The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  And we made it – getting into the cover of a beech wood, resting a moment before running on along the side of the hill, rising slightly now, until we reached the new fir trees where we could go faster, moving through the green alleys over a sun-speckled carpet of moss and old fir needles.

  We came out of the woods near the clubhouse of the golf course. Outside the staff entrance to the clubhouse I saw several bicycles. We might have taken a car but they were all parked right in front of the windows, and the road from here, I knew, must in any case be downhill all the way to the town.

  Besides, it was an afternoon for cycling: soft and fresh and sunny. The drive gave out onto a main road very nearly at the apex of the hill. We turned left, pedalled upwards a bit, and it was brakes from then on, seeing the town round a bend three or four miles away in the valley, rushing towards it, past spacious Victorian villas on the left, the Malvern hills across the hazy distances away to our right.

  We forgot pursuit and future then, forgot everything. And we flew, or seemed to fly, and the sensations were utterly new to me, as if I’d never been alive – of wind and balance and smooth motion, in which one is completely part of the land and atmosphere of the world for once: no longer an intruder, but someone naturally expected, a guest accepting gratefully all the pressing invitations of air, clarity and movement; perfectly poised, the stomach sinking with the slopes, the gut expanding, adrenalin running – a natural gyroscope keeping us rock-steady as we dived on the town, happy partners in the clear weather.

  There was a phone box at the foot of the hill and I got through to my section in Holborn, reversing the charges, speaking to the duty officer. But McCoy was away, he said, on leave.

  ‘Let me speak to Harper then,’ I said. ‘John Harper, his deputy.’

  ‘I can’t do that, sir,’ the bland voice said. ‘Can’t give you his private number.’

  ‘Then get him to phone me, for God’s sake. At this number. It’s urgent.’

  We hung about, trying to keep out of sight behind the kiosk until the phone rang behind the glass five minutes later.

  ‘Harper here. Who’s that?’ The Australian voice was impertinent and harsh, ringing down the line at me, looking for a fight.

  ‘Marlow. Peter Marlow.’

  ‘Oh yes – who? Marlow? But we heard you were dead – last week in New York.’

  ‘That was Guy Jackson.’ I began to explain what had happened, that the KGB were after me. But after a minute he interrupted.

  ‘Look, this is an open line. I’ll get down there with some men right away. Are you on your own?’

  ‘No, with Mrs Jackson. I told you.’

  ‘Right, well stay with her. Keep off the streets, out of sight Where will you be?’

  ‘A police station – or the Communications HQ here.’

  ‘Your KGB people will have thought just the same thing. You’ll find them there before you, waiting. Go anywhere else. It’ll be a couple of hours before we can get down, even if I can lay on a plane. You’ll have to wait somewhere – hidden.’

  I gave him the address of Mrs Grace’s dancing academy in Pitville and told him about the Western Area Ballroom Dancing Certificate Examinations at seven o’clock that evening.

  ‘That sounds fine,’ he said, and he really seemed pleased. ‘We’ll be there as soon as we can. At any rate before they start dancing. And keep together,’ he added. I didn’t quite follow him. Did he think Helen and I were going to part? That might have been the case. But he knew nothing of her activities with the KGB, I hadn’t told him. Solicitude perhaps? I couldn’t expect that of Harper. It worried me a little. But as I came out of the box I said to Helen, ‘I think it’s going to be all right.’

  The studio was in Pitville Mews and it took us some time to find it. It lay behind one of the few restored terraces in the area, a narrow, empty cul-de-sac, which we cycled past several times before going down. Mrs Grace’s business was in the middle of it: ‘The Pitville Dancing Academy’ in Festival of Britain lettering on a long board above the doorway: a smart black door with brass fittings. Three or four garages had been run together and converted, we saw when we’d let ourselves in, into one long studio, with a hall, reception area, and changing rooms at one end.

  There was a smell of floor polish and french chalk and some other sweeter smell, a combination of various old and cheap perfumes lying on the air. And the light was very pale and unexacting in the narrow mews, giving the long studio with its white, pine polished floor, lemon-coloured walls and mirrors, a submarine quality, a sense of fragile, colourless space.

