by Joseph Hone
I noticed the man because I had known him once – not well, but I had seen him about now and then in Holborn years before. And then his name came to me: David Marcus, the Scots lawyer who had originally come to our Mid East Section as a ferret, expert on double agents and potential defectors – common as rabbits with us then – the man, they said, who never let go and, indeed, who had finally unearthed Williams, his chief in the department, as a KGB mole, an event which indirectly had led to my release from Durham jail five years previously. Marcus had subsequently been promoted to Head of Section. But that, as I say, was years ago and he could certainly only have gone upwards since then. He had the vigorous tenacity and ambition of his race – aimed for the mountain-top in my days at Holborn, and sure to be up there now, on the pinnacle, chipping away at the tablets. I’d never seen him in the club before – he struck me more as a Garrick man, if anything – and I fancied, with the well-worn premonition that becomes second nature in this business, that he had turned up at the bar that morning to see me.
Sure enough, when the old ormolu clock behind the bar struck one and the members had partly straggled off to lunch, he made his move. There was now an open space on the counter between us. He turned, saw me, and made a passable imitation of surprise.
‘Ah, Marlow. How are you?’ He pushed a bowl of bitter onions towards me. I was several yards away and didn’t move, merely smiled and nodded, a fish that wouldn’t be tempted.
‘Have another sherry,’ he went on, thoughtfully producing a tastier bait. Now he moved towards me, flourishing a £5 note – a gesture that at once alerted Reddy, the normally somnolent Irish barman, who came alive now with the quizzical, avaricious features of a monkey. Reddy looked up at us, his long arms aggressively on the counter now, as if about to vault it if I declined the drink. It was Reddy who made the meeting inevitable. I took a sherry. ‘A large one,’ I added.
‘Nice to see you,’ Marcus said. The elderly bore stooped down, trying to muscle in. But Marcus would have none of him for the moment, impatience creeping into his gestures.
‘Is it?’ I smiled.
‘Who is?’ the bore said, lending a conspicuous ear.
Marcus looked at his watch. It was clearly going to be touch and go whether he could get his business done with me while yet maintaining his cover in the other man’s company – something I could see he was equally intent on doing.
‘What are you up to these days?’ he asked brightly.
‘Oh, a book on Egypt. What about you?’
Marcus put his hand into his jacket pocket and I thought for a second that he was going to produce a gun and shoot me, either for my impertinence or for some devious professional reason, his legal restraints quite lost to him. Instead he took out a latch key with a label on it while he continued talking. ‘I get around,’ he said.
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘Why?’ the bore said.
‘Still the old things,’ Marcus added.
‘And some new ones too, I shouldn’t be surprised.’ I made little attempt to avoid the sarcasm.
‘New what?’ the bore interjected.
‘New horses,’ Marcus turned to him finally. He had the key now in the palm of his hand. ‘Our friend here – he and I have stakes in a horse together.’ Whatever he was up to these days hadn’t dulled his imaginative response, I was glad to see. That had always been his gift, of course: to imagine answers to a problem – often, it seemed, sheer fantasies about a Soviet move or a possible double agent, before putting on his lawyer’s wig and laboriously following them up and almost invariably finding the nightmare true.
‘Oh,’ said the bore, ‘I had a dream once, night before the Derby: horse called “Stardust”. Put my shirt on it –’
‘No,’ Marcus cut him off. ‘We have a hurdler. Over the sticks, you know.’ At the same moment Marcus slipped me the key, leaning towards me, saying softly, ‘Be there – this afternoon. Three o’clock.’
The address on the label was W2, somewhere off the Edgware Road. I laughed on my way upstairs to lunch, and ordered a half bottle of Latour to go with the beef. I had been sad all morning at the Flower Show, for that had been real. This, on the other hand, was clearly high farce. Yet I knew too – and it came to me soon enough and even the rich wine couldn’t dispel the thought – that though Marcus might play with horses, what he really found funny was horseplay with death.
