The Cilla Rose Affair (5 page)

Evan scrutinized the studio he had appropriated for the afternoon. It belonged to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and was located in an unpretentious office building in Great Titchfield Street, several blocks north of Oxford Circus.

The studio was small and windowless, furnished with a desk and a PC, an array of overhead TV lights on a track, a remotely-controlled camera fitted with an overhead teleprompter that was linked to the screen of the PC, and a collection of flats, each a huge, blown-up photo of London: London at night, London by the river. Directly behind the desk, situated so that it would be framed by the camera, was a mock window with venetian blinds. The scenes could be swung behind the window, and the blinds raised or lowered, to convey the impression of location-reporting as the situation warranted.

Behind the blinds on this occasion was a view of the building across the road from the CBC—red bricks and white window sashes. A simple, effective lie.

“I chose this location with your well-being in mind, Simon,” Evan provided, shutting the door. Beyond the studio, television monitors were playing out scenes of the armoured siege of the Russian White House, and its defense by the citizens of Moscow. “Very few people are going to question a British media personality paying a social visit on the CBC.”

Simon Darrow looked hot and nervous. He sat down in the newsreader’s chair, unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, and rolled up his cuffs.

“Mind doing something with those lights?” he complained.

Evan obliged. He turned off the rack of overhead spots, leaving just the desk lamp, and the exit sign over the door. He set the video camera in motion on his way back, framing Simon Darrow in the false window. The man didn’t look well.

“Would you like a glass of water?”

Darrow put on a pained expression. “Your concern for my health’s touching,” he said, cynically. “See if you can cadge a couple of aspirins from the ladies, while you’re at it.”

Evan located a supply of paper cups in the men’s washroom, and a packet of Panadols in a vacant desk in the office opposite the studio. Darrow swallowed them quickly, as if he was unsure about trusting his insides to keep them down.

“I don’t even know why you’re bothering with me,” he said. “I’m nothing. Nobody. Haven’t you got anything better to do with your time? Or has the new world order suddenly made you lot redundant?”

Evan smiled. “Try to think of this as an exercise in ecology, Simon. A minute study of the planet’s oceans. Try to think of yourself as a single celled entity, drifting aimlessly in a soup of undersea nutrients. Plankton. Protozoa. Fish food.”

“Fish food,” Darrow muttered, following the aspirins with a second, swift swallow of water.

“There is a shark in our family of intelligence communities, Simon, and he’s been there for quite some time, working his way up through the ranks, blowing covers, sabotaging operations. Sabotaging lives. Not just one or two lives, Simon, and not only the lives of the crew aboard the
Cilla Rose
. A lot of good agents were sacrificed over the years to save the skin of our clever friend. That’s why I’m bothering with you, Simon. I want to know where to find the fish that swallowed you. And after that I’ll find out who swallowed him—or her. And so on, up the food chain, until I’ve hooked my shark.”

“Why don’t you just go and ask the Russians? We’re all starting to be good friends now, aren’t we? Everything swept under the carpet? Files thrown open, conspiracies traded?”

“Friends of a sort, certainly, Simon. But even good friends have been known to keep secrets from one another in the interests of national —and personal—security. And with the current state of affairs in Moscow being what they are…”

Evan’s voice trailed off as Darrow finished his water.

“Get on with it,” he muttered.

“Suppose you begin by telling me how you were recruited.”

“I wasn’t ‘recruited’. I was approached. I fell into it by accident. I was…” He smiled wanly. “Entrapped. I’m sure you’re familiar with the technique.”

“What was her name?”

“I don’t know what was on her birth certificate, but she told me her name was Jean.”

“Jean what?” Evan was taking notes with a BBC pen on a sheet of red and white CBC letterhead.

“Jean-can’t-remember, offhand,” Darrow replied. “She’s dead, anyway. Got killed in a car crash. I saw it in the papers.”

“When?”

“Long time ago,” Darrow said, pressing a tentative hand to his middle. “Roundabout the time of the Falklands thing.”

“Your memory,” said Evan, “seems to suffer from a certain creative selectivity. Would you care to explain how you came to be entrapped by the lovely and late Jean?”