  We stepped on the shiny floor for a moment, very quietly. But even so delicate a movement reverberated about the room on the sprung boards. There was an old coloured photograph of the Queen at one end of the room, next to a record-player with a lot of Victor Silvester numbers stacked beside it.

  ‘Did you ever dance?’ Helen asked.

  ‘We were taught in my prep school. Every Saturday morning. Girls came. It was very popular.’

  ‘I like it. I used to.’

  ‘I’ve forgotten the steps though.’

  ‘Afterwards, perhaps?’

  I smiled. ‘After what?’

  She turned to me. ‘If we get out of this, what will you do?’

  ‘If. God knows. Back in jail probably.’

  ‘You could still get away now – on your own.’

  I laughed. ‘It’s too much like the Thirty-Nine Steps already. And I’m tired of running. We’re together. Let’s see how long we can stay that way. With these names you have – the British might do some sort of deal with you, give you anonymous asylum.’

  ‘If I do that, won’t they think you’ve done something of your original job for them as well: not the names of the real KGB people in America, but this dissident group? They could be far more important to the West – to know who these people are, to help them.’

  ‘Maybe. Do you want to do that? Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. What else can I do? Alexei’s not going to get to us now. They’ll be here in a couple of hours. So why don’t we work on the idea together – give them the names?’

  She looked at me carefully, suggesting a future, all that future that she had once been so ready with.

  ‘All right. We could do that. If you’re sure.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was silence. She kissed me briefly, stood close to me, quite still. We were waiting for the music, about to dance. We might have been. And I saw the two of us, and the two children, living somewhere in London – a terraced house in Regent’s Park would have suited – with Mrs Grace as housekeeper. And all of us happy, of course.

  ‘Well, it might work,’ I said, letting this crazy vision grow in my mind, burgeon irresponsibly, seeing the red sailing boats on the lake in the park, and the zoo the other side of it, myself the recovered paterfamilias taking the twins for summer walks up Primrose Hill, skating on the lake over icy winter weekends. Yes, I would buy a pair of skates in Lillywhites, the assistant suitably deferential, and learn the skimming business, awkward at first, but soon finding the knack, the balance, moving smoothly into a happy and responsible middle life. And I thought it’s never what we are but what we never could be that keeps us going.

  There was an airing-cupboard in the lavatory of the gents changing room, and we climbed the shelves past the cistern, pushed out a panel above it, pulled ourselves up, then screwed the shutter down again from the top.

  A rough room had been laid out under the rafters, with boards on the ceiling joists, a camp bed, books, tins of food, a big polythene jerry-can of water, an electric ring with a tin kettle and a single 40-watt bedside light.

  At the far end of the attic a small curtained window had been let into one side of the wall. Opening it slightly I looked out onto a wide lead gutter with a steeply slated room immediately beyond which would shield any exit from the rear windows of the big terraced houses to the left on the far side of the mews. To the right I could see the small backya
rd of a pub, with the ladies and gents lavatories to either side of it, and a lot of aluminium beer casks and wooden cider crates in the middle: everything as Mrs Grace had described. A man came out as I was watching, a big farmer chap with a peaked tweed cap, just his head visible as he went for a leak, but I had to duck down all the same. Our cosy retreat was somewhere to leave in the dark rather than the light.

  ‘Did you tell Harper that we were going to be up here?’ Helen said when I got back. She was picking through Mrs Grace’s reading matter: a number of old copies of the National Geographic magazine and an early text by Victor Silvester: First Steps in Ballroom Dancing.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what about the twins? Did you tell him where they’d gone – about Mrs Grace?’

  ‘No. Just that they’d gone with someone to a hotel outside town.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘To keep off the streets. Oh – and to keep together. We’ll pick up the children as soon as he comes. Don’t worry.’ She looked at me doubtfully in the hot gloom, a smell of baked wood everywhere. The slates above us were still hot to touch after the brilliant day. ‘They’ll be there,’ I went on. ‘They weren’t going to follow Mrs Grace to the hotel. That car we saw – after the tractor, in front of the house – that was the one they kept at the end of the lane for us. Not the children. And we’ll hear Harper downstairs as soon as he comes. We’re only up here in case the KGB call by.’

