Herbert squeezed himself on board and burrowed through the crowd, the better to be out of sight if Bob had followed him down.
The doors stayed resolutely, obstinately open. Herbert supposed that, when it came to the underground, a quick exit as well as a smooth entrance was too much to ask.
Come on, he silently urged. Seeing Bob had been a shock; Herbert would not be able to relax until the train had resumed its journey without Bob.
Still the doors did not shut.
Herbert rained unspoken curses on whoever was responsible; idiots trying to drag outsize suitcases on board, or a driver who had hopped off to chat with a mate, or the signal controller keeping the light on red—or all of the above.
And there was Bob, running onto the platform. Since no one was still waiting, he knew he would find Herbert on the train or not at all.
Bob stood for a moment, seemingly unsure of what to do.
He could not have been certain that he had seen Herbert, or else he would have leapt into the nearest carriage—which happened to be Herbert’s—and started looking the moment the train moved off, after which he would have had, perhaps literally, a captive audience.
No, he was hesitating because he knew that if he got on the train and Herbert was not there, he would have abandoned his post upstairs for no reason, and would therefore have been in for an even bigger carpeting than the other two stooges.
Close, Herbert willed the doors. Close.
Bob moved toward the train.
He was a few yards from the door through which Herbert had entered the carriage. If Bob got on now, he would surely see Herbert. Yes, there were people crammed in tight, but it was still hard to hide in such a confined space.
Herbert looked toward the far end of the carriage, and saw with dismay that even if he could force his way through the crowd before Bob got on board, it was still not nearly far enough.
Unbidden, a snatch of Watcher training floated to the surface.
Conventional wisdom ran that the average person would look for a follower at a distance of between ten and twenty yards, which was exactly the range at which most people preferred to follow.
One was therefore less likely to be spotted if one hung back further or, counterintuitively, if one got closer.
If one got closer. Herbert was faster than his own thought. He was already moving back through the crowd, toward the door, as though Bob were an old friend whom he was going to embrace.
Herbert’s haste made him tread on someone’s foot and elbow another person in the kidneys, and with a flurry of muttered apologies he kept going.
Bob got on board at exactly the same moment Herbert reached the door.
It seemed inconceivable that he would not see Herbert, for he was right in his face, close enough to have been lovers. Herbert had to trust in the theory with blind, counterintuitive faith.
Bob looked over Herbert’s shoulder, literally over his shoulder, at the rest of the carriage, scanning their faces for any sign of the one closer to him than everyone else.
The doors hissed, in apparent preparation for closing, and Herbert choked back an absurd desire to laugh. Having spent so long, or at least what had seemed so long, wanting the doors to close, now he was desperate for them to remain open just a few more seconds—long enough for Bob to consider himself mistaken and step back onto the platform.
Miraculously, that is exactly what Bob did.
The train was too crowded, and Herbert was too shaken, to attempt to decipher the strange scrawl at the bottom of the Coronation map. He pulled the list of conference delegates from his pocket and, holding it in jittering hands, scanned it for Kazantsev’s name.
Kazantsev was not listed. Nor was any other Russian, for that matter.
Herbert checked three times, on the last occasion running his finger down the list name by name, and having to consciously stop himself mouthing the words as though in remedial class.
Definitely not. No Kazantsev, no Russian.
Hard as it was to credit, it seemed to Herbert that de Vere Green had been telling the truth: the conference was nothing to do with this case at all.
Instead, it seemed that the Coronation was somehow involved, and that could only be bad news; not least because it would elevate this case to levels far too stratospheric for one as lowly as he.
Well, if he had to give it up, he would do so only when he was forced, and not before. In the meantime, he needed more information; in particular, he wanted to find out as much as he could about Kazantsev, and there was only one place to go for that.
At Leicester Square, where Herbert changed trains, wisps of smog could now clearly be seen, even this far beneath ground.
He passed a bride and groom, the latter in his tailcoat and the former in her wedding dress, turned almost black by the grime. A phalanx of ushers and bridesmaids bobbed around them.
“We’ve already got married,” the groom was explaining to a passerby, “but this is the only way we can get to the reception. There are no taxis left on the streets, and even if there were, there’s no way they could see where they’re going.”
“Just look at my dress,” the bride said. “It’s ruined!”
“Well, it’s not as if you’ll be needing it again,” the groom replied.
“Cheeky!” she laughed, and slapped him softly, playfully.
Two happy faces, Herbert thought; there were not many others around, that was for sure. Certainly de Vere Green would not be looking too happy when he got wind of what Herbert was about to do.
When he returned to Leconfield House, Herbert asked not for de Vere Green but for Patricia Drummond-Francis, queen of the Registry.
“Herbert!” she cried, hurrying through the foyer to greet him before kissing him, hard and wet, on both cheeks. “How’s life in the force? Why is it you never come back and see your old friends anymore? What are you doing here?”
The last, Herbert thought, was a question in which Patricia could justifiably have put the emphasis on any one of the five words involved.
