Legacy

by Alan Judd

  Old Beaconsfield was much as he remembered, little more than a single main street with some quaint shop fronts, oppressed by traffic but still, beneath lowered eyelids, possessed of a reserved charm. It had been in that very tea shop that he and Janet, his then girlfriend, had agreed to part. Theirs had been an affair in which tea shops featured prominently. It had started in one in Oxford before he joined the army and had begun to come apart in another in Belfast, where she had visited him during his single afternoon off in four months. He wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that she now owned one. It was what she often said she most wanted to do, as she became a solicitor.

  As lunchtime approached more customers came in and Charles ordered soup and bread. There was still no hurry and he was reluctant to break his semi-trance. As Roger said, secret service beat working for a living, so far. Roger, he imagined, would by now have made himself at home in some London drinking club, pouring drinks down a sequined cleavage and thinking to hell with surveillance. Unless the cleavage was the surveillance.

  The journey back to London showed no further sign of surveillance. He took the now-functioning tube to Trafalgar Square and walked along the Strand to the short road that led down to the Savoy. He was fifteen minutes early. ‘If you’re on time, you’re late,’ he remembered their trainer, Gerry, saying as he glanced up at the Upstairs restaurant overlooking the main entrance where the cars turned. Someone had said it was good after a play or film, and not too expensive. He would recce it later.

  An hour later he lowered his bone china tea-cup to its bone china saucer, using his left hand and without taking his eyes from the early edition Times he had picked up in Beaconsfield. If he had not found it he would have had to root through dustbins for an old one, since the instructions were that he had to be reading The Times. He lowered the cup as precisely as possible, appearing to read but concentrating entirely on the movement. One of his father’s eccentricities had been to practise using his left hand in anticipation of the stroke he claimed was his destiny, and which was statistically most likely to paralyse his right side. In fact, death, when it came so prematurely, took both sides at once, in a heart attack, while he slept.

  Cup reached saucer dead centre with a faint chink. The tearoom, quiet when he arrived, was beginning to bustle. He was now the only solitary, the others having been joined by their guests. He had considered ordering for two but his instructions – to await a contact who had his description and would give the password – did not indicate whether there was to be a meeting, with a discussion, or just a message quickly passed. He studied the faded opulence of the room, with its golds, blues and reds, the sumptuous but tired sofas and armchairs, the table legs that had been knocked a few times too many. In the middle was a grand piano and a harp. A man wearing a white jacket and an auburn-haired woman in a long black dress had arranged music sheets and sat at both as if about to play, then disappeared without a note. The tea-takers, mostly female, had paid no attention.

  He folded the paper and looked around, transferring it from one hand to the other. The self-consciousness involved in deliberately appearing to be about to do what he was about to do made every action feel unconvincing. No one in the room looked a likely contact, not even the stocky, energetic man who so resembled the man who had first interviewed him for the service that Charles was tempted to ask him to take off his jacket to see whether he was wearing the same gold armbands. He certainly wore a similar spotted bow-tie. Charles wondered whether he would ever himself attempt a bow-tie. Perhaps you had to be forty to get away with it. It would help to be florid.

  A waiter was working his way round, pausing now at a table of two women and two smartly dressed little girls who giggled amidst jokes and cake-crumbs on the sofa. One of the women was paying. Charles would soon have to decide finally whether to pay and go, or order more, or just go on sitting. The woman who was not paying got up and headed for the Ladies’. Charles took out his wallet and waited. He would pay, take one more swing through all the public rooms, recce the Upstairs restaurant, then go. Since he had not been briefed on what was to be conveyed, a missed meeting seemed no big deal.

  ‘Excuse me, but you’re not a friend of David Carter’s, are you?’

  He stood too abruptly. ‘Not exactly. I’m his cousin.’

  It was one of the women with the children, the blonde one he had seen make for the Ladies’. She stood before him, smiling with a mixture of shyness and determination. Her diction was perfect but her accent foreign. ‘Perhaps you were at his wedding in France?’

