he met Heike, all the time stewing over what his grandmother had said about her.

  Heike was waiting for him at the café, wearing a yellow Atomkraft? Nein Danke T-shirt and tight black jeans. She looked gorgeous. Images of her naked in the dim light of the squat the previous night slid their way to the forefront of Phil’s brain.

  She didn’t look anything like the men in hats and raincoats of the classic spy film, or even the pneumatic women with enormous breasts and tight-fitting dresses of the Bond films.

  But she didn’t look twenty. Phil’s friend Mike’s older sister Rachel was twenty-one, and Heike looked older than her.

  They kissed each other hesitantly, a quick brush on the lips. Phil ordered a beer, and Heike a glass of wine. She did seem pleased to see him.

  She asked all about his trip to East Berlin, and he admitted he had seen Kay, the woman he had told her about in Paris and Berlin before the war. He told Heike Emma had asked Kay about the man who had ‘handled’ her on behalf of the Russians, but Kay had insisted the man was dead.

  Naturally enough, Heike was fascinated. It was a fascinating story.

  ‘So are you staying in Berlin?’

  ‘No. We’re off tomorrow.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Grams discovered from someone else where this guy is. And we’re going to see him tomorrow. It’s going to be a very long drive.’

  ‘Really? Where are you going?’

  * * *

  Phil strolled past the Hollow-Tooth Church down the Kurfürstendamm to the Hotel Zoo, which was a flashy hotel only half a block from the Bristol. He was five minutes late, but Freddie was not in the bar.

  Phil sat down, somewhat uncomfortably. He felt what he was, a scruffy boy in a hotel for international jet-setters. After he had twice turned down a disapproving waiter trying to offer him drinks, he left the bar and headed for the front desk in the hotel lobby. Something was up: a ripple of suppressed anxiety surrounded the half-dozen men and women conferring behind the desk.

  Phil stood politely next to the desk while they ignored him. Finally, a woman came over and smiled stiffly.

  ‘I’m waiting for a guest in your hotel. Herr Pelham-Walsh,’ Phil stated in German. ‘Can I telephone his room, please?’

  The smile disappeared. ‘One moment.’ She turned to the group of staff. ‘Herr Klauber? This gentleman is supposed to be meeting Herr Pelham-Walsh.’

  An immaculate man of about fifty, with perfectly groomed hair and a neatly trimmed moustache, instantly detached himself from the group and introduced himself as the manager.

  He led Phil through to the recesses of an office behind the desk and bade Phil sit down.

  ‘I am sorry to say that Herr Pelham-Walsh was killed this afternoon in a road accident,’ the man said in English. ‘Just a couple of blocks from here. It was a hit-and-run.’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘Is he a relative of yours?’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘A friend perhaps?’

  Phil’s brain fizzed. He wasn’t going to waste time speculating whether Freddie had been killed by accident; the MP had been run down deliberately, probably by the Stasi or the KGB. Possibly to stop Phil talking to him right now. Phil couldn’t think through all the implications of this immediately, but his instinct was that it would be better if the West German authorities didn’t know who he really was.

  ‘Godfather.’

  ‘And you were supposed to meet him?’

  ‘Yes. He contacted me to say he was staying in Berlin for a couple of days and he knew I was here, and could I meet him this evening? So I said yes I would.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, sir.’

  Phil realized he should be looking sad. He also realized he was probably looking as stunned as he felt, which would do fine.

  ‘We understand that Mr Pelham-Walsh was an important man in Britain? A member of parliament?’

  ‘Not just that. A government minister. Or he used to be.’

  The hotel manager absorbed the information, no doubt ratcheting up the problem a notch.

  ‘We have been in touch with the British Embassy. Do you have his wife’s contact details, perhaps? Or his home phone number?’

  ‘Freddie wasn’t married,’ Phil said, with some degree of confidence. ‘And my address book is back at my hotel.’

  ‘I see. I am sure the police or someone from the embassy will be here shortly. Would you mind waiting until they arrive?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Phil.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ The manager got to his feet. ‘Oh, forgive me, sir. What is your name?
’

  ‘Oh. Um. Eustace. Eustace Parsons.’

  Eustace? His French teacher Eustace? Get a grip, Phil told himself. But the truth was his brain was tumbling. First Kurt, and now Freddie.

  Who next?

  Phil had an uncomfortable feeling it might be him. Or Emma. Or both of them.

