The Dark Chronicles (32 page)

I clung on to that idea for a very long time. I thought it must have been at least a few months since I’d ‘gone’ and ended up… wherever I was. That was when it occurred to me that perhaps death wasn’t what I had always thought it would be, but that it was a limbo state in which you had all eternity to reflect on the life you’d had, without being able to return to it.

My considerations of death were briefly interrupted by a series of extremely vivid hallucinations. One of these involved a tie I’d owned when I was a boy, a dark green silk tie with tiny red spots my father had bought me from Gieves when I’d turned sixteen, my last birthday in London before the war. The silk had been so thick and smooth it was like a river, and now it became just that and I dove deep into its comfort, luxuriating in its coolness and wishing I could stay there for ever, breathing bubbles up to the green, red-spotted surface. And then others started diving in after
me, like the bodies in the ceremony I’d been at in Biafra, spirit bodies that cut through me and around me and seemed to keep diving further and further but never got any smaller or changed shape. And I wanted to climb up to the surface but I couldn’t, because it was blocked by loose threads of silk, white and sticky, and I couldn’t struggle past them and again I felt the weight on my chest and the trouble breathing, until I opened my eyes and saw a pair of disembodied eyes staring down at me from deep within a ball of white silk…

*

The lamps, though dimmed, had an unpleasant glare to them, and the walls a greenish tinge. I
was
in a hospital somewhere, but it was almost as bad as whatever I’d woken from. My food and drink were passed to me through a network of tubes, and I sat there, alone, imagining the fluid pumping into me and thinking back to what had happened, and what might happen next. I was in England, I knew, because the place smelled unmistakably of Dettol and every so often there was a hollow clanging, which I eventually realized was a radiator that was out of my line of sight.

I still couldn’t move. There was a window, but like everything else it only changed from white to grey to black and back again. But I was in a hospital in England, recovering. Of that I was sure.

*

The disembodied eyes returned one day: now I saw they were attached to a man in a white coat, white gauze mask, white hood, white gloves. I couldn’t speak to him, and he didn’t say anything to me – just checked my tubes and wrote things down on a white pad. I thought that my hearing must have gone again at some point, because every sound was amplified. When he moved his foot on the linoleum, it was like a coin dropping in a well.

I no longer felt pain – physical pain, that is. I thought about
Anna every day, every hour. And grieved for myself, and the life I’d wasted.

*

Another man came to see me after that, wearing the same garb. It was Smale.

‘You survived,’ he said. ‘They didn’t think you would.’

I watched his eyes. Narrow and slanted, they seemed to me to be the kind of eyes that would belong to a small, ugly, grey fish. I tried to imagine the face of such a fish, and fitted it behind his mask.

‘You were extremely lucky,’ said the fish. ‘You were in a medical facility when it happened. You were out for a minute and a half – your heart even stopped beating. The wog doctor you came with declared you dead. But then you came to – almost as if you had heard us and weren’t willing to go.’

The fish paused. ‘Of course, a lot of people have been hoping you wouldn’t make it.’ He looked away contemplatively. ‘Not me, though. We’d lose so much valuable information.’ He pushed his chair back. ‘Let’s get your clothes sent up, shall we? We’ve an important meeting to get to.’

*

London looked exactly the same: office workers jumped around puddles and struggled with umbrellas. We sploshed through the streets in the black Bentley. I sat in the back in my old suit, my hands cuffed to two soldiers sitting on either side of me. Smale was up in front. Near Piccadilly Circus Underground, we stopped at some lights and I glimpsed the headlines at a newspaper kiosk. ‘
THE PRIME MINISTER AND MOSCOW: LATEST REVELATIONS
!
’ blared the poster for
The Times
, while
The Telegraph
had the more subdued: ‘
MOUNTBATTEN SUSPENDS ARMS TO NIGERIA
’.

‘Mountbatten?’

Smale turned back to look at me, his eyes dead. ‘He formed a government a couple of weeks ago.’

I couldn’t think what to say. ‘Wilson wasn’t KGB’ was what eventually came out.

‘Really?’ Smale replied, with a smile soaked in aspic. ‘Did you believe everything your handler told you?’ Then he turned away again and told the driver to take a right at the next junction.

