The Whitehall Mandarin

by Edward Wilson

  ‘Sorry, it isn’t chilled.’

  Miranda drank thirstily. As she did so, Catesby noted the needle marks and burn-like scars from heroin injection on her inner arms. She had done it all. He poured her another drink and she seemed calmer.

  ‘Why do you think I’m here?’ said Catesby.

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  Catesby paused and waited. It was a good interrogation technique. You waited for the subject to answer their own question.

  ‘You’ve been sent to bring me back to England.’

  Catesby nodded. It wasn’t why he had been sent, but he decided it might be useful to play along with her idea.

  ‘So it’s true?’

  ‘That is one of the reasons they sent me.’ Catesby poured her more vodka. ‘How did you find out?’

  Miranda brushed a lock of hair from her eyes. ‘Someone from Hanoi, I think he might have been a general or something. He said that I had to leave Laos and then leave Vietnam too because my presence was not in the interest of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. I asked him why, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me. His French wasn’t very good and his English was worse. He then sent for Huynh to help translate.’ She paused and her eyes squinted with bitter anger. ‘Huynh is a useless cunt. He won’t stand up to anyone.’

  ‘But did he help translate, explain what was going on?’

  Miranda drank the vodka, but more slowly this time. ‘There was a lot of jabbering in Vietnamese – which consisted largely of Huynh nodding agreement. Huynh then summarised. Apparently, Hanoi and London have reached some sort of deal – secret, I bet – in which I’m to be repatriated to the UK.’

  ‘And did Huynh say I was sent to fetch you?’

  ‘No. All this happened two days ago. I talked to Jeffers about it – and he said they were throwing him out too.’

  ‘You worked with Jeffers Cauldwell in London and Brighton?’

  Miranda looked away shyly and perhaps slightly ashamed. ‘You might say that – but what we were doing was essential for the liberation of the Third World.’

  Catesby was tempted to say that Cauldwell was her honey-trap pimp, but held his tongue.

  ‘I asked Jeffers where he was going. He said, “Peking.”’

  ‘If he’s lucky,’ said Catesby.

  ‘He will be. The Chinese have much to be grateful for – he helped them get the Freedom Bomb.’

  ‘Is that what you call it?’

  ‘That’s what it is. It frees the People’s Republic of China from attack or blackmail by the USA and Moscow. In any case, I asked Cauldwell if he could arrange for me to go to China with him instead of the UK. He promised he would try.’ She sighed. ‘It kept my hopes up. And then Huynh and a Vietnamese official came to see me this evening. They said that I was leaving for Hanoi tomorrow with an Englishman who would be accompanying me to London.’

  Catesby breathed a selfish sigh of relief. It looked like he wasn’t going to Moscow after all. He began to try to piece together what had happened. The big boys in Hanoi had weighed up the advantages of staying on good terms with London as opposed to just sucking up to Moscow – and had decided on being nice to London. And then reckoned they could bundle Miranda and himself into one package.

  Miranda looked at Catesby. There was pleading in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry I hit you and swore at you. I can’t go back to London. I just can’t.’

  Catesby could see that she was desperate not to be sent back. It was a bargaining chip, but one that he had to play carefully. Miranda was the Holy Grail of information that he had been sent halfway around the world to tap. It was all there, in reach.

  Miranda reached out and ran her hand up Catesby’s thigh. ‘I’ll do anything for you. I can’t go back.’

  He lifted her hand away, but held it. ‘Look, the damage has already been done. China’s got the bomb and nothing you can tell me can take it away. But you’ve got it wrong. I haven’t been sent here to bring you back; I’ve been sent to interrogate you.’ The truth was easy and made the lies sound even more convincing. ‘My bosses in London aren’t interested in court trials and prosecutions. That’s the last thing they want. But they do want to find out what happened so it can’t happen again.’

  ‘I won’t go back. There’s too much history; too many bad things happened there. I’ll kill myself first.’

