The Oktober Projekt (29 page)

‘Perhaps I became too complacent,’ Aubrey-Spencer declared in a
rare show of contrition. ‘After I was hoofed out as Chief, I was damn sure that
Lubov wouldn’t be wasted, so I became a privateer, running Lubov from what
little cover I could muster in my JIC capacity.’

‘You joking?’

‘I most certainly am not,’ said Aubrey-Spencer. ‘Hayles and
Rafford handled him between them. Hayles on trips to Moscow to flog his fake
maps, Rafford to drum up Russian clients for his adult playground.’

‘And RUS/OPS hadn’t any clue that Lubov was performing such a
sterling service?’

‘Of course not, do grow up.’

A slipway ran into the sea opposite them, and waves washed
shingle noisily against its concrete braces; an entire army slogging up the
beach. Nick didn’t feel inclined to answer and laughed into the wind.

‘Then Bensham came along,’ Nick volunteered after a pause.

‘Damn fool should never have got within a mile of the Service,’
declared Aubrey-Spencer with venom. ‘Lubov had played ball with a string of
handlers, not giving them any reason to rock the boat. He’d also given us an
insight of the Oktober Projekt, but warned us that London couldn’t be trusted,
something rotten was going on. He wanted more time to make all the connections
but panicked when that fool Bensham threatened to retire him there and then. He
tried to get word to me through Bensham, but the fool ignored his request for a
meeting with a senior ex-officer.’

‘So you let me walk into Moscow unprepared?’ Nick said, but
Aubrey-Spencer simply glared.

‘There were three of them, remember, how was I to know which
three?’

Aubrey-Spencer climbed over an ankle high brick wall into a car
park partly claimed by the sea, gulls and paper cups bobbing on its choppy
waves. A police Range Rover blocked the car park entrance, a second unmarked
Volvo V70 sitting by an official Service car parked in a far corner overlooking
the sea, by its door an Assistant Chief Constable in the middle of a phone
call.

Dear God, thought Nick; I was sent to Moscow to test my
loyalty, well, thanks very much. ‘But you soon narrowed down the field,’
proposed Nick.

‘With Lubov knowing that Bensham was going to blow everything,
he wanted rid of what data he had. Jamie even flew out to Moscow for a crash
meeting, but there was no hide nor hair of Lubov. They had a fallback, a
dead-letter box where Jamie found a garbled note about a phone, some iPod and a
girl. By the time Rafford tracked her down she had somehow corrupted the files.
None of this need to have happened if it hadn’t been for that damn fool
Bensham. Where do we recruit these people from nowadays?’

Four anglers in chest waders and weekend waterproofs had piled
out of a Jeep with a small boat in tow. Gathered round the Range Rover blocking
the entrance, they were in the middle of a heated debate over access, pointing
to the sea. But Nick ignored their plight as his mind started to retrace the
route he had followed since Moscow; a solution to finding Lubov’s traitor in
the Service had long been gathering in Nick along the way. Drawn together in
Moscow during the restless days and nights of his captivity, pushed into a
direction by Angie’s death, dragged in another by Aubrey-Spencer; he had formed
it clearly without pedantry with no affinity to emotions or previous
relationships. Now in the perfect calmness of an English morning, it seemed
inadequate. Silent, he stared at everything and nothing.
 

Gulls floated on the cold air too light to be real, lifting and
dropping freely. The anglers, having reached a compromise were attempting to
reverse their flimsy craft between a boulder wall.

‘And do you have your final suspects after all this?’

‘Rossan from the start I considered clean. Bailrigg hasn’t got
the head nor the spine for it, so that leaves a gallant band of three. Now
Nicholas, eyes to the front, no loose talk and I’ll keep in touch through
Redman,’ Aubrey-Spencer declared.

As they drew near to the ACC, Nick could catch snippets of his
conference. ‘…double murder, but nothing to raise undue suspicion. His
neighbours can be told that he had stored something in there that might have
constituted a health hazard hence the full turnout. You know the score.’

Evidently someone did, for he snapped a smart salute in
Aubrey-Spencer’s direction and returned to the warmth of his Volvo.

‘I put my neck on the line again, that it?’

‘For some people in our
parish the truth is a sin in its own right,’ Aubrey-Spencer observed. ‘Remember
the Eleventh Commandment, Nicholas, don’t get caught,’ he added, squeezing
Nick’s arm in a farewell.