  *

  They called an hour later. It was 6.30 – half an hour to go before the dancing started. First we heard several successive keys groping the hall door lock, then quiet footsteps in the reception area, then – nothing. I was tempted to call out, fearing it was Harper and his men and that now they would leave without knowing we were there. A minute passed. I looked at Helen, whispering, ‘Shall I call?’ And if she had nodded a second sooner than she did I would have. My mouth was just opening. And then her hand was across it in the same instant, gagging me desperately, as the voice rose clear as a bell from the studio immediately beneath us.

  ‘Nichevo …’ Then two more voices in Russian, talking. And now the three of them were walking about the place, moving tilings, looking. One of them came into the gents changing room, then the lavatory. Silence. Then the airing-cupboard door opened.

  Helen’s arm lay across my chest. I started to push her away, trying to get at the revolver. But the footsteps went back into the hallway, then into the studio where the voices started again.

  ‘Nichevo …’ Followed by a lot more in the same vein. And then the word appeared, the name, emerging from the Russian dialogue as clearly as if the man concerned was being introduced at the Kremlin.

  ‘… Harper …’

  And just after that the other name, less well accented, but clear enough: ‘… Moorend Park Hotel …’ Then they left, the hall door closing softly, footsteps dying away down the mews.

  Helen’s arm dropped away from me and I found I was holding the revolver after all, but had no memory of how it had got there.

  ‘Christ. It was Harper. With the KGB. All along. I’m sorry.’

  She said nothing, looking at me in the gloom; she turned away, went over to the trap-door and started to undo the screws.

  ‘Wait. It’s no use. They’ll have someone at the hotel already – if they know about it. Harper must have had them check all the hotels on the outskirts of the town. But the twins will be all right. They won’t move on them –’

  ‘Of course they will. They probably have. Hostages. We’ll find a note when we get there.’

  ‘All right. But let’s think. You still have those names. And that’s what they want. The twins will be safe for the moment – as long as you have the names. I can get somebody else down from London – now that I know it’s Harper –’

  ‘Yes – and have a shooting-match somewhere. With the twins in between.’

  ‘All right, but –’

  ‘Well, we can’t simply stay here. We must do something. Anything. Telephone. Come on.’

  But we couldn’t leave through the studio, for just then the first of the dancers arrived, someone in charge of the music it seemed, and as we started to squeeze through the window making for the pub, the bouncy sounds of a Silvester quick-step rose up into the attic as he checked the machinery in the studio, some happy old melody imprisoned now in a strict tempo.

  It was cool outside on the roof where we crouched until the light began to fade. And then it was safe to move and we were down the short drop into the pub yard and lurking among the cider crates in the half light.

  The back door opened. Two men came out, slightly tipsy. There was music inside, a piano being hammered, people singing, a lot of chatter and laughter, with broken bursts of huge gaiety in the steady hum, as if everyone inside were being systematically tickled.

  We went through into the crowded saloon bar. It was an old provincial city pub, a small Victorian ale-house happily forgotten in these narrow streets in the inner town, with the original porcelain-handled beer-pulls, curved mahogany counter, and a series of dirty seaside postcards pinned up next to the dart-board. And it was packed tight with elderly folk, part of some group it seemed, very merry, the men in their best dark crumpled Sunday suits holding straight glass pints of bitter, and the women, squat, with bright-hued mackintoshes and unsuitable hats, full of Guinness. A seedy, narrow-faced man, cigarette ash trickling over his double-breasted suit – a caricature piano-player – was playing the piano, thumping out a fifties Jimmy Young number.

  ‘They tried to tell us we’re too young …

  Too young to rea-ly be in love …’

  The crinkled faces beamed, sang, swallowed, belched and swayed.

  We pushed through this happy alcoholic euphoria, this old England briefly revitalised in merry song and strong ale at the end of a Sunday charabanc outing to Weston-super-Mare, into the public bar which gave out onto the street. And this was crowded too, with quieter regulars and with a group of men in smart blue suits drinking at the end of the bar by the doorway. The suits, I thought. Suits. What are they doing here?

  But by then it was too late.

