The Cilla Rose Affair

by Winona Kent

  Ian emptied the tub and, massaging his injured shoulder, peered into the mirror over the sink. A headful of bedraggled red hair, an acute African sunburn, assorted bruises and lacerations: he looked like a manic-depressive lobster. Discarding his towel, he eased on the white terrycloth robe the hotel had thoughtfully provided on the doorhook, and went out to see what his father had brought. Arranged on top of the dressing table were assorted white cartons of Chinese take-away: Almond Chicken and Beef Chow Mein, Sweet and Sour Prawns, Egg Rolls.

  “Tempting your gallbladder?” he inquired, peering into the box containing the prawns, “or testing it?”

  “A little of both, I suspect,” Evan replied, producing two pairs of paper-wrapped chopsticks from the breast pocket of his windbreaker and setting out the contents of the shopping bags on the bed: new clothes for Ian, a bundle of typewritten yellow pages. He glanced at a large, dark bruise that was sulking its way down his son’s right leg. “Did you want me to ring for the medics?”

  “No thanks. I’ve met the doctor you people keep on call in London. I’d rather go without.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ll live,” Ian said, emphatically, picking up the yellow papers. “What are these?”

  “Yuri Gregchenko’s famous last words.” Evan set up the VCR while his son perched on the edge of the dressing table, paging through the manuscript. On the television, a special news bulletin announcing unfolding political developments in Moscow caused the elder Harris to pause.

  “The Cilla Rose,” Ian said, stopping at the page his father had marked with a red paperclip.

  Evan was still watching the news. “MI5 was suspicious of her from the moment Seasound went on the air. The Soviets were making regular submarine patrols of the area—and Seasound appeared to be anchored in a particularly advantageous position.”

  “So they suspected radio transmissions, that sort of thing.”

  “That sort of thing, yes. For a pirate station, they were exceptionally well-funded. They had a fan club, T-shirts, window stickers, high profile advertising. They published their own monthly magazine and sponsored dances in clubs around the country. There was the question of ownership, as well: offshore interests, with somewhat murky ties to the Soviet Union. The actual Seasound business office was in Romilly Square, near Cambridge Circus.”

  “What about the DJ’s?”

  “All of them were under surveillance.”

  “Simon Darrow included…?”

  “Simon Darrow along with the rest of them. We never found anything. They were either innocent…or very careful.”

  “MI5 had an agent in place…?”

  “Mark Braden,” Evan said. “Whatever information he was able to gather was dropped off when he had shore leave, every third week. I was his contact. We used a drop site in Covent Garden.”

  “What’s happening in Moscow?” Ian asked, at last, acknowledging the television.

  “Gorbachev’s been isolated at his dacha in the Crimea. They appear to be staging a coup.”

  “Interesting,” Ian said, thoughtfully.

  He turned his attention to the food cartons. “Your assignment with Seasound wasn’t really the bread and butter of Canadian Intelligence,” he said, impaling his chopstick upon a battered prawn. “How did you happen to be involved?”

  “It was the heyday of co-operation among friends and relations, old son. The Brits were rife with compromised agents. I was in London, and I was available.”

  Evan had finished installing the VCR, and a tape. Wally Green replaced CNN on the television screen, wearing a polka-dot tie and striped waistcoat, conducting an unseen orchestra while his guest of the week took a seat on the raised dais.

  “Last Saturday,” Evan supplied. “Simon Darrow.”

  Ian looked on with interest at the darling of mid-morning radio listeners, the hero of the housewives. Darrow was a little younger than his father, his hair streaked with grey, his face—the face of rock music programs on television in the Seventies, celebrity contests and chat shows in the Eighties, and now, in the early Nineties, multimedia adverts for private health schemes and crisis hotline numbers—deeply tanned.

  “You’re a London kid,” Wally Green said, hushing his audience with a politely raised hand.

  “I am indeed,” Darrow replied, modestly.

  “And you’ve told me in the past—because we are very great friends, aren’t we, Simon—that you fell into radio in the 1960’s quite by accident.”

