Confirm or Deny (Gaffney and Tipper Mysteries Book 2)

by Graham Ison

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Mr Selby, you said just now that you’re going to marry her. Not just on the basis of having wine thrown over you, and a couple of concerts, surely?”

  “No.” Selby remained thoughtfully silent for a while. “She mentioned that she was going to be in London the following weekend, to do some shopping.” He looked up guiltily. “I invited her to my flat on the Saturday evening. I’d told her that I had quite a collection of Monteverdi, Praetorius too, and a particularly fine recording of the Allegri Miserere…” He shot a glance at Tipper, sitting to one side of, and slightly behind, Gaffney.

  “And did she come to your flat?”

  “Oh yes.” He gazed at Gaffney, but seemed to be looking beyond him, picturing the scene in his flat that evening. “She’s a very emotional person, you know, very affected by music.”

  “You mean it turned her on, this early stuff?” It was Tipper who asked the harsh question.

  Selby looked at him with distaste, but said nothing.

  “What happened next?” asked Gaffney, but knew the answer. “We made love – on the settee.” Selby’s facial expression didn’t change. It was just a statement of fact.

  “And then she went home?”

  “No. She stayed the night.”

  “But wasn’t she supposed to be staying with her friend?”

  “Yes, but she asked if she could make a phone call.”

  “I see. And what form did this phone call take – can you remember? Did it sound as though she was talking to a man – or a woman?”

  Again Selby shook his head. It could have been a rejection of the idea that she might have been staying with another man, and two-timing her husband and him at the same time. “I didn’t hear what she said. The telephone’s in the hall. I showed her where it was and went back into the sitting room and closed the door while she made her call.” The expression on his face said that it was impolite to eavesdrop on other people’s telephone calls, and by implication to read other people’s letters, even with a Home Secretary’s warrant. “She left after breakfast.”

  “But you arranged to meet her again, I imagine?”

  “Yes – well no, not exactly. She rang me at home a few nights later.”

  “You’d given her your phone number, then?”

  Selby glanced at Gaffney, the trace of a sneer on his face again, as though doubting the other’s detective skills. “It’s on the dial of the phone. She must have noted it when she made the call.”

  Gaffney nodded. “So she came to the flat again?”

  “Yes, it became quite a regular thing. She would ring me one evening to say that she would be there the following evening – when I got in from the office, of course.”

  “Of course,” murmured Gaffney. “But didn’t you think this rather strange, Mr Selby? Here you have a married woman who lives in Devon, who spends an inordinate amount of time in London, and seemed to be able to spend the night with you whenever she felt like it.”

  “Actually she didn’t stay the night very often. I gave her a key to my flat and she would let herself in. She’d have supper ready for me when I got in, and then…”

  “And then you would make love?” Selby nodded. “And she’d go home?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not to Devon, obviously. What time did she usually leave your flat, after these little love-visits?”

  “Usually about nine, maybe half-past.”

  “Did she have a car? Or did she go by cab – or train, or what?”

  “I’ve really no idea.” Selby spoke loftily, becoming bored with the whole business.

  “Well you’d better think,” said Gaffney sharply. “It’s fairly evident that you have been consorting with a KGB agent, and I’d venture to suggest that it may be in your best interests to give me as much assistance as you can.”

  Selby looked shocked. It was obvious that despite the evidence which Gaffney had laid before him, he hadn’t considered Rita Hamilton’s status in terms as precise as that. Gaffney seriously wondered how he had held down his job or, for that matter, been able to secure it in the first place.

  “Are you really saying, Mr Selby,” continued Gaffney, “that you allowed her to leave your flat and walk the streets of Fulham fairly late at night, without a care about her welfare – this woman you say you love, and that you want to marry?”

  “I remember now. She said she had a car.”

  “Did you ever see it? Travel in it? What sort was it?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw it.”