  The first man at the counter had turned and was looking at me. It was Harper, the pock-marked face expanding in astonishment, a glass of gin and tonic raised to his lips. The second man looked up over a glass of light ale. It was Croxley. Detective Chief Superintendent Croxley of the Special Branch. And beyond him there was a third figure, tough, well-built, who wasn’t drinking and had obviously just arrived in the bar. Three devious emblems of somebody else’s law and order. I had come home again. I knew it now. Back where I’d started.

  ‘Marlow!’ Harper almost shouted, like a bully, putting a hand on me. ‘How in God’s name did you get here?’ He took no notice of Helen. I was suddenly angry.

  ‘Harper,’ I said, ‘you little –’ But I stopped. ‘You tell me – how did you get here? Why didn’t you pick us up?’

  The tune had changed next door. They were singing ‘Good-bye Dolly Gray.’

  ‘Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave you …’ The piano going very strongly.

  ‘We couldn’t get down the mews. They were there before us – saw them go down as we arrived. We got them as they came out, end of the street in their car. But you weren’t with them. Or back at the studio.’

  ‘How do you mean “them”?’ I was going to add: you’re with them. But I stopped in time. That knowledge was something I might need later.

  Harper didn’t reply. I looked at Croxley. He smiled. ‘What’s this, then,’ I asked him. ‘The Last Round-Up?’ He nodded, deprecatingly.

  ‘How are you, Mr Marlow? We’d heard you were dead.’

  ‘I’m fine. Or I hope I am. This is Mrs Jackson.’

  But Harper broke in suddenly, appraising her like a bar-fly muscling in on interesting company. ‘Hello. How are you, Mrs Jackson?’ He might have gone on: And the children – keeping well?

  ‘And your children,’ he said. ‘Where are they?’r />
  ‘A hotel outside town,’ I interrupted. ‘I told you.’

  I stared at him. He sipped his gin.

  ‘Yes, of course. But which hotel? Where?’

  ‘What are you up to, Harper?’ I asked. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Do?’ He turned and looked over into the saloon bar, listening to the music wistfully for a moment, as though the tune had stirred some old colonial memory in him, tales of derring-do: the Boer War, Anzac Day, of times when the far-flung Empire had saved the sceptred Isle.

  ‘… Goodbye DOLLY GRAY! …’

  They ended it with cheers, roused old voices – suddenly, vehemently unwearied.

  ‘Do?’ He turned back. ‘Round up these KGB operatives you’ve put us onto. That’s the first thing – now you’re safe. We’ve taken three of them. But there must be a crowd of them in town. There’s a show on tonight in the Town Hall, some Russian guitar stuff. So God knows how many men they may have here. We were just considering it – making plans.’

  The young Special Branch man broke in to Croxley. ‘Yes, sir. The extra men are on their way – got it on the radio. Coming through Northleach now. Should be here in twenty minutes. And the caravan has been set up behind the Town Hall.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked. ‘Storm the building? Very good for Anglo-Soviet relations.’

  Croxley smiled again, his little sweet weary smile. ‘Not exactly.’ A man of few words. I remembered that. Except when they were needed.

  Harper said, ‘We were going over there now – thought they might have taken you there somehow. We have the place surrounded: the plan was to make a few “inquiries” among the cast after the show. Cleared at the highest level, this. The PM. You won’t have heard, but there’s a bit of a purge in the works with these KGB fellows.’ He turned to Helen. ‘Anyway, your children are just as important. We should make sure they’re safe first. So let’s pick them up at that hotel now.’

  I could see what Harper wanted: to play a double game right to the end: arresting a few KGB men for the sake of a far grander design – getting the names of all their dissident members from Helen. Obviously he must have known about them, known she was the woman behind the mailbox in Grand Central station. He’d been part – the English part – of this whole KGB plan for me all along. Now he was closing in, making sure of the kill, part of a pincer movement: if the KGB men already in Cheltenham didn’t get the papers off Helen, he would, which would amount to just the same thing. And if I’d said to Croxley that Harper was a KGB man himself he wouldn’t believe me. No one would. They never did. There could be no help from that quarter. So Harper was heading us both now towards some other plan, a situation somewhere in the city where Helen would be confronted with the deal: the names she held in exchange for her children.