Dead Letter Drop

by James, Peter

  Arthur pointed me into the empty chair, and I sat down. ‘So tell me, what have you been up to?’ Arthur leaned over, smiling. I smiled back.

  ‘A bit of this and a bit of that.’

  ‘Have you indeed?’ He grinned.

  ‘I would have thought you might be able to tell me!’

  He looked taken aback. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  I waved my arm at the surroundings. ‘I thought this lot kept such a close eye on everyone, it knows what they’re going to do even before they do it.’

  Arthur laughed heartily. ‘Heavens, what a thought. The time it takes before information is handed to us to file . . . I often think we’d get it quicker by going out and buying history books.’

  I gave him a look which told him that I knew what he’d said was rubbish; he caught the look, but moved away from the subject. ‘What can I – or rather, Wotan – do for you?’

  Wotan is the nickname given to the computer that is the brain of this entire headquarters.

  ‘How is Wotan?’

  ‘Not too bad, not too bad; like wine, improving with age. The amount of things Wotan doesn’t know are getting fewer and fewer; won’t be long before there’s little left that’s not in his brain that will be worth knowing. But the trouble is there’s so much happening these days, so much, it’s a constant struggle to keep pace. That’s why the likes of you are so important to us, damned important. Don’t ever forget it.’

  I asked him some technical questions about recent increases in Wotan’s capacity, which sent him off on a ten-minute eulogy on modern science, leading to a dramatic climax of how all the greatest inventions of man had come together, culminating in one gigantic orgy of knowledge, and the child this orgy produced was Wotan. He was more excited than any child talking about his new train set could ever be. He was beaming as he talked and vibrating in the pauses. Wotan evidently turned him on.

  When he finished he leaned forward once again. ‘Well, now you know the latest, what would you like us to do for you?’

  I pulled out the chip. ‘First thing, I want to leave this with you. I need it back tomorrow, and want you to tell me everything you can about its contents.’

  He turned it over in his palm. ‘A familiar enough face. What do you already know?’

  ‘Not much,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a few ideas and I’d like to see if yours tally. It’s vital we find out exactly what its purpose is.’

  Arthur nodded.

  ‘The next thing,’ I said, ‘is this.’ I produced a letter from Fifeshire and handed it to him.

  He looked at it. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he said after reading it through.

  ‘Carry out the instructions in it.’

  Arthur looked quizzically at me. ‘Where do you want to begin?’

  ‘Doesn’t it say?’

  ‘Haven’t you read it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you’d better.’ He handed the letter to me.

  I read it. I had asked Fifeshire to authorise Arthur to make certain classified information available to me. Fifeshire had gone one further, and instructed Arthur that he was to make available to me absolutely any information about anyone, however senior they might be, not only in MI5, MI6 and all the other areas of Intelligence but also the Government and the armed forces and anywhere else I wanted to look. I was to be allowed access to any files I cared to see, from the Prime Minister downwards. I read the note with more than a little surprise. ‘Where I would like to begin,’ I said, ‘is with the name and records of everyone employed in British Intelligence.’

  Arthur looked staggered. ‘Wouldn’t you like something simpler,’ he said, ‘like last year’s cup final result?’

  I grinned.

  ‘You know what they call you in the Department, Max?’

  ‘No.’

  It was Arthur’s turn to grin. ‘The Digger,’ he said.

  ‘The Digger? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  It was his turn to grin. ‘You seem to have a reputation for thoroughness – not leaving stones unturned, digging away until you get to the bottom, never letting go. To tell you the truth I don’t think anyone thought you’d make a very good spy. You’ve changed their minds for them very neatly.’

  ‘Who’s ‘‘everyone’’?’

  Arthur smiled. ‘Word gets around,’ was all he would say. ‘Right, shall we make a start?’

  ‘Have you some paper?’

  He looked at me ruefully. ‘When were you last here? We don’t use it any more, not in this office. If all the information that goes in and out of this office went down on paper, England would be 3 feet deep in the stuff in a month.’ He tapped the computer terminal. ‘Much cleaner. Much kinder on trees too. Any notes you want to make you’d better jot down on whatever you have on you. That’s Arthur’s Law.’ He smiled. ‘Anyhow, it’s bad for the old brain to write things down. Remember them up here,’ he tapped his head. Then he leaned forward and tapped the keyboard. The word R-E-Q-U-E-S-T- followed by a string of meaningless letters appeared, then the word P-E-R-S-O-N-N-E-L appeared. The words disappeared, there was a brief pause, and then the words reappeared again, by themselves, with one additional word: R-E-A-D-Y. It was reassuring to know computers could be so banal.

  ‘Want some tea?’ said Arthur.

  I nodded, and he gave an order into an intercom on the back of his desk. Then we started. For the next ten minutes a succession of names followed by personal details poured onto the screen. They appeared in a clinical lettering that was oblivious to the fact that human lives was the subject matter: ‘Dallyn. June, Sally. Nee Wick. B. 16-3-38. Widow. Late husband: Kevin, Eric. Cause of death: coronary arrest. Place of death: Black Lion Lane, London W1, prostitute’s apartment. Prostitute: Nola Kebbit. Children: Daniel Henry Nigel, Susan Margaret Anne, Mary Angela Jennifer . . .’

