The Dark Chronicles

by Jeremy Duns

  We carried on doing this for a few minutes, not saying anything. I think Sasha was afraid to – in silence, it was easier to pretend we were doing something else, so he busied himself with selecting the best stones for the job, delegating their placement to me. It was as though he were a child building a sandcastle, searching for decoration for one of the turrets.

  When Chief was pretty much laden, I took his house-keys from my coat and placed them in his top pocket. No harm in being tidy. I signalled to Sasha. Chief’s face and hands already looked grey in the yard’s sulphurous light. Had I not pulled the trigger, he’d have been stirring his cup of cocoa and shuffling into bed about now – having just heard all about my involvement in Father’s mission from Pritchard, and had me arrested for treason as a result.

  I stopped looking at him and told Sasha to do the same; it wasn’t making things easier. We lifted him again, shimmied to the edge and started swinging him until we had a reasonable rhythm and some height. Then I counted to three, and we heaved forward and let him go.

  *

  I was enveloped in a fog of cigarette smoke as I walked into Ronnie Scott’s. Once I’d made my way through it, I saw that the support band was still on – three earnest young men sweating for their art in matching orange brocade suits – and the place was packed.

  I usually savoured the atmosphere, but tonight I had to find Vanessa, and fast. I was close to half an hour late and I wasn’t sure what kind of mood she would be in – our afternoon of lovemaking might have left her feeling the snub even more.

  We hadn’t visited the club since the previous summer, and it had expanded in the meantime, but I remembered that she liked to sit as close to the stage as possible, so I bypassed the bar and made for the candlelit tables up front. There was no sign of her. I scanned the crowd desperately: a handsome Indian gent in a pinstripe suit and white turban; a party of young women, all sporting the same outlandish hairdo; an elderly man enraptured by the band, playing along on an imaginary piano – every face in London, it seemed, but one. Perhaps she was in the lavatory, or had left a message with one of the waitresses. I was walking towards the bar, when I felt a tug at my sleeve.

  ‘So there you are,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘I was about to give up hope!’

  Her hair was down and her body poured into the turquoise shantung dress I’d bought her at Dior a few weeks earlier on a spree. She’d embellished it with a cream organza shawl and a necklace of ivory bones that showed off her tan. Her eyes were a little hooded, and one shoulder sloped oddly: she was either drunk, or high, or both.

  I felt the tension leave me. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ I said, raising my voice so I could be heard over a saxophone solo. She laughed gaily and offered me her hand. I took it and she led me away from the stage, towards her table.

  ‘Yes, well, I’m sorry, too. Where on earth have you been? Killing Russians again?’

  I forced a smile. ‘Not quite. But something came up.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ve been quite happy, really. I bumped into one of Daddy’s friends and he’s been entertaining me in your absence – such a charming man, and so knowledgeable. I believe he’s also in your game?’

  The tall, slender figure was seated at her table between a half-finished bottle of chilled Riesling and a plate of chicken curry, his jacket resting on his knees and his eyes fixed on me.

  ‘Why, hello, Paul,’ said Pritchard, with a wintry smile. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’

  IV

  Monday, 24 March 1969, London

  I woke to see the word ‘BECHEROVKA’ swimming in front of my eyes. My first thought was that I was still at Chief’s house, but then the ringing in my ears and the coating on my teeth brought it all back.

  Pritchard had left the club soon after my arrival. He hadn’t mentioned that he had been at Chief’s, though in a way I’d found that more troubling. But strangely enough, despite the fright he’d given me, I had almost been sorry to see him go, as I hadn’t had much to say to Vanessa. I’d hung on at the club with her for another hour, wearing a death’s-head grin and sweating inside my coat as the music spiralled out of control, before finally feigning tiredness and suggesting we leave.

  I’d hailed her a cab – the longer I spent with her, the worse it would be. She hadn’t been pleased, of course, but she’d taken it reasonably well and hadn’t asked any questions. I had told her I’d call her in the morning, then I’d hopped in the car and driven back to South Kensington.

  After parking near the flat, I had taken the bag from behind the back seat and thrown it into the bins behind an Italian restaurant. On impulse, I’d fished out the bottle of Becherovka and taken it up to the flat with me, hiding it under my jacket so the porter wouldn’t see.

