The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  ‘Yes, I know the rest,’ the PM said. ‘You were very quick, but not really quick enough. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how Phillips managed to get away or “disappear” about an hour before you arrived in Perth. One might almost think he’d been warned.’ The PM looked at Marcus.

  Again Marcus was totally composed. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, almost a cheeky tone in his voice. ‘It’s possible. And there was – we know from his wife – a phone call which Phillips took that Sunday, after lunch. The telephone is at the end of the hall in their house. His wife was with him at the time – they were just going out to the garden together. She heard him say “You have the wrong number.” So, of course, that may have been a warning. But only “may”: we can’t be sure. We can’t, for example, be sure that the call came from London, which is where the warning would had to have come from, since the Phillips’s home number has been on a direct dialling system from London for over a year.’

  ‘You have it all so nicely balanced, David,’ the PM said. ‘“On the one hand:this. On the other:that. It could – and it couldn’t: it might – and it mightn’t.” Do you find it impossible to make your mind up in any way on this matter?’

  ‘I’m afraid that in the absence of any conclusive evidence I must take that approach, Prime Minister,’ Marcus replied brightly. ‘This whole matter of Phillips is very much a matter of balance as far as I’m concerned – which in itself is typical of most intelligence investigations such as this. It’s often, indeed, a matter of very fine balances.’ Marcus looked distantly at the PM. ‘Very fine indeed. If I may say so.’

  ‘Yes, I know all that, Marcus. I don’t want a thesis on the art of espionage: I want your opinion, simply, as to where this man is or what’s happened to him.’

  ‘I don’t know, Prime Minister. I truly don’t have a definite opinion: I can only offer you several alternatives.’

  The PM sighed minutely. ‘Let us bear with them then.’

  ‘My first thought – and I take it first only because it’s the one all of you here seem most to favour – is that he has gone over to Moscow –’

  ‘Thank you, David. At last. And it follows then, doesn’t it, that Phillips was a major Soviet agent?’

  ‘That might follow. Though not necessarily major –’

  ‘We can dispense with the “not necessarilys”, I think. What then, if that is true? What’s the Soviet move? When is he likely to surface?’

  ‘With the others, Burgess and Philby, it took several years. They’ll wait for some suitable occasion when they can make useful propaganda out of it before they uncover him. Or they may use him as a confidential bargaining counter, held against some advantage Brezhnev wants from the West. And that could be any time: next week or next year –’

  ‘Splendid,’ the PM interjected. But this time it was Marcus who came very smartly back at him, holding up his hand like a traffic policeman. ‘If I may, Prime Minister. What I really have to say is this: we should continue to bear very much in mind my original point: we have as yet no absolutely conclusive evidence that he has gone over to Moscow. None of our sources over there, legal or illegal, have mentioned any rumours of him. And nor have the CIA. And he’s been gone over two months. Thus we must continue seriously to consider the other alternatives: that he is still over here, dead or alive: that, for example, realising we suspected his loyalty, he killed himself–drowned in that loch of his up there perhaps. And there is a third alternative, one which we’ve not properly considered at all: that realising we were on to him, he just upped and disappeared somewhere else, but not to the Soviet Union.’

  ‘Doubtful, isn’t it?’ the Defence Minister put in. ‘He took nothing with him – no luggage, passport, cash?’

  Marcus allowed himself a minute pinched smile – a nasty grimace, it would have been, had it lasted more than a second. ‘Of course, Minister, he would have made detailed arrangements for such a move long beforehand.’ Marcus returned to the PM. ‘What I’m suggesting is that Phillips, rather than going over to Russia and a drab life in the Moscow suburbs, may have gone to South America or some such place where we don’t have any political extradition treaties – there to wait for his wife to join him, before starting afresh.’

  ‘Surely not,’ the old Secretary of the Cabinet put in, aghast, unable to restrain himself. ‘Surely, from what I know of him, he’d too much at stake at home in Scotland: his house, his family, his bees; an old family, after all. Very respected.’ He shook his head in righteous disbelief, ‘I really can’t see someone like Lindsay ending up in some banana republic. That stretches fantasy too far.’

  ‘They have bees in South America,’ Marcus put in deliberately. ‘And a lot of old and respected families out there, too, I understand. Phillips may not have seen Scotland and his distinguished ancestry as the be-all and end-all, you know – especially if he was a life-long Communist, as must follow from your initial scenario that he was a Soviet agent.’

  ‘I think we’ve had enough of these disputatious theories, David. Though am I to gather from what you’ve just said that you now doubt that Phillips is a Soviet agent? I thought we were all agreed on that?’ The PM gazed at Marcus malevolently.

  ‘No, Prime Minister – I’ve not reached the stage of doubting anything yet: I’m still establishing grounds, making my enquiries.’

  He gazed at the PM with the clear cool eyes of an innocent child. The meeting closed shortly afterwards – just long enough for Marcus, apparently, to confirm a narrow victory over the Prime Minister in the whole matter.

  *

  At lunch, though, which the PM took privately later with the Cabinet Secretary and the Minister, another card was brought into play.

