by Alan Judd
‘Yes.’
‘Charles?’
‘Press your button,’ whispered Rebecca. ‘He can’t hear you unless you’re pressing it.’
Charles pressed. ‘Yes, here now. Can you hear me?’ There was a pause, then a chorus of whales in mourning. ‘Hallo?’
‘Release the button,’ whispered Rebecca. ‘You can’t hear him while you’re pressing.’
Charles released the button. An unknown civilisation, deep in interstellar space, sent its last despairing radio signals.
‘Now he’s not pressing his, the fool,’ said Rebecca.
The red light flashed once. ‘Charles?’
‘Yes, I can hear you.’
A rain forest parakeet gave its alarm call. ‘Bloody thing,’ said Hugo, clearly.
‘Hallo, I can hear you.’
‘Bloody thing.’
‘Hallo. Hallo.’ Charles felt his voice rising.
‘That any better?’ asked Hugo.
‘Yes, I can hear you.’
‘Can you hear me?’
Rebecca began to laugh.
‘It’s okay. Go ahead.’ Firecrackers exploded.
‘Going over!’ shouted Hugo, as if abandoning ship. A green light came on.
Charles put his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘What does he mean?’
‘Press your button. Not yet. Only when you want to speak.’
Charles pressed. The silence on the line was restful. ‘Hallo,’ he said. The silence continued. He released his button.
‘– anything,’ said Hugo.
Charles pressed again. ‘Say again all before “anything”.’
Hugo was strangled. Screech owls applauded. Finally he said, very clearly, ‘Bollocks.’ Lights flickered and the line went dead. The telephone on Rebecca’s desk rang. Grinning, she handed it to Charles.
‘– happened there,’ Hugo was saying. ‘Out of date anyway. Every link bar this one has been replaced by Blackpool. Is your comcen still open?’
Rebecca nodded. ‘Yes,’ said Charles.
‘Fine, I’ve actually got a telegram drafted containing what I was going to say, anyway. I’ll send it. Make sure they don’t close till you’ve got it.’
‘Much easier to have done that in the first place,’ said Rebecca. ‘You’d better get back to your exercise. I’ll bring the telegram to your room when it comes. Hugo’s unreal sometimes.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
‘There are degrees.’
Exercise Finder was a straightforward dead letter box exercise in which each student had to find and fill a DLB with a roll of film, then send written instructions on retrieving it to another student who would himself have filled one for the first, and so on. Filling had taken place during the afternoon, emptying was to take place after dark. It was the exercise during which Maurice Lydd was to be kidnapped.
Rebecca brought Hugo’s telegram to Charles’s room while he was typing instructions for Christopher Westfield, his pair. It was in a Top Secret brown envelope. She bobbed a curtsy. ‘Will there be any reply, sir?’
Roger, wearing a bath towel, put his head round the door. ‘I’d keep this open if I were you, Rebecca. Give us a shout if he tries anything. You know what he’s like.’
‘Not sure I do. Mind your towel.’
‘Shit. Sorry.’
It was the first real telegram Charles had seen. The top page was taken up mainly by arcane communications and distribution symbols but from the rest he learned that Viktor had rung him at the Foreign Office. Charles was to ring back from a call-box, after six when Viktor would probably not be there. Charles was to leave a message saying he was away on a management course and would be in touch when he returned next week. There was still no word from MI5 as to when they could proceed but there had been a swift MI5 reaction to Charles’s revelation that a government minister was one of Claire’s clients: it had sent them into spasm and they had asked that Charles have no further contact with her, pending consultation. Thus, commented Hugo, an offensive operation had become not only a counter-espionage operation outside SIS control but also a political hot potato, which meant that operational decisions would have to take second place to security and political issues. Charles would obviously be disappointed and frustrated, particularly in view of his personal interest. He should discuss with C/Sov who would be attending that night’s course dinner, as would Hugo. He should not, of course, discuss with anyone else.
‘Bad news,’ said Rebecca.
‘You know about it?’
