Birth of a Spy

by Duncan Swindells

  Was there anything else to be learnt from the photograph? Their attire told him little, they were all wearing the same drab civilian clothing of post war Britain. The picture must have been taken in the late autumn or early winter of 1948, to one side a bare tree, its branches nakedly snaking into the cold clear sky, all of the subjects were heavily dressed, the men wearing long overcoats, some in hats and scarfs, the sole woman wearing a thick jacket and gloves. He’d always assumed it had been taken at Bletchley or at the very least somewhere in Britain. But most of the people, judging from their names, were German. Even Wiseman, Hunter supposed, might easily have been Weisman or Weissmann at one time. Was he now saying the photograph had been taken in Germany in 1948? It was possible but seemed unlikely and in any case hadn’t it said Bletchley in George’s book? But then Hunter was rapidly learning not to trust everything Wiseman had told him. Perhaps they were POWs who had decided to settle in Britain at the end of the war? That might be a simpler explanation. Hunter was sure he’d read that the last Germans had been repatriated as late as 1949. Another police siren echoed along Lansdowne Terrace from the busy main road as Hunter slipped the photograph into his messenger bag next to the manuscript and went to the window. The Audi was back. They must have returned whilst he’d been in the bathroom. He ran a hand over his poorly shaven head. The Russians had clearly had enough for one night and gone home. Hunter didn’t have a home to go to but he couldn’t stay in Wiseman’s flat.

  ✽✽✽

  Hunter recognised the man immediately. Christ these guys worked long hours. He tapped on the window and it came down. Hunter pulled off his hood and Michael Healy stared back. Perhaps, Healy mused, this job might turn out to be more interesting than he’d first thought.

  ‘Remember me?’ Hunter asked meeting Healy’s curious stare. ‘I need to talk.’

  The two British field agents silently consulted one another and then the sound of the Audi’s rear doors unlocking. Hunter climbed in and the doors locked behind him. He sat forward, his filthy elbows resting on immaculate front seats, his bloodied head pushed between Bennett’s and Healy’s.

  ‘George is dead. Killed himself before you ask. Nothing to do with me. I’m going to need your help.’

  Hunter spent the next half an hour in the blacked out Audi talking with Bennett and Healy. At the end of their meeting Bennett handed him a slip of paper. Hunter thanked him, pulled the hoodie tight over his head and left. He was going to have to find somewhere to sleep for the night.

  9

  David had contacted a specialists in Germany to find many of the parts. The company had swathed them in bubble wrap and painstakingly parcelled them in corrugated carboard and thick grey tape. After a somewhat convoluted journey across Europe the parts began to arrive in a steady trickle through the post, smothered in franking stamps and lurid fragile stickers.

  The clock which lay in pieces on David’s dining room table had originally been handcrafted by Anton Harder in Ransen near Frankfurt in 1883. Some people called them Torsion or Four Hundred Day Clocks, but to David it was the Anniversary Clock.

  Harder had watched a servant lighting a chandelier. As the man lit each candle he’d turned the chandelier to light the next. Harder had realised that when the chandelier was released it would spin forward and back and he’d taken the idea and applied it to the pendulums in his clocks. Of course there were other stories too but David preferred this one. He reflected how upset Harder would have been to see one of his creations in such a condition. The glass bell had been so severely smashed he’d thrown it away and one of the brass finials was badly bent and twisted where the clock had landed. The torsion pendulum itself was delicate and whilst it appeared to the naked eye to be intact David knew it would need to be completely stripped, cleaned and reassembled and that that was going to be a fiddly and laborious task. Harder clocks were never the most accurate of time keepers but then David didn’t care about that. For him it was a link to the past, not a way of measuring the present. He was painfully aware of where it had come from and the people it had belonged to. The clock, he rationalised, could not be held responsible for that, it was just a clock after all, a collection of cogs, springs and gears. He tried to conjure up images of the men and women who had wound and cared for the delicate timepiece. They were all dead now.

  ✽✽✽

  London at night becomes a different place to different people. It was 11 o’clock and many of the pubs around Trafalgar Square were still doing a brisk trade but now the streets were filling with the night’s revellers, people streaming out of theatres and opera houses, restaurants and bars and each with their own separate agendas. Some hurrying to catch the last train home, others drunkenly falling into private hires, happy to worry about the cost, both physical and pecuniary, the following morning. The monied set who stayed in their wine bars, confident they could afford the cost of a black cab at any time. And amongst them all, the performers, the bar staff, the students who’d had too much and the stag and hen parties who’d had far too much.

  Careful to avoid busy main roads and the possibility of being recognised by the police, Scott Hunter had walked to Trafalgar Square. He skirted three of London’s most famous parks, drawn by the need to surround himself with the capital and its people, to disappear into their ranks, just another lost lonely soul on a muggy evening in May. On any other occasion he would have relished the warm spring air, but not this evening. Then, standing beneath Nelson’s column looking south along Whitehall, amidst the partygoers and tourists the uncomfortable feelings of South Kensington returned. Landseer’s bronze lions suddenly no longer protective and reassuring, but snarling and disloyal.

