Uncommon Enemy

by Alan Judd

  Charles was sceptical. It was intrinsically unlikely. ‘They wouldn’t have met, would they? An agent wouldn’t meet anyone in Nigel’s position. The only people who’d have contact with Gladiator would be his case officers. And that’s much more than a titbit, anyway. It would be hugely important to AQ. No-one would give intelligence like that away, surely? Not if it were true. And Nigel hardly knows Gladiator. They met only once – you know, years ago, in the early days, not long before the Paris trip. At dinner at Nigel’s house, I think.’

  ‘Of course Measures wouldn’t have, shouldn’t have seen him, or have had any other contact with him. Normally. But Measures’s situation is not normal. If what we know about him came out he would be sunk, holed beneath the water-line, even though it happened long ago. Remember who’s still around and knows about it. There’s Sarah, his wife – have you had contact with her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She is still—’ Matthew broke off and smiled thinly, nodding. ‘And there’s me, but I’m on my way out and dying, so that’s all right. There’s Sonia, buried deep in some bit of the SIA that Measures has never heard of and longing for early retirement. He never knew her, never knew she knew, so probably she’s safe. Then there’s Gladiator, or was until he disappeared. Measures knows that he witnessed the incident, with you. Some idiot in Foreign Office security let it slip a few years later, when Measures was clamouring for another Europe job and wanted to know why he wasn’t getting one. So it must have been very disagreeable for him to find when he came here that we were still running Gladiator. And finally, there’s you, of course. You know the whole story, but you were out of sight, out of mind, until I brought you back, much against his will. He did all he could to delay it or sidetrack it, short of being seen to do so. That’s why you must take care, Charles.’ He smiled again.

  ‘But, given all that, why should he want to risk returning and taking your job? He was doing well as an MEP, very comfortable, well paid, highly thought of. Why not just continue to keep well away, keep quiet, as he has for so long? There was no risk of anyone saying anything until he came here.’

  Matthew raised his eyebrows and parted his fingers, as in supplication. ‘Ambition? Revenge? Who knows what bitterness stirs in all our murky depths. And what better way to revenge yourself on MI6 than by taking charge of it? He’s off to a pretty good start. The SIA and its legions of lawyers and mud-slides of management will castrate and suffocate the old office. He’s keen on all that.’

  Charles remained sceptical. Everything Matthew said was plausible, given Nigel’s personality and what they both knew of his past, but it was unlikely in practice. ‘I still don’t see how Nigel could have contrived contact with Gladiator without anyone knowing. He couldn’t just go and look up the contact details himself. It would be too extraordinary. He’d have to ask someone for them.’

  ‘Maybe someone does know.’

  ‘You haven’t investigated?’

  ‘I can’t, in my position, without others knowing and therefore probably without Measures knowing. All eyes are always on the monarch, there’s no privacy for a chief without gross and elaborate deceit. But you can make inquiries, you can mount discreet investigations. You’re below the radar.’ A bus pulled up outside. Matthew closed his eyes and rested his head against the sofa until the bus pulled away. ‘Measures mounted a massive behind-the-scenes campaign to get this job, a very political campaign. I’m as certain as I can be, without actual evidence, that he is behind all these press leaks. If you look at the coverage in its entirety, especially the Sunday pieces by James Wytham, there’s a pattern. It begins with opinion pieces about the SIA being a new body in need of a new head, a new way of thinking. Then there are leaks from documents, accusations of insecurity and poor morale, signs that things are going wrong, calls for an outsider to take over, someone who understands the new world and its challenges. But when Measures arrived it all changed. Coverage since then has become more favourable; there are no more leaks, criticism is muted and there are calls for more resources. Soon, I predict, there will be a few more leaks, but they’ll be of triumphs under the new regime. You don’t know anything about James Wytham? Pity.’

  Matthew sat back and closed his eyes. He looked drained, and shook his head at Charles’s suggestion of more tea. Charles wanted to go on but could see his friend ebbing before him. ‘I will do all I can,’ he said. ‘Everything, I promise you. And I’ll keep you informed.’ He stood.

  Matthew struggled to his feet, despite Charles’s protests, steadying himself by clutching Charles’s arm. ‘This time we must nail him for good. Did he have contact with Gladiator? That’s what you have to find out. But he’ll want you out of the way. Remember that. I’ll give you all the help, all the access I can, but if I’m no longer available, recruit Sonia. Go and see her anyway. Tell her everything. You’ll need help.’

  They shook hands at the door. ‘Good luck,’ said Matthew.

  Charles held on to his hand. ‘Goodbye.’

  Matthew, smiling, patted Charles’s arm. ‘Farewell, dear friend.’

  6

  The surly policeman swung open the cell door. ‘Your lawyer’s here.’

  Charles followed him through reception to the cramped interview room, expecting to find his two interviewers and Sarah. But there was only Sarah, standing by the desk.

  ‘Call when you’re ready,’ said the policeman, closing the door on them.