  ‘I was, but I don’t think we met.’ The recognition phrases over, it was now up to him to direct the meeting. ‘Won’t you sit down?’

  ‘I really haven’t time since we are just leaving. But perhaps you could quickly tell me if you’ve heard from them.’

  As they sat Charles shook his head at the approaching waiter.

  She was smiling at him again. ‘I think you must have spilt something.’

  He looked down at his trousers. ‘My tea, a while ago. Stupid of me. I hadn’t noticed. I was experimenting.’

  ‘Experimenting?’

  He smiled back. ‘Another time. Have you a message for me?’

  The hum of the tea-room was sufficient to make overhearing difficult but not enough to compel raised voices. With two fingers pressed coquettishly against her cheek, she glanced at the ceiling as if trying to recall a date, or a name, or a shade of colour. Her eyes were grey-green, her skin slightly olive and her eyebrows well-defined and dark, despite her apparently genuine blondeness.

  The waiter was still nearby. ‘Now let me see, I think it was’ – she paused until the waiter had moved on – ‘the message is for Eric.’

  Charles nodded and leaned forward. He could not be seen to take notes.

  ‘Please tell Eric that Leonid could not make the meeting on the 27th because the committee has been in continuous session about new developments in the project. Following the last experiment it was decided to reinforce the tubes and further delay ignition. Eric will know what this means.’ She laughed and pushed back her hair, as if they were engaged in social chit-chat. Her mannerisms and tone were middle-class southern English; her accent and careful diction, he suspected, were Eastern European. He remembered that he would have to describe her clothes: calf-length dark skirt – called a midi? – shaped around her hips, looser at the bottom; polished brown boots, square-toed; cream roll-necked jersey, tight fitting. All a little warm, perhaps, for a muggy day, but in autumn you never knew. He was looking again at the way her eyebrows lifted slightly at the corners when their eyes met, briefly. She looked away and went on.

  ‘And so please tell him that Leonid thinks he will be able to meet next month as usual but two days before the usual date and that the currency for the last month had not reached his 24029609 account before he left so can Eric please ensure that it does this time.’ She paused. ‘Okay?’

  ‘24029609?’

  ‘That is correct.’

  There was another pause. The pianist had returned alone while they had been talking and, seated at the piano, began to play a single note, repeatedly, in slow time. Charles had been vestigially aware but had not heeded it until now, when he saw that she, too, was listening. It was slowly, softly done, the single insistent note becoming insidiously, then openly and finally triumphantly dominant as the tea-room chatter gradually fell silent before it. Cups were returned to saucers or held suspended. People looked at each other, then at the expressionless pianist sitting very upright, one hand in his lap. Tension increased as other sounds fell away. Waiters stopped, trays in hand. The pianist began slowly to vary his note. Incrementally, caressingly, he built up into a lingering, aching rendition of Lili Marlene that flowed and swelled to its fullest and then, at its height, declined as slowly and hauntingly as it had begun into the single note that started it.

  When it ceased there was applause and cheering. The pianist bowed several times, grinning, the waiters started and the room was
filled again with voices and movement. Charles caught her eye once more. She held his gaze, as if they had shared a private joke in company, then she stood and put out her hand. ‘It has been very nice to meet you again. Please give my regards to David and Avril when you see them.’

  He let the women leave before he paid, then spent some time in the Gents’ so that he left a good twenty minutes after them, forgetting about his proposed recce of the Upstairs restaurant. From the state of the Strand, it was clear it had been raining hard. There were puddles on the broken and uneven pavements, the gutters ran with water and the rush-hour traffic was worse than usual. He walked briskly along to Charing Cross, where he bought shaving soap and a toothbrush, then headed across the concourse to join the crowd moving onto platform one, but slipped away before the barrier, down the steps and into Villiers Street. From there he made for the Embankment Underground station, where he waited on the east-bound platform for a Circle line train, hesitated as if opting for the District line then, with an obvious last-second check of the destination display, boarded as the doors closed. He got off one stop later, at Westminster, and walked over Westminster Bridge to the south side of the Thames. A breeze rippled the brown water and an unexpected burst of afternoon sun glinted on the wet road and flashed in the windows of St Thomas’ hospital.

