A Deceptive Devotion

by Iona Whishaw

  Inside the car, brushing off the heavy drops of rain, Darling nodded toward the house, where the door had been shut almost before they were fully off the front steps.

  “That’s got to be awkward.”

  “It opens up a couple of possibilities, doesn’t it, sir? The ex-husband and that prospector. I never trust the guy who is first to the scene.”

  “This is from your vast experience as a murder investigator, is it? Back to town. We’d better visit the faithless Verne Taylor.”

  Chapter FIFTEEN

  “Nu?” snapped the commissar. “Well?”

  “He was seen to board a ship bound for Hong Kong. I suspect he has connections there among the ex-patriots.”

  “Who do we have there?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. I will find out. When I do, what would you like me to direct him to do?”

  The commissar made a face and looked at the big picture of Lenin on the wall opposite his desk. “I don’t really see the point of him anymore. He’s old. He should have been allowed to retire. And he’s cost us too much.”

  “Sir,” began his deputy. He was anxious not to anger his superior. The commissar had a reputation for showing no feeling, so that you never knew where you were before it was too late, and you were on a train bound to some godawful place.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “He may still have active connections with that British agent. I agree that eliminating Aptekar would end the problem of his taking secrets anywhere; on the other hand, he also could lead us to the agent. What was his name? Winslow?”

  “Her name,” the commissar corrected. “The agent in question now is the daughter. Stanton Winslow, the man he dealt with before and during the war, is dead. I don’t see why you think he will lead us to her, if he is busy going to Hong Kong. He should be going the other way. Unless. Ah, I see your thinking. Hong Kong is a British protectorate. He could get safe passage to England from there. He could then reconnect with her there and be brought safely into their fold by her.

  “I want him eliminated. Put someone on it. In the event that he slips through our fingers, we need to figure out where he will take asylum. Find out where she is exactly. We can put someone to work in London doing something useful instead of costing us money gallivanting around the city going to the theatre.”

  “Well, Mr. Hunt. What can I do for you?” Lane and Felix were sitting under the overhang of the apple shed on the wharf. It was cool after the rain, and the lake was still agitated from the earlier storm.

  “I have been asked by the director to have you just go over again the substance of your conversation with the Russian operative Stanimir Aptekar. You met him in June of this year in Berlin.”

  “You astonish me. He’s sent you all the way out here for that? I gave a full report. And anyway, why can’t you ask the Russian operative? He must be settled in London or the southeast by now. I understood he was going to try to get out almost immediately.”

  Hunt shifted uneasily on the bench, imagining what the pile up of dust and splinters was doing to his trousers. “That’s the problem. He hasn’t. There was a plan to meet at the Yugoslav border and he never showed up. We don’t know if he was duping us by pretending to agree to this arrangement or if he has been apprehended by the Soviets, who might have got wind of his plans to escape. If the latter is the case, he may be even now, depending on your conversations, spilling valuable British intelligence.”

  “Ha!” Lane barked. It was unbelievable! “You think I gave him valuable British intelligence? Like what? Where to find a public loo in London? The director has obviously not furnished you with all the facts. No, of course not. This whole system works without anyone anywhere having all the facts. The director himself knows very well I had no intelligence to give. I was asked to become a double agent, and for reasons I cannot explain, I agreed and was sent off to seduce the Russians armed with a story about my dissatisfaction with the West and missing my Russian nanny. It was only a stroke of luck that, instead of being seduced by my story, the agent I talked to wanted to defect. I placed the necessary information in the hands of Mr. Dunn, and that was the end of my involvement. And will, by the way, be the end of any involvement I will ever again have with British Intelligence. I am sorry you have been put to the trouble of a long journey for nothing.”

  Hunt sighed. He was a good judge of character, and he did not doubt Lane Winslow’s story in any particular. In fact, she was not the first person to express frustration about their director.

  “I think the problem is that we don’t know what’s happened to him. If he’s been captured, he will either be executed or sent to a gulag.”

  “Since when has the intelligence branch cared about that?”

  “You have a point. As I’m thinking through this, I’m wondering if it is possible that he was alerted to some danger, some betrayal of his intention to cross over, and has had to go into hiding. You met him. Could he pull this sort of thing off? I understand he’s getting on.”

  Lane thought about the Aptekar she had met. Confident, wiry, supremely aware, and intelligent.

  “It is possible,” she said. “I don’t know how much physical strength he could bring to bear on something like escaping from capture. But he is very urbane. If he could get into a community of displaced White Russians somewhere, he could pass himself off as an aristocrat with no difficulty. In fact, I expect he is an aristocrat. Even if he had no money, it wouldn’t matter. All of them must be as poor as church mice, wherever they are.” Her own countess, for example.

  “Is there any possibility that he might try to contact you?”

  Lane was about to protest the absolute impossibility of this, but then she remembered that in the previous winter Aptekar had been as close as Vancouver and had known how to reach her then. He had sent her a letter, saying he’d been a colleague of her father’s and even suggested then that she might like to come over to the Russians, when she had become involved with the death of a Russian at the local hot springs. If she agreed that it was still possible, it would almost certainly mean that she would not be out of the clutches of British Intelligence. She rubbed her eyes. She was still bleary from lack of sleep. An impossible idea worked its way up. She turned and looked at the agent, searching the profile he was presenting her.