  “Now, you say that on these occasions she stayed with a friend in London. I mean, she must have done, mustn’t she – she couldn’t have traveled back to Devon at that time of night.” Selby nodded. “But you insist that you have no idea of the address – or even vaguely where it was?”

  “No.”

  “Did she give you a telephone number?”

  “No.”

  “Not for the house in Devon?”

  “No. She said it was too risky – her husband might answer the phone.”

  “Ah yes – her husband. That brings me to my next point. How did she explain away her frequent absences to her husband? Did she volunteer an explanation for that?”

  “She didn’t say very much about him. She said he was something to do with import and export and had to travel abroad quite a lot.”

  “But surely you must have discussed him with her when the question of marriage came up – your marriage to her, I mean.”

  The trace of a smile appeared on Selby’s face. “Yes, we talked about him then. She used a strange word; she said the marriage was sterile. They no longer made love. She called it a marriage of convenience.”

  “Presumably she saw no problems with obtaining a divorce?”

  “No. She was quite sure that he was having an affair, and she said it would probably be easy enough to prove it. But she didn’t think it would come to that. She said she’d only have to ask her husband and he’d let her go.”

  “All nice and neat, then. She would just hop out of one marriage and into another.”

  “You make it sound sordid. It wasn’t like that.”

  “Adultery usually is sordid,” said Gaffney. “But tell me about Devon. Why the decision to go down there?”

  “She said that she didn’t like coming to the flat – not so often. It made her feel dirty and deceitful.”

  “But it was different in her own home?”

  “I suppose so. I don’t know, but she said she wanted to spend longer with me. I did too.” He paused to pour himself a glass of water from the carafe on the table. “She suggested that I went down to Devon when her husband was away.” He sipped at the water. “I wasn’t awfully keen on that. I had this recurring thought that he would walk in on us; it made me feel uneasy. But she said that there was absolutely no danger. Her husband always rang her from the airport both on the way out and on the way in. She said that it was an unwritten agreement between them.”

  “Did her husband know that she was having an affair, then?”

  “I don’t know. I asked her that, but she just smiled and put her finger to her lips.”

  “So you went to Devon?”

  “Yes, she wrote to me to say that her husband was going to be in Sweden—” He broke off. “But then you know that, don’t you?” Despite the fact that he had read other people’s mail on dozens of occasions, he obviously still found it distasteful that someone else should have read his.

  “Yes,” said Gaffney. “Go on.”

  “I went down there – which you also know. It was a blissful weekend.” A distant look came into Selby’s eyes. “Most of which you spent in bed, I take it?”

  “Yes – we did.”

  “Did she have a collection of Monteverdi, too?” asked Tipper. He knew that there wasn’t even a record-player in the house.

  “I don’t know. She certainly didn’t play any music while I was there.”

  “No, I didn’t think so.”<
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  Gaffney took up the questioning again. “Did she know you worked for MI5?”

  “Good heavens no!” Selby appeared horrified at the prospect.

  “You mean you didn’t tell her. That’s not quite the same thing. I asked if she knew.”

  Selby seemed momentarily puzzled by the question. “She never mentioned it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Did she ever ask what you did for a living?”

  He considered that, and eventually said, “No, I don’t think she did.”

  “Don’t you find that strange?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because you had discussed marriage. You said earlier that you were going to get married. That implies that you proposed to her, and that she accepted.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “But she never asked what your profession was. She never posed any questions about your income – whether you could keep her in a manner to which she was accustomed?”

  “No.”

  “And yet you must have realized, just from seeing that house in Devon, that there was a bit of money there somewhere. Did you not wonder about that?”

  “I imagined that her husband was quite well off, yes.”

  “But you didn’t question her willingness to give all that up to come and live with you in a flat in Fulham which, with the best will in the world, Mr Selby, cannot be described as luxurious?”

  “No.”

  “If you’ll forgive me for saying so,” said Gaffney, “I think that you have been very naive in all this. Did it not occur to you, as an officer of MI5, that you were being set up?”

