Traitor's Blood

by Reginald Hill

  Meanwhile Vita 3 became the greatest scandal of the day. To most people its full extent was never known. Subversive groups weren’t eager to advertise to their enemies what arms they’d got, still less to their friends how much money they’d been conned out of by my final coup! And all those politicians and officials the world over who’d been taking quieteners for years were now keeping quiet for free. So as far as the Great British Public was concerned, it was simply a huge and particularly unpleasant fraud. Everyone who’d ever listened to one of Vita 3’s broadcast appeals and pushed a fiver into an envelope was now convinced it had gone straight into my pocket.

  I didn’t mind. I sat back and waited for the feeling of triumph to well up inside me. It never did. I had done untold harm. I had abandoned my family and it gradually dawned on me that I had contrived to destroy whatever chance of meaning, fulfilment and happiness there might have been in my life.

  And for what?

  A triumph that never came. I tried to imagine my father’s face as he heard the news about Vita 3 and the final destruction of the Bessacarr name. I could never envisage the lineaments of pain and distress, only that characteristic expression of mingled pain and complacency as yet another disaster, uniquely forecast by himself, confirmed once more the wisdom of his ways.

  So self-disgust warred in me with self-pity, and finally self-preservation won. I set up my security screen to protect my body. I set up barriers against involvement and friendship to protect my emotions, and I set up my arrangements with Dario to protect my future. It was always my plan to see England and Angelica again before I died. At least, so I assured myself at moments of maximum depression and fear—when I’d had the dream, for instance, or after sex. Home thoughts from a succession of broads!

  All this, or most of it, I think I spilled out to Reilly. The first religion whose confessionals are conducted by a naked female priest straddling the repentant sinner’s body is going to sweep the world.

  But instead of going into penances all she said in a rather bored voice was, ‘Lem Swift, you called yourself. Is that the family name?’

  ‘Stanhope-Swift,’ I said. ‘I kept the title which pleased the traditionalists, but answered to plain Lem Swift which pleased the radicals. Lemuel, of course, was my father’s idea of wit. My mother never liked it.’

  I reached up and tried to pull her down towards me. If she wasn’t going to be moved by my confession, at least she could offer some form of absolution.

  ‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘You’ll need another fight for that.’

  She swung easily off the bed and went through to the bathroom. I heard the sound of the shower. After a while I followed her.

  She was towelling herself.

  ‘I’ve left it running,’ she said. ‘You’ll need a shower. You’re a sweaty fighter.’

  There didn’t seem to be anything to say so I stepped in. _

  By the time I’d finished, she’d left the bathroom. I dried myself for a moment, then returned to the bedroom with the towel round my waist.

  Reilly was zipping herself into her jeans. The Brigadier was sitting in the armchair. I had a sudden daft feeling that he’d been sitting there all along and I just hadn’t noticed him. I also had a not so daft feeling that he might as well have been. Suddenly Reilly’s easy capitulation at the end of our struggle made sense.

  ‘Decision time, Mr Swift,’ said the Brigadier briskly.

  ‘What’s your trick cyclist say?’ I asked, nodding at Reilly. ‘Though I doubt the BMA would approve her bedside manner!’

  ‘I said I thought you’d do it,’ she replied unabashed, cradling her breasts into her inadequate bra and opening the wardrobe to retrieve her precious blouse.

  ‘Go to Moscow and blow one of their favourite defectors away?’ I said mockingly. ‘You must be joking! With cancer I’ve got maybe three months. With the KGB I’d have maybe three minutes.’

  ‘Less,’ said Reilly. ‘You’re out of shape.’

  She said it with a grin rather than a sneer and I didn’t resent it. All right, she’d used me, but still there was between us the bond of our coupling. She might have faked the occasion, but she hadn’t faked the fun, and that put us a bit above the mutual indifference of whore and client.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ I said. ‘So, even less reason for me to go to Moscow. Even if I was prepared to assassinate my father.’

  ‘No need to go to Moscow, bucko,’ said Reilly. ‘If your da was staying in Moscow, there’d be no need to blow him away.’