*
It was the largest block of flats I’d ever seen: ten storeys and as big as Twickenham Rugby ground, on Kendal Street half a mile up from Hyde Park. My appointment was in Windsor House, through an archway and into a huge forecourt. There must have been about a hundred bell-pushes outside, but the main door was open. I dangled my key and a hall porter, in his shirt sleeves, saw me past without comment. I’d finished lunch with an Armagnac in the club, so was feeling sweaty myself but fairly perky as I took the lift up. I wondered if I should have had a gun.
I opened the lock on the heavy door while gazing impudently into the spy hole. But Marcus was sitting on a tea-chest reading The Times when I got inside, like the fox on the tree stump in Jemima Puddleduck, his little feet dangling off the floor, while another considerably larger man, a bodyguard, was by the window, looking out over the roofs into the depths of the lead blue spring sky.
Marcus stood up, folding The Times carefully, then gestured, as if to a seat. But there were none. There was no furniture at all in the apartment, just half a dozen other tea-chests, some of them open, with kitchen and other household equipment peeping out, together with two rolled-up carpets and a stack of empty picture frames against one wall. The place was nude.
‘Oh, there isn’t –’ Marcus said.
‘Never mind.’ I looked round the sterile room. I knew where I was: one of the ‘safe’ houses – a refinement, often called ‘one time pads’ – which DI6 kept in various large apartment blocks about London, each with the appearance of imminent occupation, but never lived in and rarely maintained for any length of time, where the tea-chests and old carpets could be picked up at a moment’s notice and transferred to another vacant apartment, often in the same block. They were used normally for appointments with only one individual – for debriefing a defector – or sometimes just for a single meeting, with an outsider, as in my case. Though the tea-chests, I knew, would contain enough food and other necessities to keep a man incommunicado in the apartment for a month. This fact, together with the presence of the muscular factotum, led me to suppose that Marcus, apart from wanting something from me, might impose unpleasant sanctions in order to obtain it.
I sat on a tea-chest opposite him, the Armagnac still living in me, quite prepared to do battle. But Marcus didn’t say anything. It was hot in the room. A bluebottle stirred viciously against the window; a huge puffy white cloud slid into view over Paddington. Summer was a strong rumour everywhere now. Finally Marcus sighed, thinking some deep thought. But I wasn’t going to let Marcus intimidate me with any longueurs.
‘Well?’ I asked sharply.
Marcus woke. ‘Ah, yes. Well, thank you for coming. And for going along with me over that old bore.’
‘I was curious. That’s all.’
‘Coffee?’ Marcus was starting to play the old switch-theme game, softening up the opposition, disorientating him. ‘Arthur? Brew up a kettle, will you.’ Arthur took an electric kettle from one of the chests and disappeared into the kitchen. It seemed I was probably the first person to use this safe house. Marcus was either playing it big – or else it was big.
‘Of course, curious,’ he went on. ‘That’s why Fielding got on to you. I can see that. I wanted to talk about that.’ He fidgeted with his cuffs. He was hot, I could see, but afraid to lose dignity by taking off his coat. I took my own off to further discomfit him.
‘Why?’
‘Well, we don’t want you to look for Phillips. That’s why,’ Marcus said apologetically.
‘We? Isn’t Basil part of “you”?’
‘Well, not
exactly –’
‘So who are you these days?’
‘Basil’s with the Slavs and Soviets: Section Nine. I’m Deputy Chief.’
‘Of the Section?’
‘Of the Service.’
‘I see.’
Marcus suddenly came alive now, as if, in getting things straight with these little introductory word games and having so circuitously established his bona fides, we could now properly embark on the real business, a matter, it would seem, of lesser moment than his own credentials. ‘Yes, Marlow. We’d really prefer it if you didn’t go along with Basil.’
I kept the offensive. ‘You’re going to have to tell me why, aren’t you?’
Arthur put his head round the kitchen door just then. ‘Milk and sugar?’ he sang out in a surprising thin, harassed voice, like a fretful waitress.
‘Please,’ Marcus said.
‘No sugar.’ Then I turned to Marcus. ‘You don’t happen to have a good cognac in any of those chests, do you?’
