by Gil Hogg
Codename Wolf
Gil Hogg
Copyright © 2013 Gil Hogg
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Contents
Cover
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
A Smell of Fraud
The Predators
Caring for Cathy
Blue Lantern
Present Tense
The Cruel Peak
* * *
NON-FICTION
Teaching Yourself Tranquillity
The Happy Humanist
1
My application to join the Secret Intelligence Service was tongue-in-cheek in the first place. I was making a living selling second-hand cars in Oxford at the time and in no desperate need of another job, but the opportunity arose by chance and I thought it would be interesting to test my skills against this avowed world of deceit. At the time, I was more interested in getting into MI6 than having a career as a spy; being accepted struck me as being a test of brass neck, like talking your way into the Oval Office, or the Cabinet Room at Downing Street. I was twenty-five years old then and an ex-Special Services officer.
I had always had a yen for the army and I had attempted to enter the Royal Military College at Sandhurst when I was eighteen. It was perhaps an exceptional ambition for a lad from Grantley Comprehensive School, rated one of the worst in the country. I had departed from that institution at the request of the head. Under the label Disruptive behaviour, a long list of misdemeanors too trivial to mention had been assembled against me. I had to go or be expelled.
I was quite keen to get an education, but at Grantley my talents were not recognised. Therefore I had taken charge of my own education at the local public library some time earlier – pleasant afternoons spent in a quiet seat when I was supposed to be in class. As I was said to be a ‘disturbed youth’ an arrangement was made between the school and the local authority for me to sit my A-level examinations. I passed all my subjects with top grades, and with my mother’s help was able to scrounge the necessary references for Sandhurst.
Unfortunately, this early endeavour to fulfill my romantic vision and become an army officer came to a sudden halt; and as a consequence, I received a piece of advice which I have borne in mind ever since. The advice was delivered by Lieutenant-Colonel James Austen, the invigilator in a written examination at Sandhurst, designed to see what my class of would-be subalterns had absorbed the previous day from lectures on small arms. Colonel Austen halted over my hunched shoulders during the test, and with a curt “Excuse me,” drew back the sleeve of my shirt to reveal the list of crucial facts and figures penned on the inner side of my pale white forearm just above the wrist.
Colonel Austen took me to his office. He smiled with charm. He had bright blue eyes, a sunburned face and wavy silver hair. He also had three fingers frostbitten from his left hand. He was a renowned mountaineer. In a tailored barathea uniform with service ribbons, he was a model of the man I hoped to become in later life.
“Barmby,” he said (Roger Barmby was my name then) “I like you. You have charisma, a rare quality, and I don’t mind your accent. You’d probably make a fine officer. You’ve done outstandingly well in the aptitude stuff, but I’m going to have to dismiss you. Rules, you know? Always remember this: we all cheat, but do it with elan, with dash. Above all, Barmby, don’t get caught!”
The failure of my Sandhurst initiative at that time took me back to the Barmby boarding house on Cassel Street, Oxford. My mother, Gladys, was the proprietress. As her only child I had a small room of my own at the top of the narrow, five-storey town-house. I loafed about making a little money, as much as I needed without sponging on my mother, buying and selling second-hand motorcycles. I was fascinated by smart motorcycles and fast cars, and buying and selling for profit came naturally. Although I didn’t think anything of it then, I was a talented salesman. Perhaps this gift was in my genes. I didn’t know anything about my forbears at that time, except for Gladys, shrewd but uneducated.
Shortly after the Sandhurst episode, my mother was suddenly and unnecessarily killed. She was returning home at night after visiting a friend, when she was hit on the footpath by a fast-moving and silent bicycle, without a light. She died in hospital a few days later. Her death left me sadly without family. The large sum in damages, extracted from the myopic academic who was trying to improve his cardiovascular performance in the dark, was no compensation for Gladys’s fund of cryptic common sense and affection.
I inherited the boarding house, and amongst the title documents I discovered to my surprise, a copy of a deed of settlement, in which the money to buy the boarding house was advanced by Sir Charles Conway of The Beeches, Grantley. The deed was dated in the year of my birth. In return, Gladys promised to keep confidential Any matter whatsoever pertaining to her relationship with the Conway family.