  ‘Not staying in Moscow?’ I said in bewilderment. ‘What do you mean?’

  It was to the Brigadier that I addressed myself, but again Reilly replied.

  ‘The Bessacarrs are on the move,’ she said. ‘It must be Bessacarr reunion time. Our information is that just like you, your old man, bless him, is heading back to the land of his fathers!’

  ‘Back to England?’ I said, astonished. ‘But why, for God’s sake? Why?’

  ‘Why?’ echoed Reilly. ‘To surrender himself to the authorities and stand trial for the murder of your mother, of course. Why else, bucko? Why else?’

  8

  … good in the garden …

  I got dressed.

  My mind was a maelstrom of speculation but some atavistic sense of decorum insisted I should be properly clothed before hearing what was to come next. Also it gave me a few moments to get a grip of myself.

  ‘OK,’ I said, tying my final shoelace. ‘Now tell me; why the hell should my father want to come back here and give himself up.’

  ‘As to that, Mr Swift, you are probably in a better position than anyone else to understand his personal motives,’ said the Brigadier. ‘We can merely hope to interpret the motives of his political masters. Let me fill in the picture as best I can. Your father has now been in Russia for twenty years. He is almost seventy …’

  ‘This month,’ I said. ‘He’ll be seventy this month.’

  ‘He is a widower. I mean for the second time,’ continued the Brigadier. ‘The woman, Kim, died earlier this year. Perhaps you knew that?’

  I shook my head. So Kim was dead. It meant nothing. Once I had quite liked her as a person; once her oriental prettiness had played a large part in my teenage onanistic fantasies. But for many years she had just been a length of flesh thrashing around beneath my father’s unfaithful body.

  ‘It is many years since his hosts have felt it worth-while to employ him as an active scientist,’ said the Brigadier. ‘He did some useful work for them on the biomass, I believe, but he seems to have alienated his fellow workers by his impatience and his irritability, which seemed to increase as he became aware of a decline in his own powers of creative scientific thought.’

  That figured too. God spotting a grey hair.

  ‘So he’s coming back because he’s a superannuated widower?’ I said in half-feigned stupidity.

  ‘Come on, bucko!’ interjected Reilly, who could never be quiet for long. ‘Think about it; the great Billy Bessacarr, last of the Renaissance men, how do you think he’s always envisaged celebrating his seventieth birthday?’

  I thought about it.

  ‘Under a bright spotlight. Making a long speech. To a huge, appreciative, admiring audience,’ I said.

  ‘Right on! And his masters aren’t about to lay on a fiesta in Red Square. But they have shown him how he can get close to it. And that’s at the Old Bailey.’

  I shook my head. ‘But why? I can see that it might have some attractions for him, but what’s in it for the Politburo? It’ll be great for the media, of course, but at the end of the day what’s the great message for the Western World? All they’ll hear is a lot of old red propaganda crap which will be even less potent than usual, coming from an antique defector who also happens to be a condemned murderer!’

  The Brigadier smiled and glanced at his watch.

  ‘That’s the nub of it,’ he murmured. ‘Suppose, just—suppose, he were not to be condemned.’

  ‘
You mean pardoned?’ I said stupidly.

  ‘I mean, found not guilty,’ he replied.

  ‘Oh yes, it’s a possibility we have to face,’ he continued after he had let this sink in. ‘His masters aren’t letting him come back here to make a fool of himself and them, you can be sure of that. There’s a long-term plan here, longer than even your father guesses, I suspect. It’s our understanding that some of their best legal brains have been working on his defence for more than two years.’

  ‘His defence? What defence?’ I cried. ‘I mean, look at the facts. Motive, opportunity, murder weapon covered with his prints, flight—Christ, how do you talk you way out of that lot? Surely no British lawyer would touch it?’

  I don’t know why I sounded so incredulous. The Brigadier and Reilly exchanged amused glances.

  ‘Lawyers by their very nature work for a vast number of undesirable people, Mr Swift. Traitors are not excluded. And this promises to be a cause célèbre of the kind that most of them would give their partner’s right hand to be involved with. It will have everything. Everything. It is our understanding that the defence will fall into two main areas. First, it will attack the assertion of motive.’