  “No, certainly not.” Selby reacted angrily. “We fell in love, quite naturally.”

  “This house in Devon. Where did you sleep? Presumably you slept with her.”

  “Yes. There’s a large bedroom, on the right at the top of the stairs. You obviously know it.” Gaffney nodded. “We slept there.”

  “And meals?”

  “In the dining room. Where else?” There was still the odd trace of sarcasm in Selby’s voice.

  “You found nothing strange in the house? Nothing out of the ordinary?”

  “No, not really.” He appeared to be thinking.

  “And what of Mr Hamilton? Any trace of him?”

  “No. I told you, he was in Sweden.”

  “I know,” said Gaffney patiently. “That’s not what I meant. When a man lives in a house, there are usually traces of him. In the bathroom, for instance. After-shave, a dressing-gown. Suits in the wardrobe – that sort of thing.”

  “I never looked.”

  “You’re not being very helpful, Mr Selby.”

  “There was one thing. I was in the sitting room on the Sunday morning. We both were; we were having coffee. I walked over to the bookcase and started to browse. Rita looked up and asked me if I’d mind not touching the books. She said that they were her husband’s, and he was very particular about them. She seemed quite worried, as though he might make a fuss if he came back and found any one of them out of place.”

  “Didn’t you think that strange?”

  “Not really. I presumed that she had no interest in books, and that if he came back and found that they had been moved then he’d know that someone had been there; someone else, I mean.”

  “Like a lover, perhaps?”

  Selby spread his hands. “I suppose so.”

  “Did you go outside while you were there? In the garden; or the grounds, I suppose they were called.”

  “No, I didn’t. I suggested it, but Rita said it was all overgrown and uninteresting. I wasn’t bothered; I’m not a garden person. That’s one of the reasons why I live in a flat.”

  “All in all then, you found nothing odd about the house?”

  “No.” He adopted his supercilious expression again. “But then you don’t spend all your time looking for spies, do you?”

  “Oh? I thought that’s what you were paid for, Mr Selby.” There was a light tap on the door, and a young detective entered the room silently. He handed a note to Tipper and left again. Tipper read the note and handed it to Gaffney.

  “Interesting, but not surprising,” said Gaffney. He glanced at Selby. “My officers have now found some photographic equipment, a Minox camera. For photographing documents, very likely. A real spies’ nest, eh, Mr Selby?”

  Selby looked uncomfortable. He knew that he was going to be hard pressed to explain how he, a professional intelligence officer, had spent a weekend in that house without realizing what it was being used for, although without a dedicated and thorough search of the kind that Gaffney must have undertaken, nothing incriminating could possibly have been found; it was all too professionally secreted. But try convincing a sceptical English jury. Even if his counsel objected to every juror who was carrying a copy of the Daily Telegraph, he could still have a fight on. Even the liberal supporters of misguided civil servants who sent copies of innocuous memoranda to the newspapers would not be very sympathetically disposed to outright spying.

  Gaffney returned to the thrust of his questioning. “On the other hand, Mr Selby, I have to consider this proposition: that you have consorted with an agent of the Soviet Union; that, I think, is established to the satisfaction of all of us in this room. I am prepared to accept that you may have done so unwittingly, at least at the outset; nevertheless it’s an indictment of your professional expertise. But I suggest that once you had formed a liaison with this woman, you then went on to disclose highly secret details of current MIS operations. She must have rubbed her hands; it’s the oldest ploy in the world, and you fell for it. It’s called ‘pillow-talk’. Once you realized that you were in over your head, you just had to keep on, didn’t you?”

  “Of course not; that would be a breach of security.” Selby said it as though he genuinely believed it; probably was so humorless that he couldn’t see that as an understatement it came close to farce.

  Gaffney laughed; the paradox of it amused him. “Come now, Mr Selby. Rita Hamilton knew perfectly well that you worked for the Security Service, and you told her everything that she wanted to know; when you were in bed together, of course. You told her all about the Dickson affair—”

  “I didn’t know anything about the Dickson business.” Selby spoke with desperation. “I told you that before; Geoffrey told us nothing.”