  “That’s right, Wally. I was knocking about the clubs and dance halls, and one night when I was DJ’ing at the Wimbledon Palais, someone from Seasound Radio came round to listen. I was 23.”

  “And the rest, as they say, is history. Now a lot of you are bound to remember this, but for the benefit of you young things out there—”

  There was a rousing cheer from the older women in the audience.

  “—I’ll just take this moment to jog your memories. Before 1964, pop radio didn’t exist in Britain, did it, Simon?”

  “Indeed it did not,” Darrow replied. “There was Luxembourg, of course, which was basically backed by the record companies who leased airtime. And there was the BBC Light Programme. Pop music was confined to a couple of hours on weekends. Even the Beatles had trouble getting airplay in the beginning.”

  “And what happened to change all that, Simon?”

  “A revolution,” Darrow grinned. “Pirate radio stations operating from ships and towers just outside territorial waters. Radio Caroline was the first. Easter Sunday, 1964, I think it was. Three weeks after Caroline signed on, she had seven million listeners. In May, Radio Atlanta went on the air—the two ships merged a few months after that and Caroline sailed up to the Isle of Man and became Caroline North, and Atlanta was Caroline South. After that…” He spread his hands. “It was open piracy on the high seas. Invicta, King, Essex, London, 270, 390…”

  “And Seasound,” Wally Green reminded him.

  “And Seasound,” Darrow confirmed. “The GPO, which controlled communications at that time, began a campaign to ban off-shore commercial radio, but the law—the Marine Broadcasting Offences Bill—wasn’t introduced until the summer of 1966, and even then, it didn’t take effect for another year. And by that time, of course, the BBC had got into the act. Radio One went on the air in September, 1967, and they had Tony Blackburn doing the honours. He was a pirate, too, if you’ll recall, Wally—he’d been at Radio London.”

  “What was it like?” Wally Green said, leaning forward, cosily. “Give me an idea of a typical day on board the ship.”

  Darrow chuckled. “It was pretty grotty, you know. We went in three week cycles—two weeks on, one week off. We each had our own cabin, and we used to eat in the galley with the captain and his crew. We had a TV and plenty of cheap Dutch beer and cigarettes, and the tender used to come out once a week with provisions—newspapers, food. Our lifeline to shore, that tender was—the only way you could go or come.”

  “And the ship itself was an old World War Two minesweeper, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “That’s right, Wally. The Cilla Rose. She ran cargo after the war then went for a refit in Florida. She was Panamanian registered, 150 feet long, 450 tons. I have fond memories of her.”

  “And you were on the air for how long?”

  “Not long at all, really. Only a couple of months before she sank.”

  “And very tragic that was, too. You weren’t actually on board the night it happened.”

  “No,” said Darrow, “I was lucky. I had shore leave. A gale blew up in the night and she went down very quickly. There were ten people aboard the Cilla Rose, DJ’s, engineers, the captain and his crew, and only three managed to hang on until help arrived. I was devastated, of course, when I switched on the radio the next morning and learned what had happened. I did a great deal of soul searching after that, believe me.”

  “Well,” said Wally Green, “on to happier topics. You’re currently celebrating your 25th yea
r on the air, Simon, and we’ve arranged a little bit of a do for you tonight—”

  Evan stopped the tape. “The rest is fluff,” he judged.

  His son had gone back to the manuscript. “One of your TV contemporaries in the sixties did something at a pirate radio station…didn’t he?” he said, thinking.

  “It was McGoohan,” Evan replied, rewinding the cassette. “Patrick McGoohan. Danger Man. The last episode of the third season—Not So Jolly Roger. They shot it at one of the wartime defence towers in the Thames Estuary—I believe it was Radio 390 at Red Sands.”

  “Murder, intrigue and treachery,” Ian said, darkly. “What happened the night the Cilla Rose went down?”