  ‘What? I saw him! I told the police! I saw him at it on the bed with that … with … with Kim!’

  ‘There’s no proof your mother did,’ said the Brigadier mildly. ‘But the defence will, we understand, assert that even if she did, she was unlikely to have reacted as an outraged wife.’

  ‘How then?’ I asked in a low voice.

  ‘As a woman of the world in the widest sense,’ said the Brigadier. ‘As a woman whose promiscuity was a byword in certain quarters. As a woman whose appetites were so voracious and so broad that they had driven your father into the chaste arms of his Korean secretary who later became and remained his faithful and loving wife for eighteen years.’

  He paused. I opened my mouth to speak, couldn’t, tried again.

  ‘This is monstrous. No one would believe … monstrous … what evidence …’

  ‘There will be photographs, letters,’ he said. ‘The KGB have technical skills of the highest order. You will recall that earlier in 1963 the year of your father’s defection, there occurred the Profumo scandal, consequent to which Dr Stephen Ward was tried for living off the earnings of prostitution.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. The poor bastard killed himself before the verdict came in,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. You may also remember that there were all kinds of wild stories circulating about the involvement in these, shall we say, sexually liberated circles of all kinds of eminent and respected figures?’

  ‘Yes, but the speculation all died away, publicly at least, after Ward’s suicide.’

  ‘It died because it had no roots,’ said the Brigadier. ‘But there were those even then who suggested it died because Ward died and anyone who speculated too loud was likely to follow him. Absurd, of course, but this is the line your father’s defence will follow. Mr Swift, in order to blacken your dead mother’s name, a systematic attempt will be made to blacken the names of many of the living. You will recall the security implications of the Profumo affair? Among the admitted clientele of the chief lady in the affair was the Russian Naval Attaché, Captain Ivanov. The defence will claim to have been given access (on humanitarian grounds!) to certain KGB classified material. Its alleged contents we can only guess at, but you can be certain it will be plausible and, as I’ve said, technically immaculate. The British public is always ready to believe the worst of the ruling classes. They will receive every encouragement. And even if the laws of libel and of contempt do not permit publication of all the so-called evidence, rumour has a wider circulation than even The Sun and I fear your mother’s name at least could be tarnished beyond recovery.’

  He spoke in a matter of fact rather than a sympathetic way and this made his monstrous scenario all the more realistic.

  ‘But they’d need witnesses,’ I insisted. ‘Documents, photos even, wouldn’t be enough, not at this remove. Who the hell can they put in the stand to support these allegations?’

  ‘Grow up, Swifty!’ interjected Reilly. ‘Pimps and whores will sell anything for hard cash. And there’s a couple of pretty respectable ladies and gents who’re not above bending their memories for a fistful of the necessary. And what would you say to a KGB officer, now retired, who’d admit to being in charge of the political side of the whole nasty operation?’

  ‘They’d never admit him,’ I said.

  ‘Want to bet?’ she gibed.

  ‘And then there’s Joe,’ said the Brigadier.

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘You remember Joe. The Kenyan boy. He wasn’t too bright, but big and strong. Very good in the garden, I believe.’

  ‘Yes, I remember Joe. What’s he got to do with this?’

  ‘It’s our understanding,’ said the Brigadier, ‘that the defence will claim that your mother had a relationship with Joe when he was living at Bessacarr House in Hampshire.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That she involved him in her circle and its … games. That because of his youth, and his colour, and his … size, he was a special attraction. There will be photographs.’

  ‘No!’ I protested.

  He went inexorably on.

  ‘And what is more, Joe will be produced as a witness. Big, simple, transparently honest Joe.’

  He glanced at his watch again and said to Reilly, ‘I have to go. I’m sorry. Perhaps you will finish briefing Mr Swift. I feel sure he is with us in this matter. Mr Swift, we’ll meet again later. I am sorry to have been the bearer of such distressing tidings. Good day.’

