The Dark Chronicles (33 page)

‘Can you prove that?’

‘I don’t have to. You have to prove I wasn’t.’

He raised his arm and for a moment I thought he was going to try to punch me, but he brought the palm of his hand down on a small bell on the table, the kind you see in hotel receptions, and a few seconds later the soldiers marched in. They aimed truncheons at my solar plexus, sending a jolt of pain through me and making me vomit. I tried to reach Montcrieff’s shoes but he was too far away.

‘Get him a towel or something,’ said Farraday. I wondered what his reward had been – one of the more important ministries, no doubt. I remembered his little spat with Osborne over whether Pritchard or I should be allowed to go out to Lagos. They’d played it well, the three of them. If the coup hadn’t come off perhaps they could have set up a small theatrical company.

I raised my head. Osborne was consulting a small leather-backed notebook. ‘You hadn’t visited Templeton in months,’ he said. ‘According to his daughter.’

I wiped my mouth with the cloth that had been handed me. ‘How would she know?’ I said.

‘Well, you were sleeping with her, weren’t you?’

‘Where do you get these absurd—’

‘She told us all about it,’ said Farraday, chipping in.

‘I hardly know her. She isn’t my type.’

‘Very suave,’ said Montcrieff. He pushed forward another set of photographs. ‘How do you explain these, then?’

In the car, rehearsing all the possible questions they could ask me, traps they could set, paths I could and could not take, this was one eventuality I hadn’t envisaged.

She’d hanged herself, the poor cow. Her final few hours must have been hell. I remembered the look on her face as she had stood on the steps of her flat. Sorrow and despair. I had known it – and done nothing, too wrapped up in my own problems.

‘Did she leave a note?’ I asked, my lips tight.

Osborne nodded solemnly. ‘Something about not being able to live with the fact that her boyfriend had killed her father.’

I leapt towards him, something like a scream coming from deep down in my throat, but I hadn’t even reached the desk before I felt the thump. The soldier helped me back into my seat.

‘So you
were
sleeping with her,’ said Osborne, taking the cap off his fountain pen and noting it down neatly in his book.

‘You really are a shit, Osborne,’ I said, once I’d got my breath back again. ‘Did you know that?’

He didn’t look up from his writing. ‘Murder and treason are more serious crimes.’

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘Conspiring to kill the prime minister is about as serious as it gets.’

That hit something. He pushed back his chair and stood up: his body may have been encased in finest Savile Row wool, but it did little to hide his bulk. He walked over to the plastic bucket and pushed it across the floor with a pointed little shoe, until it was just by my chair.

He yanked my head back by the forelock and brought his face up to mine. ‘Did I ever tell you what we used to do with the Yids in Palestine back in ’47?’ he said, his eyes glazed over. ‘The ones who wouldn’t talk?’

He gestured at the soldiers again, and they stepped forward, took me crisply by the arms and shoved my face into the water, holding me down. I’d counted to twenty and was starting to panic when they jerked me out and dumped me back in the chair.

‘Could we get some sandwiches or something?’ said Montcrieff. ‘I’m starving.’

‘Yes, good idea,’ said Osborne, whose face was flushed. He turned to one of the soldiers. ‘Anderson, see if they have any decent food they can send down. Sandwiches or something.’

‘Sir!’ The soldier saluted and he and the others turned on their heels and left the room.

There was silence for a moment, then Farraday cleared his throat.
‘Listen, Paul,’ he said reasonably. ‘We don’t want to spend all day on this. We know you’re working for the Russians. We just want the details. The name of your handler, where you meet him, how often. What information you’ve passed over. You know the drill. I can’t guarantee immunity, but if you cooperate now it will be a lot better for you.’

I’d got my breathing back now, and I summoned up my energy to look up at him. He was busy adjusting one of his shirt-cuffs, which had unpardonably jutted against the bevel of his wristwatch. It was twenty past one. So I could at least place myself: it was twenty past one on the twenty-eighth of April.

‘The smoked salmon and cucumber ones are good here,’ I said. ‘Could we have some tea as well?’

‘This isn’t funny, Dark,’ said Osborne. He held out his hand in a fist and then opened it, like a child playing a game. ‘Do you recognize this?’ he said. It was a small green booklet about the size of a box of matches. He flipped it open, revealing a string of numbers and other figures. ‘A one-time pad. To be used in conjunction with a radio transmitter. Care to explain?’

