Birth of a Spy

by Duncan Swindells

  The next landing was the same. Planks covering the stairs to allow more wheel barrows to come and go. Hunter was running out of options. He reached the third floor. This had been where he had seen an occupied apartment. He beat on the door but it was futile. Even if there had been someone home, by the time they had come to the door the giant would be on him. He would have to continue on and up, there was nowhere else to go and Hunter was running out of time.

  When he reached the fourth floor he realised why the ladders outside had come to such an abrupt halt. There were no stairs to the fifth and final floor. He was trapped. On the landing were two doors. The first was locked and probably a bathroom. The second opened into the master bedroom. There was nothing. The room was completely bare. No furniture, no carpets, most of the plaster was missing from two of the walls and light switches and power sockets hung from naked cables, unsupported and twisted. Hunter listened as heavy footsteps climbed the stairs. He’d reached the end of the line. He watched the tip of the silencer poke into the room and then the huge man followed.

  ‘You little shit.’

  Hunter had never heard his real voice. Before it had always been electronically disguised. There was an accent, quite a heavy one too, but Hunter couldn’t place it. He was much more concerned with the gun which was being levelled at him. He edged back towards the large bay windows at the front of the house as the giant advanced upon him.

  ‘Where’s the list?’

  ‘I told you. I gave you what I had. That’s it. There is no other list. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Do you think I’m fucking stupid? Give me the list,’ he barked, waving the gun to emphasis his request.

  ‘I can’t. I can’t give you what I don’t have.’

  ‘The camera.’

  Hunter had forgotten he even had the camera. With shaking, bloodied hands he unclipped the Cannon from its mount.

  ‘Slowly.’

  He was about to relinquish his only piece of evidence. Once he’d given that away, then what? There would be nothing to stop the giant from killing him too. This might be his only chance. If he could catch the man off guard he might be able to buy enough time to get past him and down the stairs. He held the camera as firmly as his bloody right hand would allow and threw it with all his strength at the man’s head. Its size and shape made it an awkward projectile and useless as a weapon. The giant deflected it easily then, disappointed by his adversary and shaking his head, picked up the camera and deftly removed the memory card, slipping it into his pocket.

  ‘Don’t get cute you little bastard,’ he growled at Hunter before smashing the Cannon on the floor, sending shards of expensive plastic splintering across the room.

  That was it. Hunter had played his last card, and lost. But he still held the monopole. As the giant advanced on him he carefully unclipped the telescopic leg and waited. He waited for the sparkling one liner, the witty bon mot, the Hollywood zinger that would surely be the last words he would ever hear and would have caused Amy to roll her eyes in incredulity. He waited for his final chance to hear the monster’s true voice.

  Nothing.

  Hunter was pent against the open sash window, a fresh breeze playing along his back. The giant was three feet from him and repositioning the gun with only one intention. What was it the old man had said? You’ll never beat him in a street fight. Well he hadn’t been right about much up to now. Hunter was going to pray he’d been wrong about that too. He saw the sun glint off the ring on the man’s left hand as it held the gun’s rugged grip. Not a wedding ring after all, but a Hell’s Angel’s grinning silver skull. Hunter clenched the foot of the monopole tightly in both hands and aimed for the glistening target. As the giant drew breath, steadying himself before delivering the coup de grâce, Hunter swung hard. The telescopic leg with its weighty metal mount, shot out to its full extension, simultaneously catching the side of the gun and the man’s left hand and in that instant shattering the metacarpal of his third finger. He screamed in pain, dropping the Glock, which clattered across the floor and came to rest in the doorway. The giant, nursing his hand and cursing, was after it. Hunter had one chance. He turned and leapt into the wooden rubble chute which snaked down the front of the building. The pain as his bruised back scrapped against the entrance to the chute was excruciating and blood from his hands left an incriminating trail on the recently painted crisp white window sill. He would have to brace his descent. If he fell from this height at best he could expect to break both ankles. His hands were raw from his fall on the Bayswater Road, so he used his feet to slow himself. From inside the room he could hear the giant cursing him and howling with pain.

