He went via his flat, to make a couple of phone calls in privacy.
The first was to Rosalind Franklin at King’s.
He described de Vere Green to her—a whipped cream of whitening hair, a face a shade or two of purple darker than seemed entirely healthy—and she identified him immediately as a man she had seen talking to Stensness during one of the breaks.
Herbert asked her three times, and each time she was adamant. There could not have been that many people who looked like de Vere Green, she said.
And even fewer who would want to, Herbert thought.
The second call was to Tyce.
Herbert didn’t want to mention de Vere Green. Tyce knew their history, and Herbert feared that the case would be taken away from him, staff shortage or not. Or, perhaps even worse, he would be retained on the case, but kept in limbo as it became bogged down in endless layers of bureaucracy while the Pooh-Bahs at Leconfield House and New Scotland Yard thrashed things out between themselves.
Tyce was many things, but he was no fool, and he sensed more or less instantly that Herbert was keeping something back. So Herbert told him.
“Stick it to those bastards,” Tyce said. “Don’t let them walk all over you, you hear? You’re one of us now, Herbert, so behave like one. Think where your loyalties lie. Good man.”
Well, Herbert thought. Whatever he had been expecting, it hadn’t been that.
In Tyce’s own, roundabout way, it had sounded suspiciously like a vote of confidence.
One lived and learnt.
De Vere Green’s reaction to Herbert walking through the door of his office in Leconfield House was entirely predictable: a blizzard of bonhomie.
“Dear boy!” He was rising from his desk before Herbert was more than a pace inside the room. “What a pleasant surprise! I was just thinking that I needed something to cheer me up in this beastly fog, and blow me if you don’t appear like an angel sent from heaven! Not that I imagine too many people refer to the gothic monstrosity where you work as in any way celestial. Sit down, sit down. What brings you to my humble inferno?”
De Vere Green sometimes spoke as though he had swallowed a thesaurus, refusing to use one word where ten would do. Herbert had once heard him say “individuals with access to conspicuous wealth in their own right” to describe rich people.
De Vere Green’s chin had cloned itself during a slight migration south, and his smile fell a fraction short of his eyes.
“Max Stensness was drowned last night,” Herbert said simply, watching him hard.
“Who?”
The man was a pro, Herbert had to give him that. De Vere Green had not flinched; if he had, Herbert had not seen it, and Herbert was trained to see such things.
“Max Stensness. Young man, blond. Worked at King’s College.”
“Dear boy, I’ve never heard of him.”
“That’s strange.”
“How so?”
“Because you were seen talking to him yesterday afternoon.” Herbert pulled the pamphlet out of his pocket and dropped it on de Vere Green’s desk. “The London Biochemical Conference, Royal Festival Hall.”
“My dear fellow, how can I have been seen talking to him when I don’t know who he is?” His tone was one of perfectly reasonable, mild bewilderment. Despite himself, Herbert began to wonder whether he might be mistaken.
“Son of Sir James Stensness. One of the scions of Whitehall.” De Vere Green shrugged; Herbert pressed on. “I’ve just been to see two of his colleagues. They gave me this.” He tapped the pamphlet. “Your name was on it, on the delegate list. I described you to them. One of them said she’d seen you talking to him.”
“You know scientists, Smith,” de Vere Green said. “If it’s not at the other end of a microscope, they don’t know which end is up.”
“I never said they were scientists.”
“Who else are they going to be, at a biochemical conference?”
If it had been a slip, de Vere Green had covered himself expertly. Herbert conceded the point, and switched tack. “What were you doing there anyway?”
De Vere Green tapped his nose. “You know the drill, Smith.”
“And the affiliation with Cambridge University?”
“Again, ask me no questions, Smith, and I’ll tell you no lies.”
“But that’s the thing, Richard.” Herbert felt a strange sense of liberation; finally out of the Five hierarchy, with all its connotations of Gentlemen and Players, he could use de Vere Green’s Christian name with impunity. “Max Stensness is dead, so I have to ask questions. And if you lie to me, I’ll just keep asking them.”
