The Cilla Rose Affair

by Winona Kent

  “What did you think of mine?” he countered.

  Emma laughed. “I agree with that dreadful Wally Green character, Evan—there ought to be a film.”

  “Jarrod Spencer’s getting a bit long in the tooth to be leaping over tall buildings in a single bound and stopping bullets with his bare hands, Emma. At least the man responsible for playing him is. A younger actor, perhaps.”

  “Son of Spencer,” Emma deliberated. “Yes—it has definite possibilities. Some tea before lunch? You should have told me you were coming by car—I’d have warned you about the deplorable conditions on the Hill.” She cleared away some additional debris from the kitchen table. Her photographs—the family history. Mark, her nephew, a small child in a knitted pullover and short trousers.

  Evan had a thought, and pulled out his wallet, and produced a rogues’ gallery of his own: Robin, his youngest, at the radio station in Vancouver; Anthony, in glossy black and white, snipped from a playbill. She was already well acquainted with Number One.

  Emma spread them out like Tarot cards on the table. She reminded Evan, as she bent over each in her plum velvet kaftan, of a wise old surveyor of the future—her thin hair cut in an upside-down bowl of white Friar Tuck fringe around her head, her body sagging like a comfortable chesterfield, her spectacles in danger of toppling from her nose for want of a missing arm.

  “You have lovely sons,” she concluded, gathering his family up and returning them to him. “All three are quite delicious.”

  She filled the tea kettle with water from the kitchen tap.

  “You didn’t battle the Sunday traffic all the way up from Central London to show me pictures of your offspring.”

  She knew him too well. He put away his pictures. “I’ve come to dissect your memory, Emma.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” she said, switching on the gas. “What obscure assortment of odds and ends have they got you sweeping up now?”

  “The Cilla Rose affair.”

  Emma paused.

  “Yes, I thought you’d be interested,” Evan said.

  “The Cilla Rose was not an isolated incident,” she replied. “There was a traitor in our midst at MI5. There still is.”

  “Victor Barnfather.”

  “And you’ve taken it upon yourself to try and ferret him out once and for all, have you? That’s very brave of you, I must say, Evan.”

  “The request came from Nicky Armstrong.”

  Emma was assembling the tea things on a tray. “The Canadians having a go this time,” she said, thoughtfully. “Well, I can see the sense in it. We’ve been trying to investigate ourselves for years, now, with the predictable results.”

  She took the boiling kettle off the gas flame, and absorbed herself in the making of the tea, properly, in a warm-water rinsed pot with a chip in its lip and a hand-knitted cosy, striped, that predated the second world war.

  “There are some, you know, who might say it would be better to leave well enough alone, Evan. To let the old moles retire in peace and die contentedly. There are some who might argue that since the Cold War is functionally over, everything else is irrelevant.”

  “And are you one of them?”

  “I am not,” Emma replied. “I’ve lost as many friends and compatriots to that man as you have.” She emptied a package of biscuits onto a saucer. “And a nephew.”

  She carried the tea tray across to her kitchen table.

  “What have you unearthed so far?” she asked.

  “Simon Darrow,” Evan said.

  Emma raised a surprised eyebrow.

  “He was the mole aboard the Cilla Rose. And it looks very much as though the Soviet agent who had control of him was the woman who later became his second wife.”

  “Nora Darrow?” Emma said. “She whom one reads about regularly in the society pages, hosting charity teas in Epsom and frequenting fancy dress balls in town?”

  “The very same.

  “Dear me,” Emma replied, peering over the tops of her spectacles.

  “I can’t substantially prove Nora was running Simon in 1966—but I do know she had control of a young chap from MI5 who shortly thereafter topped himself.”

  Emma was thinking. “I do recall there was a death,” she said. “A young man. A suicide. And it was about the same time as the Cilla Rose went down.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  She shook her head. “It’ll come to me. And what are you hoping to achieve by uncovering this late young man’s treachery?”

  “Not so much his treachery, Emma, as Nora’s.”