I was still catching up with a thought I’d had a few seconds earlier. I wasn’t certain of it, but I played it anyway.

‘By all means,’ I said. ‘But before I do, perhaps you can all answer one question that has been troubling me. Who was the poor chap who had his head shot off in Udi – one of the PM’s bodyguards? I presume there’s a D-notice on it.’

Osborne made to stand up, but Montcrieff gestured at him to stay seated.

‘What are you talking about?’ he said.

‘It was bloody good,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you that. The posters at the traffic lights were a nice touch. How long did that take you to put into place? Was it just the one kiosk, or did you set up several along the route between here and the hospital?’

None of them answered.

‘It was this that gave it away,’ I said, tapping the copy of the
Standard
on the desk. ‘You’re a newspaperman, Sandy, so I’m a little disappointed. I’m sure all the details in it are perfect, but you over-egged the pudding making it today’s West End Final. That edition doesn’t come off the presses until two o’clock, and according to John’s watch we’re a good half-hour away from then. Careless, really – yesterday’s edition would have done the trick just as well.’

They stared at me for a moment, and I savoured it.

‘Fuck you, Dark!’ spat Montcrieff, the first time I had seen him angry. ‘This doesn’t change that you’re a traitor. Confess now and…’

‘And what? You won’t arrange my hanging at Wembley? Something tells me the PM might not be too keen to sign the chit for that whatever I say, and even if it were signed by the real Foreign Secretary.’ I turned the screw. ‘Perhaps he’d be more interested in hearing how you planned to kill him. I bet you all loved it when Henry proposed the idea – it was Henry’s idea, wasn’t it? Kill Wilson, then pin the blame on Moscow and claim he had double-crossed his masters at the KGB. Masterful. Did he tell you an actual KGB agent would do the job, though?’ They didn’t respond. ‘How do you think he got her to do that? Did it not occur to you that his more-fascist-than-thou act might have been just that – an act – and that he was, in fact, leading you straight into a position in which the KGB could send a sniper to assassinate our prime minister?’

I let it sink in for a moment. Osborne rallied from the shock of me discovering their little subterfuge and waved the one-time pad at me. ‘This was found in your pockets when we searched you…’

‘And I took it from Henry’s pockets moments after I discovered he was Radnya and shot him,’ I said. ‘Radnya means “related” in Russian, and just as you were all delighted Henry had access to the Queen – who you would need to form a government – so were the KGB. What could be more precious than a double agent with blood ties to the throne?’ Their faces were turning white, so I closed in for the kill. ‘I suggest you send a team to Henry’s house and search the basement. Once you’ve found his transmitter, perhaps
we can stop this charade and get down to the serious business of trying to assess just how much the bastard has compromised over the last twenty-five years.’

*

He was wearing a green tweed coat and a polka-dot bow tie. It had taken me four and a half hours to get to the meeting, and he’d turned up in an outfit a child could describe.

I wasn’t in the best of moods. I’d spent most of the day with a team from Five, searching every inch of Pritchard’s enormous flat in Belgravia. He’d made me sweat – for several hours I had seriously wondered if I might still be looking at the rope. In the end, it hadn’t been in the basement, or the attic, or under the floorboards, but in a compartment concealed in one of the bookshelves.

‘I want out,’ I said to Sasha. ‘I mean it.’ But it sounded weak, even to my ears.

He leaned over and placed a hand on my arm. ‘Please, Paul,’ he said. ‘Is that any way to greet an old friend?’ We were in the Mayflower in Rotherhithe, which he had once confided in me was his favourite meeting-place. I assumed it wasn’t for the beer or because you could visit the stairs where the Pilgrim Fathers boarded the ship, but because it was dark and cosy. The place was about half-full, with a good deal of background noise, and we were seated at a remote corner table, next to a mantelshelf filled with the usual assortment of books gathering dust: Lloyd’s
Shipping Register
for 1930,
Bernard Spilsbury – His Life and Cases
, Foote’s
Handbook for Spies
…

On the way over, between checking for tails and hopping on and off buses, I’d bought a paper – a real one – and seen that de Gaulle had resigned over a referendum on the Senate: it looked like the events in Paris the previous year had finally caught up with him. The editorial on page nine opined that his ‘ideas and presence would nevertheless continue to play a part in French affairs’, while the item beneath it discussed the fall of Biafra’s stronghold, Umuahia. Would his idea of supporting the Biafrans continue, too? I’d
thought of the deserters and their families huddled in the hut in Aba; and of Gunner, ranting in the field at the futility of it all.