  Charles maintained his brisk pace. He made no notes but mentally rehearsed the salient details, confident that he had the account number because he had trained himself over the past few months to remember telephone numbers after repeating them aloud to himself, once. The secret was to give them mental rhythms. A bus had broken down on the far side of the bridge, in the middle of some roadworks on the roundabout, halting traffic in all directions. As he picked his way between the clogged vehicles, he remembered Gerry telling them that a Russian spy had been discovered in the round building in the middle, which housed London’s driving licence centre. The agent had used the records to help the Russians identify people they were interested in, and to help build up legends for Russian agents working under cover. There had been nothing of it in the papers, which heightened Charles’s pleasure in knowing it.

  He continued under the Waterloo railway bridge towards Century House, which towered above Lambeth North tube, but before reaching it he turned left into Lower Marsh where the street traders were packing up for the day and a lorry was spraying the narrow wet road with yet more water. It was a thriving street in a poor area, cheap and dilapidated but always busy. You could get anything there, they said – anything – minus the wrapping. A little over half way along was a door near a cut-price clothes shop with a polished brass plate announcing Rasen, Falcon & Co., Shippers and Exporters. Charles pressed the bell and turned to face the pane of darkened glass let into the wall at the side. When the door opened he stepped through into a short hallway with another door and a uniformed guard sitting behind a raised ledge to the side. He showed his green pass.

  The guard nodded. ‘Last one back, sir.’ He pressed a button to open the second door.

  Charles went upstairs to a lecture room at the back of the building. All the windows had blinds down and the dozen desks were mostly occupied by his fellow students bent over papers or slowly tapping the keyboards of heavy grey Olympia typewriters. They were writing up the results of the exercise. The only one to look up when Charles entered was Gerry, their instructor, slumped over the podium in his shirtsleeves and making pencil notes which he kept crossing out. The film screen was unrolled and blank behind him.

  ‘Welcome, Carlos. Late lunch?’ Gerry altered or invented names for everyone.

  ‘Late agent.’

  ‘Agents are never late in Exercise Tabby Cat. Never accidentally, anyway.’ Gerry grinned and pushed his oversize glasses up his nose. Approaching forty, he had unruly fair hair, an expressive, good-natured, prematurely lined face and a generally dishevelled appearance. ‘Better crack on with your write-up. We’ve got the moving pictures soon. Big treat. You’ve missed tea.’

  Charles went to his desk. The worst part of exercises was the write-up. It was supposed to be concise and properly divided between factual account, intelligence product – if any – and opinion and recommendation. It was supposed to contain everything important and nothing unimportant, with the proviso that some unimportant things might later turn out to have been important.

  ‘Never weary the busy A officer reader,’ Gerry often told them. ‘Action officers are dealing with at least twenty other cases apart from yours and they don’t want to read about sunsets in deathless prose. At the same time, when your case goes bottom up and the proverbial hits the fan, as is not unknown’ – he would grin and push his glasses again – ‘you will be the first to be blamed for not having told the A officer something which at the time he did not want to know.’

  When Rebecca, the training course secretary, entered the students – all men between their early twenties and early thirties – looked up. ‘Message for Charles,’ she said, smiling more confidently now than in the early days when she used to blush through her suntan as they all looked at her. ‘C/Sov wants to see you a.s.a.p.’

  Controller/Soviet Bloc was in charge of all Soviet and Eastern European operations.

  ‘Found you out already,’ called Roger, from the far side of the room.

  ‘Wants more sugar in his tea,’ said Christopher Westfield, a plump former merchant banker who was said to have taken a salary cut of three-quarters when he joined.