  Hunter had been so careful not to fall down the chute but now he wasn’t moving at all. Straining his neck, he craned upwards. The strap of his messenger bag had caught around one of the vertical struts making up the chute’s mouth. He’d bought the bag because it had been advertised as durable and tough but now he was praying that it would tear and release him. Shifting his position Hunter let the strap take his full weight and hoped that the stitching would finally fail.

  Methodically the giant retrieved his gun and prepared to finish the job. Even using his weaker hand, at this range and in such a small space, he ought to hit his target. He spun, ready to fire. But the room was empty. There was no way his mark could have slipped past him unnoticed, the gun had come to rest next to the door. For a fleeting moment the giant almost felt pity for the boy who had caused him so much pain. He must have been so terrified he’d taken his own life, throwing himself from the window. But just as quickly the moment passed and, holding his shattered hand the giant marched over to where Hunter had stood, prepared to see his latest victim’s broken body lying bent and lifeless on the pavement below. Naturally, he would have preferred a cleaner outcome. He took great pride in his work, but once they were dead, they were dead and that was an end to it. And then he saw the chute. Clever little shit. He thrust the Glock down the wooden opening and loosed off a couple of speculative rounds.

  Hunter was lying on a grimy bed of cement and rubble as the bullets hit home sending puffs of fine brick dust into the air. Battered and bruised and slowed by his injuries he dragged himself from the skip, grey cement clinging in patches to his wet clothing. He grabbed a black Lonsdale hoodie that one of the builders had carelessly discarded and threw it over his head, his shoulder bag in hand, its broken strap trailing happily behind him as he stood on the pavement and weighed up his position. Hunter didn’t have much time. He could already hear police sirens heading his way. North, the way his pursuer might expect, or south and back towards Hyde Park and the Police?

  Neither. On the opposite side of the road he spotted a basement flat down a narrow, wrought iron staircase. Providing he made it across the road in time he ought to be able to observe his attacker leaving. If he was too slow, he would be trapped at the bottom of a stairwell with no escape. Hunter dodged through the traffic and threw himself down the heavy metal steps.

  A police car tore down Westbourne Terrace heading towards the park as Hunter’s pursuer left, the man turning sharply and heading north as he had suspected he would. Hunter was finally able to catch his breath. He was finally able to take stock of recent events. He dropped the bag and broke down.

  8

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Scott.’

  Silence.

  ‘She’s dead George. He killed her. Right in front of us.’ Hunter hadn’t wanted to accept Amy’s death but now the words came tumbling out.

  ‘You must come here, to the flat I mean. I have something I need to show you,’ Wiseman said sounding unnaturally calm.

  ‘You’re kidding, right? The police are everywhere.’ Hunter hesitated. ‘I should just go and turn myself in.’

  ‘No, Scott. There are things you do not yet understand.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘You must come to the flat. I have something to show you that will explain everything. It will e
xplain everything about your grandfather.’

  ‘My what?’

  Silence.

  ‘George?’

  Hunter looked at his iPhone. He pressed the indented home button at the bottom of its screen. Dead. He swore under his breath. His grandfather? What the hell did his grandfather have to do with anything? Papa was in a retirement home in Somerset and had been for years. He’d been diagnosed with early onset dementia and Scott’s father hadn’t been able to take care of him. Hunter couldn’t remember ever meeting his mother’s father. If he was going to go to Wiseman’s flat he would have to be extremely careful. He couldn’t think how the police would have tied the old man into any of this, but then there were all his buddies from the secret service to worry about. He’d wait until after dark. Hunter pulled the hoodie tight over his head.

  Lansdowne Terrace was quiet now, the café at the end of the road having long since closed for the day. Kensington’s ladies had moved on first to wine bars and then theatres in the West End. Hunter decided to take his time approaching the flat. He had nothing to lose now. The old man wasn’t going anywhere, but there was still the issue of two secret service cars, one British, one Russian. Hunter preferred to conduct his meeting with Wiseman on his own terms and that was going to involve encouraging these unwanted guests to leave. Nearest him, the Russian car with its diplomatic X plates. If his plan worked, he might kill two birds with one stone and remove the other car as well.

