by Alex Gerlis
Perhaps it was the tone of her voice and the clear hint of fear in it that caused him to experience a sudden sensation in the pit of stomach, the unmistakable feeling one gets on hearing bad news. Except in this case he wasn’t sure what the news was. He suggested they go into the lounge to discuss matters and to his surprise she agreed, though only after reminding him to put on his slippers first.
They sat in their respective armchairs, she taking care to smooth out the cover on the armrest and making a visible effort to calm herself.
‘The agency telephoned this afternoon.’
She stared at him as if she’d provided sufficient explanation. The only sound was that of a dysfunctional clock they’d inherited from her mother on the mantelpiece.
‘Which agency, dear?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Colin, how many agencies do we know? The adoption agency, you fool! They’d been contacted by the matron at St Christopher’s who told them a police officer had been enquiring about the adoption of Neville. It transpires he may have family after all, a father indeed. This emerged back in May but the matron didn’t bother to say anything to the agency at the time – she thought she’d dealt with the matter and it had gone away. However, a police officer recently returned to the hospital to make further enquiries. The agency said they wanted us to be aware of this. They assure me it is highly unlikely they’ll link the adoption to the agency and thus with us but they said in the unlikely event of questions being asked we are to stick to our story.’
He nodded and could see why she was worried. ‘I don’t understand why the police haven’t yet contacted the agency.’
‘Because they don’t know about the agency. As far as the hospital was concerned it was an adoption arranged directly by the matron with a Mr and Mrs Brown with an address in Croydon.’
‘But you assured me it was legal.’
‘I felt I had to do that because otherwise you wouldn’t have agreed to it, would you? In any case, we’re giving the boy a decent home, with two God-fearing parents. It’s not as if we’re doing anything wrong.’
‘I’m not sure I understand why the matron is involved?’
‘Don’t be naive Colin – no doubt to supplement her salary. And it’s not as if she’s done any harm.’
‘Well, if we sit tight and the police don’t establish a link between the hospital and the agency we won’t have anything to worry about. But I still don’t understand why you said I’m to blame?’
‘Because when you registered Neville here in Reading, you would insist on filling in a form that included the details of his adoption. I told you, you should have filled in a normal birth certificate and said we’d lost the original.’
‘And I told you, Jean, that would have been too complicated and involve breaking the law, which I was not prepared to do.’
She sat drumming her fingers on the armrest, thinking of her next line of attack.
‘Let us hope the matron is correct and the police make no connection with the agency. They can waste their time looking for a Terence and Margaret Brown.’
Chapter 14
Istanbul, Turkey
September 1943
Richard Prince would be the first to admit he’d taken to aspects of Turkish life in a particularly enthusiastic manner.
He’d lost count of the number of cups of Turkish coffee he drank daily, and at meal times he’d taken to chasing it with glasses of cold Turkish beer which he much preferred to warm English bitter. He’d also developed a taste for Turkish cigarettes; on that first Monday he soon realised that much of the distinctive aroma of the city could be attributed to the ubiquity of the sweet-smelling tobacco. He bought a small packet of Murad cigarettes and finished all ten in the course of the day. By the Tuesday he was chain-smoking them – they were less harsh than their English counterparts, with a more pleasant taste. He loved the food too, in particular that rice was served with most dishes in the same way as potatoes were in Britain. His previous experience of rice had been limited to pudding. Maybe that is what Gilbey had meant by falling in love with the place.
But the chromium trail was proving to be elusive and he realised how much a British agent in a foreign country relied on local help, as he had on his previous mission. So those first few days in Istanbul were strangely paradoxical: on the one hand he loved the environment – he didn’t think he’d ever been so stimulated by a place, so excited to be in it. Yet on the other hand he felt lost, had no idea where to start.
There was one piece of advice Gilbey had given him when he’d come to the safe house in Holland Park one evening: ‘Find a friend, Prince…’ which was typical of Gilbey – an enigmatic remark which he allowed to stand on its own for a while as its apparent wisdom was given time to sink in. Prince said he wasn’t altogether sure what he meant.
‘What I mean, Prince,’ said Gilbey, mildly exasperated and shifting in his armchair to face him, ‘is that when you’re on your own you can’t trust anyone, of course, but that doesn’t mean to say you shouldn’t seek out people who’ll be useful, people who in the normal course of their job can give you helpful guidance – just so long as you’re subtle about it, eh?’ At least he’d found a friend, of sorts: Ismet, the helpful concierge. It was not too fanciful, Prince decided, to anoint Ismet as his friend.
And now it was the Thursday night, five days after his arrival and Prince was sitting at the desk in his room at the Hotel Bristol. In front of him was the typewriter with a blank sheet of paper poised to be written on, as it had been for the past half hour. Alongside the typewriter was a large ashtray, the remains of a dozen Murad cigarettes in it, one alight in his mouth. The window was open and despite the fact it was approaching eleven o’clock the sounds of this extraordinary city showed no signs of dying down: the shouts and laughter from the street, car horns in the distance and beyond them the noise from the ships on the Bosphorus, the river especially busy as a low mist descended on it. In the past few minutes the temperature had dropped and now a pleasant breeze caused the net curtain to billow into the room.