  Emma poured the tea. “You’re a damnable man, Evan Harris,” she said. “You’re going to confront her with the details, are you? Compel her to cooperate. Have you actually got anything on the woman?”

  “Something her brother mentioned. And a videotape shot in her back garden in Epsom, where she may or may not have injected her husband with poison. The frame enlargement’s ambiguous at best.”

  “Neither of which, in themselves, are quite enough to make the lady squirm, are they, Evan?”

  “They are not,” he admitted.

  “What about weaknesses? Can you exploit those? What does she value the most, I wonder?”

  “Her money…her friends…her popularity and her position in society. Her status as Simon Darrow’s widow.”

  “Not to mention her personal safety, if you can prove any of your allegations. I’ve heard by way of the grapevine that there’s an unfinished manuscript floating about, some unpublished memoirs naming names.”

  “Yuri Gregchenko,” Evan said. “And the only name he mentioned was Simon Darrow’s.”

  “Still,” Emma said. “The story might, after all, turn out to be finished…mightn’t it? An earlier draft discovered somewhere…a chance discovery…?”

  Evan looked at her. “You devil.”

  “I am not without my uses, even in retirement, my love.”

  “I’m not certain Nora would capitulate that easily. She’s made of tougher stuff than her husband. On top of which…she appears to have conveniently disappeared.”

  Evan tipped a corner of the cotton curtain back with his finger, and observed the garden beyond the window of her house. In the afternoon sun, he could see a stone pathway, and, at the end of it, a wooden trellice laced with columbines and sweat peas. There were roses in one clump of earth, and fiery orange and red nasturtiums in another, and lavender, dill, chives and parsley in the ground beneath a flowering cherry tree.

  There was a cat, stalking something small and with rather a lot of legs beneath the window.

  “You ought never to have left your wife,” Emma said, broaching a separate matter of ancient history.

  “Things weren’t that simple back then, Emma. And it was Gwennie who left me, not the other way round.”

  Britain’s foremost writer of spy fiction passed the saucer of Peek Frean’s dark chocolate digestives across the table.

  “Have a biscuit,” she said, humouring him, going back to the tea tray. “Trevor Jackson. I knew the name would come to me.”

  Ian let himself in through the large front door, with its stained glass windows and name-tagged summoning bells, and climbed the stairs to the top, smelling what everyone on each landing had eaten for dinner the night before. His middle brother inhabited the attic, his view on one side Haverstock Hill, Adelaide Road on the other.

  “Come in,” Anthony said, greeting him with the obligatory actors’ embrace.

  “Still doing Starlight Express?”

  “God, no, that was ages ago. I’m just finishing up a spot of Noel Coward at the moment. Had to cultivate a rather upper class, twittish sort of accent to accommodate the part.” He paused. “You’re lopsided.”

  “War injury,” Ian said, rubbing his shoulder. “What’s for lunch?”

  “Soup and sandwiches. Traditional fare. Like to look ’round?”

  “All right,” Ian agreed, easily.

  There was the kitchen, with squeaking cup
board hinges and creaking floorboards, an extremely questionable gas cooker and a dwarf fridge.

  There was a bathroom, slope-ceilinged—an appendage to the kitchen—with a complaining geyser and a toilet with an overhead cistern and a chain, and a four-legged, animal-pawed tub, painted blue.

  The main part of the flat was furnished with pots of hanging ferns and large cushions. And an interesting collection of Underground posters. Ian stood before each of them in turn, his hands behind his back, studying them as a connoisseur of modern art might peruse the displays on the walls of a downtown gallery.

  “Where did you get these?” he said. Fly the Tube—he remembered that one—four hybrid trains, with cockpit noses and Underground bodies, celebrating the opening of the 1977 Piccadilly Line extension to Heathrow.

  “Obtained,” his brother replied, “at great personal expense to myself, through a top-secret dealer in Portobello Road—”

  Ian was looking at him.

  “London Transport Museum,” he conceded. “Two pounds forty.” He nodded at a clever artist’s canvas overlaid with a diagram of the Underground done entirely in fat, coloured lines of squeezed acrylic paint. “The original of that was mocked up in toothpaste. I saw the display.”

