‘On balance, yes.’
Watson-Jones’s restlessness has grown to a crescendo in the last few minutes. Feverish scribblings in his notebook, constant shifting in his chair, agitated adjustments of his glasses (on off, on off). Pountney has noticed before that sometimes his desire to speak had a physical manifestation. Now he is unable to keep silent a moment longer.
‘To some of us, Mr Carswell,’ Watson-Jones interupts, ‘that decision appears incomprehensible. If we make the perfectly reasonable assumption that the KGB had already learned of Martineau’s adultery, we must also assume that they would have made use of the knowledge to blackmail Martineau into working for them. That’s why your decision was, shall we say, convenient to them. It allowed them more time to inject their poison into our system and that this was done, if not with your direct knowledge, at least with your connivance. What do you say to that?’
It is the first moment of outright confrontation since the interview began. A tactic out of the blue, not what he had agreed with Lander. (‘I’ll be a spectator on this one, You deal with Carswell.’)
Carswell takes his pipe out of his mouth and looks up at Watson-Jones, staring him straight in the eye.
‘Your suggestion is preposterous, not to say offensive. I reject it totally and unequivocally. I must ask you to retract it.’
4
‘What’s going on?’
A man was standing outside the door of her apartment, barring her way. His head was closely shaven, his deep-set eyes and pinched mouth had a cruelty that was commonplace now. She shuddered. What was happening to them? Had the Soviets so destroyed their sense of right and wrong that they were prepared to take sides against each other?
‘Mrs Balassi?’
‘Yes.’
‘You can’t go in.’
Through the half-open door she glimpsed two men going through her possessions. Were they so confident now that they didn’t mind you seeing them at work? They were AVH, she was certain. Who else would be able to get into her flat without her assistance? She was soiled by their presence, outraged that they should be free to look at anything of hers, touch her clothes, her possessions. She was sick with apprehension. Was their presence a sign that they knew about her investigation into Julia’s death?
‘What are you doing there?’
It was her flat. This was her front door. Why should anyone stop her going in? A deep rage surged within her, destroying reason, driving her to act in a way she had never acted before. She turned to go, as if obeying the command, knowing the guard would relax. In that instant, she turned back, pushed past him before he could stop her and went in.
‘Who authorized this? Who let you barge in here like this?’
‘Stay outside until we have finished.’ A second policeman looked up from his task of taking her books from the shelves, one by one, and leafing through them to reveal any hidden notes or papers.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Outside.’ He came towards her, arms outstretched to block her way. At the same moment, she was grabbed by the guardian at the door, her arms were forced behind her back and she was dragged, protesting and screaming, out of the apartment. She tried vainly to shake herself free.
‘No,’ she shouted. ‘No! Leave me alone.’
She heard doors being opened on the landings below. She could imagine the horrified glances of her neighbours as they looked upstairs and saw her pinioned against the wall. They’d know what was happening soon enough, and they’d retreat quickly into their flats, pretending they’d heard and seen nothing.
‘What are you doing? Leave me alone.’
Her guard put his hand round her mouth. She could smell the nicotine on his fingers. She bit him as hard as she could, sinking her teeth deep into the flesh of his hand. He let go, cursing, and she was free. She ran into her flat, screaming, ‘Get out! Get out of here!’
The blow that silenced her was not a hard one, but it was unexpected. She fell against the sofa and tumbled backwards to the floor, her knees apart and her skirt around her waist, her arm twisted behind her.
The policeman looked down at her. She knew what he was thinking. Her head echoed with rage and humiliation. The terror that she felt reached deep into her past and for one brief, agonizing moment she was back in another place and time, defenceless, at risk, terrified.
‘No, no!’ Was she screaming now, or was she hearing in her mind the echo of her screams from all those years ago? For one frightening moment past and present were confused. ‘No.’
Then she heard a voice say, ‘I’m sorry. Are you all right?’ A hand helped her to her feet. She was shaking. Her mouth was dry. There was a film of sweat on her face. She smoothed her skirt and put a hand through her hair.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘What are you doing here?’ Her voice sounded distant, not hers, as if she was speaking through a tunnel.
‘We have orders to search your place.’
‘Why? What for?’
He shrugged. ‘We’ve nearly finished.’ He was thickset and powerful, the senior officer. ‘We’ll be out of here soon.’
The voice of reason. Beware. Beware. These people are never reasonable.
‘What do you want?’
‘I’m not authorized to tell you that.’
There was something else in his expression, another message that she was failing to understand. He was smiling at her. ‘You won a gold, didn’t you? London 1948. I’m right, aren’t I?’
‘That was a long time ago.’
‘I knew I recognized you from somewhere. I was in London too. You don’t remember me, though, do you?’
How could she? She’d never seen him before in her life.
‘Were you in the men’s swimming team?’ she asked.
‘No, no. I didn’t compete. Here. Look at this.’ He opened his wallet and took out a dog-eared photograph showing four young men in bathing costumes, their arms around each other, wide smiles on their faces, their hair plastered down, bodies shining and wet, standing on the edge of the pool. Another man, in white shirt and dark serge trousers, stood beside them. ‘Our relay squad after one of the heats. That’s me.’