He checked his notebook once more, where the outline for the article he was about to write was written in fountain pen. He was pleased with the idea: an article about the Egyptian Bazaar and the New Mosque alongside it, but built around a homage to Turkish coffee and in particular to the Mehmet Efendi coffee shop. There’d be so much colour in this article even Martin Mason would be impressed – it would be like one of these abstract paintings.
But a nice article was all well and good; what London would want to see was some intelligence and he had none to share. They would take the view that after five days in Istanbul he ought to have made some progress.
It was then he decided he’d buy himself some time: he’d write an article which would slightly – perhaps more than slightly actually – exaggerate what progress he’d made. He was flying solo, as Gilbey called it, so there wasn’t an awful lot they could do about it but it was best if they thought the mission was going well.
He’d write the article tonight, wire it in the morning and then, he resolved, he’d get a move on. If they were shipping tons of chromium from Istanbul, surely that couldn’t be too difficult to find.
DOYLE/ISTANBUL/3SEPT
COFFEE
The slug began with a consonant so they’d know to look for a message, and the article was being sent on a Friday, meaning the key words would be the fourth ones in every third sentence.
He’d written the message down on a separate sheet of paper, which was almost certainly something Christine Wright would strongly disapprove of, but then she was hardly going to approve of him sending a message in the first place about progress in the mission when none had taken place. He’d destroy the sheet anyway once the article was written.
He finished his cigarette, lit another one and flexed his shoulders. He was ready.
Ten minutes later he ripped the paper from the machine and crumpled it up, flinging it in the general direction of the bin. He’d written somethi
ng that read more like a police report than a magazine article, damn Mason and his bloody colour. He went back to the message, which he now realised was possibly too verbose.
It was much harder than he’d realised; it had been difficult enough to secrete the messages into articles written in the safe house in London, but under pressure in a hotel room in Istanbul was a very different matter. A second version only went as far as two paragraphs before joining its predecessor on the floor by the bin and the third attempt was barely even that, just two and a bit sentences replete with errors.
So he paused, telephoned room service for a beer – ‘actually two bottles if you don’t mind’ – and stood by the window, trying to work out where the most distant lights were shining from. He felt ready to try again and composed another version of the message, even tighter this time, before feeding another sheet into the typewriter and started typing with a cigarette wedged in the corner of his mouth as he imagined befitted a journalist.
An hour later he was finished. By now the noise outside had dropped and even the ships on the Bosphorus had fallen silent. He checked the article: the message was there, the fourth word of every third sentence.
There can be no doubt Istanbul … The only real problem comes when … It seems only so much coffee can … Then in the far distance the … Behind there I found a wonderful … The shopkeepers are good at pretending they … The only real contact is with … The sea birds on the quays are … On the same track as the cars and the … The best coffee of the day was … Behind it the fish stall was selling … I found the start of the walk was perhaps…
He read the article through and double-checked the message. It certainly worked: no problem so far found good contact on track of chromium ends.
London should be pleased, which was after all the point of the exercise. They weren’t to know that his ‘good contact’ was no more than an obliging concierge at the hotel and being ‘on track of chromium’ was what he would regard as poetic licence, at its most generous. It was more of a statement of intent than anything else and he wasn’t setting out to deceive.
He’d file the article at the Grand Post Office in the morning and after that there’d be no more messing around. He’d get down to business and it was more than possible that by the time London actually saw the message – probably Monday – he’d have started to make genuine progress.
Pleased with himself he finished the remains of the second bottle of beer, smoked one more Murad and made a point of using the same match to burn the drafts of the eleven-word message.
Richard Prince slept well that night; for the first time in months it was a sleep unpunctuated by nightmares featuring either Henry or Hanne.
* * *
He knew he’d slept well because it had obviously rained heavily overnight and he’d heard nothing despite his window being open. By the time he left the hotel in the morning the rain had stopped, although the surfaces were still damp and a fetid smell rose from the drains.
Istanbul had lost some of its allure that Friday morning as he walked down Beyoğlu and crossed the Golden Horn. The clouds had now passed and the sun was working hard, creating a nasty fug and little plumes of steam as the surface water evaporated. By the time he arrived at the Grand Post Office in Fatih he was exhausted, sweating profusely and regretting not having listened to Ismet as he left the hotel.
‘Where is it you’re going, Mr Doyle, sir, if I may ask?’
‘The Grand Post Office, Ismet.’
‘To file another article?’
Prince had nodded.
‘You are very prolific, Mr Doyle, sir, is that the right word?’
Prince nodded again.
‘My advice would be to take a taxi, Mr Doyle, sir. It is not a pleasant day.’
But Prince had said it was fine, he could do with the walk.