  “Is this why you’ve come? You think he’s here? All this probing and these hypothetical questions! Why don’t you just ask? And I’ll save you the trouble now. He’s not here. He hasn’t contacted me, and I certainly don’t expect him to. I’ll grant you that it is theoretically possible. He knows more or less where I live. He was out in Vancouver during the winter. He was running an incompetent local asset who was working with the Russians. However, his contacting me assumes that he could get all the way to Western Canada while on the run.”

  “There is the possibility that he is not on the run at all, but still in the pay of his original masters,” Hunt speculated, ignoring her outburst.

  “In that case, he would have no need to find me. He’d be busy working operatives in Germany and even England. If there was an arrangement to pick him up somewhere in Europe and he didn’t turn up, then you might want to worry about who betrayed him, if he was captured before he could escape. I was under the impression you people don’t like loose ends. The betrayer, if such a one exists, is a loose end.” She stood up and brushed off the back of her skirt. Rain was beginning to spit down again. “One thing is certain, Mr. Hunt. I am not your loose end. Everything I know, you now know.”

  Hunt stood up, followed Lane’s lead, and brushed off his behind, and then looked at his now-dusty hand in distaste.

  “Is there the slightest possibility that he will try to contact your guest?”

  Lane stopped still and then turned slowly and looked at him.

  “My guest?” Of course, she thought, she’d mentioned her guest when
she’d spoken to him on the phone. “I shouldn’t think so. Why should he? What an odd idea.”

  “I was under the impression she is Russian herself.”

  “Were you? How, I wonder?”

  Hunt smiled and shook his head. “I have no idea how I got that impression. All this talk of Russians, I suppose. Thank you, Miss Winslow. I will let you know if we require anything else.”

  Well, Hunt thought, opening his car door. Had he wasted his time?

  “Please don’t,” Lane said, with her brightest smile. “Can you find your way back? Oh, and don’t pass on my best regards to your boss when you speak with him.”

  Hunt nodded and got into his car. “Right. Duly noted. Well then, goodbye, Miss Winslow. Oh, and congratulations on your upcoming wedding!”

  Chilled by more than just the rain that was beginning to fall in earnest, she watched Hunt’s hired car labour up the steep road from the lake. His congratulations—so cheerfully delivered—had stopped her breath. The tiniest handful of people knew she was getting married. How had he come to know? She turned the engine over in her car. She had better go to Bales’s store for some biscuits to give legitimacy to her having driven away suddenly in the afternoon. But she sat, her engine running, rain beginning to fall more persistently, blurring her windshield.

  She tried to assess how she felt. Newly frightened about the reach of her former employers, certainly, but there was also melancholy at the thought that perhaps Aptekar had not managed to get out. She pushed away her concerns about what British Intelligence seemed to know and focused on Aptekar. Perhaps his story to her about wanting to end his career on a nice farm in Sussex was all a fairy story. Spies rarely told the absolute truth. On the other hand, if he had been planning to defect, the thought that someone might have betrayed him disturbed her. Who? It was possible he had been under surveillance the whole time in Berlin, after Berlin, or even before. Who knew what he got up to? Certainly, during the winter when he was in Canada, he had seemed to be a trusted and hard-nosed Soviet agent.

  It was the sudden thought that she herself somehow might be responsible for his fall from grace that caused her to put her forehead on the steering wheel and close her eyes. It was at that moment that she began to wonder why Hunt had really come all this way. And she didn’t buy for a second that he made a mistake about her guest. How had he known? And how had he known about her marriage?

  With a groan she realized that she was now forced to keep more secrets from Darling. She would not be able to tell him about this meeting, or anything that was said in it. She had thought the whole business of the Official Secrets Act—to which she was bound for the next fifty years—was finally behind them. She recalled how it had created the great cavern of doubt between her and Darling right from the beginning and had nearly got her charged with murder. Bloody British Intelligence!

  Ames closed his exam paper and looked around the room. He appeared to be the first one finished, and he immediately became uneasy. He glanced at the enormous clock at the front of the hall. There were more than twenty minutes remaining. He should do what he learned to do in school: go back and check his work. It wouldn’t hurt. He opened the booklet to the first page again and carefully reviewed his answers on a series of questions about the Criminal Code as it governed arrests. His mind wandered to his conversation with the local police about the dead Russian man. The constable he had talked to had listened patiently and taken notes, looking with interest at the picture and commenting on the car.

  “So you think this is a suspicious death and that this fellow might be behind it? Do I have that right?” he’d said to Ames.

  This was such an oversimplification of what Ames had swirling around in his mind that he had to think about what to say next. “It’s not that I think it’s a suspicious death—your coroner does. You could have a word with him. There is at least one very frightened citizen who recognized this man in the photograph from back home as being a member of the secret police.”