“I need a peek at one of your files,” he said.
“You were snaffling around here this morning.”
“News travels.”
“Is this something to do with that?”
Herbert nodded, knowing that Patricia would understand his reluctance to go back to de Vere Green so soon. She shared Herbert’s opinion of his former boss, and knew, too, that when dealing with a man like de Vere Green, the more information one had to hand before battle commenced, the better.
Patricia led Herbert back through the security gates and into the Registry, where all the files were stored. The contents took up the entire ground floor, with its bricked-up windows and steel grilles; and rarely had anyone presided over a fiefdom with such benign firmness as Patricia did.
Her underlings were all daughters of high society or service families, straight out of Roedean or Swiss finishers, with a strictly tripartite vocabulary (“yah,” “really?,” and “nightmare,” the latter elongated through several syllables) and little ambition beyond marrying as quickly and suitably as possible. “If I’m going to be bored,” they would trill, “I’d rather be bored by a lord!” Patricia worked them like a headmistress and read their minds as though telepathic.
Had she been a man, she would have been director-general by now; had she been a man, and had she dressed the part, too, that was. Patricia’s default garb was old corduroys and patched jerseys dotted with the few clumps of earth that hadn’t stuck beneath her fingernails.
Her true nature—ruddily outdoorsy, hunting and jolly hockey sticks—offset the way in which she carried her head tilted slightly back, a mannerism she had adopted not through any notions of perceived superiority but (and it had taken Herbert a long time to work this out) to disguise the incipience of her double chin.
“Oh,” she said, “and happy birthday.”
“How on earth did you remember that?”
“I remember everything, Herbert,” Patricia
said with mock grandiloquence, holding the pause for a perfect second before laughing.
“You’re a wonder.”
“One of the seven. Now, what’s the name?”
“Alexander Kazantsev.”
“Write it down.” She pointed to the pile of request slips. She may have been on Herbert’s side, but she still maintained a theatrical devotion to the rules.
He wrote, as requested, and signed an illegible signature. Patricia took the slip and perused it as though checking for obscenity.
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” she said.
“Thank you so much.”
“You’ll have to read it here.” Usual practice was to sign files out and take them back to one’s own office, but this clearly could not apply to a visiting detective. “There are a couple of desks round the back.” Patricia pointed through a forest of metal shelving.
Herbert smiled his heartfelt thanks; he knew she was running a considerable risk in helping him.
Patricia disappeared, her voluminous skirts giving her the appearance of a galleon under full sail beneath a helmet of hair that would have pleased a Valkyrie.
Herbert looked at the photographs on her desk; one each of her five sons, ranging from twenty-five through fifteen years of age, all immortalized in sepia at points various around her throne.
Patricia kept a small transistor radio on her desk, and Herbert listened to it while he counted back the minutes. The Automobile Association was being besieged with calls. The previous evening it had been motorists asking for advice on conditions, and this morning the same motorists were ringing back to moan that they had been misled. Thinking that the fog would last only a few hours, the AA had apparently suggested that people park in side streets under lampposts and leave their lights on to warn drivers of their presence. Now all those cars had flat batteries, and the AA vans could not find their way through the fog to give them a jumpstart.
Patricia came back in short order, plopping a small manila folder in front of Herbert and bustling onward without interruption. A small queue of those wanting to take out or return files had already built up in her brief absence.
Herbert opened the file and began to read.
Kazantsev seemed to be a bona fide Izvestia journalist. He had arrived in London nine months ago, and had been placed under intense surveillance until the end of June, when surveillance had been discontinued “due to lack of any espionage activity on the subject’s part.”
During that period, he had visited the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens on only three occasions, all for simple administrative purposes pertaining to press accreditation or visa requirements.
This at least Herbert felt confident believing; there was probably no building in London which was watched with greater zeal than the Soviet Embassy. Five’s Watchers stationed themselves in cars parked outside (which were renumbered and repainted every few months) and in buildings opposite. They were constantly filming the comings and goings, and would inevitably requisition every new and improved listening microphone on which Five got its grubby hands.
There was good reason for the endeavor. Of the entire Soviet Embassy staff—and, among adversarial countries, London was Moscow’s second most important station, behind Washington—only about a third were genuine diplomats. Another third belonged to the MGB, Soviet civilian intelligence, and the final third were attached to the GRU, military intelligence.
Translations of several of Kazantsev’s articles were attached to the file. One had been dismissed by an anonymous scribble in the margin as “dreadful boring rubbish,” but in fact the majority seemed to Herbert to be interesting and eminently readable.
That in itself meant nothing. If one could write well enough to pass oneself off as a journalist, then the espionage world was one’s oyster. Unlike diplomats, reporters could go anywhere, from slums to palaces and all points in between, meeting people from every walk of life. It was a rare journalist who could keep secrets like a spy, but that did not mean such people did not exist.