‘Someone had to take it off the cipher machine and they didn’t want to indoctrinate the Castle secretaries into the case and you’re not allowed in the cipher room because you’re a student, so that left me. Hugo will retrospectively indoctrinate me when he comes down tonight, he says. Sorry. It’s obviously a very personal case.’
It was actually a relief that she knew. ‘And Gerry, presumably?’
‘No, only in general terms, like me before.’ She pushed the door to and sat on the end of the bed. ‘What will you do, now that they say you can’t do anything?’
‘I haven’t thought yet.’
‘You won’t do nothing, will you? I can’t imagine you doing nothing, just letting it lie.’
The remark felt like a vote of confidence. ‘You’re right. I’ll do something.’
She looked at him for a moment, then smiled. ‘You can do something for me, too. Tell me what’s going on here, with the others. There’s a plot, isn’t there? I hope it’s not going to be Roger wearing his towel during dinner or anything like that.’
‘Nothing as bad as that. Need to know.’
‘Are you sure I don’t?’
‘Fairly.’
‘Liar.’ She stood. ‘I’ll take your instructions to Christopher if they’re ready.’
The news of the freeze on his case was a heavy weight, carried within. He felt he moved more slowly, and his thoughts circled it like satellites round some sombre planet.
Nonetheless, he set off confidently on the exercise. He was proud of his public lavatory DLB. The film in its plastic container floated in the cistern. Christopher had only to lift the cistern lid and flush for verisimilitude; he would have an obvious reason for being there, it was easily accessible and completely private.
‘The beauty of this exercise,’ Gerry had said, rubbing his hands, ‘is that it exposes you to the strengths and failings of your colleagues, just as your agents will be exposed in far off climes. All it takes is a modicum of thought and commonsense. That’s why it’s usually done badly.’
The DLB Christopher had chosen was almost, Charles thought, as good as his own. It was beneath a church pew, easily reached by one who knelt to pray. People prayed less often than they went to the loo, but never mind. He had also received, secretly, the DLB instructions for Ian Clyde, one of the kidnappers, in which the film canister was wedged into the woodwork of one of the sea-defences along the coast. Charles was to empty it for him while Clyde and two others lay in wait for Maurice Lydd in the remote corner of a naval sports field. Lydd had been told he must appear as a jogger, wearing a tracksuit.
Christopher’s church was easy to find, but locked. There were no lights in the porch, so he couldn’t see whether there was a notice identifying the keyholder. He had little time, anyway. Christopher should have realised that churches were often locked these days. The nearby cottage probably held the key and he could have asked, but chose not to. The agent he was supposed to be would not want to expose himself to possible identification. As Gerry had said, all such arrangements took was a modicum of thought and commonsense. It would teach the ever-confident Christopher a lesson. Anyway, it was only an exercise and, compared with his frozen operation, it was irrelevant.
He took a taxi from the ferry terminus to the deserted yacht club on the beach west of the Castle. The club was no marina, just a building housing an inshore lifeboat and a lookout area, with a dozen or so yachts drawn up on the beach. The tide was in and wires tinkled and rattled
in the darkness against metal masts. There were lights across the Solent on the Isle of Wight and road lights a quarter of a mile or so behind, across the golf course. The intermittent beam from a beacon on top of an old fort was enough to see by. There was no one around.
He crunched across the wet shingle towards the third line of old posts and beams on his right. Starting with the first post, which rose only a couple of feet above the piled shingle, he had to count five down towards the sea, then stand on the lower beam to feel on top of the post a shallow hole with the canister stuck in it.
At high tide, however, the seaward posts were covered and there was water washing over the beam between four and five. Typical of Ian Clyde, he reflected. Once again, all that was needed was commonsense and a little thought. This time, however, he decided to make the effort. He didn’t want to return completely empty-handed. Holding on to the top beam, he walked along the lower as far as the water, then lifted his legs and tried to go hand over hand, as in a gym, to the fifth post. What would he say he was doing if accosted? Practising acrobatics? Trying to drown himself the hard way? Winning a bet? The beam was wet with spray and his hands slipped as he swung his legs towards the post. He was lucky not to go flat on his back in the water, getting his feet down to the lower beam just in time. The sea sloshed around his ankles. He gave up.