Was it him? A man with swept-back hair, a thin body, boyish appearance. Could the years have done so much damage? He was thickset now, balding, red-faced. How could she know? People change in eight years. What difference did it make? He had been a political guardian then. He was her enemy now. His kind had removed Julia that terrible night.
‘Look,’ he said suddenly, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘I can get this business dropped.’
‘What business?’
‘I don’t need to spell it out for you, do I?’ He laughed. ‘We both know the answer to that one.’ He paused, his expression becoming one of concern. ‘I can help get you out of this.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Being who you are makes it possible.’
‘Makes what possible?’
‘I’ll prepare a report, say I found nothing. Remind them who you are. They’ve probably forgotten that. Bloody administrators. They don’t know their arse from their elbow, do they? Then they’ll call the whole thing off.’
He took her arm and guided her to a sofa. He sat down beside her. ‘I do a favour for you, and you do one for me. Fair enough, eh?’
‘What do you want?’ How could she have been so naive?
‘Pretty girl like you. You’ve got something we all want.’ He put his arm round her. ‘I’d have thought you needed a little looking after, eh? A little protection. Especially after our visit tonight. It’s not as if we’re strangers, is it? After all, we’ve got London in common, haven’t we? Old times.’
‘Get out.’ She hit him across the face with her hand as hard as she could. ‘Get out at once.’
He smiled cruelly at her. ‘I could have helped you. You won’t realize what trouble you’re in until it’s too late. Then you’ll wish you’d decided differently.’
/> She let herself cry only when the three AVH officers had left.
5
Margaret’s note was waiting on his desk. SS phoned. Change of plan. Lunch now Simpson’s. Wd you meet him there at 1. Why Simpson’s? That wasn’t Sykes’s style, though he had been known to splash out on rare occasions. (‘And why shouldn’t he?’ was Harriet’s comment on her brother’s lack of generosity. ‘With all that money he’s got no excuse not to.’) He couldn’t remember whose turn it was to pay. He hoped it wasn’t his.
Sykes looked respectable for once. He had discarded his baggy sweater and worn corduroys for a decent suit, though his shoes could have done with a spot of polish. They went straight to the table, Pountney noticing with relief that it was booked in his brother-in-law’s name. They ordered sole and Sykes chose a ‘decent bottle of Sauvignon’.
Halfway through lunch, Pountney explained that he’d had a visit from Anna Livesey, the girlfriend of the missing ISA researcher, Joe Leman.
‘She said that Leman went to Vienna to write something for you,’ Pountney said. ‘Is that right?’
‘There’s nothing secret about it.’ Sykes laughed. ‘If you’d asked me, I’d have told you.’
‘Why Leman of all people? He didn’t work for you.’
‘Most of my writers don’t work for me, Gerry. How else do you think I make a profit? Few staff, low overheads. Don’t forget, despite the commitment of Commentary to socialism I’m condemned by many on the Left, not to mention my own sister, as a filthy exploitative capitalist because I don’t run my publishing company on principles that match the socialist ethic we promote. The trouble with the politically motivated, Gerry, is that they conveniently forget that in business political rules don’t apply.’
‘That doesn’t tell me why Leman?’
‘That’s easy. He came to me with an interesting idea and I endorsed it. We gave him his currency allowance, got him a train ticket and packed him off to Vienna.’
‘He brought the idea to you?’
‘I went to a party at his Institute and he approached me there. I asked him round to Lincoln’s Inn Fields a few days later to talk about it. I liked him. Nice chap. Not very talkative, hard to get close to but his heart’s in the right place.’
‘Why commission a piece from someone with no journalistic experience?’
‘I’m prepared to take risks. That’s why I’m successful. If you’d come to me with the same idea, I might even have said yes to you.’
‘It’s a long way from his job at the Institute, isn’t it?’
‘He said he was considering a career change. I was prepared to back him. At the time I didn’t think I’d got much to lose. In retrospect, that was a poor judgement.’
‘Anna Livesey said Leman got very excited at the prospect of writing these articles.’
‘Not enough to meet his deadline, unfortunately.’
‘The point she’s making is that Leman reacted more strongly than the nature of the piece you’d asked him to write suggests.’
‘I wondered what ideas she’d been putting into your head.’ Sykes laughed again, that familiar, mocking, superior laugh that Pountney found so hard to contend with. ‘I hardly think Anna Livesey’s judgement of something which neither of us witnessed is much to go on, do you, Gerry? How do we know she’s telling the truth? She wants her lover back before romance goes cold, which for him I suspect it already has, because I think that’s why he buggered off in the first place. Anna Livesey is the reason for Joe’s disappearance. If she’s trying to make a case that I hatched some plot with Leman, she’ll have to do better than that. And so will you.’
It was impossible to shake him. His positions were always watertight, delivered with an assurance that Pountney envied. He disapproved of Sykes because he couldn’t understand him. Why wasn’t Sykes stretched on the rack as he was, agonizing how to navigate a safe path through endless shades of grey? Or was everything in business black and white?