  ‘Of course it’s useless,’ the Minister said, ‘using anyone in his own service for any kind of surveillance on Marcus – or confidential investigation on him. He’d spot it at once. Besides, it’s my reading that everyone that counts in the SIS is behind Marcus on this in any case. They’re closing ranks, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally,’ the PM said, putting aside his half finished plate of cold meat salad. ‘But I have someone outside Marcus’s ranks – yet within the SIS: a very senior chap, who has already voiced mild doubts about Marcus in any case. I’ll brief him in the matter.’ The PM sipped a little water, lifting the glass a fraction as though toasting an equally small triumph.

  ‘Is that wise?’ the Cabinet Secretary asked, concerned at once by this devious approach. ‘Dividing loyalties in that way? Can you trust this man?’

  ‘Oh, I think so,’ the PM went on, basking confidently now in the warmth of his illicit conceit. ‘At worst, this fellow is the Devil I know. Whereas with Marcus – there’s no question – he’s hiding something. Something which I should know, therefore something serious. And I have to find out.’

  ‘No question,’ put in the Minister.

  ‘So either I fire him now – which is bolting the door with the horses gone – or I use this other fellow to try and find out what’s going on. This whole Phillips situation couldn’t be worse in any case. Might as well attack, as sit back and wait for the chopper.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  The two men readily agreed.

  ‘But this “other fellow”?’ the Cabinet Secretary queried innocently. ‘Who?’

  ‘Better keep him under wraps, if you don’t mind. For the time being. Don’t want his cover blown. Fewer the better–you know the sort of thing.’ The PM looked at the other two with an amiable confidentiality and after they had left he put a call through to Basil Fielding.

  ‘Don’t use my name,’ the PM told the secretary before she rang. ‘Just put him on to me if he’s there.’

  Basil Fielding was there, back at his office in Holborn, and he recognised the Prime Minister’s voice at once.

  ‘Can you get round here – before three?’

  ‘I’d like to,’ Fielding said. ‘Unfortunately I have a security clearance meeting then.’

  �
�Well, hand it over to someone else.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m the subject of this meeting –’

  ‘What – who ordered this?’

  ‘Deputy Head. This morning. It rather takes me off active duty, I’m afraid,’ Fielding added sweetly.

  ‘Never mind that. You get round here this evening on your own steam. Come by the garden entrance–say seven o’clock. All right?’

  ‘Yes. Certainly. I’ll be there.’

  Both men were pleased with the outcome of their conversation: the Prime Minister because it seemed to confirm his worst suspicions about Marcus; and Basil Fielding since now, quite as an unexpected bonus, he had considerably enhanced his grip on the Prime Minister.

  *

  Fyodor Kudashkin had no idea who the man had been in the Professor’s rooms – except that, in trailing him so clumsily afterwards, he thought he must come from some branch of British Security or Intelligence. The London KGB Resident might know: Kudashkin retained a clear image of the unexpected visitor that morning. A session with one of the Embassy artists and an Identikit might well establish him.

  But meanwhile, like some canny animal in a miracle of nature, Kudashkin had changed colours – his crumpled, candy-striped summer suit replaced by something much less conspicuous, a blue Dacron two-piece with a rather vulgar kipper tie to go with it in the same false material. He carried a shiny black PVC briefcase with him into the lobby of the Londoner Hotel together with a tartan zip bag in the same cheap style. His easy windblown hair had been reformed, mastered now with some sticky lotion that had set the strands over his skull like dried seaweed after a tide has left it. His cheeks were padded out with cotton wool and he had suddenly achieved a fashionable, if ridiculous, walrus moustache. His old spectacles had gone too, replaced by an ostentatious new pair, rimless, the glass cut in a smart hexagonal pattern. Overnight he had changed from vague Ivy League academic into an aggressive salesman from New Jersey.

  The clerk gave him his key and he went straight up to a small room at the back of the hotel in Marylebone. Once inside, he sat on the bed and dialled another room number in the same hotel. ‘Room 32,’ he said when a voice answered. ‘The third floor. Come straight over.’ Then he went to the window, gazing up over the grimy rooftops into a broad sweep of deep blue sky, while waiting for the Croat policeman from Zagreb.

  Ivo Vladovič would not be easy to outwit, Kudashkin thought – reminding himself again, as the big man came into the bedroom, what a tough old bird this ex-partisan commander was: a great hulk of a man, with a light belted raincoat draped now over his shoulders, a face like badly chiselled rock, mottled cheeks hollowing with age, a drooping nose over a long chin and hands that clasped a cigarette holder like the shaft of a spade.

  Kudashkin had long since realised that, unlike the servile security or police chiefs with whom he’d dealt in the other Eastern bloc nations, this man, though nearly as orthodox as they in his Marxist politics, would brook a minimum of interference in his plans for unseating Tito and introducing a hard-line, Moscow-orientated regime in Yugoslavia. He and the other Yugoslav Cominformists were anxious for indirect Soviet support in their schemes – but for no more than that. When the day came which would see the end of Tito and his Marxist apostasy it was Vladovič who was determined to rule the roost and call the tune: Vladovič who would run the country then – in association with Moscow, yes – but an association hardly closer than that which existed between the two countries at present.

