The Girl in Berlin (2 page)

‘I’m officially on leave till tomorrow, but Gorch wants to see me.’ He knew he was scheduled for bodyguard duty, looking after some middle-grade visiting American. Escort duty could theoretically be dangerous, but in practice was almost always a ticket to unbearable boredom.

‘What’s been going on while I was away?’

Manfred Jarrell shrugged. He blinked and pushed his round glasses up his nose. ‘Electricians’ Union,’ he said, ‘riddled with Reds. The British Electricity Authority want something done about it. All the leading officials are members of the Communist Party. They’ve smashed the wages freeze—’

‘Okay, okay.’ This aspect of the work made Jake a little uncomfortable. ‘We all know it’s run by Frank Haxell. That’s nothing new. Why the sudden emergency?’

Jarrell shrugged and pushed his glasses up again. ‘Because the wages freeze has gone west, I suppose. They’ve kind of won, haven’t they.’

‘Maybe for the moment, but one wee victory for the workers doesna’ make a revolution.’

‘Oh – and there was a message.
He
called yesterday. You’re to meet him tomorrow evening.’ Jarrell handed McGovern a torn-off sheet of paper on which was written the name of a pub and the time, 6.00 p.m. McGovern folded it into his pocket and stood thinking about it, interested, excited even. Jarrell looked at him. ‘You’d better cut along to the boss, sir. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting, does he.’

McGovern looked quizzically at his subaltern, who seemed to lack a proper understanding of his subordinate position. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said.

Detective Chief Superintendent Gorch was one reason McGovern stayed in the job. He’d not seriously considered
cutting loose, but on dark days, on boring and frustrating days, and there were quite a few of those, he flirted with the idea of some wholly different life. He dreamed of living with Lily on the edge of Loch Fyne, scene of childhood holidays with his mother’s crofter family. Lily would paint and he would … but what would he do? That was the problem. He would fish. Like surveillance, fishing required patience. You sat there for hours, waiting, not a twitch on the line until suddenly … But he knew he’d never be able to survive the pure air of the glens. He needed the smoke-soaked atmosphere of a great city. And Lily wasn’t exactly wedded to the beauty of the Scottish landscape. She longed for the sun beating down.

He sat down in a leather chair near Gorch’s desk.

‘How’s your father-in-law, then?’

‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid. My wife may be up there a while.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’ Gorch always spoke quietly. The vast jowls and flat, thick lips, the overgrown eyebrows, beefy cheeks and overall his great girth and weight encased in an old-fashioned, three-piece suit of dark grey birds-eye cloth, the waistcoat near bursting over his bulging stomach, added up to an air of reassurance rather than menace. He might have been a clergyman from years gone by or possibly a head gamekeeper, or even a benevolent workhouse master. He did not seem to belong at all to the modern era, to the rapid pace of the thrusting postwar world. But he would have been only two or three years old when Queen Victoria died.

Gorch’s words sank in a friendly silence. After a while he added: ‘They’ve got a job for you, lad.’

They – MI5; McGovern’s pulse quickened.

Another pause. ‘Kingdom thinks very highly of you.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Gorch eyed him cannily. ‘I suppose you think they’re a bunch of public-school pansies.’

McGovern smiled faintly, but shook his head.

‘Kingdom is a clever man. He had a very good war record in intelligence. Some of them may be, let’s say, amateurish, but he knows the score all right. Some say he was the best interrogator we had. Thing is – this is confidential – they are in a lot of trouble. In fact, they’re in very big trouble indeed.’

‘Sir?’

‘They know there’s a mole, known it for some time. And now – well, Kingdom will put you in the picture.’

‘I’m meeting him tomorrow evening. There was a message.’

‘Report back to me.’

Without Lily the flat was dusty and lonely. He longed to ring her, but telephone calls were expensive. It still surprised him she was his wife, that he’d ever dared ask her to marry him and that she’d accepted. She wasn’t like other women, that is, like the women from his childhood. She didn’t gossip with the neighbours, didn’t clean and scrub everything in sight. On the contrary, she came from a wealthy family and she had a career.

She wouldn’t have much time for her painting up there, looking after her father, now he was so ill … he pictured her at the easel, wearing her dirty, grey smock and frowning at her work, motionless for minutes on end, staring, her long, black hair caught up in a rough knot at the back. Her skin was pale and people often didn’t realise her father came from India, especially as her name, Lily, seemed quite British – although she’d told him early on that it was also an Indian name, and chosen by her parents for that reason: that it was both Indian and Scottish, like her.