‘I’m no use to you any more,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe any of it.’ And too many people were dead, I could have added – most of them because of me.

He pursed his lips, then placed his forefinger and thumb on either side of his mouth and stroked his beard. It meant he was thinking.

‘They have questioned you?’ he said, drawing his head a little closer to me. I gave him a look. ‘What did you tell them?’

‘I thought of something.’

He stopped stroking his beard. ‘What?’

I took a sip of my pint. ‘I blew Henry’s cover,’ I said. ‘And I don’t care what you say, it won’t scare me. Trust me, nothing you can say will scare me.’

He didn’t move for some time, and then he suddenly leaned back in his seat and started laughing. I asked him if he would mind explaining the joke.

He slowly wound down the merriment. ‘You were worried about how I might react?’

I shrugged.

‘This was foreseen, Paul,’ he said pompously. ‘This was always the endgame.’

‘What was?’ I asked. ‘For me to blow Henry’s cover?’

‘Of course. If he was not going to survive, you had to remain protected at all costs. It does not matter that you have exposed him now. They can’t question him, and you are clean.’ He frowned. ‘You told them about Anna also, I presume? I mean, that she was… working with Henry?’

I noted the hesitation and tried not to hate him too much for it. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Was that also part of the endgame?’

Sasha raised his hands in a very Russian gesture. ‘Perhaps. It is possible. I was never in contact with her. It was always Henry.’

It was always Henry. ‘So Pritchard was running you?’ I asked. He nodded. That explained a lot – why he’d had the transmitter, for a start.
He had run Anna, he had run Sasha and, although I hadn’t known it, he had run me. That night he’d left Vanessa’s table at Ronnie Scott’s – he hadn’t gone home. He’d gone to meet Sasha and
then
home, where he had sent a message to Anna in Lagos. She had immediately upped sticks for Udi, telling her back-up man to find Slavin and kill him – and me if I tried to get anywhere near? Yes, that was how it must have been, or something like it.

I shivered inwardly and turned back to Sasha. ‘If Henry was Radnya,’ I said, ‘what was my code-name?’

He pretended not to hear the tense I’d used. ‘You really want to know?’ he said. ‘It’s an ugly one. “Nezavisimyj”.’

‘“Independent” – why that?’

‘Because we had to keep you separate from the rest of the cell, for…’ – he looked around for a suitable phrase – ‘personal reasons.’

‘You mean because if I had discovered that Anna was alive, Henry had pimped her to me and Father had shot himself over the whole affair, I might not have been so cooperative.’

He smiled tolerantly. ‘If you prefer. But from the start you were seen as an independent operator. A free agent. Someone who had to be nurtured, but who was his own man.’

‘And now?’

He leaned over and grabbed a handful of peanuts out of a tinted glass bowl I hadn’t noticed on the table between us, and dropped a few into his mouth.

‘Now we need you more than ever,’ he said, and crunched a few of them down noisily.

‘Not interested,’ I said.

‘Paul, listen. I understand you are no longer a Communist. In truth, I sometimes wonder if I am either.’ He caught my look. ‘It is the truth. But times and circumstances change. Look at what you distrust about us. About me, if you wish. Do you really believe I am a worse master than the men now running your country?’

‘The coup failed,’ I said. ‘They’re not running it any more than they were last month.’

He tilted his head a little. ‘No? With your old Chief gone, I think you will see some changes. These men have a lot of ambition, Paul. That is why Henry thought of the coup: he felt it would be less dangerous in the long term to let them into the open, with the illusion of victory, than to continue their games behind the scenes. The plan was for him to control them from the inside – and in doing so slowly immobilize them.’

‘Hell of a risky plan.’

He shrugged: he could wear as much tweed as he wanted, but his shrugs were more Russian than vodka. ‘I think it was well calculated. Britain would have been in a state of shock – look at what happened with the Americans – and a traumatized enemy would have suited us well. But, as you say, the coup failed. And Henry is dead. The faction is in a more powerful position than ever, however: far from being under suspicion for the attempt on the Prime Minister’s life, they have used it to call for more financial support, which I think they will receive. They have a hold of the reins, and we need a way to control them.’