* * *
Inspector Uzun had been having a bad summer in more ways than one. He’d sent his wife and children to the coast to escape the worst the summer had to offer the city. If his wife was surprised at his generosity she didn’t question it: he’d booked a villa in Bodrum large enough for her and the children and her two sisters and their children too. It was the least he could do, he assured her.
It was costing him a small fortune, but it would be worth it. He’d rented an apartment with views of the Bosphorus not far from his office, where he’d installed Hamida, a curvaceous Lebanese girl who assured him she was twenty-four and had never met a man as distinguished as him. He was, she told him, a wonderful lover, quite unlike all the Frenchmen she had known. For the whole of August Inspector Uzun would have Hamida all to himself. The fact that the rent for the apartment in Istanbul along with that of the villa in Bodrum was costing him a fortune was something he’d have to deal with. He was to be interviewed for promotion at the start of September and that, in his opinion, was something of a formality.
But the summer had been a disaster. Hamida had been in the apartment with views of Bosphorus for less than five days when she announced she had to return to Beirut as a matter of urgency: her mother was ill and was demanding her return. Inspector Uzun not only paid for her first-class rail fare to Beirut but also gave her enough money to return to Istanbul – first class, of course – when her mother recovered. He’d also lent her money to buy medicines in Beirut, quite a lot of money as it happened – enough money to buy all the medicine in Beirut, he thought, but she did promise she’d pay him back. Every night away from him would be the darkest night of her life, she assured him.
He never heard from Hamida again.
And by the time he was interviewed for promotion at the start of September his work record was looking pretty poor. Thanks to Hamida’s disappearance he’d spent all of August in a state of torpor, lacking energy and motivation, worried sick about money. July hadn’t been much better and, looking back on his casebook, nor had May or June. At his interview they’d asked how many weeks it had been since he’d found any spies or recruited new informers – proper ones, mind, not time-wasters. He was welcome to try again for promotion in a year… or two.
All of which explained Inspector Uzun’s special interest in the Irish journalist staying at the Hotel Bristol. This man called Doyle had done little to arouse suspicion other than the fact he was a journalist newly arrived in the city, but Inspector Uzun was becoming desperate and decided to keep a close eye on the Irishman: he might well provide him with the break he needed. After all, Ismet was a reliable source, not exactly the excitable type. So when on that Friday morning Ismet rang him to let him know the journalist was on his way to file another article, Inspector Uzun decided to pay a visit himself to the Grand Post Office. He’d go after lunch, which meant he could treat himself to a coffee – or two – at nearby Mehmet Efendi.
The best coffee in Istanbul.
* * *
The inspector has encountered the usual fuss at the Grand Post Office about obtaining copies of the articles. First of all they had to find them and then he had to fill in various forms and wait for the manager’s manager to approve the release of the articles, and when Inspector Uzun started shouting about national security the manager just looked at him as if he didn’t really care but obviously wasn’t going to say as much. Inspector Uzun wondered whether he was letting matters get to him. He could have done with a holiday in the villa at Bodrum, never mind his wife and her many sisters. Quite how he was going to pay all the bills…
On his way back to the office he stopped at a bar in Galatasary where he’d had a very lucrative arrangement with the owner for a couple of years. In return for a regular payment by the owner, Inspector Uzun ensured the bar – and in particular some of its more nefarious activities – remained untroubled by his more officious colleagues. He decided to ask the owner, a genial and very overweight man called Osman, for an advance in return for what he’d promise would be an enhanced service. The visit was a disaster: Osman’s cousin was now running the place, the owner having recently suffered a serious heart attac
k. Not only did the cousin decline to pay an advance, he informed Uzun he wasn’t going to give him any money at all. Ever. He had his own contacts in the police and now perhaps he’d like to leave.
Worried and humiliated, Uzun returned to the office of the secret police near the Dolmabahçe Palace where his mood did not improve. He read the articles, which appeared to be disappointingly innocuous. Although his English was good, he’d be the first to accept it wasn’t fluent so he passed the two articles on to one of the translators. He wanted these translated as a matter of urgency. And while they were at it, they should send them to the people who checked documents for codes, which was something he had trouble understanding.
He had to wait until Tuesday for the translations and the report from the coding team to come back. The latter couldn’t detect any problems at all, though they’d need to see more than two articles to detect any kind of pattern, and then the report started to talk about frequency, which was something else he had trouble understanding.
But he wasn’t giving up; he told his superior – one of the men who’d turned down his promotion – that he had a good lead, a possible spy. Things were looking up.
Now all he had to do was find a shred of evidence.
At least he had an idea where to start.
* * *
After filing his second article at the Grand Post Office, Prince spent the rest of that Friday, the weekend and the start of the next week walking the shore, searching for docks that would seem a likely place from where chromium might be shipped. He decided to be systematic about it, taking a taxi to different locations, walking along the shore, exploring the various quays and ports, taking innocent photos of the river with his Kodak, the Minox ready in case it was needed.