“You can ask all you like, but I’m bound by Acts of Parliament, Smith.” The emphasis was unmistakably on Herbert’s surname; the class divide was still alive and kicking, at least as far as de Vere Green was concerned, and the bonhomie had been dialed back a notch. “As are you, if you recall.”
“You’re not immune from the law of the land.”
“Dear boy, that sounds like some kind of threat.”
“Ask Sillitoe. He’ll back me up.”
De Vere Green winced slightly, as most of Five’s officers did when someone mentioned Sillitoe—Sir Percy of that ilk, a policeman to his bootstraps, now halfway through his sixties and with the genial, bluff face of a kindly grandfather. With his erect bearing, Sillitoe had always reminded Herbert of Wavell, the soldier who had been the penultimate viceroy of India; an altogether too simple, too straight, too decent soul to prosper in the muddy waters where the intriguers hunted.
As Five’s director-general, Sir Percy was, in contrast to the majority of his peers, busy trying to reduce the organization’s powers rather than augment them, for fear that Britain would become a police state. Five’s officers could not make arrests, nor did they have the expertise to gather evidence that would stand up in court.
The Metropolitan Police could, and did, respectively.
“How can we act legally when our work so often involves transgressions against propriety or the law itself?” de Vere Green asked.
“Propriety and the law being mutually exclusive?” De Vere Green made a gesture: Don’t be naïve, Smith, we’re men of the world. Herbert continued. “Richard, we can go round and round, but the fact remains: I have a dead man, and you were seen talking to him a couple of hours before he died.”
“Your witness must have been mistaken.”
“You’re quite distinctive, you know.”
“And I tell you, she was mistaken. Whose word do you trust?”
“Do you really want to know the answer to that?”
De Vere Green flashed Herbert a look of shamed malevolence; he could witter all he liked about the greater good of the service and the public interest, but he was nowhere near stupid enough not to see Herbert’s grievance and the reasons for it.
“She’ll come and do a physical ID, if need be. And since you wouldn’t allow her in here, we’d have to do it down at the Yard. Lots of people down at the Yard, Richard.”
This was the crux, and they both knew it full well; despite his flamboyance and bluster, de Vere Green was, like all spooks, part of a vampiric breed that shunned the light and thrived in the shadows.
If he had to stand and fight, then he would want to do so on his own terrain; and that meant giving Herbert something, a morsel even, to keep the policeman in the spy’s cave.
As far as Five was concerned, the darker the better, as though they were bats.
“Max Stensness was one of my informers.” De Vere Green sighed.
There were three levels of files within Five.
The lowest, Nominal Indices, were open to all officers.
Y Box, next up the scale, were Top Secret, requiring special clearance.
The most sensitive, Held Files, were not kept in Registry at all.
De Vere Green was gone ten minutes, and returned with Stensness’ file; a Nominal Index, he said with a sliver of disdain, implying that Stensness had been small beer.
Herber
t opened the file.
Max Stensness, born Kensington, 17th November 1926. Parents, Sir James and Lady Clarissa. Graduate student at King’s College, London, working in the field of crystallography. Marital status: single. Address: 14 Cadiz Street, Walworth, London S.E.
Walworth was hardly one of London’s more salubrious areas. That was often the way with Establishment children, Herbert thought; they either conformed completely, or rebelled completely.
Herbert opened his mouth to put de Vere Green straight—Rosalind Franklin had given him the address in Highgate where she’d attended Stensness’ house-warming only a week before—and then thought better of it. Two could play at withholding information.
Member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Herbert sat up straight, and read on.