  I’d slept very little, spending most of the night going through what had happened and getting to the bottom of the bottle. Now, as the dawn light fell on overturned chairs and shattered glass, I stripped and forced myself to work through the old fitness regimen. By the end of it, I was dripping in sweat and my mind was focused on the morning ahead. I had three objectives. Visit Station 12 and pick up my copy of the Slavin dossier – I didn’t want to have to explain why I hadn’t already received it. See if Chief’s file on Anna was in Registry – as a Head of Section I had full clearance, although one didn’t usually ask to see material related to Chief without a very good reason. I had several. But above all, I had to make sure I was sent out to Nigeria. I had no idea what else Slavin might have up his sleeve, and I needed to hear it before anyone else.

  Resolved, I took a bath, shaved and put on a fresh suit. After a scratch breakfast, I packed an old canvas hold-all with a few clothes and took the lift downstairs. I left a message for George to give the car the full treatment, outside and in. Then I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take me to Lambeth.

  *

  ‘Gentlemen!’ William Osborne’s stentorian tones put a sudden stop to the murmuring around the table. ‘I think it’s time we settled down and got this show on the road, as our American friends like to say.’

  He gave a slightly unconvincing chortle, and his waistcoat expanded in the process. Unblessed by the breeding or charm that had smoothed the waters for others, Osborne had clawed his way to becoming Head of Western Hemisphere Section by virtue of his prodigious intellect. A highly capable administrator, he had been widely expected to take over as Deputy Chief last year, but the job had instead gone to John Farraday, a smooth Foreign Office nob with no previous experience of the spy game but a penchant for hosting lavish dinner parties. Osborne had managed to isolate him within weeks, and nobody was in any doubt who really ran things when Chief was away. But he didn’t have the title, yet – and it was by no means a certainty that he’d get it.

  This meeting was held every Monday morning at this time, and was known as ‘the Round Table’, although none of us were knights and the table was, in fact, rectangular. Farraday had just arrived and taken his place in his usual corner; he was now busily checking that his cuffs were protruding from his jacket sleeves by half an inch. Seated immediately to his right, and directly facing me, was Pritchard. In a crisp, narrow-cut pinstripe suit and woven silk tie, he didn’t look in the least as though he’d been sipping Riesling in a Soho jazz club less than nine hours ago.

  After the war, Pritchard had joined MI5, where he had eventually become Head of E Branch: Colonial Affairs. When it had finally become clear to the Whitehall mandarins that it was suicidal to have intelligence officers posted in former colonies with no official links to the Service, which was responsible for all other overseas territories, E Branch had been taken over, and Pritchard had moved with it. Coming from Five, and being a Scot to boot, had initially made him a deeply suspected outsider, especially as many of the Service’s old guard had been forcibly retired at the same time he joined. However, he was also a decorated war hero, independently wealthy, and staunchly right-wing, and within a few months of his joining the Service he had been taken up as a kin
d of mascot by its rank and file: their man on the board. While in Five, Pritchard had been converted to the Americans’ idea that British intelligence was still penetrated by the KGB, and he’d devoted a great deal of time and energy to examining old files and case histories in the hope of catching another mole. He’d brought this zeal with him to the Service, and it had made him a lot of high-ranking friends. Chief and Osborne had initially been all in favour of Pritchard’s ‘hunting expeditions’, as his periodic attempts to uproot traitors were known, but now felt that he and his clique were stoking an atmosphere of paranoia and distrust. I tended to agree.

  Naturally, I had watched Pritchard’s entry into the Service and subsequent rise in popularity within it with considerable unease – the tall bespectacled ghost I had met in a farmhouse in Germany in 1945 was, for obvious reasons, the last person on earth I wanted to work alongside, especially as he now seemed on a drive to find moles inside the Service. I had been appointed Head of Section at an unusually tender age, partly due to Father’s near-mythical status within the Service and partly due to Chief’s patronage. Now Pritchard had caught up with me, and although Africa was one of the smaller Sections, there was already talk of him in the corridors as a potential Deputy Chief, or even Chief, somewhere down the line.