  Hunter’s clothes, such as they were, hung on him like rags, damp, torn and caked in cement dust, his shoes ruined. The paint splattered Lonsdale hoodie he’d found at the building site on Sussex Gardens now permanently covering his badly shaven head, the broken messenger bag held tightly in his bandaged hand. People were starting to stare at him, furtive glances exchanged between friends, colleagues, partners. Hunter couldn’t afford to be recognised, not just yet. In the past forty-eight hours his life had been turned upside down. He looked at the young couples in Trafalgar Square. Cruelly, now that it was no longer possible, Hunter realised quite what he had lost, that he had wanted to marry Amy, perhaps even start a family with her. Now that would never be, and the most painful aspect of his whole sorry situation was that this was all down to him. This had all been his doing. He had been so insistent on deciphering the Lorenz code, despite being warned by two different people not to. He had dragged Amy to London instead of taking her to the police and safety as she had suggested, and now, thanks to him, she was gone. And where was he? No closer to the truth than before the wretched envelope had landed on his doorstep.

  Hunter trudged past the front of Charing Cross Station, where rows of nervous taxi drivers prepared themselves for intemperate clientele, and street sweepers began the clean up so that London might soil itself all over again the following evening, like some giant plutocratic baby. Further off, at The Mall, someone’s son or daughter was being lifted into an ambulance. The idea of being stretchered away from the world, from the hurt and the pain to somewhere warm, somewhere he might even sleep, perhaps never to re-awaken, appealed greatly to Hunter. He thought of Wiseman, that strange cantankerous old man, now dead by his own hand and perhaps finally at peace with himself. I made a terrible mistake. The words reverberated tunelessly around Hunter’s weary head as he walked down Villiers Street towards the Embankment and the pedestrian bridge which straddled the Thames. I made a terrible mistake. Words which now threatened to become Hunter’s very own epitaph.

  He was looking for somewhere to curl up for the night, somewhere where if it rained there was a reasonable chance he might stay dry. Although he was exceptionally tired sleep seemed unthinkable. At the top of the stairs, as the bridge turned and began its long journey over dark waters, Hunter found his spot. Someone had been there before him, l
eaving a large square of thick, dirty cardboard. From its size and shape it might, at one time, have held a fridge or washing machine, but now it was so filthy any writing was illegible, its previous purpose a mystery. Hunter supposed its owner could return in time, but he was ready to drop and so, his precious bag clutched firmly in his arms, he slumped down and sat wearily contemplating the river as it swept beneath him, a sombre headless serpent doggedly pursuing the ocean beneath a waxing gibbous moon.

  It didn’t take long before Hunter’s head began to drop and he succumbed to a fitful sleep. To the hundreds of people who passed him, he was just another homeless person, to be despised, pitied or ignored. He slipped deeper and deeper, into a world of disturbing and terrifying images. He dreamt only of dead people. Dead people he was unable to help, unable to save, but who cried out to him, pleaded with him, begging him to take pity on them. The strangers in Wiseman’s photograph were there, their black and white mouths hanging open, wordlessly beseeching him. Joth, Wiseman, Amy. An unholy trinity now, reaching out to him, begging for his help. Then as the nightmare continued, grabbing him, pulling at his clothes, tearing them from him, whilst simultaneously pushing him away. Hunter woke with a start. He was being kicked. Not violently, just hard enough to wake him. He was confused, briefly wondering where he was. He looked up. The youth doing the kicking was about nineteen or twenty, black, powerfully built and, if his clothes were anything to go by, possibly also living rough. The owner of the cardboard?

  ‘Is this your,’ Hunter hesitated, unsure of his next word, ‘bed?’

  ‘Fuck you man! Bed! I got my own bed. What’s in the bag?’

  Not the owner of the cardboard but a common thief. Hunter clutched the messenger bag tightly to him, its contents all that remained of his previous life. The youth crouched down on his haunches, his large, muscular hands flat on the moist, grey paving, face thrust up close to Hunter’s.

  ‘What’s in the bag, man?’

  Hunter had never been in this position before, but then he thought back over the events of the previous two days. He’d been chased by an armed man, shot at and witnessed death all around him. He didn’t have to stand for this. He reached into the bag. Instinctively the youth drew back. Hunter hadn’t properly examined the laptop which had saved his life since the shooting, but even in the limited light of Hungerford Bridge he could see the dull brass bullet nestling amongst the bent and broken hard drive.

  ‘There you go. Take it.’ He thrust the laptop at his assailant. ‘As you can see it has a bullet in it, so good luck selling that.’

  ‘Whoa, man.’

  ‘I’ve spent the day being chased and shot at. I am, as a result quite tired, so if you think you’re the worst thing that’s happened to me today, you are seriously fucking flattering yourself. Take it.’

  Hunter sprang to his feet thrusting the ruined machine at the youth’s chest.

  ‘Come on, take it. Take it.’

  ‘Okay man, just calm down.’

  ‘No. The time for me to be calm is long gone my friend.’ Hunter started shouting and shoving the MacBook at his attacker. ‘Take it. Take it.’