Stensness, along with fifty thousand other card-carrying Reds, had been exposed as a member of the CPGB by Operation Party Piece, one of Five’s more notable successes. A few months earlier, a team of enterprising operatives had broken into the CPGB headquarters in Covent Garden over a weekend and photographed the entire membership list, which included thirty Labor MPs. Also included in the haul had been a statue of Lenin—there were hundreds, the operatives said, so one would never be missed—and an intriguing lump of metal which, following intense and prolonged examination, had turned out to be a toilet ballcock.
The dossier contained a photograph of Stensness participating in a rally and waving a banner quoting Lenin: The state is the instrument by which the economically dominant group in society exercises power.
As far as snappy slogans went, Herbert thought that Gillette could have taught Lenin a thing or two, but anyway.
He looked up from the file and at de Vere Green. “If Stensness was a party member, why was he informing for you?” he asked.
“It’s all there, if you keep going. He went to the Soviet Union this past summer, some kind of cultural shindig, you know the type.”
“What did his father think of that?”
“As little as possible, I should imagine. Anyway. While he was there, he saw the kind of beastly place that the ‘workers’ paradise’”—de Vere Green’s fingers described quotation marks in the air—“really is. Came back a changed man. Offered to inform. Decent of him, I thought.”
“Decent” was not the word Herbert would have used, but he knew that there were only two sides in espionage: us and them.
“How did Stensness know where to find you?” he asked.
“We have other men in place within the Party, of course. There are channels through which such information can be passed. He came to me that way.”
“What kind of information was he giving you?”
“Again, it’s all in there. Party activities. New members. That kind of stuff.”
Reports in de Vere Green’s fluid handwriting were attached in loose leaf. Herbert flicked through them. Rumors of a strike here and a demonstration there; a trade delegation looking for Moscow’s approval; a clandestine diatribe against the atom bomb. It all seemed pretty standard stuff.
Too standard, in fact, to be dealt with by someone of de Vere Green’s seniority.
“I like to keep my hand in, dear boy,” de Vere Green said in answer to Herbert’s unasked question. “It’s something I press for at every departmental meeting, in fact; almost every officer should maintain some contact with the grass roots.”
The only time de Vere Green came into contact with grass roots, Herbert thought, was when he bent down to examine the carcass of a pheasant he had just blasted from the sky.
Not to mention, of course, that the very qualities that had made Herbert a good follower—specifically, his invisibility—would have mitigated in every way against de Vere Green being a successful field agent. The Great Wall of China was less noticeable than he was.
Unless—and this was in no way beyond Five—they let de Vere Green operate on the grounds that, since no one in their right mind could possibly believe de Vere Green a spy, that was conversely the best cover of all.
“How many other informers do you handle?” Herbert asked.
“Three.”
“Can I see their files?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re not relevant to this case.”
“I think you should let me be the judge of that.”
De Vere Green shook his head. “Dear boy, you should just concentrate on solving your own mystery, not anyone else’s.”
Herbert felt the muscles in his cheeks tighten, as though he was using them to crack nuts. De Vere Green’s jaunty condescension could still bring his blood to the boil at double speed.
Herbert exhaled through his nose and, with some effort, kept his voice calm. “How often did you and Stensness meet?”
“That depended on how much material he had for me.”
“On average?”
De Vere Green made a moue. “Once a month. Once every three weeks, perhaps.”
“Where did you meet?”
“You remember your tradecraft, Smith.”
The usual places for agent and handler to cross paths: parks, darkened alleys, the far corners of pubs, anywhere where they could cloak themselves in furtiveness.
“Did you ever go to his house?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“You weren’t friends, then?”
“Friends?” De Vere Green gave the word a yard of clean air. “Lordy, no.”
And there it was; take a man’s information, and despise him for it.
“You never met any of his friends?”
“Dear boy, these weren’t social occasions.”
“His private life?”
“Was private, I presume.”
There was no mention of Stensness’ sexuality anywhere in his file.
On one level, this was odd. Post-Burgess, Five considered homosexuality the very worst of the seven character defects, the others being profligacy, alcoholism, drug-taking, unreliability, dishonesty, and promiscuity.
