“You don’t know if he had any enemies, undesirable friends, anything like that?”
“Max was a scientist, Inspector, not a criminal.” Sir James tapped his fingers against the desktop. “He’ll have to be buried immediately, of course.”
“Sir James, I can appreciate your anxiety, but please understand that, while the case remains open, your son—your son’s body, I should say—is evidence, and therefore must be treated …”
“Listen to me, Inspector. My wife is very ill. She has, at most, a couple of months to live; more likely weeks, perhaps even days. I have to look after her twenty-four hours a day. I am not going to let her go to her grave with her son still in a mortuary. Do you understand?”
Parents should never outlive their children, Herbert thought; it was not in the natural order of things. “I am doing all I can to find your son’s killer, Sir James.”
“That is as may be, Inspector; but your department are not, are they?”
“I’m sorry?”
“They send me an inspector.” Sir James rolled the word out of the side of his mouth, as though it were a bad smell. “A single inspector; no one higher. I would imagine there are plenty of victims who get better treatment than this. Is my son less important than them?”
All men were equal below the turf, Herbert thought.
“Sir James, if you are unhappy with my assignment, please ring Detective Superintendent Tyce at New Scotland Yard…”
“Young man, I will ring the commissioner himself. Now, if you’re going to look for my son’s killer, you won’t find him in here; so you may go.”
The station attendant at High Street Kensington said the next train was five minutes away. Herbert sat on a platform bench and read the conference pamphlet Rosalind had given him.
The speeches and panel discussions were as esoteric to a layman’s eyes as he would have expected; science really was a different language, he thought. He flicked through the pages, reading little and understanding less, until he reached the list of delegates at the back.
Each delegate was listed, along with his institution and country. There had been about a hundred people there, representing a healthy selection of nations. British apart, there were Americans, French, Swiss, Canadians, Swedes, and Portuguese.
Speakers were marked with an asterisk; there had been six sessions, four of them individual lectures, the other two panel discussions. The topics looked suitably obtuse; manna for the scientist, Herbert thought, but anesthetic for the layman.
He was halfway down the list, skipping through the list of British delegates, when his gaze, attention, and heartbeat skidded to a halt pretty much simultaneously.
De Vere Green, Richard. University of Cambridge.
Herbert knew Richard de Vere Green, and he knew, too, that he was not affiliated with the University of Cambridge, at least not officially. De Vere Green’s institution was altogether closer to home. He had been Herbert’s boss at Five.
Elkington and Highgate could wait; Herbert took the underground back to Green Park. Someone had left a copy of the Express, and Herbert flitted idly through the classifieds and the promotional contests—Win a car! First prize a Humber Super Snipe, worth £1,627. Second prize an MG Midget, £825—before turning to the gossip column, spiritual home of those whom he envied and despised in equal measure.
Lord Beaverbrook had declared that the gossip column was the most important part of the paper, and had therefore decreed a list of those never to be mentioned favorably. No one knew for sure who was included, but prime suspects included Charlie Chaplin (suspected communist), Noel Coward (queer), and Paul Robeson (a bit of both, not to mention the color of his skin).
The Express was a dreadful paper, which was one of the main reasons Herbert liked it, and its interest lasted precisely the length of an average tube journey, which was recommendation enough for any journal. Today, however, he read the Express primarily to avoid thinking about de Vere Green, an exercise which proved predictably futile.
At Five, Herbert had been a Watcher. No, he had been the Watcher; the best surveillance operative in the entire service. Being a Watcher was like playing the drums; almost anyone could do it, but very few people could do it well.
In the opinion of all those qualified to make such a judgment, Herbert had been outstanding. His eyesight and hearing were both very good, he was a quick thinker and capable of reacting well to the unexpected, and he was endlessly patient, a master of the gentle art that was doing damn all convincingly.
And he was the nearest thing to an invisible man. He was neither dwarf nor giant, not revoltingly ugly nor sickeningly handsome, midway between beer barrel and string bean. In short, he was the kind of person one would pass in the street without noticing.
Many people were just different enough from the norm—whatever that was—for a stranger to notice them, even for a couple of seconds.
Not Herbert. He was entirely nondescript, exceptional only at being unexceptional.
It was not hard to imagine what that could do to a man’s psyche.
But back to de Vere Green—and back, too, to Donald Maclean.
May 1951, eighteen months ago. Five had been tailing Maclean for months, looking for fresh evidence of his treachery; they already had enough to hang him several times over, but their proof had been gained from coded messages sent to and from Soviet stations and decrypted under the Venona program.
To seize Maclean on such evidence would have been to alert Moscow that their ciphers had been cracked, which would have caused more problems than it solved. So the order had gone out: catch him with his fingers in the sweetie jar.
Maclean was followed in London only; the Watchers were called off every night when he boarded his train back home to Tatsfield, on the border between Kent and Surrey. De Vere Green—at that time head of A Branch, under whose auspices surveillance fell—had decreed there was no point in following Maclean farther than Charing Cross.