Drowning while clearing a DLB was the sort of thing Hugo would worry about, he reflected as he trudged back across the shingle, shoes squelching and wet trouser bottoms clinging to his legs. Hugo would doubtless carry flippers and snorkel in his briefcase. His father, he thought, would have enjoyed this sort of thing, just as Charles would have enjoyed discussing it with him. But his father would have emptied KGB DLBs. Yet again, memory was poisoned. There were moments – whilst shaving, listening to the radio news, tying up his shoes, in the midst of conversation – when he was seized by spasms of hatred for the man who had done this. It was the sharp, lightning hatred born of intimacy, short-circuiting all his carefully constructed rationality and detachment. There had been moments like this in adolescence when he was gripped by an intense, visceral distaste for the man across the table who slurped his soup and left drops clinging to his grey moustache, while talking happily on. There was a guilty pleasure in giving way to them.
He walked back along the coast road and stopped at a call-box. This time the phone was answered quickly. He gave his name and asked to leave a message for Mr Koslov.
‘Moment.’ The operator stressed the second syllable.
‘Hallo, Mr Koslov speaking.’
This was unexpected. Charles sensed a mutual nervous tension as they introduced themselves. ‘Are you all right?’ asked Viktor.
‘Very well, thank you. Are you?’
‘Thank you, I am well. I was wondering if we could meet again, you know.’
‘Of course.’ Viktor’s ‘you know’ sounded self-consciously casual. Charles said he would ring again to make a date when he got back from his management course. They were correct with each other, aware that every word was being recorded. Although meetings had been forbidden, this much had been sanctioned to maintain the semblance of normality. ‘And you, Viktor, are you all right?’ He echoed Viktor’s phrasing.
‘Yes, I think so, thank you.’
‘We’ll talk.’
‘I hope so.’
He walked quickly back towards the Castle. Those few words proved the catalyst for his decision. He would resign and pursue the case independently. As a personal quest there would be no forbidden areas, no security or political constraints. He would get at the truth himself. The office may not like it but they couldn’t stop him; he would be breaking no law, telling no secrets. Viktor held the key to his father’s – and now, he felt, to his own – past. Viktor, never less than professional, had an existence apart from his job and had let it show during their conversation. Viktor was a man he could talk to. And the key to Viktor was Claire.
‘Thanks a bunch, old son.’ Christopher Westfield’s hand lay heavily upon Charles’s shoulder. ‘Great idea. Nice, insalubrious, public brick shit-house, just the sort I love to patronise and which you obviously associate with me. Only one problem: locked daily at five p.m. Notice on the door, for those who can read.’
Christopher had come in just as Charles finished describing the inadequacy of the church DLB to Gerry and the others. Gerry was displeased; none of them had chosen well and Clyde, Lydd, Brooke, Newick and Devauden were not back. Everyone wanted to bath and change for dinner and he was not inclined to wait any longer, now that Christopher had returned to add to the depressing catalogue of incompetence. Charles kept quiet about his wet shoes and trousers.
The course was nearing its end and it was a formal black-tie dinner that night with a number of guests apart from Hookey and Hugo, who had brought Anna. The bar was full. Hugo’s glance at Charles was pregnant with undisclosed meaning but he continued talking to others. Anna stood by his side, her detachment emphasised rather than modified by her expression of polite interest. She had not seen Charles. It was an opportunity to examine her features more carefully than when talking to her. ‘Faces in those days sparked/The whole shooting match off,’ ran Philip Larkin’s poem.
‘Where are the missing four from the exercise?’ asked Rebecca. ‘It’s perfectly plain you’re all up to something so you might as well say what it is. Even Gerry’s noticed now.’
‘Is he angry?’
‘Gerry doesn’t get angry about that sort of thing.’
Christopher pushed his way through. ‘They’ve got him. They’re on their way.’ He grinned at Rebecca.