  It was all there; the dates, the schools, the hobbies, the family friends, where they spent their holidays, who they slept with, the charities they supported; all the good and bad and the skeletons in the closets; all the facts not originally entered on the job application forms, that had been gleaned by the team of agents whose sole job, unsavoury but necessary, was much the same as that of ordinary private eyes operating throughout the country: to pry out all the facts. The only difference between these agents and the private eyes was that private eyes mainly worked on jobs concerning marriage fidelity; the agents worked on jobs concerning a different type of fidelity: fidelity to the country.

  Tea arrived. It wasn’t served by a robot but by a tea lady who looked like she’d been kloned from an original mould, produced by a factory that supplied railway and factory canteens throughout the land. As she opened the door the screen went blank, and would remain blank until after she had departed and Arthur pushed the reset button.

  Arthur sat awkwardly, confused by the presence of this lady as she shuffled about, placing first saucers, then cups, then spoons in front of us, then pouring first milk into the cups, then tea, then putting down a plate and then putting biscuits onto the plate. He swivelled his head as if it was on a mechanical pivot, to look at her, at the tray, at me, at the table, then back to her again. For the last hour he had brimmed with information, glowed like a light bulb while Wotan spewed forth, and now, suddenly, he had shrivelled up, as if another coin needed to be put into his meter.

  I looked at his bushy face and thought about the extraordinary life he had spent so much of, and would continue to spend a great deal more of, down here in this bright hole, going home at night in his Ford Cortina to another bright hole, to a bright little wife to whom he no doubt waxed lyrical about the latest advances in microprocessor technology, about Josephson junctions and packet switching and finite state theory.

  Arthur, with his walking holidays in Snowdonia, and his £12,000 a year pay packet, would no doubt go on for many years to come, waking with a bushy smile in the mornings while I would wake a shaking wreck, diving for my gun, trying to remember where I was each morning; in 30
years’ time Arthur would still be waking, smiling, in his own bed, slitting open his mail, reading his papers, and I would probably be long since buried – silently, quietly killed and buried in some far-off lonely land.

  A bag was thrust under my nose. It contained Turkish delight: green ones with white icing. It was a crinkly paper bag of the sort sold at any confectioners. Crème-de-menthe-flavoured Turkish delight was his one vice in life, so he had previously told me; he never smoked, never drank, but ate incessant quantities of crème-de-menthe Turkish delight. I took one from the bag, and it laid a little trail of icing sugar across the glistening table-top.

  I had a couple more lumps. That little paper bag and the growing trails of icing sugar, the plate of biscuits and the steaming cups on the table were all a welcome intrusion into this strange twilight world that, but for this array of items from the ordinary world outside, could well have been on another planet altogether. Thinking about Wetherby’s crinkly bag of peanuts, I idly wondered whether a crinkly bag of goodies was an essential item of equipment for employees of British Intelligence.

  We settled back down to work again. We were about a quarter of the way through the A’s. Arthur put a Turkish delight and half a gingernut into his mouth, and chewed them happily. ‘Curious taste, the two together; mix very well. Did you bring your overnight bag?’

  ‘No, I’ve taken a 6-year lease on this corner of your office.’

  ‘Well, I hope the lease is renewable, because it’s going to take all of that.’ He was longing to ask me what it was I was looking for, and then to be able to point me straight to the answer – if it lay in here at all, which I doubted; but he knew it wasn’t his job to ask, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell him.

  An hour and a half later we got to my name. The file was up to date to the start of my assignment in the States. No one had been able to find out very much of interest about me and there was certainly nothing there that upset me. There was nothing under Jephcott that upset him either. He’d probably made sure of that himself, not that there was likely to have been anything much anyway.

  We finished that particular job at eleven o’clock. Arthur looked blearily at me; the hair in the immediate vicinity of his mouth was almost white with icing sugar. I hadn’t slept for two nights and right now, as far as I was concerned, another one wasn’t going to make much difference. I wanted to get my job done and to be gone from England before anyone else found out I was here, and news didn’t travel slowly in my particular company.

  Arthur telephoned his wife for the third time. He had missed the cocktail party they had been going to, he’d missed the dinner party she’d decided to go on to and meet him at, and he was becoming resigned to the fact that there was every likelihood he was going to miss breakfast as well. He talked to his wife with all the tenderness of someone dictating a letter to the rates officer. He put the receiver down and looked up at me. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

  ‘Orchnev,’ I said.

  He looked thoughtful. ‘Rings a bell. Can’t place it, though. Does ring a bell.’ He stroked his beard. ‘Russian. Wanted to flog some secrets. Something like that.’ He tapped the keyboards and a short dossier appeared, much as Karavenoff had described, but more detailed. The dossier ended with a written letter to Fifeshire dated 15 July – exactly one month before Fifeshire was shot. The letter was short and to the point. Orchnev introduced himself as being a senior member of the Science Council of the Politburo. He wished to defect and live in England, and would be willing to trade information for cooperation on the part of the British authorities. He stated he would be prepared to provide evidence of the calibre of information he had, and asked Fifeshire to reply to an address in West Germany.