They finished lunch talking about Suez, Sykes criticizing the Government’s handling of the affair in every department. ‘An unholy mess, for which the whole damn lot of you, Government and civil service alike, will be held responsible, Gerry. I’m glad I’m not in your shoes, working for a war mongering idiot like Watson-Jones. God knows how you stand it.’
Pountney was used to Sykes’s tirades, his relief being that at least they were political and he had his own beliefs, such as they were, with which to withstand them. With Harriet they were always personal, which made them harder to ignore.
‘There was something else I wanted to mention,’ Sykes said suddenly.
‘Yes?’
He hesitated before speaking. The moment’s silence subtly shifted the balance of their conversation. It put Sykes firmly in the driving seat. Pountney never knew whether his brother-in-law was an instinctive actor or whether he planned such moments deliberately.
‘There’s not a shred of truth in any of the allegations against Merton House that you’re investigating,’ he said. ‘Not a single shred.’
‘What allegations?’ Play innocent. Sykes couldn’t possibly know about the Peter report.
‘You don’t have to pretend with me, Gerry. I know you’re part of Watson-Jones’s committee.’
‘What allegations?’
Sykes filled his glass before he went on talking. ‘Merton House is an old-fashioned institution, answerable only to itself. In my view, it should have been done away with years ago. But it’s all we’ve got, and some of the work it does is valuable. So what do we do? We allow ourselves to be beguiled by a few former inmates who believe that since they departed the place has been rented out to the Soviets. As if that wasn’t crass enough, we’ve gone even crasser and appointed an investigating committee to look into their allegations, instead of dismissing them as the dangerous fantasies of a group of disappointed men.’
Pountney was horrified. Maybe half a dozen people, apart from the committee itself, knew what was happening. Senior and trusted members of the civil service, the Prime Minister’s closest advisers. Yet here was his brother-in-law, who was also a journalist, telling him openly that he knew all about the committee. Pountney shuddered at the implications.
‘You’re wasting your time investigating this report. You won’t come up with anything concrete to support what they say because it doesn’t exist. You’re going to spend a lot of energy proving what the rest of the world already knows. There is no Soviet infiltration at Merton House. Their charges are malicious nonsense.’
Silence was the only tactic possible. If he said anything he would be guilty of revealing what he was not at liberty to reveal.
‘For God’s sake, Gerry, I don’t need a secret enquiry chaired by Watson-Jones to tell me that the changes in the Intelligence Service after Peter went sour were not Soviet-inspired. The process was a spring-clean, much-needed and long overdue. It got rid of a lot of dead wood and in the view of many, myself included, probably could have gone a lot further. The idea that the Soviets have recruited a group of senior officers at Merton House is patently absurd. That we allow it any currency at all shows how low we’ve fallen in our own self-esteem. The allegation that Bobby Martineau was turned by the Soviets is equally absurd. Martineau may have blotted his copybook in the past, but he is certainly no traitor, nor does it justify the appalling way he’s being deliberately ignored right now. What he’s telling us is important and someone should be listening. You know what your committee should be spending its time on? Answering the one question that never gets asked. Why isn’t the truth getting through?’
‘What truth?’
‘What’s happening in Hungary.’
Pountney remembered David Lander’s SSC report on Hungary. ‘What is happening there?’
Sykes stared at him in disbelief. ‘God knows why I should be telling you this. There’s a growing belief that there will be a revolution before the end of the summer. The Soviets are building up their military reserves in the country in readiness. S
ome day soon there’s going to be an almighty explosion. If we had our eyes open and our wits about us, then maybe we could gain some advantage from it. Instead we allow ourselves to be obsessed by Suez and the threat to past glories, we neutralize our Intelligence Service through self-inflicted wounds, while ignoring the chance to do something decisive to weaken the hold of communism on the lives of millions of innocent people.’
Sykes signalled for the bill. ‘I know you can’t respond to what I’m saying and I don’t expect you to. But I hope you’re listening to me. I’m not trying to score off you or embarrass you. For once, Gerry, you must trust me. I’m acting in your interests. I’m trying to warn you that something bad is going on and I don’t like to see you caught up in it.’
6
‘Help me, Daddy. Help me bring him back alive.’
She woke herself with the sound of her own voice. In her dreams her father was always closer to her and more vivid than she remembered him being when he was alive. She saw him as a vital, handsome, impossible man, whom she loved and despaired of at the same time. Jock Livesey had designed yachts for the rich, and one day he had sailed over the horizon never to reappear, leaving no trace of his yacht, his crew or himself. What he had that she lacked was optimism, a belief that anything was possible. It was that belief that she so desperately wanted him to give her now.
She put on her dressing gown and went downstairs. The letter remained where she had left it the previous evening. She read it again, but in the interval nothing had changed. Pountney had discussed the question of Joe’s commission with Stephen Sykes, he said, and he was satisfied with his replies. He didn’t think there was any point in pursuing this line of enquiry further. Of course, if any new information came to hand, he would be in touch with her at once.
The only door she had managed to force open that might have yielded some hint of what had happened to Joe had been slammed firmly shut in her face. Where next? She had no idea.
Secret Kingdom Page 14