  Also seated around the table were Godsal, who headed up Middle East Section, Quiney, responsible for Western Europe, and Smale, who was standing in for Far East as Innes was on leave. They all looked harmless enough, with their schoolmasters’ faces and woollen suits, but I was under no illusions: they could be lethal. One ill-timed gesture, one misplaced word, and they would pounce. Technically, treason still warranted the death penalty. If I were exposed, I had no doubt they’d apply every technicality in the book. So: tread carefully. I needed things to go my way.

  Osborne pushed a garishly cuff-linked sleeve to one side to examine his wristwatch. ‘I was hoping Chief would be able to start us off,’ he said, ‘but he doesn’t seem to have arrived yet.’ His piggy little eyes, buried behind thick black frames, darted downwards, as if he thought Chief might be about to emerge from beneath the table.

  ‘Strange,’ I murmured under my breath.

  ‘Did you say something, Paul?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, looking up sheepishly. ‘It’s just that… No. Never mind, carry on.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well… it just struck me that it’s very unlike Chief. He’s usually in well before nine on Mondays, isn’t he?’

  Osborne inspected a fingernail, then nibbled at it viciously. ‘Has he called in?’ he asked Smale, who was performing his usual duties as the head of Chief’s secretariat in parallel with his new role. Smale shook his head.

  ‘Perhaps traffic’s bad,’ I said. ‘God knows this place is hard enough to get to from the centre of town.’

  Osborne nodded: the old buildings had been a short walk from his flat.

  ‘It is a little peculiar,’ said Pritchard suddenly, the traces of his Morningside accent amplified by the room’s acoustics. ‘He called me in to see him last night but wasn’t there by the time I arrived.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Osborne, turning his head. ‘What did he want to see you about?’

  ‘The Slavin file – at any rate, his message was attached to that.’

  ‘What time did you get the message?’ asked Osborne.

  ‘Around seven. I’d just come back from Enfield and left straight away, but the house was deserted when I arrived.’

  ‘Perhaps he’d fallen asleep,’ I suggested.

  ‘I don’t think so. I checked pretty thoroughly.’

  Yes, I thought – you did.

  ‘I was worried something might have happened,’ Pritchard continued, ‘but I couldn’t for the life of me remember the way to Barnes’s cottage and didn’t want to call in a Full Alert without ample reason. I suddenly remembered Chief sometimes spends weekends in London with his daughter, Vanessa. I called her flat, and her roommate – a charming young Australian girl – told me she’d just left for a club in Soho, so I thought I’d drive in to see if Chief was with her – or if she knew where he’d got to.’

  ‘And did she?’ asked Godsal.

  ‘No. She also thought he was out at Swanwick and was equally mystified. But I bumped into Paul there.’

  The table’s eyes turned to me.

  ‘Caught red-handed,’ I said, grinning sheepishly. ‘I’ve a soft spot for jazz.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Pritchard, ‘is that what it was?’ Then, pointedly: ‘She seemed quite taken with you.’

  I did my best to blush.

  ‘Perhaps we should give him a call,’ said Osborne, rescuing me. ‘Perhaps he’s simply slept in.’ He nodded at Smale quickly, before anyone could dwell too much on the unlikely image of Chief failing to set his alarm clock, and Smale walked briskly across the room and picked up a telephone sitting on one of the filing cabinets. As he dialled, I imagined the ring echoing in the empty house. To fill the silence, people conspicuously shuffled pieces of paper, fiddled with pen tops and suddenly realized they had lost their glasses cases, until Smale eventually replaced the receiver and shook his head, and we all went back to staring at him.

  ‘Call Barnes,’ said Osborne, and waved his hand to indicate he should do it elsewhere.

  Smale nodded and slithered out of the door. And that was that: the ball was rolling. Within a couple of hours, a team of specialists would begin prowling through Chief’s living room with dogs and cameras and ink pads. Looking for evidence, looking for blood. I’d carried out last night’s work in a kind of concentrated trance. Now I was gripped by panic as the reality of it came back to me, and a series of possible lapses leapt through my mind. Had I swept every inch of the carpet? Covered the bullet-mark adequately? I had a sudden flash of Chief’s dark, frozen eyes staring up at me from the floor – could I really have removed all trace of that horror?