My mother had told me that she used to work as a servant in the kitchen at The Beeches before she bought the boarding house, and that my middle name, Roger Conway Barmby, was given out of her respect for the family. Naturally I was curious about my father, and there was an earlier time when I had questioned Gladys as closely as a son can respectfully question his mother. Her replies never went beyond ‘Your father was a good friend.’ When I asked her where she got the money to buy the house, she said, ‘I inherited it from a good friend, that’s all.’ Her attitude was that Roger Conway Barmby had a lot to be thankful for, and ought to mind his own business. Gladys could be unyieldingly firm, and I knew then that I was never going to get any more information from her. I gave up trying.
I created a lot of fantasies about my father, but the reality I believed then was that he was probably a passing tradesman. My arrival would have been a deeply embarrassing matter to my mother, which in decency I finally thought I ought not probe. As to the inheritance, people do occasionally leave money to friends.
Now tha
t Gladys was gone, and I had seen the deed of settlement, I was staggered by the notion that Sir Charles Conway could be my father. I was satisfied that there was no other inference I could draw from the clandestine document.
The Conway family were Oxford grandees. Sir Charles, in his day, had been Lord Lieutenant of the County. I visited the public library and read some of the papers on local history to add to my sketchy knowledge. Sir Charles had died in debt. The Beeches estate was sold, and the National Trust acquired the Elizabethan manor and a few acres around it. One of Charles’s three children, all sons, had died in a safari accident in Kenya. The eldest, who had inherited the title, suffered from Huntington’s Chorea, and was in a home for the disabled. Only the younger son, James, had survived fit. Little but the name Elliston Conway and a family history as maritime traders going back to the eighteenth century, remained. But Elliston Conway was a name, particularly in Oxfordshire, and I was tortured and enthralled by the idea that it could rightfully be mine – Roger Conway Barmby, or Roger Elliston Conway?
Not surprisingly, no father’s name had been entered on my birth certificate and I hadn’t even begun to toy with the complications of getting a DNA test. I decided to visit The Beeches, which I had often driven past on the South Oxford High Road, always remembering, and not with any distaste, that Gladys had worked happily in that grand pile as a kitchen-hand. She always spoke well of the house and the family on the rare occasions when they were mentioned.
The mansion was open to the public on two afternoons a week to enable the hoi polloi to glimpse the treasures acquired on their behalf. I went through the stone gateway and walked up the drive to the front doors, past the rose garden, the lake and the fountains. As I neared the entrance, I passed through the neatly clipped miniature box hedges arranged like a maze, with curious apprehension. Imagine if this place was, in a sense, mine!
I paid for entry at the ticket box and ascended the marble steps, entering the dank-smelling Great Hall, a vast shadowy space hung with family portraits. A white marble staircase, with a tongue of red carpet rose before me and divided in two, swirling up to left and right. Shafts of light speared though the stained glass windows, casting puddles of colour on the mahogany panelling. I stood on the polished tiles inside the doorway, looking upward, while my eyes accustomed themselves to the life-size portrait in oils which dominated the hall from the landing where the stairs divided.
Roger Conway Barmby’s quest was over. There, in the robes of a baronet, looking calmly over the heads of the curious tourists, was the face of a man who was unmistakably my father. I stared up at what could have been taken for a portrait of me in fancy dress; I stared until I was unsteady on my feet.
I hardly saw the finery of the rest of the mansion which I toured quickly, transfixed by the long, square-jawed face, the wide forehead, the grey eyes slightly downward slanting to the outward edges of the eyebrows, the sharp, straight nose, the pallor of fine skin, and even the hank of barley-coloured hair over his brow that was the young Sir Charles Conway, and was also me. I left the Beeches with elation, only tinctured slightly by a sense of the richness of the life that had passed me by; but I’m an optimist. I only look back with a kind of theoretical interest. I haven’t time for what might have been.
I was much more concerned with what could be. Without any plan in mind other than to confirm my parentage, I continued my researches. I found that just seven days before my birth, Lady Lucy Conway, Charles’s wife, had a son who was christened Roger James Elliston Conway, known as James. I wondered how painful this parallel pregnancy would have been for Gladys, who must have known of it.
James, I discovered, had attended Rugby School, completed a Politics, Philosophy, and Economics degree at Oriel College Oxford, married his undergraduate sweetheart, and departed to farm a thousand acres in North Wales. Already, he was a member of the National Farmer’s Union, the parish council, and a supporter of local charities in Llangollen. The newspaper clippings made much of him, but to me he was distinguished only by his lineage; a dull figure whose sole ambition seemed to be to breed cattle, sheep and children.