Outside London, Soviet officials’ movement was restricted. They were therefore unlikely to venture forth for contacts that could just as easily have been made in town. Besides, Tatsfield was a small village; it would have been virtually impossible to watch Maclean there without attracting attention.
It was de Vere Green’s call, and it was, notwithstanding everything that happened later, exactly the right one.
Six foot four, and wearing a shabby tweed coat and crumpled trilby at a time when the fashion was for Anthony Eden homburgs, Maclean was easy to follow. He knew that Five were on to him, too, though he probably thought they should have been embarrassed at having to tail a member of the upper classes. “I’m in frightful trouble,” he would tell people. “I’m being followed by the dicks.”
Alcohol made him indiscreet. Herbert once got close enough to him in a pub to hear Maclean say, “I’m working for Uncle Joe. I’m the English Hiss.”
Friday, 25th May, was Maclean’s birthday. That lunchtime, the home secretary had signed an order authorizing his interrogation, to begin the following Monday. As he arrived at Charing Cross to catch the 5:19, Herbert was immediately struck by the change in Maclean’s demeanor. Usually he walked with his shoulders hunched and his hands jammed into his pockets, but that evening he seemed to walk down the platform with a spring in his step. The brim of his hat was up all round and he was wearing a jaunty bowtie. He seemed in good spirits, for once.
Then Maclean turned and waved, and Herbert knew. He knew.
Maclean could not have been sure exactly where his shadows were, but he waved anyway, before leaping easily onto the train. Perhaps he thought he was being stylish, but Herbert thought it arrogant; idiotic, too, in what it revealed.
Herbert went to the nearest phone box, barged an old lady aside without ceremony, and rang de Vere Green, who was off to the country and did not want his weekend disturbed.
“Dear boy,” he said, “don’t be so ridiculous.”
Herbert persisted. Something was up; de Vere Green had to send men d
own to Tatsfield immediately. Hang the expense and the likelihood of the surveillance being blown.
“You cannot have heard me,” de Vere Green said, steel beneath his tongue as the suave Establishment bonhomie vanished. “There is nothing to worry about. He’ll be back tomorrow morning, fear not.”
Saturday was a half day in Whitehall. Herbert met Maclean’s usual train, and there was no sign of him; nor on the two subsequent services.
Detention at ports and airports needed the home secretary’s permission, and there was no way to get that without going through endless stifling strata of gradism and bureaucracy.
The deputy branch assistant director would pass it up to the assistant branch director, who would hand it on to the branch director, who would take it to the deputy director-general of the entire service, who might or might not give it to the director-general himself, who might mention it to the home secretary when they next met over a whiskey, but only if he remembered in between praising the beauty of the minister’s teenage daughter and discussing prospects for Laker and Lock down at the Oval.
And when a decision had been made, it would be passed back down the ranks with the same excruciating slowness, a trickle of water rolling slowly through hanging gardens, and the chance to act would have vanished.
In six years at Five, the most sensible words Herbert had come across had been scrawled in an anonymous appendage to a memorandum: “This case is of the highest possible importance, and therefore must be handled at the lowest possible level.” It was laughably, sickeningly true.
Anyway, the weekend came and went, with the great and the good doing things that were no doubt both great and good. The panic started on Monday, by which time Burgess and Maclean were halfway to Moscow. They had taken a midnight ferry on Friday from Southampton to St. Malo, where they had met Russian intelligence officers who had given them false papers and a route via Vienna.
During the search of Maclean’s office, Herbert found a piece of his doggerel:
Dared to leave a herd they hate,
Dared to question church and state.
Sodden straws on a rising tide,
They know they’ve chosen the losing side.
Naturally, there was an inquiry; naturally, it was a farce; and, naturally, there was a fall guy.
No, said de Vere Green, none of the Watchers had contacted him that Friday evening to apprise him of their suspicions.
Yes, of course he would have expected them to; particularly Mr. Smith, who had operational command and with whom lay all tactical responsibility. Maclean had waved, and still Mr. Smith had not thought to tell de Vere Green.
No, he would not have expected it of such a respected professional.
Yes, he agreed; such incompetence was staggering, and must be punished.
Throughout all this, de Vere Green looked straight at Herbert without turning a hair.
It was Herbert’s word against his, and de Vere Green was higher up the greasy pole; he had been in the service for thirty years, having joined straight from Oxford; he was One of Them.
Five was no place for a fair hearing. Arguing one’s case was seen to imply lack of judgment. “Because I say so” and “It’s always been done this way” were stonewall discussion-finishers. External overviews were out of the question, for “security reasons.”
Even as the Empire crumbled, everyone in Five was clinging with sticky fingers to their own little spheres of influence.
But equally, there was a reluctance to dismiss Herbert for fear he would make a nuisance of himself with the press or some such. Besides, Five were never decisive enough to sack anyone; one left only to tend one’s garden in retirement or be interred six feet beneath it.
So Herbert was offered a post in Vetting, a new department created on Attlee’s express order to prevent further treason. The words “horse,” “stable door,” and “bolted” sprang pretty much unbidden to mind. At least he was spared the formalities of a leaving party; in Five these tedious affairs were known, with manifest irony, as OBJs—short for O! Be Joyful.