  They stood looking at each other. It had happened too quickly. There should have been time to prepare. After a moment, they both smiled and shook hands. As if the years had made us strangers, he thought. As they should have, as was only natural. As if we really were the grown-ups we pretend to be.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. She said something but he didn’t take it in. ‘I’m sorry that we should meet like this, after all this time. Funny, in a way.’

  ‘I’m sure it will come to seem so.’

  Her hair was shorter and tinted, her face more drawn, her figure thinner. But the shape of her features, her voice, her mouth, her eyes, were immediately familiar. His own mouth felt dry, which surprised him, because he had thought he was beyond all that.

  She looked businesslike in a tailored black skirt and a matching jacket, over a crisp white blouse.

  ‘How long have we got?’ he asked. A professional question, one you asked your agent at the start of a meeting.

  ‘As long as we want. You’re allowed to confer privately with your legal representative.’

  They sat on the chairs at the near side of the desk, facing each other. She took a black Moleskine notebook from her handbag. In trying not to look at her legs as she crossed them, his eyes were caught by her wedding and engagement rings. She took a Mont Blanc pen from her handbag and eased the elastic strap aside to open her notebook.

  ‘Tell me everything.’

  He kept back only his conversation with Matthew Abrahams and, for the time being, the identity of Gladiator.

  ‘I’m just so surprised he hasn’t told me you were back,’ she said, interrupting his account of his meeting with Nigel.

  ‘I’m sure he will.’ Just as soon as he hears who the defendant’s solicitor is, he thought.

  When he had finished she said, ‘The police will want to go over the same ground again, now that I’m here. Answer their questions clearly and simply but don’t do more than that, don’t say any more than they ask of you. If you do start saying too much, I’ll interrupt. Otherwise, if I’m not saying anything, it’s all right.’

  Charles nodded, thinking about the next step, his real purpose. ‘There is something else. It doesn’t affect what’s happening here, now, but it is important context. Are you free for dinner, assuming they release me?’

  She looked at him.

  ‘It is important,’ he repeated. ‘It is business.’

  ‘Well, I could be. Nigel’s out this evening, as it happens.’ She hesitated again. ‘I suppose there’s no impropriety, personally or professionall
y. It could put Nigel in a difficult position if there were proceedings. Not that I think there’ll be any.’

  ‘It shouldn’t, surely, as long as you really are my lawyer. And it’s not as if he doesn’t know we know each other.’

  ‘No. All right. So long as it’s early.’

  She got up and opened the door. Freckles and Corduroy must have been waiting outside because they entered before she sat down again.

  As she predicted, the questioning went over much of the ground already covered, albeit more formally. She intervened only once, leaning nearer the microphone.

  ‘I think we should make it quite clear, for the record, that there is no allegation that Mr Thoroughgood has any connection with the journalist James Wytham, author of the leaks that are the principal concern of this enquiry, nor that he is suspected of being the source of any of those leaks.’

  ‘Correct,’ said Corduroy.

  During the pause that followed, the unasked questions – then what are we here for? Surely not for the harmless David Horam piece? – were palpable. Both policemen looked awkward.

  Freckles broke the pause. ‘All right, you came down to London, you were briefed on the missing Gladiator, you got your pass, you were given an office—’

  ‘A desk.’

  ‘—given a desk and you set to work on reviewing the Gladiator case. Could you describe what that involved?’

  Corduroy held up his hand, looking from Freckles to Sarah. ‘I don’t want to throw a spanner in the works. But this is a sensitive case, on which we were specially briefed.’ He looked again to Charles. ‘As was Mr Thoroughgood, of course, but his legal representative—’

  Charles abandoned his plan not to tell her until later. ‘She knows the case,’ he said.

  They all stared. ‘Mrs Measures – her married name – was involved in the case from the start, many years ago. It was she who introduced Gladiator to me.’ He saw understanding growing in her eyes, and with it questions. He turned back to the police. ‘You can ask what you like about Gladiator.’

  ‘Well, it’s not the case itself; it’s what you did, establishing what you were doing, that concerns us,’ said Corduroy. ‘So, you started reviewing it. What does that mean exactly?’

  ‘I began reading the files. Because it’s an old case it still has paper files. Seven volumes. Only the most recent papers – if you can call them that – are electronic.’

  And nothing like as detailed and revealing, unless by omission, he forbore to add. The change in record-keeping was striking. The old paper system, rigid, cumbersome, labour-intensive and tedious, had been enforced by middle-aged women in registries who mercilessly pursued careless young officers for failing to sign off minutes, complete contact notes or file telegrams. Often needlessly duplicated, it had at least the advantage that it always told the story. Everything that happened, all the intelligence produced, what motivated the agent, what he thought of his marriage or of his job, what he was paid, how his case officer felt about him, what decisions were taken and by whom, the identities of everyone who had access to the file – all of it was recorded in wearisome detail.

  But narrative disappeared when files went electronic. The intelligence reports were still there and significant case developments still recorded, but there was no sense of a controlling influence, and little record of how, why or by whom decisions were taken. Above all, there was no sense of history, no awareness of what had already been said and done. No-one, it was clear, read files any more. Gladiator’s recent young case officers were keen and competent but they could not appreciate their agent’s hinterland, what he had been at their age, where he came from, nor how much more he knew about spying than they did.