  ‘All right, I said calm down.’

  ‘Come on you fucker. Take it!’

  ‘Listen, I’m going okay? I’m sorry.’

  ‘Fuck you and “sorry”. What do you know about sorry? Just fuck off and leave me alone,’ he shouted after the retreating figure. That had felt good. Although he’d spent the past twenty-four hours surrounded by death and destruction oddly Hunter had seldom felt more alive. He resumed his place on the cardboard and tried to get back to sleep, closing his mind to the events of the previous day, fighting to ignore the almost overpowering smell of stale urine and listening to the sound of Big Ben, born on the Thames.

  ✽✽✽

  At the far end of Hungerford Bridge, Healy and Bennett waited for the young black man to return.

  ‘You losing your touch, Steve?’

  Steve Donovan opened his hands wide and a beaming smile spread across his face.

  ‘He really let me have it. Got quite aggro, started shoving me around and everything.’

  Healy wouldn’t have picked a fight with Steve Donovan unless his life had depended on it. The lad was enormous. 165 pounds of second generation, South London middle weight, and a regular at some of the gyms around Elephant and Castle.

  ‘Sounds like someone needs to learn a few manners. Should we step in?’ he suggested.

  Bennett shook his head, ‘Boss says not to. We’ll keep an eye on him, but it sounds like he’s doing fine to me. Cheers, Steve.’ Bennett took a twenty pound note from his wallet.

  ‘Any time guys, any time.’

  ✽✽✽

  It was the middle of the night when Sir John Alperton finally put the phone down. Patricia Hedley-King had called at half past ten, just as Sir John had been packing up for the evening, about to wander down to Waterloo and catch the last train to Kent and home. She’d taken up nearly an hour and a half of his precious time all of which might have been spared if she’d said what she had to say either at their lamentable meeting in The Nightingale or by sending him a succinctly worded email. But that just wasn’t her style. She was incapable of using one word when a hundred would do. Sir John had always suspected that that had in no small part contributed to her sudden and all too public fall from grace and subsequent change in career.

  Now he would have to phone his wife, possibly waking her, to explain he wouldn’t be coming home and then he would have to get someone to make him up the day bed in his office. He looked at the electronic cigarette Valerie had bought him. It wasn’t the same, not by a long stretch but for now it would have to do, she’d made that clear. A silent edict, laid down with one slight, insinuating glance. He took a long draw on the mix of chemicals. Better. It was too late now and he didn’t have the energy to skulk around the labyrinthine passages of the building simply in order to have a clandestine fag. Events were moving swifter than he would have liked or could have predicted. Once he’d spoken to his wife he’d phone Healy and Bennett and see where his boy was. When he’d last heard from them there had been some unpleasantness in Hyde Park. Shots evidently had been fired, an innocent bystander injured. This, he reflected as he took another long draw on the e-cigarette, could not be allowed to continue for very much longer, added to which he now had that frightful woman Hedley-King breathing down his neck.

  Their meeting had been highly unsatisfactory from Sir John’s perspective. He knew fine well what she was driving at. There had been rumours circulating The Home Office for some time. There had been other meetings with other civil servants. Other civil servants who had been a lot less guarded than Hedley-King, especially after a few glasses of thick red tongue loosener, bought by Sir John at his club, and so her dinner invitation hadn’t come as a complete surprise. But Turkey? He had been shocked when she’d brought up Turkey. That had taken some balls. He jabbed the internal button on his intercom.

  Brigit Crowther had been Sir John’s private secretary, PA and confident for the past twenty years. Never his lover though he thought with a small twinge of regret. Bridget, it transpired, as well as being an excellent secretary was a woman of high moral principles. Sir John couldn’t honestly say that he would have given her the job had he known that at the time, but now she was as trusted a member of his staff as he could imagine. And anyway, all those impulses were long forgotten, a distant memory, like so many neglected friendships.

  ‘Yes, Sir John?’

  ‘Brigit, could you arrange for someone to have my day bed made up for me do you think?’

  ‘Certainly, Sir John. Will there be anything else?’

  ‘Would you mind phoning Valerie and letting her know I’ll be working late? I’m going to need a car signing out for tomorrow too.’

  ‘I’ll check and see if the BMW is available?’

  ‘Thank you, Brigit. On second thoughts don’t bother Valerie, I’ll phone her myself.’

  ‘Very go
od, Sir John.’

  He could do with hearing a familiar voice. It would make a pleasant change to speak to a woman who was actually on his side. And then he’d speak to Bennett and Healy. There was never any concern about getting them out of bed.

  As he waited for his wife to pick up, Alperton inspected his most recent purchase. He flicked up the tie’s silken tail, inspecting the finely formed tipping and keeper. Then, out of nowhere, the most profound feeling of disappointment overcame him. Not in the tie, but in everything else, in the path he had chosen and the choices he had made, an unanswerable sense of the futility of it all, coupled with a desperate need to reach into the future and prove the old man wrong. And as quickly as it had descended on him, like a sudden and inexplicable rush of chilled air on a summer’s evening, the feeling passed and his wife was sleepily answering their phone.