  “If this ‘secret policeman’ of yours is back home, why do we need to worry about him, again?”

  Ames had felt a little foolish.

  “Look, I think, my boss thinks there might be something going on here among the Russians, so he wanted to make sure you had all the information I collected.”

  “If we have a suspicious death, we’ll look into it, rest assured, and if it leads to any of the rest of this, we’ll look into that as well. Will that do? Oh. And good luck with your exam.”

  Ames had stood up and thanked the constable, who was already being distracted by the tea cart. “Can you let my inspector know if you find anything?” He’d pulled a used envelope out of the wastebasket, jotted down the information for getting hold of Darling, and pushed it toward the constable, who had picked it up impatiently and put it on top of his notes.

  Thinking about this now, Ames did not feel reassured and, indeed, had begun to wonder how important it really was. Looking at the infinite details of the Criminal Code, he thought about how easy it was to go down a rabbit hole when you were investigating something. You could talk yourself into believing some detail meant something and work to make it fit into a pattern that might be entirely of your own invention. You needed, he thought glumly, to both look into rabbit holes and keep the big picture in mind in case you were looking down the wrong hole.

  “Gentlemen. Time’s up,” the invigilator said.

  The sound of paper rustling and pencils being put down and chairs beginning to scrape on the wooden floor interrupted his thoughts. No matter how well he did on this exam, it was a long way from guaranteeing he’d be any good at the job, he thought, nodding at the man who came by to pick up his test.

  Aptekar walked off the gangplank onto the solid wooden pier of the Vancouver port. Despite the maelstrom of truck engines and men shouting and all the business of crates being loaded and unloaded, chains rattling, and horns honking, gulls circling and squawking, the scene seemed quiet to him compared to the insistent metallic thrumming and banging of the engines in the ship that never let up during the whole of the trip. His quarters had been in the bowels of the ship, crowded in with ten other sailors near the echoing steel engine room.

  He stood, trying to orient himself. He’d been here less than a year ago, he thought, under such different circumstances that his past appeared to him like a fictional story. He was the prince in the tale, living in luxury at the great Hotel Vancouver, being waited on, wearing an expensive Italian suit and English shoes.

  He looked down at his borrowed and collapsing boots and laboured to see himself as anyone else might see him, an ageing Russian sailor coming off the ship for a night on the town. He’d wanted to bring his rucksack with his only change of clothes, but the sailors were not permitted to carry anything off the ship. One of the young men he’d befriended on the crossing came up behind him and pounded him on the back.

  “You should come where we’re going, comrade. Girls and drink, or are you too old, eh?”

  Aptekar smiled. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “That’s the idea! Tomo over there knows the places. He’s been here before.”

  “Ah. Good. So we don’t have to waste time being lost. Is the minder coming as well?” Aptekar could see the commissar standing at the top of the gangplank looking over the scene, his hands behind his back, a look of supreme confidence on his face.

  “He doesn’t have to, does he? He’s already got one of us on the job.”

  Maybe even you, Aptekar thought. Well, I know the places, too. “All right, then, let’s go,” he said.

  The waterfront hotel bar was raucous with good spirits. His companions had put together four tables and sat in front of now-empty plates but full glasses, all talking at once, shouting over each other. In another hour, Aptekar thought, it will tip, and tempers will begin to rise, arguments about money, disputes over the girls who had begun to gat
her. Glasses would be broken and sailors tossed out. He staggered drunkenly toward the dark hallway where the sign of the pointing finger indicated the location of the toilets down some stairs.

  Once in the dimly lit hallway, he paused, completely sober, and looked behind him. No one had followed, but it wouldn’t be long. He hurried down the stairs to the first landing. Now he could hear talking above him at the hallway entrance. On the bottom landing, he could smell the acrid bathrooms, combined with the kind of permanent mouldering damp of dockside hotels the world over. A door at the end of the little passageway had a small filthy window. Thank God, an outside door. Heavy steps were beginning down the stairs. Two men, talking pornographically about their plans for the rest of the evening in loud Russian.

  Aptekar darted to the door and slipped out into the dark, closing the door quietly. A cold clinging fog had moved in off the water. It was not yet ten. He could still get a tram east.

  Chapter SIXTEEN

  A park bench. What a bloody cliché! The green at Russell Square was nearly uninhabited except for one stout matron under an umbrella impatiently waiting for her toy poodle to perform. It wasn’t fully raining, but the spitting of drops made the director turn with irritation to see if the man he was meeting was coming. He put up his own umbrella and took a folded newspaper out of the inside pocket of his raincoat. It was open to an article about Harold Wilson possibly getting an appointment to the board of trade.

  The director looked up. Where was his counterpart? Who the hell was Harold Wilson? Maybe he should get a quiet desk job like the board of trade. He stared unseeing at the paper again. The whole bloody thing could fall through. The first name they’d given him had been a bust. A pretender from Exeter, who was too cowardly to do anything but talk big about the virtues of socialism. He’d never have made a real agent for the Russians. Well, the director thought, I’ve done my bit by giving them Aptekar’s name. It wasn’t his fault the Ruskies had bungled it.