Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “I see. But now you’ve no clients. You are, in fact, a waste of space. Literally so.”

  “You have anything else you want to share with me?”

  “Share? Share! Oh you fucking hippies. Yes, I’ll ‘share’,” both hands went up to frame the word in speech marks, “this with you: there’s no victory in him firing you or you firing him. The only success was getting the bloody book out of him. Any less and it’s a waste of your time and a waste of Syd’s space. We might as well move the photocopier back in.”

  “What would you suggest? I already go through the slush pile every day to so little purpose.”

  “Move yer arse. You’re supposed to be the Crown Prince of Lit Fic. Take on some clients and do it quick. Stop messing around with no-hopers who don’t want to know you . . .”

  “There were only three.”

  “Stop messing about and start building your list. Forget promising and go for established.”

  “And how – from the elevated view of a secretary and receptionist – would you suggest I set about doing this?”

  “You little gobshite! Poach ’em! Get out there and nick other buggers’ clients! And you dare talk to me like that again and I’ll rip yer bollocks off!”

  Well. That was me put in my place.

  Poach ’em.

  So I did.

  Writers are fickle creatures. Most have no loyalty whatsoever. Most live in a constant state of feeling ill-served and unappreciated.

  I rang half a dozen writers I’d published in my two years at Hamilton Hardy and announced that I was jumping ship. Not – note – that I had already jumped ship. That in itself might have appeared disloyal. And since all had reasons aplenty to be dissatisfied with the service they thought they weren’t getting from Bloggs and Brown or Bottle and Briggs (make up a name, it really doesn’t matter) . . . by the end of the week Hawes Greene had six new clients on the books, including a Somerset Maugham winner, a Hawthornden and two hotly tipped to win the Booker one day.

  I felt free of a quagmire . . . a quagmire that was Bentinck. I don’t think I can honestly say that I liked any of these writers any better than I liked Bentinck, but they weren’t going to suck me into a bog of contradictions. Just flatter their fragile egos with soft lullabies of genius and all would be well.

  I received a postcard from Toby Mornay’s agent. A postcard in an envelope. It read: Fuck you!

  I received a postcard not in an envelope from Jeremy Crich’s agent: You’re welcome to him, and I hope you lose as much sleep over him as I have.

  And as I’d managed to bag Crich at the point when he was ready with a new and uncontracted novel, I was in business. Or as they say back home, I wuz cookin’.

  Yes. All would be well.

  Two weeks or more passed.

  I was in the office late. Even the Buckett had gone back to Dagenham.

  Whoever was last to leave ended up with the direct line. So when the phone rang I answered.

  “Is that Hawes Greene?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry to be calling at this time of night. I’m trying to find Jack Turner.”

  “Speaking.”

  “Mr Turner . . . I’m Molly Bentinck.”

  A young voice . . . a beautiful voice . . . a daughter omitted from Who Ain’t Who . . . a sister?

  “I’m Roger’s wife.”

  Fuck me!

  He was wedged halfway up the stairs, where a small landing enabled a 180-degree turn in the staircase. He’d fallen, collapsed, taken a snooze, whatever, at this point and Mrs Bentinck could not budge him.

  He was wearing shirt, Y-fronts and socks. No trousers. She was wearing a neat little black skirt and a highly starched white blouse. She’d kicked off her high heels to get more purchase on 200 and more pounds of Mr Toad.

  She was maybe five years older than me. A looker.

  “He just flopped,” she said. “I tugged and shoved for a bit, then his eyes opened once. He said, ‘Get Jack’, and I was left wondering who Jack was. I found your letter from a week or two back among the rot and rubbish on the dining table and took a chance.”

  Get Jack? Why, for God’s sake?

  “You want to move him now?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind, Mr Turner. He is between us and the loo.”

  We got him to the next floor, into a bedroom, on to a bed that screamed with his weight.

  It was, in utter contrast to his small back room, clean and ordered.

  She caught me looking.

  “It’s my house. Been in my family since it was built. I told him when he wanted to move in all the crap from his mother’s house after she died that he could have two rooms on the ground floor, and that’s all. The rest he is to keep clean and tidy. He pays for the cleaner, who is never allowed into his pigsty at the back. He’s also responsible for the exterior. But you can see for yourself how conscientious he is about that. I don’t suppose you know what happened to the door knocker?”