  The letter had been delivered by a complicated route; it was brought to the United States by a bribed Aeroflot stewardess, it then went to the British Embassy in Washington, who passed it on in the diplomatic bag. It was marked ‘Received’ by Whitehall on 12 August – three days before the shooting. It was not the sort of letter Fifeshire would have forgotten, yet he hadn’t mentioned it when I saw him, in spite of my showing him the second letter.

  ‘You must have a reply to this letter,’ I said.

  Arthur shook his head. ‘It would be here if there was one. Maybe Sir Charles didn’t have time to deal with it before the shooting.’

  ‘Then surely someone else would have . . .’ I trailed off. I was saying it to myself as much as to Arthur. Who dealt with whose correspondence wasn’t his division. ‘Could the reply be in another file?’

  ‘If it was there’d be a copy here too. Everything in Wotan is cross-referenced to everything else. Everything with the name Orchnev in it would be duplicated here.’

  ‘Wotan could be fallible.’

  Arthur’s tiredness was beginning to show. ‘Most unlikely,’ he said, almost bitchily, springing to Wotan’s defence. ‘And where do you suppose you’d start looking?’

  ‘I don’t know, Arthur, I don’t know.’ I did know, but I too was tiring now, and I had a pretty strong feeling that Wotan probably hadn’t made a mistake and I wasn’t going to find anything else here. I knew one thing for certain; from the wording of the letter that was in my pocket there must have been a reply to Orchnev and most probably quite a bit of correspondence with him. It wasn’t in Wotan because someone hadn’t wanted it in Wotan.

  18

  Arthur offered me a lift home and I accepted gratefully. The rented car could stay in the police pound; it wasn’t my headache. I wondered what condition my mews house in Holland Park would be in, since invariably when I go away for any length of time my cleaning lady falls sick and doesn’t turn up, and the fridge, loaded with meat and milk, always breaks down the day after I’ve left.

  There was something Arthur wanted to say to me, to tell me – I more than sensed it, I was sure of it; yet as we left, in the express elevator which took us up to the back of the police car pound, he just made small talk. I climbed sleepily into his bright green Cortina; it smelt of dogs, as I had imagined it might.

  I gave him plenty of opportunities to say what he wanted on the way to Holland Park but he just continued with the small talk. I asked him to drop me a couple of blocks from the mews; I felt like some fresh air and I wanted to check the immediate vicinity of the house for any prowlers. I arranged to see Arthur the following afternoon and thanked him for his time.

  I walked on down Notting Hill Gate and turned into Holland Street. The past hours with Arthur had given me plenty more to chew on; but whilst the pieces seemed to fit, the puzzle was only getting larger. Fifeshire, I was certain, had told me the truth; but if he hadn’t received Orchnev’s first letter then it must have been someone in the same department who had intercepted it. Maybe Arthur knew who it was that had prevented the information getting into Wotan; maybe that is what he was trying to bring himself to tell me – a lot of maybes at the moment. Arthur did, for sure, want to tell me something; I had no doubt that one way or another I’d be finding out what before too long.

  I turned the corner into the dark. From a house at the end with several cars parked outside and light streaking from behind the curtains, music blared out, punctuated by odd snatches of laughter; it was evidently a good party. There were no other lights on in the rest of the mews.

  I turned the key in the lock; it should have been double-locked, but the door opened at the first turn of the key. I pulled out my gun, slipped the safety catch, and went in, snapping on the hall light as I did so, then falling headlong, with my foot trapped in something.

  The carpet and floorboards had been removed; I lay there, blinking in amazement at the dust-covered foundations and the timber joists; it was between two joists that I had caught my foot. I picked myself up and started to look around. No cleaning lady would have stood a chance. The place was literally destroyed: every inch of fabric – curtains, carpets, sofa covering, chair coverings – had been systematically torn into strips. The furniture had been dismantled and hacked into little
pieces. Light bulbs had been broken open, the plumbing disconnected and all the pipes – water, drainage, sewage, the lot – ripped from out of the bowels of the house and laid on the floors. The walls had been stripped, not only of their paint and wallpaper but also their plaster; even the round brass door handles had been hack-sawed out.

  Whoever had been here must have been pretty damn sure there was something hidden, or pretty mad at me. The only thing that had been left reasonably intact was the actual shell of the building; other than that, with the exception of a couple of lights, there was nothing that had not been destroyed. Fortunately I’m not too sentimental.

  I cleared myself a few feet of space, assembled a pile of shredded fabrics, lay down and slept through until morning. I awoke at about half six, feeling cold, stiff and in need of a night’s sleep. I couldn’t even make myself a cup of coffee, since someone had been to work on the kettle with a can opener and the stove looked like a child’s attempt at building a Meccano battleship.