  “I’d got a message from Mark. We’d agreed on that ahead of time: if something urgent came up, if he was in trouble or he had news that couldn’t wait, he’d radio ship-to-shore with a coded message that would alert me. I’d go out to visit him, and then anything he had to pass along could be hidden in the binding of a book, which he’d hand to me without attracting undue attention to himself. The book that week was Muirhead’s Short Blue Guide to London. I’d just come back from a location shoot in the country when I got Mark’s message. I went out with that evening’s supply tender. There was very little he could say to me openly: he gave me the distinct impression he was being watched very closely. He managed to slip me the book—but when I got back to London, there was no message.”

  “Intercepted?”

  “Probably.”

  “So he was blown.”

  “Something happened.”

  “And then she sank. Very conveniently.”

  “A deliberate scuttling, we always suspected. Either to silence Mark or to conceal something aboard the Cilla Rose they were afraid we’d discover. Perhaps both.”

  Ian spiked another prawn. “So you’ve been tasked to ferret out Victor Barnfather. What does he have to do with the Cilla Rose affair?”

  “Barnfather was an up and coming young agent with MI5 in 1966. A contemporary of Simon Darrow’s. I would be very surprised if there weren’t some secrets traded…some tidbits of information that would mean nothing to the average person…but something to the principal players…”

  “So you start with Simon Darrow. And then…?”

  “Then,” Evan said, sitting down with the telephone and dialling Darrow’s number at the radio station, “we follow the little trail of crumbs all the way to the gingerbread house.”

  Chapter Four

  Monday, 19 August 1991

  Evan paid his admission and rode the slow lift to the north landing, wandering casually among the exhibitions detailing the history and engineering feats of Tower Bridge, and the development of London’s docklands. He carried on to the enclosed high-level walkway that connected the north and south towers, where Simon Darrow was perusing the scatterbox jumble of London’s architecture along the mud-brown stretch of the Thames.

  He looked, Evan thought, every inch the broadcasting mogul: yacht racing and expensive gold wristwatches, comfortably cool in a blue-striped shirt and canvas-coloured trousers. “Good afternoon, Simon.”

  Darrow turned around. The walkway was hot. In the distant summer’s haze, the rounded dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral was barely recognizable. Further to the west, the slim, pointing finger of the Telecom Tower was all but invisible.

  “What can I do for you?” he said. He’d been waiting for Evan for half an hour.

  Evan produced Yuri Gregchenko’s obituary—a small mention taken from The Times.

  “Yuri Gregchenko,” Darrow said. “Never heard of him.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Evan replied. “He’d apparently heard of you, though, Simon.”

  He’d brought the manuscript with him, in a large brown envelope. Withdrawing it, he leafed through the pages, studiously and with a faint touch of the theatrical.

  “Here we are, Simon.”

  He watched the man’s face as he read Gregchenko’s account of the recruiting of a young, up and coming broadcaster named Simon Darrow who was coerced into monitoring the activities of an MI5 agent installed aboard a pirate radio ship anchored in the Thames Estuary. A broadcaster named Simon Darrow who had saved the day for the Soviets by intercepting an urgent coded message the MI5 agent was preparing to pass on to his Canadian contact.

  Evan watched the broadcaster’s face closely, but, aside from a slight twitching of the man’s lips, there was no outward betrayal of his emotions.

  “It’s fiction!” he said, finally, forcing a laugh. “Preposterous fiction. Where did you get this?”

  Evan took the manuscript back into safe-keeping. “Where do you think?”

  “Now you listen to me. I can state categorically that what you have there is a complete and utter fabrication. I don’t know what Gregchenko’s motives could have been in naming me as a Soviet informer, but he’s wrong. I don’t deny being aboard the Cilla Rose—that’s where I began my broadcasting career—but I most certainly wasn’t any sort of spy. Good heavens, I wouldn’t know the first thing about it.”

  “Not an awful lot to know about spying, Simon. Keep an eye on the target, watch what he does. Steal into his cabin while he’s on the air and remove the message you know he has hidden in the binding of Muirhead’s Short Blue Guide to London. Report your success to your KGB contact when you next go ashore. You had shore leave, in fact, the night the Cilla Rose went down.”

  “Damned good fortune on my part,” Darrow maintained.