Marcus resumed without a smile or a comment. ‘No-I’m not going to have to tell you. But I –’
‘The Prime Minister authorised this, you know. You’re above him, I suppose?’
Marcus sighed again. ‘The PM is not in possession of all the facts –’
‘He rarely is with you people.’
‘Marlow, are you going to listen,’ Marcus said abruptly.
‘Are you going to tell me the truth – or even take a stab in that direction?’
‘Yes, I am, if you’d wait a moment,’ he added petulantly.
‘Are you keeping Phillips somewhere?’
‘No. We’re not. He has disappeared. We don’t know where he is. But we don’t particularly want him found either – for his own good, and certainly for his reputation at least, among his family and friends.’
‘He’s gone over to Moscow?’
‘I doubt it,’ Marcus said wryly. ‘Rather the opposite camp. Phillips, I’m afraid, was another sort of traitor. The right wing. So far out, in fact, he fell overboard completely.’
‘National Front?’
‘Good God, no!’ Marcus was briefly appalled. ‘Retired Army wallahs down in Devon: vigilantes with handles to their names, those sort. As well as people in the Service.’
I shook my head in wonder.
‘No, it’s true. There’s always been a vaguely right-wing element in the SIS. And since the scandals of the fifties and early sixties – Philby and that lot – together with Labour coming in again then, it’s hardened very considerably during the last ten years – and around Phillips, we found out about six months ago. He was the kingpin.’
‘How? How did you find out?’
‘No need for details. But we discovered he’s put taps on the PM’s office in Downing Street: bugs in the wall, the lot. We traced it back to him, kept him under close surveillance. It was him and two or three others. Then, just when we were sure and were going to pick him up, he disappeared, went under. Someone must have got word to him.’
‘The usual,’ I said. ‘But you still need to nail him, don’t you? All the more so, I should have thought.’
‘Well, yes: at first I thought exactly that. “Do everything – find him,” I said. And so we turned him over for two months. But nothing – absolutely. So then I thought, well, leave him. He’s gone. He’s out – drowned himself up in that loch of his in Scotland most likely. Let dead dogs lie. Because you see, Marlow, if we did find him he’d have to stand trial with no end of a rumpus then.’
‘Indeed.’ A rumpus, I knew, after all the other scandals, was like a fifth horse of the apocalypse in our service.
‘So you see, if you help Lindsay’s family – or Basil – you’ll be doing them a disservice, Marlow. They’ll end up with a traitor instead of, as now, a hero, albeit missing or dead.’
Arthur brought us two mugs of coffee; cheap stuff, too much chicory. But I drank it, thinking, it gave me time. Of course there was one flaw in Marcus’s story – so obvious he must have left it intentionally, I thought.
‘Why haven’t you told the PM all this?’
Marcus obviously found the coffee as tart as I had, for he put the mug down and didn’t touch it again.
‘Oh, we did tell him. He knows all about what Phillips was up to. It was the PM who lied to you, Marlow. He wants him found all right, but not for the reasons he gave you, obviously. He’d like him found – and topped, if it were still possible, along with the others. He’s livid with us now – all on for a rumpus.’
Marcus paused, seeming to consider the awful effects of such a thing coming to pass: first three decades of reds under the bed, now fascists bugging the PM’s study. I could see if this came to light Marcus and his cronies would be in for a roasting.
‘Well, naturally, I’m just as anxious to stall him. It’s our service, after all. Prime Ministers come and go. We have to live with our mistakes.’
‘And Basil?’ I asked. ‘Where does he fit in? Does he know what you told me about Phillips?’
‘No. At least, I hope not. And I’d thank you not to tell him either. He’s just anxious for kudos. And don’t forget – Phillips was running a genuine grade A job out in Yugoslavia, against Moscow. That’s all perfectly above board. But it was cover for his real activities.’
‘But the other two, Dearden and McKnight: that was Moscow, wasn’t it? So maybe they got Phillips as well?’