  “I don’t. And I can assume you don’t live here?”

  “Good Lord, no. I live in Tuscany. I left Roger six years ago. Let me put the kettle on and I’ll fill you in. I suppose he’ll have tea. Somewhere.”

  Back in Bentinck’s allotted portion of the house, among a lifetime supply of tinned desserts . . . custard, rice pudding, tapioca, semolina and some stuff called Angel Delight, which he whipped up in a Cuisinart – I had known him to spatter both of us in butterscotch – she found a packet of Typhoo.

  “You may imagine, I was not the first Mrs Bentinck.”

  “Well, there are no Mrs Bentincks in Who’s Who.”

  She said nothing to this – a “so what?” shrug.

  “He married Penny when he was twenty-five. She was taken ill while he was running some daft mission in the Baltic. He put the job first. Assumed she’d pull through. Dashed back at the last minute to find she’d died a couple of hours earlier. Never forgave himself. He had betrayed her – that was his word. Betrayed her in the service of a cause that in itself was a betrayal.

  “Had plenty of girlfriends after that, but he wouldn’t marry anyone until he was out of the service. Didn’t want to see the pattern repeated. Either something would happen while he was away or something would happen to him. Married again in ’67. Swiftly followed by an acrimonious divorce in ’69.

  “We met in ’72. You may find this hard to believe. In his late forties, he was still slim. Harder still, he was still charming . . . still . . . intriguing. Or perhaps you can see that. Perhaps that’s why you’re here?”

  A few teacups later a voice from above bellowed, “Molly!”

  Molly said, “The kraken awakes.” And went to see what.

  Five minutes later she returned with half a dozen foolscap sheets – handwritten on both sides.

  “For you,” she said.

  I leafed through them.

  “No,” she said. “Read. I’ll make more tea. I might even warm up a can of tinned milk mush.”

  “If I’m to read more Rogerisms, I’d prefer a whisky.”

  “Why not? Why not, indeed?”

  Instead of reaching for the half-empty bottle of Bells, she reached into her travel bag and pulled out a duty-free litre of Laphroaig.

  Okay, for Laphroaig I might just get through twelve sides of Bentinck-scrawl. By page four I was asking for a top-up.

  It was rant. Twelve pages of semi-coherent drivel ending with “MAURICE OLDFIELD WAS NOT A POOF!” in capital letters.

  “Well?”

  “Mrs Bentinck, did you know Maurice Oldfield?”

  “Yes. And I was at his funeral only a couple of years ago, as it happens. A good friend. So, Roger’s springing to his defence is he?”

  “Lurching would be more the word.”

  I showed her the last line.

  “Oh. Well, there has been a lot of nonsense put about by those third-rate hacks who specialize in writing about MI6, hasn’t there? Maurice was gay . . . ergo Maurice was a security risk . . . ergo Maurice
was a double agent. All bollocks, of course.”

  “That’s pretty much what Mr Bentinck says.”

  “And that’s his book, is it?”

  “No, Mrs Bentinck. It’s not a book. At best it’s a letter to The Times.”

  “Bad as that, eh?”

  “Why is he doing this?”

  “What? Defending a mate?”

  “No . . . that I do understand. The rest of it. Wanting to write a book at all. I don’t know what he believes. I don’t know what he’s saying.”

  She crossed the room, picked up the cover of Bentinck’s Meccano kit and handed it to me. The two little boys in the half-light, the paternal gaze of a loving father.

  “It’s all there. Everything he believes in is in that picture. Everything about the England he defends. Look at the boys. Socks pulled up, garters in place, ties straight, hair combed . . . Dad’s even wearing a suit. And they produce something practical and useful and probably grow up to be District Officers in the far reaches of the Empire.”

  “All that in a box lid?”

  “Yes, all of it.”

  “Then why betray it?”

  “Ah . . . you think writing about it is betraying it?”

  “I . . . don’t know . . .”

  “Roger is defending it. If he ever writes his book he will be defending these values by exposing their betrayal.”

  “And that was . . . ?”

  “I think you’ll find he blames you people for that.”