  “At the London Transport Museum,” Ian guessed.

  “I could live there,” Anthony replied, “full-time.”

  Ian went through to the bathroom.

  He ought to have known there’d be more: a huge map, tacked to the wall opposite the toilet. Normal people kept Reader’s Digests and crossword puzzles on hand. Not Anthony Harris.

  “It’s famous, that map,” Anthony said. “Originally the creation of Harry Beck. He wasn’t a designer at all. He was an engineer with London Transport. He illustrated the layout of the stations and the lines during an extended period of unemployment, basing it entirely on diagrams of electrical circuitry.”

  “You’re obsessed,” Ian concluded.

  “Some people,” Anthony reminded him, “maintain an extensive collection of records by obscure sixties California surf groups.” He gave his older brother a fond hug. “I, on the other hand, maintain an extensive collection of obscure Underground paraphernalia. Tea?”

  “As long as it’s something normal, Ant, and not some boiled homeopathic cure for haemorrhoids and gout.”

  Anthony disappeared, and Ian abandoned the bathroom for his brother’s bedroom. He stood in the doorway, surveying the scattered devastation of Anthony’s day-to-day existence.

  The bed was unmade. Abandoned clothes—a black t-shirt, an abused denim jacket, socks, jeans—had been flung over the upturned prongs of a bamboo hatrack, and across a brass-cornered steamer chest in the corner.

  There were more maps in here, and a life-sized poster of a red London call box, and on top of some overcrammed bookshelves, a lava lamp.

  There were also two VCR’s in the room, and a television, a tape player.

  Anthony wasn’t quite as Bohemian as he liked to let on.

  “What was that one about Sunset and Vine and Doheny?” his brother said, rummaging through the kitchen cupboards, moving aside boxes and packets and crinkly paper packages, humming what he thought was the tune.

  “Dead Man’s Curve,” Ian answered, absently. “That’s not obscure. That’s Jan and Dean.”

  He ventured all the way into Anthony’s bedroom.

  “Thanks very much for helping Evan out the other day. You have no idea how useful your information on Potter Maynard was to us.”

  “Made the world safe for democracy yet again, did I?” his brother replied. “It would have been nice if he’d been that concerned about me when I was growing up.”

  “Get over it, Ant. It wasn’t that bad.” They’d had this conversation before.

  “You’re five years older than me. You have different memories.”

  There was no point in arguing. Ian’s eye had caught a small bookcase beside the bed. Curiously, he bent down to investigate. “Anyway, you can’t accuse him of ignoring you now. At least give him credit for trying. It’s a well-known fact that people who’re starved for love only make it worse by running away from anybody who tries to show them any kind of affection.”

  “I don’t run away,” Anthony said, from the kitchen, but he didn’t sound all that confident about it.

  “Next time Evan asks you for a favour,” Ian suggested, “don’t be so quick to assume it’s all completely work-related. We could have tracked Potter Maynard down ourselves. It just would have taken us a bit longer.” He pulled a book out of the case: All About the Pop Pirates, price 5 shillings, published in 1966. “Asking you to help might have been the only way Evan could think of to keep you talking to him.”

  There was no comment from the kitchen.

  Ian sat down on the bed. The book was a pirate’s encyclopedia, crammed with pictures and chat, and prominently featured on Pages 42 and 43 were Simon Darrow and Mark Braden—the latter stretched out on his cot in his cabin aboard the Cilla Rose, giving the camera a cheeky salute.

  Anthony appeared in the doorway. “That’s not very original of Evan.”

  “No, you’re right, it isn’t. We ought to expect more from the great actor who once incited shopping centres full of screaming teenaged girls to run riot just by showing up to sign autographs.” Ian looked at him. “He’s only human, Ant. Misapprehensions, weaknesses, the whole bit. He’s probably as frightened of you as you are of him.”

  His brother didn’t say anything. He disappeared, and then returned with a flower-patterned tin.

  “Licorice,” he said, holding it out.