“Ah, now, that I do recall. She had lots of very good chums, this lady, and she enjoyed a good party. Well–Jean invited Simon round for the weekend, arranged to render him absolutely blotto, tucked him into bed with a trio of naughty ladies, added evidence of an illicit drug or two to lend some intrigue, invited the photogs in—”

“Ah, yes,” said Evan. “The inimitable photographers.”

“Following which I was given certain options—much the same terms as the ones you offered the other day. I chose the path of least resistance…and I was summarily introduced to Clara, who thereafter commanded me to do her bidding.”

“Clara,” Evan repeated, adding the name to his notes.

“The KGB agent you wanted me to tell you about. The one I reported to. Her name was Clara—a pseudonym, I always assumed.”

“English?”

“Decidedly.”

“Pretty?”

“Nondescript,” Darrow said. “I believe she made herself plain. You know—spectacles, headscarf, no makeup. I couldn’t even begin to describe her face or her body to you. She was amazingly average in every way.”

“And you met, how many times?”

“Five. When I had shore leave. We’d set the time of the next meeting at the end of the one before. There was no other communication between us. She arranged to leave a signal if it was all right to keep the appointment. No signal, no meeting.”

“How old was she?”

“Difficult to say. Thirties, I thought. An old maid in her 30s, a prune of a woman.”

“Would you be able to recognize her from pictures?”

The cooperative veneer faded as quickly as it had developed. “You didn’t say anything about pictures the other day, Harris. You said a name and a description. I’ve given you what you wanted. I’m not prepared to jeopardize my safety any further. You know as well as I do, the KGB has never taken kindly to tellers of tales.”

“Perhaps at some future meeting,” Evan suggested.

“You bastard. It never ends, does it? Some poor sod capitulates once, and that’s it, he’s in it for life.”

“That’s the general theory about blackmail, anyway, Simon.” Evan finished his notes with a flourish. “I’ll be in touch once I’ve had the opportunity to find out more about Clara. And Jean.”

Simon Darrow shot his interrogator a look of vehemence, which was rapidly replaced by a shadow of painful uncertainty. He stood up, rolling his chair back across the floor, so that it struck the venetian blinds. His face was flushed red; his breathing had become rapid.

Evan suspected the worst, and neatly stepped out of the way.

“Down the hallway to your right,” he advised, as Darrow bolted.

Simon didn’t often take the tube. He preferred driving—in spite of the delays, in spite of the roadworks, in spite of the appalling back-ups in Central London. Once he was clear of the city, the run down to Epsom was actually quite pleasant, and it was something Simon looked forward to on a regular basis.

On this particular Wednesday afternoon, however, the Porsche was in the garage, its fuel pump having packed up the evening before. Simon had walked to Great Titchfield Street, trying to shake off the bug that had invaded his intestines and caused his temperature to soar.

He hadn’t been successful. And now, the dreaded interview with Harris over and done with, the burden removed from his shoulders, he ought to have been relieved. He wasn’t, though. He wasn’t altogether certain what it was, precisely, that was niggling at him, that dogged little anxiety that wouldn’t go away. He felt like hell, he knew that for a fact. And he was getting worse by the hour.

All he wanted now was to go home to Epsom to his wife, and the 15.22 from Waterloo would accomplish that in short order.

He walked the short distance to Oxford Circus, lacking the patience and the stomach for a taxi ride through traffic. He went down and bought a ticket to Waterloo from a machine, and found his way down to the trains.

The southbound Bakerloo platform was crowded. There’d been a delay somewhere and the trains were arriving packed full of passengers, and very few of them were getting off. Simon leaned back against the wall. His legs were aching. His bowels were in rebellion. His temperature, he was certain, was well over 100. He had nothing left to expel, and still the nausea and the cramps gripped his insides, squeezing his middle like a malevolent fist.

I should have taken that taxi
, he thought. He was suffocating down here, on the airless platform. He let several trains go through without getting on, thinking the overcrowding would lessen, but it was hopeless. As soon as one backlog of passengers cleared out, another trainful descended from above.