  Fear was seeping into his brain, seizing it up, preventing rational thought.

  Get a grip.

  ‘Thank you.’ The manager scribbled the name down on a piece of paper. ‘And where are you staying?’

  ‘The youth hostel in Bayernallee.’ Better.

  The manager’s nose remained unwrinkled as he wrote this down. ‘And your home address?’

  Phil spelled out a random address in Marlow, the closest town to Wittingcombe.

  The manager floated off, and Phil hung around in the lobby, doing his best to overcome his agitation.

  He did mind waiting for the police or a man from the embassy, actually. Once he got himself ensnared with the authorities, it would be impossible for him and Emma to get away to Spain.

  So, while the bodies behind the reception desk were conferring, he slipped unnoticed out of the front entrance and hurried down the street towards his own hotel.

  * * *

  Heike was strolling along Tauentzienstrasse when a battered green BMW pulled up beside her. She jumped in. Rozhkov was in the driver’s seat.

  ‘What happened to the other car?’ she asked. Rozhkov had been driving an equally battered grey Mercedes.

  ‘I had to get rid of it.’

  ‘Pelham-Walsh?’

  ‘Yes. I got him on a side street. Only possible witness was a young woman with two children, and I’m sure she was looking at them, not me.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Dead.’

  Traffic accidents were better than more blatant liquidations, especially for high-profile targets like Pelham-Walsh. A shooting would have stirred up a hornets’ nest. The problem was, hit-and-runs weren’t always reliable; at least this one had been successful.

  ‘How did it go with young Phil?’ Rozhkov asked.

  ‘Well. He confirmed he and Emma saw Kay Ortmann yesterday.’

  ‘We know that. But the surveillance tapes show she didn’t tell them anything.’

  ‘That’s true. But Phil said Emma knows where Lothar is.’

  ‘Did he say how she knows?’

  ‘No. But he did tell me where. They are planning to track Lothar down tomorrow.’

  Heike was glad Phil had spilled the beans about Lothar’s whereabouts. After the debacle in Annecy, the plan had changed, at Rozhkov’s suggestion. The idea now was to let Phil and Emma lead them to Lothar, and then kill him. And them. And the agent buried deep within the British establishment for the last forty years would remain safely buried, as would the couple of others still in place that he had recruited in turn.

  She really must do a better job of dealing with Phil. He was going to die – she knew it, and she should be able to handle it if she was to be the professional agent she aspired to be. She had done a lot for her country; there was a lot more she could do.

  She was glad she hadn’t had to sleep with him again that night. Phil had declined her suggestion, saying he had a long drive the following day.

  As, therefore, did she and Rozhkov.

  ‘Well done,’ said Rozhkov. ‘So where are they leading us tomorrow?’

  Heike told him.

  Fifty-Four

  Phil’s tiny travelling alarm clock went off at 4 a.m. He was in a deep sleep, and it took all his willpower to drag himself out of bed and stand under a shower for five minutes. He was supposed to be meeting Emma in the hotel lobby at 4.30 a.m.

  As soon as he had returned to the Bristol the evening before he had knocked on Emma’s door and forced her out and down to the bar for a drink. He was more inclined than ever to believe that her room was bugged. She had seen from his face that something important was up, and under the murmur of the cocktail-hour crowd, Phil had explained that Freddie had summoned him to his hotel, and that he was now dead, run over on a side street.

  A succession of emotions swept across Emma’s face: shock, sadness, fear and then resolution.

  ‘It was the KGB, wasn’t it?’ Phil said.

  ‘Must have been. Do you know why Freddie wanted to talk to you?’

  ‘No idea,’ Phil lied.

  ‘We need to leave this city,’ Emma said.

  Phil heartily agreed. Freddie’s death had badly shaken him; he didn’t want to spend a moment longer than he had to in Berlin. ‘Shall we go right now?’

  ‘Yes.’ Then Emma hesitated. ‘Maybe not right now. We’re both tired and we have a very long journey ahead of us.’ That’s when she came up with the plan of getting up at four in the morning.

  Emma was waiting for him in the lobby, looking as resolute as ever. She had summoned the TR6 to the hotel entrance. It was already light outside, but the Kurfürstendamm was quiet. Out on the street the sun was rising behind the broken spire of the church, painting stripes of rose and gold along the upper floors of the buildings along the street.