  “It would make an interesting story, though, wouldn’t it, Simon, if news of this was somehow leaked to the press. Say…the Sunday Mirror? Or the News of the World? I don’t imagine your old pals in what’s left of the KGB will be all that amused—but then, all sorts of revelations are creeping out of that corner of the world these days.”

  “I’ll sue you,” Darrow exclaimed, in disbelief.

  “I’m quite certain you will. Your solicitor will undoubtedly advise it, anyway. You’d better be absolutely certain of your innocence, though, Simon—the tabloids revel in a good scandal, especially when the sordid details of a public figure’s personal life are dragged out in court.”

  Darrow glared at him. “What do you want, Harris?”

  “The name of the Soviet agent who was running you. The details of your meetings.”

  “And if I refuse…?”

  Evan let his eyes wander across to a discarded copy of one of that morning’s newspapers, headlined with news from Moscow that was already outdated and changing by the moment.

  “You,” Darrow said, shaking his head, “you are—”

  “A menace?” Evan suggested, pleasantly. “Just doing my job, Simon. Acting isn’t my only occupation, after all.”

  “Does your occupation include blackmail?”

  “I prefer to think of it as professional advice,” Evan said, easily. He jotted his telephone number down in the margin of the obituary. “Give me a ring when you’ve made up your mind, Simon. I’ll arrange a time and a place that’s mutually advantageous to both of us. I look forward to hearing from you.”

  “That’s rattled him,” Ian said, into the small microphone clipped to the inside of his shirt collar. “Stand by—here he comes.”

  He took up his position on the pavement as Simon arrived back at street level and began the long walk down to the narrow lane behind Tower Gateway DLR, where he’d left his Porsche.

  “Anything…?” Evan checked.

  “Negative. He’s going straight to his car. I’ll let you know if he makes any outgoing calls.”

  Ian climbed into the van he’d parked several spots behind the Porsche, started the engine, and waited. While he was waiting, he took off his sunglasses, and pulled on a baseball cap, altering his appearance just enough for Simon not to remember him, should he happen to glimpse into his rearview mirror.

  The Porsche pulled out and, two car-lengths behind, Ian kept an ear tuned to the intercept device he had installed in the van, a computerized bloodhound using softwa
re especially written to track the signals of any mobile phone operating within the national network. Simon habitually talked on the phone while he manoeuvred through the London traffic. His routine had been studied, his daily practices duly noted in the preliminary report his father had worked up in the few days prior to their meeting.

  Today he was silent, and Ian was surprised. The plan had been to panic Simon, to put the fear of God into him and then see who he tried to contact for further instructions.

  Simon wasn’t playing the game.

  Yet.

  The darling of British broadcasting maintained two places of residence—a rambling cottage in Epsom and a town flat in Wimpole Mews, W1, next door to Harley Street and not far from what had once been the residence of Stephen Ward and his infamous houseguest, Christine Keeler.

  Turning into Wimpole Mews, Simon disappeared. Ian parked the van on the road a block away, then sprinted back to the flat next door to Simon’s, the owners of which had been persuaded to take a week’s vacation out of the country on very short notice. The flat’s upstairs bedroom had been outfitted as a small listening post: receivers were paired to the transmitters inside Simon’s rooms, voice-activated tape recorders occupied dressing tables and chairs.

  Clipping on a pair of headsets, Ian sat down on the bed to wait, and to listen.

  Still nothing.

  He’d have been tempted to believe there was a serious malfunction somewhere in his equipment, had it not been for the peripheral noises in Simon’s flat—the unmistakable sounds of someone pouring himself a stiff drink, having a shower, drying his hair.

  There was the sound of a motor on the roadway outside, and Ian got up to have a look. A tall woman with shoulder-length black hair was climbing out of a taxi. She paid the driver, then let herself in through Simon’s front door.

  Wife, Ian noted on his log. 18:45.

  The recorders on the dressing table began to whirr. Mrs. Darrow was in a conversational mood: renovations to the cottage in Epsom, a neighbour’s marital troubles, Simon’s upcoming appearance at a charity benefit, Mrs. Darrow’s recent picture in a glossy magazine, their plans for the evening.