  Osborne clapped his great hands together. ‘I think we should start. I know some of you have to prepare for the Anguilla meeting later. There is only one item on today’s agenda – the Slavin dossier, which I trust you have all now read. All other matters will be covered in our next meeting.’ He turned to Pritchard. ‘Perhaps you could start us off, Henry?’

  ‘By all means.’ Pritchard walked over to the door and dimmed the lights, then fiddled with the projector in the centre of the table. After some clicks and whirrs, a magnified photograph suddenly appeared on the wall facing us. A man with stooped shoulders and a widow’s peak was bending down to examine a wooden mask at a street market, a quizzical smile on his lips.

  ‘Meet Colonel Vladimir Mikhailovich Slavin of the KGB,’ said Pritchard. ‘Unmarried. No children. Walked into the High Commission in Lagos on Friday and asked for a British passport in exchange for information about a double agent. In an interview with Geoffrey Manning, the Head of Station, Slavin claimed that Moscow had recruited this agent in Germany in 1945, and that he was given the code-name Radnya.’ He peered at the table over his half-moon spectacles. ‘Needless to say, if true, this would be a monumental disaster. Twenty-four years is a very long time for a double agent to remain undetected, and Christ knows what damage he could have caused.’

  With a click, another photograph filled the top half of the wall. This was of a woman, three-quarters in profile, her hair swept back, no make-up. She looked older, of course – but it was her. I focused on her eyes, trying to read anything in them, but she was squinting in the harsh light and it wasn’t possible. An ancient line of poetry I’d last heard recited in a dusty classroom suddenly flashed through my mind, unbidden: With them that walk against me, is my sun…

  ‘This is the other figure we’re looking at. Irina Grigorieva, a third secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Lagos. According to Slavin, she recruited Radnya after falling in love with him. Cherchez la femme.’ He allowed a brief interval for polite laughter. Once a couple of people had obliged, he continued: ‘Both of these pictures, incidentally, were taken by the Station’s wa
tchers within the last couple of years, so we can take it that this is more or less how they look today.’ He walked back to the door and turned the lights back up.

  ‘Do we know what their duties involve?’ asked Farraday.

  ‘I had a look at our records this morning, and we have Slavin down as arriving in Nigeria in ’65, under cover as a political attaché. Before that, he was in similar positions in Kinshasa and Accra, which makes him something of an Africa expert in Russian terms. Our educated guess is that his job is to formulate policy in the region – and, of course, to keep an eye on what everyone else is getting up to.’

  ‘Everyone else meaning us?’ asked Farraday. He seemed to be following the discussion, for a change.

  Pritchard nodded. ‘Among others. I presume everyone here’s au fait with the situation in Nigeria?’ He took some smart buff folders out of his briefcase and handed them round the table – the covers boasted the grand title ‘THE NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR: A SUMMARY AND ASSESSMENT OF THE CONFLICT TO DATE’. ‘This is a draft of a paper we’ll be sending the Cabinet next week,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll find we’ve covered a lot of ground.’ Leafing through it, I could see he wasn’t exaggerating: there was a section on the country’s history, a detailed chronology of all the major events of the war so far, profiles of the leading personalities on both sides… I felt a pang of professional jealousy.

  ‘I think you all know the basics,’ Pritchard went on airily. ‘But in case you’ve got sick of following it on the news, I’ll quickly summarize the salient facts. Nigeria is our largest former colony. When it gained independence in ’60, it was the great hope of Africa – a shining new democracy of thirty-five million people, with enormous potential both as a trading partner and as a political force for good in the continent. But independence was swiftly followed by chaos and violence. Pogroms against the Ibo tribe in the east eventually led to that region seceding from the rest of the country and renaming itself the Republic of Biafra. That sparked a civil war. So far, so Africa. From our point of view, however, it’s been a complete mess, unfortunately compounded by our government’s handling of the situation. We initially refused to take sides in the war, sitting resolutely on the fence. Then, in August ’67, the Nigerians – “the Federal side” – took delivery of several Czech Delphin L-29 jet-fighters from Moscow. That sent us into a panic: nobody wants the Russians to be in control of one of Africa’s largest nations once the war ends. As a result, we’ve now painted ourselves into a corner, and are effectively competing with Moscow to provide more and more arms to the Nigerians, in the hope of gaining favour with them after the war.’