  Catesby squeezed her hand. ‘If you tell me what happened, I’ll tell the Vietnamese that London definitely doesn’t want you back. That we don’t want messy trials and publicity,’ Catesby smiled, ‘that reveal the intelligence services are shit. And,’ Catesby gently touched her heroin injection scars, ‘even if you think it was for a good cause, you’ve been horribly used.’

  The tears, pent up for so long, came in a flood. Catesby put an arm round her and held her tight. He felt sweet pain as if he were her parent. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to tell me anything.’

  ‘I want to – and I need you to listen.’

  It all poured out. A list of dates and names and places. Sordid hotels with camera peepholes and stately homes with stately peepholes. Catesby had never realised there were so many taboos to be transgressed. He had always known that the sexual tastes of the upper classes were bizarre, but had never realised quite how bizarre. Their behaviour was more Aleister Crowley than Kinsey Report. But Miranda’s most valuable honey-trap victims were the nuclear scientists at Harwell and officials at the MoD. She introduced them into a dangerous world in which they became willing players. But as Miranda told her story, there was one name she still hadn’t mentioned.

  Catesby wasn’t sure how to ask her. He began indirectly. ‘Were you happy as child?’

  Miranda frowned and shook her head.

  ‘I suppose that was a stupid question.’

  She gave a twisted smile. ‘It was a stupid question.’

  ‘You realise, you must realise, that your mother is suspected of passing on secret information to the Chinese.’

  Miranda laughed out loud. ‘Then she must be doing it through a spiritual medium, from beyond the grave.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. I’m very sorry.’ Catesby was confused. Why hadn’t Miranda mentioned it before? ‘When did your mother die?’

  ‘Why don’t you shut the fuck up? It’s none of your business and I don’t want to talk about it.’

  Catesby knew that he was getting close to something. Miranda was upset, but he had to play hard as well as soft. ‘If you don’t talk, they’ll put you on a plane back to London and I won’t be able to help you.’

  ‘I swear I’ll kill myself first.’

  ‘I don’t want you to do that.’ Catesby touched her scarred arm. ‘I care about you.’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘Okay.’ Catesby stared past Miranda into the black night and counted the seconds. He counted three minutes. Two minutes were enough for a subject to calm down and an extra minute meant they started thinking of other things. ‘I can do a deal with the Vietnamese if London will back me. Are you listening?’

  Miranda nodded. It sounded like she was crying.

  ‘But you need to tell me everything about your mother.’

  Miranda shivered and wiped her eyes. ‘She died twenty years ago.’

  Catesby was confused again. He supposed Miranda was either talking figuratively about a living mother who was ‘dead’ to her – or about a nanny, a much-loved Malaysian or Chinese ayah. ‘You must have been very young.’ Catesby offered more vodka and assumed she meant an ayah. ‘You regarded that person, rather than Lady Somers, as your real mother.’

  ‘She was my real mother.’ Miranda laughed again and shook her head. ‘You don’t understand, do you?’

  Catesby shook his head, but a tiny pinpoint of light was beginning to pierce through. The final piece of the puzzle was about to fall into place.

  Miranda looked directly at Catesby. Her eyes shone damp and hurt in the candlelight. ‘That’s always been the problem. Don’t you see?’

&n
bsp; ‘I’m beginning to.’

  ‘Lady Somers,’ Miranda rocked back and laughed. It was a braying laugh that pierced through the thatched roof and jungle forest, rocking the night around them more than the American bombs. ‘Lady Somers isn’t my mother; she’s my father.’

  Catesby smiled. ‘Your father is a very beautiful woman.’

  ‘Isn’t she just?’

  ‘How many people know about this?’

  ‘Practically no one. Her Swedish surgeon died long ago. It’s her best-kept secret – her most important secret. You can’t imagine how fierce she is about it.’

  ‘And you used it against her?’

  Miranda finished the vodka in her cup. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘She used to bring work home. I was astonished by how secret some of it was. She thought it was safe in her house – and there was a wall safe too.’ Miranda held out her cup.

  Catesby poured the vodka.

  ‘I don’t want to get too pissed; I’m not proud of what I did.’

  ‘Was Jeffers involved?’