I reflected that I was entitled to the name Conway. I became determined to take the legal steps necessary to make the change. I dropped the unbeautiful name, Barmby. It had occurred to me that people would confuse me with James, and if they did so, that might be to my advantage. Perhaps I increased the likelyhood of confusion by adding ‘Elliston’. I became, by deed poll, Roger Elliston Conway. Now I had the name, and a lineage which I could, if pressed, properly defend.
The practicalities of becoming Roger Elliston Conway were small. As Roger Barmby I had no close circle of school friends, only a few casual acquaintances, and I scarcely ever saw any of Gladys’s old friends. Gladys herself never had any relations that I knew of, so there was no embarrassing metamorphosis from Barmby to Elliston Conway.
My half-brother James had moved, virtually as of right, through Rugby and Oxford. James had obtained an upper second at Oriel College. An Oxford University degree would have been of great use to me; more than to a farmer in North Wales. In any event, I calculated that the real value in being Roger Conway – I intended to be careful to call myself that – of the Elliston Conway family, was not in noising it across every bar-room I entered, but in the quiet, unseen advantages of being discreetly known to have a pedigree. This would assure that certain doors would open for me – those of exclusive clubs, bankers, employers and society hostesses. I had already found, from my modest operations as a second-hand car salesman, that understanding the English propensity for snobbery was a necessary prerequisite for getting on in life.
2
The next episode in my career was, unwittingly, to provide a further qualification for the secret services. I had sold the boarding-house and bought an apartment in River Fields, an expensive new development on the Cherwell. My burry butcher’s-boy drawl had yielded to nine months of elocution. According to a certain class of English person, including the elocution teacher, I now spoke, impossibly, without an accent.
As Roger Elliston Conway I appeared to be a well-educated, well-off bachelor. But I had no career. I whirled around the town in a Ferrari or a Lotus, and made a prosperous living from buying wrecks, getting their odometers rewound, and having them rebuilt and polished for sale. Although I never soiled my own hands with the technical functions of this trade, I took the financial risk and my skill was in negotiating the sale; it was an ignoble following for the son of a baronet.
Despite the Sandhurst fiasco, I was heavily influenced by books and films of Britain’s nineteenth-century campaigns abroad, and still yearned to realise my idealised view of the life of an army officer. I therefore decided to apply for a short term commission in the army. I took some satisfaction in presenting myself as a young man from Rugby and Oxford, with a good degree, seeking to enlarge his experience before settling to a more routine career in the City. I thought, what can the army do if it finds me out? Only kick me out again.
With my paper qualifications, I was a veritable prize for the forces. Without difficulty I had obtained copies of James’s university record and birth certificate, to which only modest alterations were required. My interlocutors fawned over me. I had no conscience in this, knowing that poor Roger Barmby, with his four A-levels, and his squashed vowels, although unacceptable as officer material, was every bit as good a man.
I was accepted by the army with alacrity, applied for special forces, and completed my officer training without a hitch, and with enjoyment. I liked the comradeship – something new to an only child – and the balance of physical and intellectual life. As one would expect of a person with my attainments, I was in the upper quartile of my class.
It was here that my boyish dreams began to be dissipated by cold reality. I had been attracted to the daring deeds of the Special Air Service – as portrayed in films and thrillers – and had never given much thought to the serious consequences of placing my body in jeopardy. When I took time to c
onsider, and to talk to veteran officers who had endured the Iraq War and Afghanistan, I became conscious that the risk of being killed or maimed was grave. I began to wonder if this albeit short-term career I had chosen, this taster of adventure, was really wise.
The training regimes of the SAS were bone-cracking; hurling myself down cliffs, crawling through swamps and jumping out of aircraft. Later, I feared, real bullets, real mines and real shrapnel would add a different dimension of unkindness to flesh and bone. During the course of my training, I gradually, but keenly, began to appreciate the obvious: that the human body is a fragile thing in a life of conflict and that I had but one of them. With this realisation preying on my mind and active service in Afghanistan or Iraq looming up, I tried to make my specialty intelligence work. As adroitly as I could, I selected every option, every course, every task which led toward indoor work at HQ, and away from physically active operations in the field.