Red and pink, Herbert had been told during his Vetting days, red and pink; it was a short step from one to the other. Sodomy equaled heresy, and heresy equaled treachery; whether you were a commie or a bugger, or both, you had chosen to set yourself above society’s clear and unmistakable judgment, and if you could do that, you could do anything. You had lost all mental control. You might love the enemy.
But equally Herbert knew another golden rule of Five: if ever a situation could be explained either by conspiracy or cock-up, the latter invariably won the day. Five’s image as the acme of domestic espionage services would have been laughable had it not been so tragically wide of the mark. Behind the masks of powerful, heroic crusaders were phalanxes of bumbling loafers.
Five was a place where everyone seemed to smell of failure. The shadow of the war still hung heavily over Britain, and nowhere more so than Leconfield House. During the war, most fit and dynamic young men had opted to join the fighting services, forcing Five to recruit—how to put this charitably?—more idiosyncratic characters from the law and the theater, from Fleet Street and Oxbridge.
The good ones were merely dim and dreary, or harmless eccentrics; the bad ones were venal and pernicious. Nepotism was not so much an unspoken principle as official policy. It was widely said in Leconfield House that the answer to the question “How many people work in Five?” was “About half.”
Run a security service? Herbert thought. This lot couldn’t even run a bath.
That Five had not uncovered Stensness’ homosexuality was therefore no surprise.
“What were you talking to Stensness about at the conference yesterday?” he said.
“I asked him if he had anything new for me,” de Vere Green replied. “He said he hadn’t, but there was a party meeting coming up so he’d get back to me in the next week or so.”
“Did you know you were going to see him at the conference?”
“Not at all.”
“So what
you were talking about was nothing to do with the conference?”
“Correct.”
“Was it a shock?”
“Was what a shock?”
“To see him there.”
“Nothing in this business is a shock, dear boy.”
The fog crawled past. It was a gray, obscene animal, a deep-sea predator, drifting with the minutest slowness, draping itself round Leconfield House’s gun ports which had been installed during the war in anticipation of Nazi parachutists landing in Hyde Park and marauding down Curzon Street. Rumor had it that they were still manned on Sundays in case a mob from Speaker’s Corner decided to go on the rampage.
The occasional passerby loomed suddenly out of the gloom, was dimly visible for a few moments, and then melted once more back into the murk. The world seemed to have shrunk to a circle barely a cricket pitch’s length in diameter; beyond that small clearing of clarity, armies could have been massing without Herbert’s knowledge.
Herbert stopped by his flat, found Cholmeley Crescent—the street on which Stensness had lived—in an A to Z map of London, memorized the names and layout of every street within a half-mile radius, and set out for the tube again, this time with a copy of The Times. In the time it would take him to get up to Highgate, he could do nine-tenths of the crossword.
He took the Piccadilly Line to Leicester Square.
A sequence of letters (5,4); C-H-A-I-N M-A-I-L.
Not quite enough room for a Yankee in the colony (5); K-E-N-Y-A.
At Leicester Square, he changed for the Northern Line.
Turned over French bed in a French town (7). A French bed: lit, and backwards—“turned over”—made til. That left a four-letter French town into which “til” would fit.
Herbert flicked through the names of French towns in his head. Paris, Marseilles, Avignon, Bordeaux, Lille … All more than four letters.
Lyon fit, but he could find no way in which “til” could be inserted to make a word.
Then came Lens, and he had it: L-E-N-T-I-L-S.
Cycling coppers; the first four times as good as the second (5,8); P-E-N-N-Y F-A-R-T-H-I-N-G.
A day for football in Yorkshire (9); W-E-D-N-E-S-D-A-Y.
Herbert was not so absorbed in the crossword that he did not observe his fellow passengers from time to time; and so it was, somewhere between Euston and Camden Town, that he realized he was being followed.
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