‘Maybe they did,’ Marcus was pleased with this idea. He was very bland now, believing he had made his case secure with me. ‘That’s certainly my opinion. They dumped him in that loch, or something, so that Zagreb circle is well and truly dead now anyway. But Phillips still matters to us: we don’t want a right-wing purge, a month in the Old Bailey and enough classified fodder to keep the Sunday Times “Insight” boys happy for a year. And that remains a possibility – if you go sniffing about after him.’
‘Especially if I find him, you mean?’
‘Alive, I mean. If you find him dead that won’t matter at all, of course. But we’d prefer it if you didn’t bother, in fact – if you kept off it.’
Marcus had gone just a fraction too far. He was hiding something; he didn’t want me to go looking for Phillips for some other reason entirely – I had no idea what. Everything on the surface added up – I could see that: Phillips, though never authoritarian in my memory of him, did have just that kind of upper-class, very conventional, army background which could have led him to such a clandestine right-wing position within the service.
Very well then, I thought: Marcus’s scenario on Phillips was quite probable – but for two things: his not wanting me to find him, which seemed unlikely anyway – for if I did find him, alive, it would surely be no great trouble for Marcus to keep his mild treason under wraps, as he’d done with the other conspirators. No one knew of the matter so far in any case, and, unless the PM himself let the cats run, there was no reason why anyone should know. Secondly, there was the matter of Phillips’s other official concerns: the Zagreb circle, apparently instrumental in preventing Moscow from getting a foothold in Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. This, indeed, was grade A, an operation sanctioned from the very top (and most likely being run in tandem with the Americans, more anxious than we to maintain that country’s independence). And it struck me that no Deputy Chief of an intelligence service could so lightly dismiss the loss of a principal operative in such a sehe me, as Marcus had done, and that Phillips’s work in this respect was, in any case, more important than his being discovered playing toy soldiers with some old colonial darlings down in the shires.
Well, let him hide whatever he wants, I thought. The matter had come into a private realm that morning at the Flower Show, a world beyond any that Marcus lived in or could apparently comprehend.
I said, ‘I’m going to help them anyway, Marcus. I offered to this morning. Purely as a private matter – unless you have in mind to lock me up here for a month.’
Marcus didn’t smile. ‘I see,’ he said, like a ho
usemaster confronted with a boy who was bigger than him, and likely to prove it.
‘Yes. I don’t know that you do see, but this has really nothing to do with you. I’m not interested in all your political stories. The Phillips are old friends of mine. That’s the level it’s on as far as I’m concerned. I left your service years ago – and it’s I who have the extreme prejudice about it. If I find Lindsay it’ll be for his family. What you do about it then is your own affair. There is a world outside yours, you know – of people and families, not part of your mad power plays. And I don’t care if Phillips was trying to score on the right wing, not a bit: I wouldn’t fancy it myself, but I understand it very well. It’s his background after all, and you people taught him to fight for it over the years. Anyway, it’s all absolutely insignificant in comparison with a man’s disappearance – his possible death – for his own family. And that’s what I’m concerned with. So let’s just beg to differ, shall we?’
Marcus eased his collar and sniffed. My response couldn’t have surprised him, and he seemed now in his mind to be addressing himself to the next item on an already prepared agenda.
‘Beg, Marlow: that’s the word all right. For, of course, I shan’t authorise Basil’s payment to you.’
‘You’ve been close on his tail, haven’t you?’
‘And will remain so – and yours, I’m afraid. Why don’t you give it up, Marlow?’
‘You’d pay me more, would you?’
‘Yes,’ he said lightly. So he was hiding something. But I laughed, rather than give any hint of feeling this.
‘A few days ago I had the bank manager on the ’phone, murmuring about foreclosures, bald tyres all round and a sherry bill that looked like I was washing in the stuff. Yet here I am being offered a small fortune either way. I can’t lose, can I?’
‘Yes, you can, Marlow,’ Marcus said quickly. ‘I assure you you can.’
‘Thirty pieces of silver, indeed,’ I looked at him with distaste. ‘You don’t intimidate me. And you won’t. Oh, you can lock me up here, I suppose. But that won’t last. Why don’t you give it up? I told you: this is a personal matter now. I won’t screw your pitch, whatever dull game you’re playing. I give you my word on that.’