  ‘Partly. He gave me the camera and showed me how to use it. But even if it hadn’t been for him, I still wanted to pass on the information – and I was in such a good place to get it.’ Miranda stared into her cup. ‘But I’m not a very good spy – and she found the camera in my knickers’ drawer. She wasn’t looking for a spy camera; she was looking for my drugs stash. Funny, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘She was relieved to find that I’d given up shooting heroin for spying for China. I was, in fact, clean at the time – but I came back to it. We still had a big row about the camera.’

  It reminded Catesby of the spy’s dilemma. Which is the bigger crime: betraying your country or betraying the person you love?

  ‘There was no question,’ continued Miranda, ‘that she was going to turn me in, to have me arrested. But she said that both of us might get arrested and go to prison. I made a little joke of it and said: “Where would you go then, Mother, Holloway Women’s Prison or the Scrubs?” She didn’t like that. And, when it was just the two of us, I always called her Pen, short for Penelope. Sometimes we could be like two girls together – talking about clothes and hair.’ Miranda smiled. ‘But we couldn’t swap clothes – she’s so much taller than me. And doesn’t she have beautiful legs?’

  ‘Indeed.’ Catesby remembered how the cops on the gate at the Admiralty used to eye her up as she clicked past on her stilettos.

  ‘Pen wanted to know for whom I was working and what I had already photographed. She thought she could do a cover-up and shift the blame elsewhere. I am sure what she wanted to do was roll up Jeffers’ spy ring in such a way that she and I wouldn’t get in trouble. But it didn’t take her long to realise I wasn’t playing that game. The neighbours must have heard us shouting, but they probably thought it was about me and my lifestyle again.’

  ‘Until then, Lady Somers was totally innocent of any espionage activity?’

  ‘Absolutely, completely. Pen was a totally loyal servant of the British state. She is, of course, a great admirer of Chinese culture because of her upbringing. But she would never have betrayed Britain for China.’ Miranda laughed again, but this time it was a gentle warm laugh. ‘I suppose you could say that Pen is a very complex woman. And, as Whitehall mandarins go, slightly to the left. She votes Labour and thinks she’s an anti-imperialist.’

  Once again, Catesby remembered the MICE rule. The four ways you recruited an agent: money, ideology, coercion and ego. In her daughter’s case, it was ideology; for Lady Somers, it was coercion. ‘But you forced her to work for you and Jeffers?’

  ‘You got it in one, Mr Catesby. You must be the star of the Secret Intelligence Service.’

  Catesby smiled. Miranda had finally begun to sound a little drunk.

  ‘As I said, Pen is a loyal Brit. But there are two things that she loves more than her country. One is being a woman and the other is me. And she didn’t want to lose either of those.’

  ‘So you blackmailed her?’

  ‘You are so astonishingly brilliant. You are definitely going to be head of SIS. Sorry, I get sarcastic when I’m pissed.’

  ‘I suppose…’

  ‘If you suppose that Peking gave a shopping list to Jeffers Cauldwell and that Jeffers passed it on to me, you are absolutely right. I then took the list into her study and said, “Pen, if you don’t get this information asap, every tabloid in the country will be headlining your story.” You could imagine the fun: Lady – question mark – Somers; Ministry of Defence in Drag Act; MoD Still Awaits its First Woman Boss. And that would have hurt her more than being called a traitor. At first, I hated doing it. But Pen got used to it – and that made it easier.’

  Catesby understood only too well. Being a double agent becomes a habit at first and, after a while, an exhilarating habit like a drug.

  ‘Pen started to joke about it. It was almost as if she enjoyed playing the game. We had ideological arguments, but they were good-tempered.’ Miranda lowered her voice. ‘And I can tell you another secret about my reserved distinguished Whitehall mandarin of a parent – a most odd secret.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She loves The Beatles. She used to use them against me in our political rows. Pen, particularly after a bit to drink, would dance about singing lyrics from Magical Mystery Tour. You know the bit about flaunting pictures of Chairman Mao and freeing your mind.’

  ‘The Beatles,’ said Catesby, ‘seem to prefer Moscow.’

  ‘And Pen used to sing that one too. All that stuff about being back in the USSR and how lucky you were.’