  Ian picked out something hard and black, and put it in his mouth. He replaced the little paperback in the bookcase, and took out another: a tattered volume with a faded blue cover, the title embossed on its spine in tarnished gold, Muirhead’s Short Blue Guide to London.

  He went back to the bed. “I didn’t know you had this.”

  “What?”

  “This guidebook.”

  “I’ve had it since I was three,” Anthony said.

  Something very peculiar was going on in Ian’s mouth. He fished the hard black thing out with his finger, and looked at it.

  “Anthony,” he said, evenly, “this is a button.”

  The kettle was whistling on the stove. Anthony bent over the dark, wet object in the palm of Ian’s hand.

  “So it is,” he said, transferring it to the pocket of his jeans. “I’ve been looking for that.”

  He disappeared again, to rescue the tea kettle.

  Ian returned to Muirhead. Inside were venerable references to the Croydon Aerodrome and to the London Season, and to long-obsolete examples of English currency—sovereigns and florins, half crowns and farthings—as well as a number of expressionist green crayon scribbles across the sepia plan of St. Paul’s Cathedral on page 115.

  A bygone era, he mused, flipping the pages to Covent Garden. The book had been an antique, even in 1966. Covent Garden wasn’t even there anymore—the old Covent Garden, with its fruit and vegetable markets. The new Covent Garden, reincarnated, full of shops and trendy restaurants, had reverted to the tourists.

  He remembered what his father had said about Covent Garden being the drop site he and Mark Braden had used.

  And then he stopped, cold.

  Evan had told him: the signal was a chalk mark, bright yellow on a singular red brick. No mark, no drop, too risky.

  He’d gone there after the Cilla Rose. He’d looked for the chalk slash, just in case. On the off-chance.

  There had been no mark.

  Yet here, on page 92 of Muirhead’s Short Blue Guide to London, bisecting a paragraph about Covent Garden, was a single yellow line of chalk.

  “Ant,” he said, urgently, scrambling to his feet. “Anthony—I need to use your phone.”

  Chapter Ten

  Monday, 26 August 1991

  “You didn’t requisition this fog, did you?”

  Evan laughed. They had left the car in one of t
he side roads off St. Martin’s Lane and walked the rest of the way into Covent Garden. It was half past two in the morning, and a damp haze had drifted up from the Thames, lending an appropriately spectral atmosphere to the deserted, night-lit streets.

  “The last time I did anything remotely like this in this neighbourhood,” he said, “there were nuns gathering up bruised apples from the gutters around the market carts and porters having a drink in the Nag’s Head opposite the Opera House.”

  He paused to orient himself.

  “I think it’s this way.”

  He led his son into an old cobbled alley off The Market, its only illumination a solitary yellow streetlamp at its far end, throwing eerie shadows off the surrounding brick walls.

  “Gaslight, too,” Ian remarked, wryly.

  “Yes, I’ve arranged for the ghost of Ellen Terry to meet us here directly,” his father replied. He stopped midway down the passage and clicked on his torch, shining it over the cobblestones. The beam caught the glint of a small drain in the ground. “At least that’s still there. Count up eight rows from the grating.”

  Ian knelt down. “…six, seven, eight.” He gave the brick in question a perfunctory prod with his finger. “It’s loose,” he confirmed.

  Working his fingernails in behind the rough edges, he wriggled the brick free and placed it on the ground. His father shone the light into the cavity.

  “Wow,” Ian said.

  Nestled inside was a small package wrapped in a square bit of mackintosh.

  “I feel like that guy who discovered King Tut’s tomb in Egypt.”

  “Howard Carter,” Evan supplied. “Let’s hope this particular catacomb doesn’t carry with it any nasty curses.”

  “Good morning, gentlemen.”

  Father and son looked up, startled. It was a uniformed policeman, arms folded, expression stern.

  “Speak of the devil,” Evan said, under his breath. “Good morning.”

  “Might one inquire what you two happen to be doing at this very late hour?”

  “Ah,” Evan said, getting to his feet. “Yes.” He glanced at his son, who stared back, impassively. “We collect bricks.”