‘Got who? What?’ she asked.
His decision made, Charles felt as detached as Anna looked. He couldn’t see her now because Christopher was in the way. Apart from attempting to empty Clyde’s DLB, he was having nothing to do with the horseplay. It reminded him of mess jinks in the army, in which, now he thought about it, he had probably participated more than he would have confessed. Desmond, too, seemed to regard it without much enthusiasm, studying the various plaques and maps on the wall rather than gossiping and intriguing with the others.
There was a commotion from the far end of the bar near the door. The three captors, in jeans and tracksuits, half dragged, half carried a very large white sack with ‘HM Diplomatic Service’ printed across it in black. It was tied at the top.
Rebecca pulled at Charles’s sleeve. ‘Charles, tell me, what’s going on?’
‘Nothing to do with me. You’ll see soon enough.’
People laughed at something one of the kidnappers said. The visitors looked on a little uneasily, the more senior the more uneasy, except Hookey, who turned away, smiling, to get himself another gin.
‘Well here’s Maurice Lydd anyway,’ said Rebecca. ‘With his drink already, so he must’ve come straight from his room.’
Lydd, smiling as nearly always, had slipped in behind the kidnappers, and was looking on.
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Christopher. ‘Then who have they got, the silly buggers?’
The bag was untied and, with a cheer, the three tugged at the corners and emptied onto the floor a tousled, tracksuited man with short fair hair and freckles. The bar was silent. He got to his feet, pugnaciously facing up to his audience. ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’ he demanded. His voice was loud and confident, suggestive of one who was accustomed to using it. ‘Who are you lot?’
Ian Clyde started to say something but stopped. Gerry stepped forward, holding out his hand. ‘It looks as if there’s been an embarrassing mistake,’ he said. ‘A prank that went wrong. I’m Gerry Welling, we’re all civil servants and as stage one of our mammoth apologies I’d like to buy you a drink.’
The man hesitated, then took Gerry’s hand. ‘Peter Chester, captain, Royal Marines,’ he said quietly.
‘Splendid, splendid. C-in-C Portsmouth dined at this table only last week. Now, what will it be? Drink the place dry if you like. And when you’re ready I hope you’ll help decide on a f
itting punishment for the perpetrators.’ He turned to them. ‘You’d better get changed fast, you lot.’
It emerged that Lydd had run across the wrong rugby pitch, while, at the right time and in darkness, the unfortunate captain had run across the right one. Lydd was pleased with himself. ‘It wasn’t exactly anti-surveillance but I had a sort of hunch,’ he told Desmond. ‘I was uneasy about that particular pitch. It was in a dark corner of the field with no obvious way out. Though I daresay I could have out-run them.’ It did not seem to occur to him to question why he should have been picked on.
‘Why weren’t you at the wash-up?’ Charles asked.
‘I got back late because I decided to check that the DLB I’d laid had been properly cleared, which it had. A well-chosen site, though I say it myself. What about yours?’
Dinner was delayed. The Marine captain, after several gins and tonic, regretfully declined the offer of a place at table and the loan of a dinner jacket. He had a wife at home, who must be assuming he was doing a half-marathon, as he sometimes did. Normally he ran first thing in the morning but he had been getting lazy of late, so it served him right, almost. Perhaps an appropriate punishment for the miscreants was that they should join him for his 6 a.m. run every morning the following week? He was reasonably fit and should give them a run for their money. Gerry thought this splendid and conceived an equally splendid addition: both miscreants and the rest of the course, since they had all known about it, should pay for all the drinks that night. When eventually the now-garrulous captain was helped into a Castle car he was given a noisy farewell by the party of MOD civil servants on a management course.
As they went into dinner Christopher pulled Charles aside. ‘Hope you don’t mind, but I’ve switched our places around so that I’m next to Maggie and you’re next to that prat Hugo’s wife. That okay?’
Maggie was an attractive, outspoken, widely travelled woman of around forty who had lectured them on office procedures and paperwork. She had started as a secretary and was now a senior general branch officer.