  Only in Britain, Catesby thought with national pride, only in Britain would a pop group take sides in a complex ideological split between two forms of Communism. ‘It sounds,’ he said, ‘as if the two of you got along fine.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Do you love her?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  ‘Then why have you betrayed her?’

  ‘Because she took me away from my first mother.’

  ‘And you can never forgive her for that?’

  ‘I can now. That’s why I had to tell you the truth about her. I’ve settled the account. Now I can love her freely.’

  The first person Catesby met at the British Embassy in Hanoi was the Soviet ambassador, who wanted help in translating one of his poems into English. Once again, Catesby felt he had crashed through the looking glass into a surreal world of March hares and talking sheep. Just to make sure that his Vietnamese driver had, in fact, dropped him off at the right embassy, Catesby glanced through the large open window to make sure that it really was the Union Flag fluttering from the flagpole. It was.

  The patched white stucco building at 31 Hai Ba Trung was the scruffiest British Embassy he had ever seen – but, with its shuttered windows and dark red roof tiles, it did have the faded charm that always clung to French colonial architecture in the tropics. Catesby half-expected to see the ghost of Albert Camus chatting to Graham Greene. But in this case, the writer in the white linen suit was a Russian ambassador who fancied himself as a poet.

  Catesby had briefly met Ilya Scherbakov at embassy functions in Germany and France, but wouldn’t have recognised him if Scherbakov hadn’t recognised him first. The Russian, of course, had been expecting Catesby to turn up and knew all about what he had been up to.

  ‘I believe,’ said Scherbakov clutching a few sheets of longhand written verse in Cyrillic, ‘that you understand Russian?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not fluent.’

  ‘But you look like a man with the heart of a poet.’

  ‘I have the heart of a poet. I keep it in a jar of formaldehyde above my writing desk.’

  ‘Was he or she a famous poet?’

  ‘No, it was only a joke.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’ Scherbakov seemed a little disappointed that Catesby didn’t have a piece of Shelley or Keats or Christina Rossetti in his study. />
  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘But I hope,’ said the Russian shaking his poem, ‘that you will be so kind as to have a look at this. I have a meeting with Daphne and I want to read it to her.’ Scherbakov smiled. ‘She is, I believe, “Your Man in Hanoi”?’

  ‘Daphne,’ said Catesby without batting an eye, ‘is Consul-General.’ It was, however, pointless to pretend that she wasn’t a spy. In places like Hanoi, diplomatic cover stories were polite fictions that no one believed. Daphne Park was, as Catesby well knew, one of the bravest and most competent officers in SIS.

  Catesby took the poem and spread it out on the reception desk. The title translated as: ‘I Want the Snow to Fall.’ It was a poem about homesickness. About how the Russian soul, languishing in tropical Vietnam, longs for snow, cornflower-blue skies, frosty air, iceflowers on window glass, birch trees, endless snowfields and so on. Catesby borrowed a pen and quickly added to and altered a rough translation that the ambassador had already begun. The poem ended: ‘Oh dearest Homeland! How can the Russian soul live in Vietnam!’

  As Catesby handed back the poem, Scherbakov asked, ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘It combines the lyricism of Pushkin with the sad longing of Chekhov.’

  Scherbakov laughed and shook his finger at Catesby. ‘I think you are making fun of me.’

  ‘Of course not. It is a good poem and Daphne will love it.’

  Scherbakov nodded. As he put the poem in a jacket pocket, someone entered the foyer.

  ‘Look,’ said the Russian, ‘here comes Jock the Sock.’

  Catesby was a little abashed that Scherbakov knew the nickname of Murray MacLehose, the Glasgow-born ambassador. It was a nickname only bandied about by FO and SIS insiders. But there was no ill feeling, for MacLehose and Scherbakov warmly embraced.

  ‘Great to see you, Ilya,’ said MacLehose. ‘Daphne’s waiting for you.’

  As the Russian left the room, Catesby called out, ‘And thanks for the vodka.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ said MacLehose looking at Catesby, ‘why don’t you come up to my office for a wee dram.’