  “He already has.”

  “Which is why I was surprised he wanted an American anywhere near this. But . . . you’re one of the very people he’s trying to get through to, aren’t you? It’s addressed to you. It’s personal. After all, so much of it is. The betrayal is personal. He is so unforgiving.”

  “The first Mrs Bentinck?”

  “Exactly. A private betrayal matched by a public one. He cannot write about the former, so he writes about the latter. He berates the West and America in particular for betraying Eastern Europe. You should hear him on the subject of Berlin.”

  “I have.”

  “Or on Vietnam, for that matter.”

  “That he doesn’t much mention.”

  “Draft dodger, eh? This may surprise you, but in Roger’s eyes the only honourable thing to do about Vietnam was dodge. To go was to betray. To give false hope was to lie. To pitch in and pull out was to lie. He’s no respecter of cowards, don’t get me wrong. But he honestly believes it was better not to have got involved in the first place. I watched the final evacuation of the embassy in Saigon on the BBC with him. He was in tears. All he could say was ‘Betrayal’.”

  Molly Bentinck kept a flat in St John’s Wood. We let Bentinck sleep it off and she drove me home. Just before I stepped out of the car she asked, “There’s nothing you can do with what he’s writing?”

  “Mrs Bentinck, he fired me.”

  “I think you’ll find not.”

  Oh God, could I bear his “not”?

  “Do keep in touch, Mr Turner.”

  For 200 quid the guy in the Edgware Road replaced my woofers. Woofers? I know. Don’t ask. Then I went back to Great Marlborough Street and spent another 200 on albums.

  Pasta and punctuation. Lunch with Jeremy Crich. A man with an infinite ability to manipulate the comma. I had known him to ring up, asking to revise over the phone, only have him move commas around, swap semicolons for en-rules, en-rules for em-rules and blah-de-blah.

  He handed over Hackney Year Zero, a hard-hitting satire of his life and hard times at the proletarian “coalface” in one of London’s less fashionable boroughs (where they can’t spell “cappuccino”), to which he had moved from Hampstead (where they can spell “cappuccino”), with, “Can you get me a hundred grand for this? I need to get me teeth fixed.”

  When I got back to Henrietta Street there was a note on my desk from the Buckett:

  Bentinck phoned for you.

  Said something like “Mozart, 2 Joannas. 8.30 tomorrow night.”

  Is this spook code of some sort? Vera.

  I took Mr Bentinck a present. Two tins of Bird’s Custard. That’ll learn me. He pulled a face at the conjunction of two words on the label I’d never even noticed: “low” and “fat”.

  Molly had left the Laphroaig. He poured for us both, said, “Pin back yer lug’oles,” and pulled a long-playing Microgroove 33⅓ rpm record from its dusty paper sleeve. We had moved up from shellac to vinyl. I did not ask what. Mozart, that much I knew. Two pianos, that too. He’d fill in the rest later.

  A lively piece. Lots of elbow on the strings. But no pianos. A couple of minutes pass and just as I’m thinking he might have picked up the wrong record a piano crashed in with a riff (rock ’n’ roll has riffs, why not Mozart?) that knocked me for six. Twenty minutes of bliss followed. I cannot even hear him breathe. I can forget that I am, for reasons which passeth the understanding of Our Freud, a prisoner of a fat toad with an inordinate ability to get under my skin. I am . . . bound by the beauty.

  “Well, what do you think, hippie?”

  “I think: can I live without this? Who was it?”

  “Concerto for Two Pianos in E flat. K whatever. Clara Haskil and . . . and . . . and some other bloke whose name I can’t read without me specs. Recorded about thirty years ago, I reckon.”

  He didn’t mention his hymn to Oldfield. I could only assume that Molly had told him what I’d said and he’d shelved it. He made no reference to passing out – trouserless in Chelsea – halfway up the stairs. I could only assume he had little or no memory of it. He made no mention of screaming bloody murder at me down the phone and I was damn sure he remembered that.

  We played the Mozart again. He showed me a dumper truck he was building with his Meccano kit, and as the evening struggled to its grateful close I said, “Mr Bentinck, about the book idea . . .” with every intention of concluding on “Let’s just forget it”, but he cut me short with:

  “Working on it.”