*

They blindfolded me soon after that, and about twenty minutes later I was bundled out of the car and marched down a steep stairway. The room was cold and there was a slightly dank smell. Pipes gurgled in the background. Someone took the blindfold off. The two soldiers turned on their heels and took up station outside the door; Smale pushed me inside.

It was a familiar scene, right down to the naked bulb hanging from a coat-hanger. Beneath it, three men were seated behind a large desk that looked as though it were made from a solid block of steel. Two of the men were no surprise: Farraday and Osborne. The man sitting between them gave me more food for thought: Sandy Montcrieff, the
Mirror
reporter I’d met at the Lagos Yacht Club, and whom I’d later seen with Smale at the clinic in Udi.

We were in the ‘rubber room’, a space reserved for the interrogation of suspected double agents and other such undesirables; I’d sat in on a couple of sessions here before, during the renewed round of vettings after Philby had made a run for it. This gave me an advantage, of course. The bulb was burning through my eyes, but I knew it was a trick: it had been especially made by a company in Vauxhall to burn that bright, and the things were a devil to get replaced. Apart from the lamp, desk, chairs and a plastic bucket filled with dirty-looking water on the floor, the room was unfurnished, so as to enhance the subject’s isolation and disorientation – but I knew that we were in the soundproofed basement of one of the smarter hotels in West Kensington.

Despite all of this, I was much more afraid than the poor souls I’d seen interviewed here before. Because I was guilty.

Osborne asked me to take a seat, which I did. The chair was cold and too low. I mentally stripped the three of them, visualizing Montcrieff’s pale and bony legs, Osborne with his gut hanging over his belt and Farraday with unsightly moles across his back. It didn’t help much.

‘What’s this about?’ I said, selecting a tone somewhere between irritation and puzzlement. Might as well kick off proceedings. ‘Are you holding me responsible for Wilson’s death? I did everything I—’

‘I’m sure you did,’ said Montcrieff. ‘Thankfully, it wasn’t enough. But that’s just between ourselves. If you don’t tell us what we want to know, we’ll announce that you were the assassin.’

The other two didn’t flinch.

Montcrieff adjusted his cuffs and smiled innocently. ‘What we want to know,’ he went on, ‘is how long you thought you could get away with playing us all for fools.’

‘“Us”?’ I said. ‘Sorry, who the fuck are you again?’ I turned to Osborne: ‘William, I thought this was Service business.’

Osborne was stony-faced. ‘Sandy’s been with Five for years,’ he said. ‘And he was appointed Foreign Secretary two weeks ago.’

So. Not just a
Mirror
hack, then, but one of Cecil King’s men in Five, and these two – along with Pritchard – had been plotting with him from the beginning. It was a repeat of King’s coup attempt from last year, only this time the idea had been to have Wilson assassinated and then exposed as a Russian agent – and this time they had succeeded. Mountbatten was merely the figurehead: these three and a handful of other right-wing crackpots were in power now. No swastikas waving over The Mall – just a few desks moved. I imagined Chief would have been given the option of carrying on under the new regime or being shunted into retirement.

‘You know I didn’t kill Wilson,’ I said. ‘The Grigorieva woman pulled the trigger before I got to her.’

‘We only have your word for that. According to Smale, you were holding the gun when he came in.’

‘And he’s willing to testify to that, is he?’

Montcrieff laughed. ‘I don’t think you fully understand the situation,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to
try
you. The public is distraught, and crying out for revenge. We could have you hanged in Wembley stadium and sell tickets if we wanted.’ He leaned down and took a rolled-up
Standard
from a briefcase by his legs. He slapped it onto the table and pointed to the headline: ‘
BRITAIN BACKS UNITY GOVERNMENT
’. It was the twenty-eighth of April, I noticed – exactly a month since Udi.

‘What do you want?’ I asked, though I had a fair idea.

‘We found Templeton’s body,’ said Osborne, referring to Chief by his surname; presumably he had the title now. ‘Washed up near Limehouse.’ He threw some photographs onto the desk. I picked them up and forced myself to look at them. They were as grim as could be expected.

‘Well?’ I said. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Henry killed him.’

‘And why would he do something like that?’

‘Because he was Radnya, of course.’