‘Or you,’ said Nick, slamming the door, banging twice on the
roof as he stood back.

With a curt wave Aubrey-Spencer sat back, appraising Nick as if
he had only at this very moment come to see him for who he really was. Although
the car was an automatic, Aubrey-Spencer’s driver still made driving a chore as
they headed along the prom with a police car none too discreetly behind. No
friends, no prisoners, decided Nick as Aubrey-Spencer’s car had a nasty brush
with a cyclist at the bottom of the road. And every step forward will take me
further from heaven he thought, splashing his way across the car park. Around
him the morning wore a freshness unlike any other hour of the day; washed,
unused, it smelt starched and untouched by any previous labours and for Nick it
seemed to be heralding a new beginning.

• • •

The following morning Rossan collected
Nick from his latest B&B refuge in a state of high dudgeon and anxiety. As
Rossan drove, his mood filthy, the sun played hide and seek behind stiff
blotches of cloud all the way to Peacehaven; thin shafts of sunlight lifting out
the contours of a retirement retreat built to one wondrous haphazard plan.

‘Her mother found her and rang for an ambulance, but she
refused to go to hospital, demanding to speak to you, only you, and gave them
our emergency number. The duty officer called me and I promised he’d be posted
to the moon if he breathed a word, assured him that she’s not having a complete
and utter meltdown, she’s just being plain stupid,’ Rossan explained, parked on
the east side of
 
The Dell his mood
revived to something close to tolerant. ‘When I spoke to her over the phone,
she sounded as mad as a hatter, so I sent reinforcements and a doctor.’

‘Who’s with her?’

‘Danny, Lumb and Montford.’

‘No one else has been informed?’

‘Not a soul,’ Rossan said. ‘Her parents are pretty shook up,’
he added. ‘Retired missionaries and if anyone discovers I’ve broken every
personnel protocol under the sun I’m finished.’

‘Let’s go talk,’ suggested Nick.

The bungalow was post-war built from smooth red brick, standing
solid and firm with York stone mullioned bay windows. It was one of those
places that would never change over the years, an architectural time machine,
decided Nick as they parked behind Danny’s BMW. Overgrown fields flowed from
the bungalow on three sides, tended until illness or age let them revert back
to weeds and high grass that stretched away to a sharp peak of headland. A
small market garden business left to rot with a cluster of wooden sheds,
glasshouses and garages gently falling apart. One of them a brick coal store
its door owed a coat of paint, held one end of a blue clothesline. Pegged along
the line washing fluttering as neatly as semaphore flags in the needle cold
wind; clothes for a couple surviving on slim pensions, all of them tumbled of
colour and designed for comfort rather than fashion.

‘Where is she?’ Rossan asked as Danny opened the door.

‘Back room with Lumb,’ said Danny, letting them past. ‘Parents
are in the front with Montford.’

Nick heard the television before opening the door. Inside,
Montford from internal security sat across from the couple, separated by a
generation and a continent.

‘I’ve tried my hardest sir,’ Montford whispered, coming over to
Rossan. ‘But I can’t really get through to them.’

On the television a game show host exhorted a contestant to
have another go; if only we could thought Nick, glancing around, taking in the
statuettes, spears, clubs and shields vying with tribal masks for a piece of
space. In no apparent order they summarised the couple’s lifetime as
missionaries, members of some zealous tribe that must have saved souls in
exchange for primitive goods. This is their horde for retirement he thought; a
cluttered bungalow in an unfashionable resort with views of the sea and orderly
avenues to comfort you right up to death. Now we’ve gone and broken the spell.

‘Your daughter is suffering from stress,’ Rossan said very
loud, standing over the husband, hands snuggled into his coat pockets. ‘That’s
why we’re here.’

‘A dreadful mess,’ the old man said, shaking his head. ‘Hetty,’
he pointed to his wife. ‘Angina. Lucky it didn’t finish her.’

‘I’ll go and have a word,’ suggested Nick as Rossan crouching,
tried to explain their presence to a very frail woman.