  He observed the two cars for nearly an hour. The driver of the Merc. was a ferocious smoker finishing three cigarettes in that time. Hunter was waiting for the next butt to be thrown from the window. He edged forward. Through the semi-tinted windows he watched the flare of a lighter. Hunter had never been much of a smoker, but the guy in the car smoked with the urgency of need, then discarded the bulk of each cigarette, so he didn’t have long to wait before the car’s electric window came down a couple of inches and a largely unfinished butt joined the pile growing on the pavement. Hunter sprang up and alongside, but before he could even begin his well-rehearsed speech the uncompromising looking Muscovite inside pressed a button and the window whirred shut. For a fleeting second, their eye’s met. Now the Russians knew someone was prowling around outside their car. Wiseman was always telling him it was a good idea to have a plan B.

  Hunter marched confidently in front of the Mercedes and put his shoulder bag on its bonnet. Theatrically he removed a scrappy piece of paper and an old orange biro. He couldn’t see the driver through the tint, but he stared at where he thought the man ought to be and began to write. He didn’t spare the beautiful paintwork of the Mercedes, putting his full weight behind the pen. Then, when there was still no reaction from inside the car, Hunter took the piece of paper and placed it on the windscreen.

  Alperton at Russian Embassy.

  He had no idea who Alperton was but his note certainly had the desired effect. The engine sprang to life, the car was flung into gear and Hunter had to leap out of the way as it disappeared off and up Lansdowne Terrace, leaving the paper to flutter to the ground. No sooner had the Russians left than the lights of the A4 outside Wiseman’s flat came on and that too disappeared, following the speeding Russians West at a discreet distance, presumably to find out where their counterparts were going in quite such a hurry. Hunter was free to approach the twelve steps leading to Wiseman’s flat. He could see the main door was propped open, George’s cricket bat keeping it ajar. Could the killer have come back? Needing something to defend himself with he picked up the bat, having long since abandoned the monopole. Inside the tiny close Wiseman’s front door stood invitingly open. That was unlike the old man. Hunter tightened his grip on the weapon.

  Music spilled from the kitchen. A transistor radio judging by the quality. Britten’s Serenade. Not the original though, Hunter thought, listening for Pears’s distinctively plaintive tone, no this must be a more recent recording. He’d never understood the professor’s fascination with the piece, what took Britten and Blake twenty minutes to say Johnny Ramone could have done in two.

  In the front room everything was as it had been. George, dressed in a flowing silk dressing gown, a decanter by his side, sat motionless before the empty fire. Only when Hunter moved further into the room, passed the piano and its photographic chronical did he realise something was very wrong. The old man’s chin rested on his chest and there was the over powering smell of whisky and vomit. Wiseman’s dappled hand dangled limply by his side, a tumbler lying relinquished on the floor, his naked feet exposing the hard, yellow claws of old age. Hunter saw prescription pill boxes on the table next to Wiseman’s typewriter. George had taken his own life and so Hunter had no idea what made him do it, but he bent down and tried to find the old man’s pulse. He wanted to close his eyes but couldn’t.

  This was the third dead body he’d seen in as many days; Joth, George and he felt he could now say, Amy. He took the decanter, poured what was left into a tumbler and found a space on the sofa which meant he didn’t have to see Wiseman’s body. The old man had said he would tell him something concerning his grandfather. Hunter grimaced. He wouldn’t be telling him anything now, would he?

  No, that wasn’t quite true. Wiseman had said he’d show him something. Hunter got up and started searching the room, finally able to examine the books on Wiseman’s shelves. An eclectic mix, from Albert Camus to Jean-Luc Godard, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann rubbing shoulders with Noam Chomsky and Ayn Rand but nothing which suggested a connection with Hunter’s grandfather. From the books he moved to the photographs. Arranged on the mantlepiece just the collection of pictures one might expect of a dotting grandfather. Shots of babies, toddlers and then their first days at school. Again, nothing connecting Wiseman in any way with his grandparents. Perhaps the photographs on the piano would tell him more? These were from a different era, a black and white era, their absence of colour imbuing them with a sense of times long past and bygone days and much more in keeping with his grandparents. He saw the gala events, the sixties starlets and George proudly posing in his service uniform. That was certainly a time when his papa had been around, he’d seen similar photographs at his father’s house. Hunter picked up the picture which had started it all. The picture on the dust cover of Wiseman’s book, George in his black tie and dinner jacket, happily clutching a cigar.