Vetting fell within C Branch, Security. The remit was to examine the backgrounds of all civil servants with “regular and constant access to the most highly classified defense information” and “the more highly classified categories of atomic energy information;” but since most Whitehall departments believed that they and only they should meddle in their colleagues’ affairs, Vetting’s role was relegated more or less to that of applying the rubber stamp.
The process went as follows.
The internal security departments at each ministry would forward completed copies of the standard questionnaires, along with a full curriculum vitae, a declaration of links to extremist organizations both left and right, and two referees.
Vetting would check the Registry files to see what, if anything, Five held on each candidate, and then send a standard letter to the referees—some of whom, it transpired, had not seen their particular applicant for a decade or more.
Then Vetting would conduct a pointlessly anodyne “interview” with each nominee, pen a laconic nothing recorded against on his application, and recommend him for clearance, which he had enjoyed anyway while they had worked through the endless backlog of cases.
Even when Vetting did turn up a bad apple, very little was done about it, particularly if the contender in question had gone to the right school. If a chap was one of us, reasoned de Vere Green and his ilk, why bother to put him through this beastly snooping? They had their special ties and their inscribed cuff links, and they could do no wrong.
If the intelligence services had been as adept at spotting spies and traitors as they were at discerning who was one of them—and, just as importantly, who was not one of them—then this country would have been impenetrable, then and evermore.
But they found it impossible to believe that anyone from the upper classes could be anything other than loyal to the institutions into which they had been born and raised. Besides, no one wanted McCarthyism on this side of the Atlantic.
The sheer futility of it was enough to make a man weep. Not least because all this was taking place after Burgess and Maclean—because of Burgess and Maclean, in fact—and if ever two people could prove that breeding meant nothing, it was them. They would both have sailed through the very procedures that their treachery had sparked into existence.
The pair of them seemed destined to cast a long pall, not only over Herbert’s life but over that of the country as a whole. Gone was the unquestioning innocence of the prewar world, where the upper classes had been preordained to lead, unquestioned in their fitness to do so.
Now there prevailed a strange mixture of democratic optimism, Cold War chilliness, and tutting prejudice, especially against homosexuals, whose cause Burgess had almost single-handedly set back thirty years. Within months of his defection, prosecutions for sodomy and indecency were running at five times what they had been before the war.
Then, a few months later, the cards of yet another internal reshuffle landed with de Vere Green taking over as head of C Branch. It was hardly ideal, but then again even Herbert could see that Five would have been a one-man band had it allowed itself to take account of every feud under its roof.
If anything, de Vere Green seemed to have got worse in their brief time apart. His talents for politicking and ingratiation had now wholly eclipsed whatever soupçon of administrative efficacy he had once boasted, and he impressed the staff of wherever he worked mainly by his terror when called upon to take a decision.
They lasted a week together. De Vere Green went out of his way to appear pleasant to Herbert, who in turn went even further out of his way to annoy him, all the while trying to pretend that the work they were doing was in any way meaningful.
Finally Herbert did what the faceless powers had no doubt been angling for all along, and resigned. De Vere Green must have seen it as a capitulation, and a shockingly easy one at that; when Herbert broke the news, he actually started, and in doing so inadve
rtently jabbed the letter opener into the soft webbing between his left thumb and forefinger.
Herbert watched as a perfect globe of blood appeared on his skin as if fully formed; it was a moment before he realized that the unholy scream of pained terror he could hear was coming from de Vere Green himself.
“Do something,” he gasped between howls. “Get a cloth, for God’s sake.”
Herbert looked again at his hand. The cut seemed a nasty one, though not especially serious; certainly not one which merited his yelling the house down. This was de Vere Green, Herbert reminded himself; one of those Englishmen who probably cared more for his dog than his wife, if indeed he had one.
Several people had already appeared at the door of his office, excitedly aghast. It occurred to Herbert that they might prove good witnesses if de Vere Green tried to claim he had been the one to stab him.
And then Herbert turned on his heel, sidestepped the gathering throng, and walked quickly from the building. He should probably have been ashamed, but he was not. Not in the slightest.
New Scotland Yard could hardly offer him a post quick enough; they were desperate for recruits, and much of his work at Five had been sufficiently akin to their own disciplines—one of the reasons Six looked down so much on Five was that they saw them less as spies than as plodding policemen, country cousins to their urban sophisticates—to allow Herbert to come in at a much higher rank than usual; though, as he had discovered, what the top brass decreed and what those on the shop floor thought of it were two very different things.
At last Herbert was free of Five, free of being a menial man doing a boring job in a humdrum organization, an outfit of such crashing incompetence that it denied its own existence even while fueling the fantasies of young men nationwide. He was free of de Vere Green, with his hail-fellow-well-met veneer and his endless capacity for intrigue, for de Vere Green intrigued at all times, everywhere, in all places, and with everybody.
He was free of it all. And now he was right back in it.
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