Her family, the wealthy Campbells, who ran one of the big Glasgow department stores, had been no more pleased than
McGovern’s about the marriage. They’d shaken their heads and pursed their lips and whispered that Lily was going the way of her mother – because it wasn’t the first time for them, for Lily’s mother, Jean, had gone off to India and married a native. That Lily had married a working-class lad was hardly a scandal to compete with that. Yet it still amazed McGovern that he, brought up in a working-class tenement, should have married into such a clan.

When India was torn apart by Partition the Campbells, in spite of the scandal, had taken in Jean, her gentle, harmless husband and their daughter. How lucky it was, they used to say, that Lily was so pale. Really, you’d never know she was a half-caste.

He’d brought home a beer and tuned into the Home Service. As he relaxed he started to think about tomorrow – not about the day’s work in the wake of some minor American dignitary, but of the evening’s rendezvous with a spy: Miles Kingdom.

two

A
LAN WENTWORTH HAD
spent the afternoon with his mistress, Edith Fanshawe. As a result he hadn’t returned to Broadcasting House until teatime, with masses of work still to do. This was ironic, since usually when he rang his wife to explain that he had to work late, the real reason was a rendezvous with Edith, but on this occasion he could give the excuse with a good conscience, as he was telling the truth.

It was well past seven when he left the building and his imagination slipped back to Edith. Her cries of pleasure – her declarations – I’m addicted to you, you beast … He pushed open the swing doors and turned left, his hat pulled down, hands in the pockets of his corduroy trousers. As he walked along, frowning, he wasn’t thinking at all, he was mentally revisiting the pale, softened marble of her thighs, the look in her violet eyes as she incited his desire, grasping him so greedily – he could not shake off the obsession.

He bumped violently into an oncoming pedestrian. The disagreeable shock, the blunt jerk of a stranger’s body against his, unleashed an unreasonable anger. ‘What the hell! Can’t you look where you’re going?’ he said, although it had been his own fault.

Then he looked again. The man was carelessly dressed, hatless, his raincoat flapping open, but – the bony face, the shock of hair.

‘
Colin
! It
is
, isn’t it? Good God!’ Astonishment wiped out all thoughts of Edith.

A wary look crossed the face of the man who’d once been his friend. He seemed ready to bolt, run for cover.

‘This is extraordinary. What the hell are you doing here?’ Alan knew the question was ridiculous, but the words just burst out.

‘Alan—’ Colin Harris just stood there, seemingly stunned.

‘Where on earth have you been, old chap?’ That sounded even sillier, as though Colin had been gone for a few hours rather than three years.

Colin shrugged, held his hands wide as though he didn’t know himself. The twisted grin suggested his disappearance might have been a bad joke.

Alan looked at his watch. He was so late. But if he was going to be late home anyway … and now he had an excuse. ‘We have to have a drink – there’s a pub round the corner—’

Colin shook his head, put up a hand as if warding off a blow.

‘Oh come on – can’t just pass by on the other side, you know—’

Colin fell into step beside him.

They found a seat by the stained-glass window of the pub across the road. Alan insisted on buying the drinks. They’d barely spoken, yet he could tell just by looking that Colin was hard up, that things were going badly for him. He placed the glasses on the table. ‘Just going to phone Dinah,’ he said. ‘You remember Dinah, don’t you?’

‘Of course I remember Dinah.’

‘We’ve got a kid now. Little chap, he’s a year old. Thomas – Tommy.’

The telephone booth was near the bar and there was a lot of noise.

‘You’ll never guess who I’ve just bumped into! Colin!’ he shouted.

And Dinah immediately responded with: ‘Oh, you must find out what happened to him – bring him up here immediately.’

Pleased with the convenient excuse he returned to his seat in genial mood.

‘So, tell me what – what you’ve been doing – what
happened
to you?’ Cigarettes helped to ease the tension. The beauty of a cigarette was not just the nicotine but that it also gave you something to do with your hands. All the business of it – matches, hands to lips, inhaling, exhaling, it was quite a little drama – masked unease.

Colin stared into his glass. ‘I – I was just coming to see you. On the off chance. Heard you were working at the Beeb.’