  “What you said before, Mr Selby, was that Geoffrey Hodder told you that a Major Armitage from the MOD was passing classified material to a hostile intelligence officer.” Selby nodded dumbly. “And that’s what you told Mrs Hamilton. She in turn told the Kremlin using the transmitter which was installed not eight feet above the bed where you and she were making love. That was a cheap price for her to pay for your treachery, wasn’t it?” Selby opened his mouth to protest, but Gaffney went on, relentlessly. “That enabled the KGB to alert Dickson to the fact that MI5 knew all about him, and she – Mrs Hamilton – was instructed to make the usual arrangements. The result was that Dickson escaped, and was able to escape because you’d told Rita that he was under surveillance. We now know that he went straight down to Bere Watton—”

  “Probably slept the night with Rita in the same bed,” said Tipper quietly in a spiteful aside. Selby looked sick.

  “And all because of your obsession with a woman who deliberately set you up,” continued Gaffney, “and conned you into believing that seventeenth-century music made her passionate. I’ll bet she doesn’t know Monteverdi from Monty Python.”

  Selby’s natural languidity finally deserted him; there was almost uncontrolled panic in his face now. “Are you crazy?” he asked, his voice rising. “You’ve got no proof, none at all.”

  Still Gaffney spoke mildly, his tone almost politely conversational. “How long would it take us to get it? How many hours of interrogation, going over the same points, again and again? The hours of solitary confinement in between, and then the same questions, over and over again. You know the principles, don’t you? You’re in the trade. An
d eventually you’ll crack, won’t you? You’ll tell me everything; everything I want to know. How much you told her; when you told her; and what you got in return.” He paused. “Well we know one of the answers to that; sexual favors, but what else? A high price to pay for years in prison…” Selby was ashen-faced now; he moaned slightly and Gaffney wondered if he were going to faint. “Or was it ideological? Perhaps you deliberately sought a contact, and quite willingly gave information; no coercion at all, was that it? The sex was a bonus, maybe. Like Burgess, Maclean and Philby, were you? A great believer in the cause of Soviet supremacy, of world communism; is that you, Mr Selby? Are you really a closet communist? A latter-day Apostle?”

  “No, I’m not!” Selby’s voice had almost reached screaming pitch. “I don’t know, I didn’t know.” He held his head in his hands, briefly, and then looked up, his face distorted with anguish. “She was kind and sympathetic. She didn’t ask me about my job; never mentioned it. I didn’t even give her my office telephone number, and I certainly didn’t tell her anything that was going on. I never mentioned Dickson, or Armitage. We just made love; it was wonderful, and unbelievable…”

  Gaffney sighed. “Selby, you’re not convincing me. You’re an intelligence officer; don’t try to mislead me with all this nonsense about love. It’s starry-eyed rubbish, and you know it.”

  Selby seemed to recover his poise, although he was still very white about the face. “You’ve got absolutely no proof. You can’t keep me here, you know.” Suddenly he stood up, arms at his sides.

  “Oh do sit down,” said Gaffney mildly, ignoring Selby’s hysterical outburst. So far there wasn’t much evidence that would justify his detention, but Gaffney was going to keep him just the same. He’d frightened him now, badly; that was obvious, and it might be productive to see what happened next, when he could confront Selby with Rita Hamilton. Then he would be able to see who accused whom. But they had to find Rita Hamilton first.

  “Now we come to the point of all this, Mr Selby,” continued Gaffney. “It is obviously a matter of great urgency and importance that we find Mrs Hamilton as soon as possible – and arrest her.”

  Selby knew that that was the case, had tried to prevent himself from thinking it, stemming the very crystallization of a concept that Gaffney had now put so graphically into words. “Yes, I suppose so.” His hands, loosely linked, hung down between his knees, and his head was bowed.