  He forced himself to examine Wiseman’s body, what little of it there was. Hunter took a handkerchief and tried to tidy him up. He’d never appeared to be a large man but now he looked tiny, shrunken and pathetic, his skin although still warm to the touch, already starting to sallow and grey. His eyes which Hunter couldn’t bare to shut seeming dull and glassy. Hunter looked over his shoulder towards the piano and its photographs. Photographs showing an energetic happy young man enjoying life. But that would not be the way he would remember him, a man who had taken such pride in his appearance, such delight in the finer things, no, Hunter would forever remember him as he was now. Awkwardly he padded him down, finding nothing, then finally he closed his eyes.

  On the table by the window, where the Olivetti sat, were the tablets George had taken. A cocktail of oramorph and diazepam. Hunter knew enough to know they were painkillers, presumably for whatever illness had been slowly killing him. It was when he examined the pills that he saw the manuscript left next to the typewriter. Bound together with two colourful treasury tags it had been typed on the thinnest of paper.

  A Life in Film, by George Wiseman

  his address, and underneath in longhand;

  For Scott. I am so very sorry. I made a terrible mistake.

  So this was it? This was what the old man had insisted he return to the flat for? An unpublished manuscript detailing George’s escapades in the film business? Hunter was struggling to imagine what that could possibly have to do with any of his grandparents. None of them had had anything to do with the film industry to the best of his knowledge. But this was certainly it. George’s gift to him. Again he had the horrible feeling he was missing som
ething. He flicked through the manuscript, the onion skin pages feeling false beneath his fingers, a poor imitation of the original, like one of Professor Sinclair’s reproductions. Then, hearing police sirens from the other end of Lansdowne Terrace and fast coming to terms with his new life as a fugitive, Hunter slipped the manuscript into his bag. Taking one last look around the room he switched off the lights. The old man’s kitchen was in front of him and so he guessed the room at the far end of the corridor must be the bathroom.

  George’s bathroom, whilst immaculate in almost every respect, had not been re-decorated in an extremely long time. The bath and sink were of a draconian brown plastic that, coupled with the lack of any natural light lent the room a gloomy, airless quality. Even Wiseman’s clearly fastidious nature hadn’t stopped a broadening limescale stain from developing beneath the bath’s silver taps. Above the sink a faded plastic cabinet. Hunter regarded himself in its mirror. He looked exhausted but he knew that sleep would not come to him, not naturally. He opened the cabinet in the hope of finding something to bandage his hands with and tablets. Anything which might help him lose consciousness and escape the horrors of the waking world. Instead of Valium or Zolpidem, Hunter found nail scissors. He took a towel from the radiator and struggling with the small scissors, cut it into thin strips which he wound around his painful hands, then he began cutting off his hair. The old man had used cheap plastic disposable razors and so Hunter made a terrible mess of his head as he shaved it clean. It was as he was staring at his bald and bloodied reflection in the bathroom mirror that the whispering voices grew louder. He grabbed what remained of the hand towel and ran it over his bloodied head before rushing back into the sitting room. How could he have been so stupid, so unobservant? The photograph. George with his father. Six people in the background. Six names on the list. He turned the frame over. It had appeared quite an ordinary one, befitting an uninspiring group photograph. But now Hunter saw the silver hallmark. Wiseman didn’t do drab. There was a wooden backplate with a supporting leg to stand the frame upon and along each side small silver clasps. Hunter undid them, removing the protective cover and placing it and the glass on top of the piano. He held the black and white photograph in his hands. On its reverse, written in elegant swirling script, the six names he had seen in code, plus the names of George and his father, Sam Wiseman and the date 1948. He turned the picture over and tried to put names to faces, but it was impossible. At least he knew when these people had lived and consequently he assumed that they were now probably all dead, the youngest of them looking to be in their thirties and one of the men considerably older than that.