  It was one of Kudashkin’s responsibilities to prevent this happening and to ensure a far more rigid control of Yugoslavia in these political eventualities – a task made the more difficult since he knew this Croatian police chief mistrusted him deeply already.

  The two men shook hands, but hurriedly. Vladovič turned then and without taking his coat off walked over to the other side of the room. Then he stood facing Kudashkin, like a tree.

  ‘I’ve only two days in London,’ he said formally. ‘I would like to have things settled by then.’ He spoke Russian well, but again in a hurry. There was a permanent impatience in his voice. For time was running out – his time at least, and soon any changes in Yugoslavia would have to be left in the hands of younger men. Kudashkin had recognised this over-anxious intent in the man before – a chink in his armour which he hoped to enlarge so that Vladovič would overreach himself and find a place, with the others like him, in one of Tito’s jails. For the Soviets had their own man in Yugoslavia groomed for the succession after Tito, a younger and far more malleable Serb, already a member of the party’s Central Committee in Belgrade. Vladovič was an anachronism, though he retained much support, particularly among the exiled Yugoslav Cominformists of his own wartime generation. It was a matter of treading carefully then, of using both carrot and stick with the man.

  ‘I can’t promise anything,’ Kudashkin said. ‘Not in that time.’

  ‘You promised Phillips – the British Intelligence officer. We handled his man Dearden for you, in Zagreb. And Phillips was supposed to come out, you said – to investigate. Well, he hasn’t.’

  ‘He will,’ Kudashkin said confidently. ‘They’ve delayed him here. But he’ll come, and then you can take him.’

  Vladovič remained ill at ease, unconvinced. ‘It’s late, though,’ he said angrily. ‘It puts every other arrangement out: I was supposed to arrest this Phillips weeks ago – shortly after Dearden was killed. The two events were meant to nearly coincide. I could have clearly proved Western interference in our internal affairs then.’

  ‘You still can: he will come.’

  Vladovič opened his arms, stretching his hands out in a hopeless gesture, so that his coat, opening around him like bat wings, nearly slipped to the floor. ‘You seem to forget our other agreements,’ he said viciously. ‘They had to happen at the same time –’

  ‘Not exactly. They couldn’t, since we don’t control everything. Phillips’s movements, for example –’

  ‘Look, the Croatian fascists, Radovič and the others, in Munich and Brussels: our plan?’ Vladovič said intently. Kudashkin nodded calmly. ‘You remember – we were to accuse Phillips of dealing with them, supporting them – showing how the West was anxious to create an alliance with these exiled nationalists, and was thus favouring a break away independent state of Croatia after Tito’s death – which would give us the opportunity of clamping down and taking over?’

  ‘Yes, that was the plan.’

  ‘Well, as I forecast, Radovič came to Zagreb three weeks ago, under cover, and we spotted him. But there was no Phillips – and no one else from British Intelligence there either that we could link Radovič with. I had to let him go. So we’re back where we started. Radovič won’t come again for a long while – a year maybe.’

  Kudashkin smiled. ‘I remember all that. But Phillips will come, you can rely on it. And Radovič can then be taken in Brussels – and brought back into the country. You’ve done that before.’

  ‘It’s far more risky though, taking someone outside.’

  Kudashkin was tart and officious now. ‘What you have to realise is that none of us can guarantee an exact date for Phillips’s arrival; we never could. You are being inflexible: we had to allow for variations in our plans.’

  ‘I realise that. Some allowances. But it’s three months since Dearden went – and every day Tito consolidates his succession. Flexibility, yes. But the time factor now is even more important. If we have to wait much longer it will be too late: Tito will have completed his plans for a collegiate leadership after his death. We must have action within the month – which means we must have Phillips. Or, if not him, then someone else from British or Western Intelligence whom we can pin these charges on.’

  ‘You shall have Phillips,’ Kudashkin said easily. ‘As I told you – I understand from our Resident here that he has simply been delayed with other work.’ Then he paused, a possibility forming in his mind: ‘Him – or someone else. We’ll let you know who – as soon as our sources in Br
itish Intelligence tell us.’

  Alone again, Kudashkin considered his position. It was doubtful if Vladovič would ever see Phillips in Yugoslavia now, he thought. Phillips seemed genuinely to have disappeared: Allcock had known nothing, apart from confirming that the family were neither hiding him nor, as far as he knew, privy to any British Intelligence ruse in which his disappearance had been intended. He had then packed the old man off to Amsterdam for a week or two as a precaution.

  Now it was time to approach his other crucial source in the matter: Basil Fielding. He had a long-standing arrangement to meet him later that afternoon near the man’s apartment in Kensington. Perhaps Fielding would have some fresh information, some new clues. Or, if not, perhaps together they might form some other plan which would both satisfy the impatient Croat and lead to his downfall.