  He left. I hardly noticed. I was feeling so sick that I went into the bathroom and after a while I flushed away the croissants, orange juice and Morello cherry conserve. I filled the washbasin with cold water and plunged my face in, holding my breath till I was forced, gasping, back into the unchanged air.

  I went back into the bedroom. Reilly had produced a bottle of vodka from somewhere and she slopped some of it into a glass which she handed to me.

  ‘The rest isn’t so painful,’ she said. ‘Not to you anyway. We said there were two main areas of defence. The first was to attack motive. Why should a lecherous slut like your ma get upset at the sight of your old man rogering the oriental help? OK, down, boy! It’s not me speaking, it’s the defence. That out of the way, they’ll come on to the question, if your da didn’t kill your ma, who did? And the answer they’ve come up with is, us. That is to say, British Intelligence. How do you like that? The same lot, they will suggest, as rubbed out Stephen Ward in case he got so uptight he spilled everything he knew about the Westminster-Mayfair connection. What do you say to that?’

  She looked at me, eyes wide, inviting me to share her incredulity.

  I said, ‘OK, Reilly. So I’ve got the broad picture. My old man’s planning to go out in a blaze of glory at No 1 Court, Old Bailey, throwing so much shit at the fan, everyone’s bound to get a piece. And for why? For the greater glory of the Soviet Union? I don’t buy that. Whatever else was phoney about him, his supranationalism wasn’t.’

  ‘Suppose I said, to justify himself to himself?’ said Reilly. ‘Would that make sense?’

  ‘You don’t justify murder by fixing the evidence,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t imagine he ever thought of it as murder?’ asked Reilly. ‘That letter he wrote you, I bet what he said was that he was innocent of murder. And he’d believe it. Justifiable homicide, that’s how he’d see it. But he’s not going to be able to get a jury to bring in that verdict, is he? So he’s going after the symbolic not guilty, and if the facts have to be altered a bit, it’s only because an English jury isn’t competent to deal with the truth.’

  I thought about this. The letter I couldn’t remember precisely, but it all rang true. I felt sick again, not physically this time, but in the very pores of my being.

  ‘Reilly,’ I said, ‘he deserves to die. Once I’d have begged to be allowed to
do it. If what you tell me is true, he deserves it even more. But I’ve changed too. I don’t need persuading that he ought to be killed, but whether I…’

  ‘Swift,’ she interrupted, unsmiling now. ‘I hope you haven’t mistaken any of this for persuasion. The Brigadier spelt out the deal. Believe me, he means it, every last threat of it.’

  ‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘But if my father’s coming back here, surely you’ve got experts who can blow him away without any difficulty. Why do you want me?’

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘you don’t imagine he’s just going to walk quietly into some local nick and say, “Surprise, surprise! Look who’s here!” do you? The Russians are going to arrange for his first appearance to be as spectacular and public as possible. They know what we’d do if the situation were reversed and they must have many a good belly laugh at the way they can use the West’s free press and other media against it. It’ll be a long way from London, but it has to be in the West. There’ll be a press conference, photographs, printed statements, the full business, then he’ll get on a plane to the UK to surrender himself to the authorities. Once he’s gone public like that, they know he’s safe. For him to die then would almost be better than a trial for the Soviets! All they want is a huge Western scandal. Once this thing hits the headlines, they’ve got it. No, he’s got to be shut up before the press see him and the KGB will be keeping him wrapped up tighter than a nun’s knockers.’

  She had seated herself in front of the dressing-table mirror and was repairing her face.

  ‘So how do you propose to get to him?’ I asked.

  I was genuinely curious. I’d almost forgotten we were talking about my father. Reilly’s next words reminded me brutally.

  ‘Not me. You,’ she said. ‘By invitation.’

  ‘By invitation!’ I laughed. ‘Why the hell should he invite me anywhere except to jump over the nearest cliff?’

  ‘Because his principal motive for this whole exercise is self-justification,’ she said calmly. ‘In the eyes of the world in general. But more particularly, if the opportunity presented itself, in the eyes of his dearly beloved son and heir. The only thing that’s going to tempt him to bust his security screen is the chance to talk to you.’