A long-case clock marched Nick down the hall, gracefully
keeping pace with his steps. In a back room facing the garden, Ruth Parfrey sat
upright on a hoop-back Windsor armchair at a writing desk of light oak polished
until it shone. She had that sort of English transient beauty that would leave
her a little plainer after each child, though for Parfrey that had never been a
consideration; she also had both wrists heavily bandaged, gauze dressings
covering self-inflicted wounds made with one of her father’s razor blades.
Above her head a large photograph glued to card, its rough edges finished with dark
strips of tape. Surrounded by laughing children her parents posed sternly for
the camera, their arms round a child apiece, but there was no warmth in the
embrace. In the background a tin mission with a huge wooden cross dominating a
blistering African sky. From where Nick stood the cross appeared to have been
rammed right through the mission’s roof, as though angrily staking a claim on
behalf of God.

‘Hello Ruth,’ said Nick as Lumb, a female officer with serious
eyes took herself out of the room. ‘How are you feeling?’

 
‘Oh… Nick, thanks
for coming,’ she answered not bothering to lift her face, and Nick wondered if
she’d been prescribed tranquillisers or painkillers and how much blood she
might have lost.

From the kitchen Nick heard the rattle of cups and clank of a
tray as Danny set about the refreshments. ‘What can I do for you?’ Nick asked,
sitting across from her.

‘I wanted to tell you about working for Moscow,’ Parfrey said,
staring at her wrists. ‘It’s only now when I’ve had time to reflect, that I recognise
how much damage I’ve caused.’

‘You want to share it, Ruth?’

But before she could begin Danny knocked once, bringing in a
metal tray leaving two cups of tea on a beaten copper table too low to be of
any practical use. Out of an immense canvas bag Parfrey pulled out her
cigarettes and a box of matches; defiantly, in childish sweeps of her hand she
lit one, holding it at the very tip of her fingers to keep them clear of the
smoke that slunk away to the ceiling.

‘It began when I was a student, I suppose. I’d a vague left
wing sympathy, a fellow traveller is how I would be described, a useful idiot
in our terminology. I tended to ignore the ideological pull, thought I’d
outgrow it. Then you meet someone who shares a
parallel world view, and that’s it, no blinding light, just a
realisation,’ she said slowly, ‘I’m not going to provide dates and names now,’
she added.

‘So how did you know that Lubov was on to you?’

Stubbing out her cigarette she turned her head away, in profile
its classic lines more beautiful than ever, but when she faced him again there
was a grimace on her pale lips that just stopped short of being a scowl. ‘Just
the mention that he’d struck gold.’

‘And that was it?’

‘I suppose.’
 
She
reached for her cup drinking her tea
automatically, her gaze set on a
missionary chart depicting colonial Africa, its border spotted with tufts of
mould. Around its edges small photographs of 1950s missionaries with neat hand
and ruler lines joining them to their destinations; their churches all probably
forgotten, a good few of the young faces probably dead. Over Nick’s voice
asking if she understood, she heard the sea in the distance, and somewhere
inside her head a voice of her own urging caution.

‘What more did I need?’ she said with no particular emotion, a
plain everyday statement, and slipped back into a protracted silence as though
determining if she could actually go ahead with her story.

Nick let the silence develop, a temporary break to increase the
pain. Looking at Parfrey then away, he sensed she was trying to shut him out
completely. Along the hall the clock chased away another hour, and the bungalow
settled back on its dusty haunches in preparation for another dull afternoon. A
cold wind came up off the sea and gusted inland, strumming telephone wires and
playing down the roof, only the television penetrated the stillness with a
screeching of tyres and sirens from New York.

‘After years of Lubov delivering just enough for us to continue
his payments, I knew he’d struck lucky, hit the big time,’ she said abruptly,
‘I was correct I guess.’ And she trailed off again dumping her cup on the table
with a bang.

A waist-high bookcase sat in a corner set aside for reading,
under a green Anglepoise dipping its head; Dickens, Austen, Eliot, Trollope and
Goethe fought for room with atlases, encyclopaedias and dictionaries.

‘Take your time,’ Nick suggested, though he knew that commodity
was what they lacked the most.

‘Then Bensham confirmed it didn’t he. Bensham said Lubov had
run into evidence of the Oktober Projekt. I realised that if Lubov had any
brains he’d already have unearthed a financial genealogy for it. If he had
that, he had me, so to speak. Simple, that’s all I needed, that’s all I’d been
waiting for.’