‘We also found this in the clinic in Udi,’ said Osborne, making the recommended sudden leap of subject to disorient me. He placed the Tokarev on the table; it spun for a moment on the surface before coming to a stop. ‘Do you usually favour Soviet weaponry?’

‘That’s not mine,’ I said. ‘It belonged to a man called Akuji.’

‘Yes, we know about him – Henry’s contact with Ojukwu. We received his report a few days ago. He has shown no signs of developing the disease you had, thankfully.’ He nodded at the gun. ‘So what do you normally use, then? Henry told us you shot someone on a golf course.’

‘I didn’t shoot him,’ I said. ‘He took a pill.’

Osborne turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘What weapon do you use?’

They had me. They must have searched my flat, found the safe, cracked it open.

‘A Luger P08,’ I said. ‘As I presume you already know.’

‘Indeed,’ said Farraday, and he took it out and placed it next to
the Tokarev. ‘Did you get a chit from Armoury for this? Because I wasn’t aware we kept a stock of antique German pistols.’

I smiled tolerantly. ‘You haven’t brought me here for carrying a non-regulation weapon. Presumably you’re about to tell me that Chief’s bullet-wound is consistent with it being fired from this gun.’

‘Bingo,’ said Montcrieff.

‘Most officers have their own weapons,’ I said. ‘No doubt you all have your own, somewhere, in case of emergencies.’ None of them reacted, so I went on. ‘These little things’ – I gestured airily at the Luger – ‘were highly prized in their day, and are still very efficient. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Pritchard also had one.’

‘So where is it?’ said Farraday.

‘How the hell should I know?’ I asked. ‘Have you tried searching
his
home? It’s interesting that he told you about Akuji, though. “Henry’s contact with the Biafrans”, my arse – don’t you remember Henry told us we didn’t
have
any contacts on the Biafran side? That’s because we don’t: the KGB does. Akuji is a Moscow man. He’s closely related to and physically resembles Ojukwu. His role was to pose as Ojukwu to any British representatives sent to try to arrange peace talks with the Biafrans – I suspect Geoffrey Manning had just such a meeting arranged on the day I met him. My guess is that Akuji was to agree to whatever Manning proposed regarding talks, naturally without informing Ojukwu or anyone else in the Biafran hierarchy about it. Then whoever from the PM’s party had gone along to meet him would either have found themselves stood up or wasting a lot of time trying to negotiate peace with an impostor – all of which would have drawn away vital resources and attention from the security arrangements for the visit to Udi.’

They just stared at me, and I kept looking from one to the other.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ I said. ‘I’m not the double. Look, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Chief must have called Henry out to Swanwick to discuss Slavin, and during their conversation twigged that he was Radnya. So Henry shot him, took a few of his clothes, dumped his body and pretended he’d gone missing.’

Osborne sighed. ‘No. That is precisely what
you
did.’

It was my turn to stare. He sounded certain of it.

‘As well as the gun, we have three witnesses. The firmest is a local solicitor, who lives in the village and was passing on the way into town. But all three described a black sports car very much like your little toy.’

‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘It was in my garage. Did they get a licence plate?’

Osborne spread his hands on the desk.

‘Well, then!’

‘But they did identify the car in other ways. Our solicitor friend told us that it had no boot. There are very few models with that feature. Yours is one.’

‘Who questioned him?’

‘That is immaterial.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘It’s not. I’ll wager that whoever questioned him had already come up with the theory that the car was mine, and the solicitor was just doing his best to give the answers he thought would satisfy the man from London. It’s a classic investigative error.’

‘Don’t be so bloody patronizing,’ said Osborne, and I knew he’d done the interview. Farraday’s scornful glance in his direction confirmed it.

‘Henry admitted to going out there – and admitted to the timing of the witnesses, if I remember rightly,’ I said. ‘It was also in the middle of the night, so anyone who saw a black car would have had to have been looking very closely. And as none of your “witnesses” took a number down, that seems unlikely.’

‘Then,’ said Osborne softly, ‘there are the fingerprints. We took yours when you were in your coma. And then we compared them to all the sets we found in Templeton’s house. Care to hazard a guess at what we discovered?’

‘That some of them matched. Bravo – I’ve probably visited that house fifty times in the last three years. I was there the weekend before Chief disappeared.’