Perhaps if Kazantsev had been posted to London in the days when Herbert was a Watcher, he would have been tailed more efficiently and Five might have been less inclined to dismiss him as a bog-standard correspondent. No reporter Herbert had ever met would have searched the house in Cholmeley Crescent the way Kazantsev had. Floorboards and skirting boards were the mark of a professional, someone who’d learned their craft in MGB school, not on the news desk at Pravda or Tass.
Whatever the Five files did or did not say, Kazantsev was a spy, of that Herbert was certain; and foreign espionage was the one thing that the police would always leave alone. Robbers, rapists, even murderers were ten-a-penny, but international intrigue meant politics, and the police liked to stay as far away from politics as possible.
This was Herbert’s dilemma; the one he had been facing, in one form or another, since the moment he had learned of de Vere Green’s involvement.
On the one hand, this was clearly an espionage case, even if Herbert did not know exactly how. The sensible thing to do, therefore, would be to hand it over to Five and be done with it.
On the other hand, a murder had been committed; and Five, whatever else they might or might not do, would be neither especially concerned with bringing the killer to justice, nor particularly qualified to do so.
And this was not even to mention Herbert’s own personal interest. He was tired of being the outsider fobbed off with the nothing cases. This was his chance to do something special, to use his experience and contacts; and to show Tyce that his support, as welcome as it had been unexpected, had not been misplaced.
Herbert was turning all this over in his head when his thoughts were interrupted by voices from next door. There was only a thin partition wall between the desk where he was sitting and de Vere Green’s office. And de Vere Green was angry; angry enough for his voice to carry through the partition with some ease.
“What do you mean, lost him?” he was saying.
“He gave us the slip in the cemetery, sir,” came the reply, from the man with the estuarine accent whom Herbert had heard on Egyptian Avenue in Highgate Cemetery, when he had been hiding in the burial chamber.
Herbert stopped breathing. It was de Vere Green who had ordered him followed.
“And that was the last time you saw him?” de Vere Green asked.
“Yes, sir.”
If the other two goons were also in there, they did not dissent. When it came to the incident at Archway station, Herbert thought, Bob must have decided that discretion was the better part of valor. His sense of self-preservation was evidently better than his aptitude for surveillance.
It was serious enough, Herbert thought, that the goons had come here in the first place. The Watchers did not operate out of Leconfield House for fear that they would be too identifiable to the Soviets. Instead, they were based in an unmarked four-story Georgian house on Clarence Terrace, on the southwest side of Regent’s Park. Herbert knew that building as well as he did his own flat. In his capacity as a senior Watcher, Herbert had come to Leconfield House more often than most; the majority of Watchers would visit Leconfield House once a year, if that.
“So where is he now?” de Vere Green barked. No dear boys here.
Herbert could not resist. He stood up, walked round the corner, and into de Vere Green’s office, where he amused himself for a brief moment by trying to work out which of the four men looked most astonished by his appearance.
“Right here,” Herbert said.
The argument raged for fifteen minutes, going first back and forth, and then nowhere.
De Vere Green, scattering dear boys around like confetti, assured Herbert that the decision to send the Watchers—long since banished from the room—to follow him was nothing personal. He simply wanted to know where Herbert went and what he found. In fact he was rather hoping, gentleman to gentleman, that Herbert would be so kind as to share such information with him.
No, Herbert said; this was a murder
investigation, plain and simple. If de Vere Green had anything to contribute, he should say so; if not, he should leave well alone. De Vere Green was clearly hiding something, Herbert added; why else would he have had him trailed? And how was Kazantsev, whom Herbert had found in Stensness’ house, involved?
De Vere Green would not, of course, presume to speak for Kazantsev, but the correspondent’s very presence indicated that this was way out of a detective inspector’s league. Herbert should simply turn it over to Five and be done with it.
This was not a request; that much was clear.
Herbert thought of what Tyce had said, about loyalties, and jurisdiction, and he made the decision almost without realizing. If de Vere Green had nothing concrete to show that Five merited control of this case, then Herbert would not hand it over.
After a stretch of mutual, glowering, silence, de Vere Green tried another tactic.
He feared, he said, that Stensness’ murder was a matter of national security. Not necessarily in and of itself, but perhaps as part of wider ramifications. He would tell Herbert what he knew, if Herbert in turn told him what he had managed to find. They could help each other.
A tacit admission, Herbert said, that de Vere Green had been economical with the truth in the first place.
An occupational hazard of their mutual trades, de Vere Green replied. Deal?
You first.
“I, er, I …” De Vere Green steepled his hands, which was as penitent as Herbert had ever seen him. “I misled you, dear boy. Earlier.”
Herbert said nothing, ushering de Vere Green to fill the silence, which he did.
“I told you that when I saw Stensness at the conference, he said he didn’t have anything new for me. That was not, in fact, true …” De Vere Green paused, his inner thespian never far from the surface. “He told me he had something that would change the world.”
“Change the world?”
Visibility Page 9