‘You didn’t seem all that pleased to see me, though.’

‘I – it was a shock. I wasn’t – I hadn’t geared myself up – it’s taken a while to decide to get in touch. You’re one of the only people … I was going to get up a bit of Dutch courage first. And I left it late – thought you wouldn’t still be there at this hour – easier really, if you weren’t. The thing is—’ He stopped abruptly, mid-sentence.

‘After the trial you just bloody disappeared. What happened?’

‘I don’t know where to begin.’ He frowned into the distance. ‘Well …’

‘We even wondered …’

‘If I’d fled behind the Iron Curtain?’ The sarcasm Colin managed to convey with these words stirred the embers of Alan’s guilty feelings towards his old friend. He should have done more. He should have
cared
more. But before he had time to form his confused feelings into words Colin said in a different, defiant tone of voice: ‘Well, you’d be right.’

‘Really?’ Alan managed to sound merely mildly interested, as though Colin had said: ‘I went to ground in Wales for a bit’, but he felt nervous. He dreaded what was coming next.

‘I was angry. With all of you. With bloody everyone. You – the Party, the comrades – my mother – I don’t know why. You stood by me, after all, didn’t you. But I just wanted to see the back of everyone who had anything to do with the whole bloody mess. I stayed with my mother for a few weeks while I tried to decide what to do. But she drove me mad. At first I thought things would get back to normal, but the fact is I had hell’s own problem getting work here after the trial. British justice! I got off in the end – didn’t I? Well, you wouldn’t think so. Prospective employers wouldn’t look me in the eye. You know – no smoke without fire. Do we really want someone who might be a criminal sitting in our cosy little office? One of them even suggested I go and start a new life in New Zealand. New Zealand! Do I look like a sheep farmer, for Christ’s sake? The Party wasn’t much help either. I thought the comrades would stick by me, but I was a terrible embarrassment. Bugger me if they didn’t suggest I left the country too! Someone put me in touch with some friends in Germany, nothing official, just some people they knew; communists, of course, communists who’d survived. They said if I disappeared for a bit, I could come back later when everyone would have forgotten about it. So I went to East Germany. Not that it was East Germany then. I went to live in the Soviet sector of Berlin.

‘These friends fixed me up with a kind of semi-journalism job, but … it’s been difficult. I’ve never really belonged, I don’t fit in. I mean, I wasn’t a defector, so in a funny way that meant I wasn’t
on their side
. I’m in a sort of no man’s land – in Berlin – and Berlin’s a sort of no man’s land of its own. And God, it’s depressing … I mean, we had the Blitz and the doodle bugs and all that, but it’s nothing to Berlin. And as for boys – ’ he said, looking anywhere but at Alan, ‘well, that was depressing too. When I first got there in ’48, it was still – people would do anything for food, cigarettes, money. It was all rather degrading. Anyway … oh, God, it’s such a long story …’ He didn’t finish
the sentence. Instead he smoked hungrily, flicking ash off the coal with a nervous tic, staring away in a corner of the saloon bar, oblivious of the drinkers refreshing themselves after work, the cheery drone of male voices and laughter. Then he straightened up. ‘At least what they’re trying to do is create a better Germany. West Berlin is just a little outpost of American imperialism. I know that sounds like propaganda, but it’s true. All they care about is keeping the Soviet Union at bay. But it’s all … it isn’t how I imagined …’

Alan thought of himself as a man of the world, but he was not a cynic. He was still capable of being shocked to hear that Colin, a defendant in a big trial, who had been convicted and then had the conviction quashed, should nevertheless have been treated with suspicion. No smoke without a fire.

Deep down Alan had known all along that Colin had gone east. Colin had always been such an idealist. Over the years when Alan had thought about Colin, which wasn’t, frankly, that often, he’d thought it was a good solution. He was a communist, wasn’t he, so it was logical to go and live and work in a communist country.

Colin did not sound so enthusiastic now. Well, there were hordes of disillusioned communists littering the place these days.

The knuckles of Colin’s bony hand stretched tight round his glass. He took a long gulp. ‘The thing is – I’m trying to come back. I need a job, here, I mean. That’s why I was on my way to see you. I just wondered if there was some slight chance you’d be able to get me something … I don’t know what exactly you do at the BBC and I know it’s a long shot, but—’