Sweating, he checked his watch, and was alarmed to discover that if he didn’t make some sort of concerted effort to get aboard the next train, he would almost certainly miss his connection at Waterloo.

Wearily, he made his way through the backpackers and punk rockers and tourists to the edge of the platform. He watched for the clues that heralded another train’s imminent approach—the golden prediction of the computerized indicator suspended from the wall; a subtle breeze; a distant, throaty roar that had always made him think of an emptying drain in a bath.

Yes, there was one coming. The indicator confirmed it. He could hear the train’s wheels whipping the track.

Suddenly very dizzy, he lurched slightly to his left to make room on the platform edge for a young man in an ill-fitting suit and found himself, quite by accident, staring at a large representation of himself pasted on the track side of the tunnel wall:
Simon Darrow for the Crisis Line
—
when you’re desperate, when you’ve nowhere to turn
—

In the newspapers the following morning, it would be variously reported that Simon Darrow died as a result of an appalling crush on an already congested platform at Oxford Circus; a desperate suicide bid; a heart attack; a deliberate push. In truth, his temperature soaring, disoriented and reeling, the darling of British broadcasting had tumbled over the edge quite by accident, collapsing onto the tracks just as a train burst from its tunnel and roared along the length of the station.

Simon Darrow had met his end quickly, crushed by the wheels of the train and finished off by the 600 volts carried in the two raised conductor rails, overseen benevolently by his own smiling face, offering sanctuary from the world’s worst troubles.

Friday, 23 August 1991

Was it his imagination?

A young man, it was, in trainers and a sweatshirt, following him.

Evan stopped, and bent down to check his shoelace. The young man walked past him, crossed the road, then lingered midway along the block, admiring the architecture of a nearby Georgian row.

His place behind Evan was taken by an older man in a cloth cap.

It could, of course, have been nothing more than a training exercise. British Intelligence were inordinately fond of sending their fledglings round to friendly agents with orders to maintain surveillance—the degree of their success dependent upon whether or not they were detected by their target.

Evan doubted these two were tender young recruits: they were too good. He’d first noticed them as he’d left his flat in Queen Anne Square and walked up along Brompton Road towards Knightsbridge Station.

He made a small diversion and boarded a bus, noting the older man as he followed him up the steps to the top and chose a seat in the rear. The younger man loitered on the pavement for a few moments longer, then climbed aboard also, staying on the lower level.

The bus deposited Evan at Charing Cross. Walking across the road, he caught another one to Waterloo. The two men followed, confirming that it most definitely was not his imagination. He was being targeted.

At Waterloo Station, Evan bought himself a croissant and a cup of tea from the kiosk beside the entrance to the Underground, and found himself a seat in a waiting area beneath the departures board. He listened to the piped-in marching band ushering the hordes to and from their trains, and he gave 50p to a young woman in a white lab coat who was shaking a charity tin for Kings College Children’s Hospital. He took advantage of the opportunity to study the young man in the sweatshirt, who’d bought himself a
Telegraph
from the newsagents and who was now leaning against the outer wall of the shop, reading about the end of the coup in Moscow, the return of Gorbachev, the death of the Communist Party.

There were two kinds of watchers: the overt, who were fond of targeting foreign nationals with diplomatic immunity, who trailed you about openly, unabashedly, keeping you on your toes and effectively preventing you from engaging in any sort of clandestine activities; and the covert, whose success was measured by the amount of information they were able to amass without being noticed.

There were two kinds of targets, as well, Evan thought, drinking his tea. Those who twigged, and those who didn’t. And if you caught on, you again had two choices: to react, or not. If you took deliberately evasive action, you gave away the game. They’d be more careful next time, less easily spotted. Often the best course of action was to do nothing at all.

Evan finished his croissant and tea and went down into the tube. He bought a ticket back to Charing Cross and travelled the short distance under the river, coming up at Trafalgar Square and following the long, curving passageway around beneath the pavement and the pigeons, to Cockspur Street. The tunnel smelled like a toilet, water of questionable heritage having seeped into the gutters, belying the bold, brave blue plastic improvements thrown up around the escalators and the newsagents.