  I got Jeremy Crich his hundred grand. (What fools these mortals be.) Syd congratulated me, and the Buckett, for once, refrained from calling me a twat.

  Syd said to bring him up to speed on the spookery. I related to him much of what Molly Bentinck had told me.

  “It’s a Chinese box. Layer upon layer. I’m not at all sure I understand the half of this.”

  Syd said, “Perhaps I do.”

  “Betrayal is not the simple word I thought it was.”

  “Oh, I think it is. You’ll recall I said Bentinck’s grandfather Mad Mike Cholmondoley had been court-martialled in the Boer War. Cashiered. That is military justice. Much more prevalent is military injustice. The textbooks record the fate of Mad Jack . . . retired to his estate in Rutland and spent the rest of his life slaughtering pheasants and careering across the farms of his tenants in pursuit of the uneatable, till the day he fell off the horse and broke his neck. No book records the fate of the eighty-odd enlisted men under his command who came back wounded . . . half of them missing limbs . . . but you can bet your last farthing there were no pensions, no free medical care . . . no nothing.

  “I think your Mr Toad probably feels the injustice inherent in military folly. It is possible, though I doubt he would say so as clearly, that Bentinck regards everything MI6 has done since the Cold War began as folly, that they waste people just as surely as any crazy cavalry charge. That’s the betrayal. ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’ was a betrayal. If you served in my war, most of the fifties was a betrayal. If you served in that farce down in the Falklands, you’re being betrayed even as we speak. Bentinck is a patriot. I see no reason to doubt that. Bentinck is betraying those who politick with patriotism and the safety of the realm. He believes in both, needless to say. In his own mind Bentinck is only betraying the betrayers.”

  “Wheels within wheels.”

  “No. It’s simple, far simpler than you think.”

  Bentinck’s next choice, the next module in my education in music, was simplicity itself. H
e had me sit through all six of Johann Sebastian Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello, played by Pablo Casals, relieved (but that honestly isn’t the word) by a Brunello di Montalcino 1976 and a bowl of butterscotch Angel Delight.

  “There’s an arrogance comes with the job. I know you think I’m an arrogant prick, but the kind of man who’ll do what I did will always think he’s right, otherwise he wouldn’t bloody do it. But it goes beyond that. The Deputy Head of MI6, back in the fifties I mean, took arrogance to a new level. He spoke for many of us. You might even think he spoke for me. He sent around a memo, this would be twenty-five and more years ago, so leaked I’m amazed it didn’t end up in the Daily Mirror . . . It said that SIS was now the guardian of moral and intellectual integrity, that the Cold War had induced a moral stalemate as deadlocked as the nuclear stalemate of Mutually Assured Destruction. It was down to us. We were the front line, the Home Front . . . We were . . . everything.”

  “Stealth knights in Teflon armour?”

  “Sneer if you like. Indeed, you may be right to sneer. It was in itself a delusion. It’s like a law of physics. Some action and its inescapable reaction. We set up an organization like SIS . . . whose job is to serve and protect. How many police forces in the world have that as their motto, I wonder? But . . . the laws of physics prevail. Once set up, any organization has as its first principle its own survival. It can flip from serving the state to become the internal enemy of the state if it feels itself threatened. But since it still is the secret servant of the state it will feel wholly justified in its actions and in keeping them secret. Secrecy is not just its modus operandi, it is its very nature.”

  A phrase from my student days came back to me: Lit 101.

  “‘The law is the law, even when it’s wrong.’”

  “Eh?”

  “It’s Kafka. Either in The Trial or one of the short stories. Writing about the secret police.”

  “German?”

  “Czech Jew. But he wrote in German.”

  “Hitler get him?”

  “No. He died years before.”

  “Ah . . . one of the lucky ones.”

  I had no idea where this was going and left the next moment to him.

  “And so . . . you see . . . we have a self-perpetuating, self-justifying body that has arrogated to itself the moral guardianship of the state . . . and what you end up with is a state within a state. A secret state. It will work against our enemies, wherever perceived, and because, as you said, it does not cease to be the law even when it is wrong, it doesn’t question what it does. It doesn’t question what it achieves.”