  ‘Probably disgusted by your anti-surveillance precautions,’ said Gerry. ‘Becky, please politely convey to C/Sov that Carlos will sprint over to Head Office as soon as he has finished here, which will be some time after six. Meanwhile, let’s be having your write-ups soon, gentle men.’ He rubbed his hands as he separated both words. ‘I’ll be having some more tea.’ He and Rebecca left the room.

  Charles looked across at Roger. ‘Is that mine?’

  Yawning, Roger held up the bottom of his tie and considered it. ‘Possibly. Probably. Shirt, too, maybe. All my own teeth, though.’

  Desmond Kimmeridge, a former cavalry officer known, thanks to Gerry, as Debonair, glanced at the tie. ‘I should let him keep it if I were you.’

  Gerry returned rubbing his hands. ‘Right, that’s it. Finish your write-ups later, in your own time. Meanwhile, mes enfants, we have a film show. Windows and blinds fully closed, please, for the Secret Intelligence Service’s very own Keystone Cops. Probably all of you thought you were under surveillance at some point during this morning’s exercise, and you should’ve specified times and places in your write-ups, with descriptions of surveillants. Perceived surveillants. Imaginary surveillants. None of you was, you see, except one. Cheaper that way. Let it roll, Becky.’

  After a couple of false starts and the usual teasing, Rebecca coaxed the cumbersome apparatus at the back of the room into action. Charles watched himself enter the Savoy, briefly looking straight at the camera concealed in the window of the Upstairs restaurant. Next he was seen reading his paper and drinking tea, replacing his cup without looking and, to guffaws from the audience, spilling some. Then he was seen talking to the blonde foreign woman, his exercise ‘agent’, which provoked ribaldry. Finally he was shown walking briskly away from the Savoy.

  ‘The team was with you all the way back here,’ said Gerry, ‘and for a while before you reached the hotel. They picked you up in the Strand.’

  ‘Rather they’d picked up the girl,’ said Christopher.

  Charles tried to recover a little of his pride. ‘But I spotted the chap in brown shoes in Beaconsfield. And the Russian Embassy car at the station before.’

  ‘Nothing to do with us. You were on your own in Beaconsfield. Coincidence, chance, like most of life. Make sure you report the Russian car, though.’

  ‘The man was behaving oddly. He followed me most of the way.’

  ‘No accounting for taste,’ said Roger.

  Gerry shook his head. ‘Look around you and the world is full of people doing odd things. Cross
my heart, cut my throat and hope to die, Charles, there was no surveillance on you until you reached the Strand. Then you had the full works until you got back here. The team reckoned your approach to the meeting looked reasonably natural except that your walk was a touch too deliberate, too slow. Let’s watch you arrive again – Becky, thanks. Here, see. Most people are walking as if they’re trying to get somewhere. You’re not. We’ll spare you the hotel shots again but they reckon your body language and so on was okay except that you obviously relaxed after about half an hour, as if you were no longer looking, no longer alert, no longer seriously expecting anything. The surprise encounter with your agent was handled well, they said. Looked very natural. Probably because it was a surprise. But afterwards you shot off from the hotel like Buster Keaton speeded up – there, you see, completely different walk. Much brisker, much more purposeful, eager to get back before you forget it all. Looking forward to doing your write-up, I daresay. And clearly no longer looking. Not surveillance aware.’ Gerry emphasised the words with his fist on the podium. ‘Serious point, this, for all of you. SV teams reckon they can always tell the difference between – say – a KGB officer approaching a meeting, brush contact, emptying or filling a DLB – dead letter box – or whatever – and one who’s just done it, because afterwards he’s relieved and his pace quickens. Remember that, gentle men. Do not let it happen. Whenever you’re doing any operation you should walk at your normal pace throughout. You probably don’t know what that is. Well, get to know it. Measure it. And always, always, give anyone watching an obvious reason for your being wherever you are. One day the lives of your agents may depend on it. And the rest of you remember that Carlos got clobbered this time, so it may be you next. Or Carlos again, who knows. But in case you think you’ve got clean away with it, we’ve a further surprise for you. Okay, Rebecca?’