  The roads were empty. But as they approached the western suburb of Zehlendorf, and the checkpoint from West Berlin back on to the autobahn corridor through East Germany, a number of lorries began to accumulate.

  It was here that they were most likely to be stopped, either by the West German authorities if they had realized Phil knew something about Freddie’s death, or by the East German border guards. Phil and Emma had discussed this, and decided that if the East Germans had been happy to follow them to visit Kay without arresting them, they would be likely to allow them out of Berlin.

  The reasoning sounded plausible. But it could be wrong. The only way they would know was when they were safely driving along the corridor itself.

  Both sets of border guards let them through, the East German taking longer than his western counterpart, but that in itself wasn’t suspicious. And then they were off on the autobahn, heading to Helmstedt, Braunschweig and Hanover.

  Emma and Phil were wrapped up in their own thoughts. It was too early to talk. On the open road, with no speed limit, Phil put his foot down, nudging the speedometer past a ton.

  He checked his grandmother, who caught his eye and grinned. The sun hung low behind them, urging them on.

  It appeared that giving a false name to the manager at the Hotel Zoo had worked, at least for a little bit. Swann would hear of Freddie’s death soon enough. The British Embassy had already been told, and presumably the news would spread around Whitehall to reach him. Phil had considered trying to telephone him, reverse charges, the night before, and telling him that Lothar was in Spain.

  But Phil was cautious. The safest choice seemed to be to keep as low a profile as they could until they actually found Lothar. Then he would telephone Swann.

  Who was this damn mole anyway? Of course, it could easily be someone Emma had never met, someone who hadn’t been part of her story yet – someone like Denis Healey – or more likely someone of whom Phil hadn’t even heard. In which case there was no point in Phil trying to speculate.

  But if it was someone Emma knew from the 1930s, then that would explain Swann’s insistence Phil keep their conversation from her.

  If the mole was a friend of Emma’s.

  Or if Emma had recruited the mole herself.

  That would mean Emma had not been completely open in the stories she had told Phil; she had held things back.

  It was possible. In fact, she had always admitted she was holding information back, information that it would be dangerous for Phil to know.

  So if Emma knew the mole, who might it be?

  Kurt would have been a good guess. He had risen in the ranks of the West German Foreign Ministry. But he was dead; almost certainly killed by the KGB.

  What about Roland? Had Emma recruited Roland at some point, maybe after their reconciliation?

  But Roland, too, was dead. It sounded as if Swann was
looking for a mole that was still burrowing.

  There was another obvious possibility.

  ‘Grams?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know you said Freddie spied for the Russians before the war?’

  ‘Yes, darling.’

  ‘Do you think he might still have been working for them?’

  Even as he was driving, Phil could feel Emma’s sharp brown eyes studying him closely.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I was trying to figure out why he was killed.’

  ‘You mean, you think it might have been the British? Because he was a Russian spy?’

  ‘I don’t know, Grams,’ Phil said. ‘I’m just trying to make sense of this.’

  ‘I suppose he might have been working for the KGB. But I think it unlikely. He did help MI5 track down Burgess and Maclean, and I think Philby.’ She sighed. ‘That’s the problem with this spying business. You never really know. Even when it’s your own brother.’

  A tear crept down her cheek. ‘Freddie was exasperating, but I liked him.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Grams,’ said Phil.

  But his mind continued to roam. ‘What about Cyril?’

  ‘Cyril?’

  ‘Do you think he has anything to do with Kurt’s death?’ Phil asked. ‘Kurt did know Cyril was a spy, after all.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Emma hesitantly. But it was clear the idea hadn’t occurred to her.

  Emma was thinking too.

  ‘If you’re looking for a spy, I don’t think you need look much further than Heike.’

  Phil glanced at Emma and swallowed. ‘I saw her last night, Grams.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I slipped out to see her for a drink. Just before I went to meet Freddie at the Hotel Zoo.’

  ‘But I told you to stay clear of her!’

  ‘I know you did. But I thought you were wrong; I was sure you were wrong.’

  ‘You fool, Philip!’

  ‘Until I was with her. Then I realized you were right. She’s not twenty. And if she’s not twenty, she probably isn’t a student at the University of Bonn. And much as it pains me to admit it, she probably doesn’t fancy me. And when she quickly turned the conversation to where we were going today, I knew for sure why she was interested in me.’