  Charles could not resist the self-indulgent lure of the early volumes, most of which he had written. It was something of a shock to find that, even in the short space of one career, papers he had drafted as a young man were now redolent of another age, of assumptions, attitudes, ways of seeing and doing that seemed as obvious and up to date then as the latest practices did now. And as permanent.

  But these files were also uniquely resonant of four people – Gladiator, Sarah, himself and Nigel, though Nigel was in most volumes an off-stage presence whose significance became apparent only later. For Charles, the interpenetration of their characters infused the notes, minutes, telegrams and letters he had written, even those that were not about them. Despite his intimacy with the story, he was surprised by how much he had forgotten, and by how each recovered detail released clouds of others, like dust from old books.

  He described none of this to the police. There was no point, they could read the files for themselves if they wanted. If they did they would see that the very first papers were not his. A pink memo from the mid-nineties recorded how Nigel Measures, a desk officer in the Foreign Office, had told someone on the MI6 European liaison desk that his wife knew someone who might be of interest to ‘your people’ in the Irish context. Measures, whom the memo described as not always very helpful to MI6, had said that his wife taught law part time in London and Dublin. One of her Dublin students had connections with the Provisional movement and struck her, she reported, as the kind of person someone should talk to, especially now that the Provisionals had broken the ceasefire. Measures himself knew no more than that and – frankly, he said – didn’t want to. Anyone interested should talk directly to his wife, though he doubted there was anything in it – ‘But you people must be used to chasing hares.’

  The next memo recorded that a desk officer from the terrorist section had rung Sarah and had got the student’s name – Martin Worth – along with a summary of remarks he had made, suggesting inside knowledge of the recent Docklands bombing in London and his own disapproval of it. The desk officer had arranged to visit her in London and to trace Worth but she’d rung back to change the meeting because she would be in Dublin. The desk officer was sent abroad on another case and someone noted that Charles, who had just joined the section, was on a familiarisation visit to the embassy in Dublin; he could see her while she was there. The name Martin Worth came back No Trace.

  Next was a telegram sent to Charles in Dublin, giving the background and suggesting he call on Mrs Measures, using an alias. A short reply from Charles explained that he knew her from Oxford, so would have to use his own name. Head Office agreed, reluctantly.

  Of course, this brief exchange conveyed only what had happened but nothing of what mattered. That was the problem with files, even the best-kept. He remembered that when London’s telegram had come through he was reading in the embassy’s communications centre – the comcen – supposedly the most protected part of the building. The comcen was not yet computerised and the floor was littered with encoded ticker-tape from the cipher machines which the Foreign Office cipher clerk, who was deep in his newspaper, had allowed to accumulate. When one of the machines resumed its mechanical chatter he got up with a sigh, pressed a few buttons, shrugged and walked away.

  ‘Something from your lot. You’ll have to get Angie from chancery if you don’t know how to unwrap it.’

  Charles had been trained on that machine, once, and had forgotten. MI6 traffic was double-enciphered and Angie was out to lunch. Charles approached the machine. His fingers hovered over the buttons, then he thought better of it and looked back at the clerk.

  ‘Press that red one first,’ said the clerk, pointing. ‘That’s what Angie does. Then hold the bar, press green and wait till they ask who you are. Then tell them.’ He lit a cigarette.

  Charles watched the telegram come chattering through, gathering the punched tape and tearing it into little pieces before dropping it into the empty Secret Waste bag, where the tangled mess on the floor should have been.

  Sarah’s name and his designation were the first words he read. He had not seen her since the dinner party and had seen little of Nigel. They had no children, he knew from when he had last looked up Nigel in the Diplomatic List, the form book of Foreign Office pedigree and postings. Char
les was in the embassy in Bangkok then, awaiting a briefing from the head of station before making a cold approach to a Chinese diplomat, which hadn’t worked. Nigel and Sarah were in Geneva, he read. Nigel was first secretary political, which was early promotion. Charles suspected that, like most busy and successful people, they lived as if the past had never been.

  He did not. When he had seen her name that morning in Dublin, coughed out in staccato by the cipher machine, it was a shock that felt immediately apt. Of course it had to be her; the past lived in the present, there was a pattern in the carpet, and perhaps it mattered after all.

  He went up to Angie’s empty office to make the call. Sarah answered, he remembered, with the characteristic slight catch in her voice he had noticed again when he’d rung her from the police station. ‘Sarah, it’s Charles Thoroughgood.’

  ‘Hallo, Charles.’

  She sounded as matter-of-fact as he imagined he did. They asked each other how they were, agreed they hadn’t spoken for ages, that life had flown by since the dinner party in Clapham. ‘I’ve been asked to ring you about the person you mentioned to Nigel,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Might we meet today? I’m in Dublin.’

  ‘If you like.’

  He suggested the bar of Jury’s hotel, which he had heard had an international clientele and was safe, the sort of place where British officials and business people could meet.

  Waiting for her in reception, pretending to read a paper, he was surprised by his own nervousness; an indication of how little one knew oneself.