‘Cost of last,’ said Dalby again. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘Last,’ I said. ‘Last—what the cobbler threw at his wife, you know.’
Dalby continued reading from my expense account for the month. ‘Then this item: “To entertainment, drinks and dinner: Mirabelle Restaurant twenty-three pounds.” What is this, you, Chico, Carswell and Murray at the –’ he paused, and mouthed the words incredulously and slowly, ‘– Mirabelle Restaurant!! You’re supposed to spend £103 per month. This lot comes to £191 18s 6d. How’s that?’
It seemed he expected an answer. ‘I’m keeping a few items over till next month,’ I said.
That went down like a lead balloon. Dalby had stopped joking now, he began looking really annoyed, he scratched the side of his face nervously and kept waving my expense sheet so that it made crackling noises in the air.
‘Ross said you were an impertinent –. You’ll impertinent your way right out of here before long. You’ll see.’ His rage had gone suddenly, but it seemed a shame to leave it like that.
‘In all those expensive clothes,’ I asked plaintively, ‘do you expect us to eat in a Wimpy Bar?’ Dalby rolled with the punch, he didn’t even know what a Wimpy Bar was; he just couldn’t bear the thought of a sergeant brushing waiters with him at the Mirabelle. That’s why I continually did it, and why I itemized it in the most unequivocal way I knew. Dalby at this stage executed a famous military manoeuvre known as the ‘War Office twostep’, generally used for withdrawing intact when out-ranked. He started explaining that there was no need for Carswell and Murray to buy things off my expense sheet. Carswell can have his own. I didn’t particularly want Murray to have an expense sheet but I was interested to see whether I could angle Dalby into having to give him one.
‘Accounts will never in a million years let you give a sergeant with less than two years’ provisional service a sheet of money.’
I followed up, ‘You know that’s the sort of thing they are dead fussy about;—no, you might get away with giving him free use of Carswell’s petty cash, but what they says goes when it comes to money sheets.’
Dalby sat there with a sardonic look clamped across his head like a pair of earphones. ‘When you have quite finished, for reasons known only to yourself, getting Sergeant Murray an expense sheet, let me say that I have considered the matter carefully and both of them can have one.’ Dalby leaned back and put his suède ankle boots on the back of the only comfortable chair in the office. He picked up the two books that lay on the top of the old brief-case that I intended to lose and replace from expenses at the earliest possible moment. He read the spines aloud, ‘Experimental Induction of Psychoneuroses in Personality and Behaviour Disorders, Vol 1, by Liddell, and Shorvon’s Abreactions. I saw them on your desk this morning but I don’t think it will get us closer to Jay.
‘Now I know you are a little miffed at working with what you consider inadequate information, but we’ll settle all that.’ He paused for a long time, as though thinking carefully before committing himself by what he was about to say, as indeed I’m sure he was doing. ‘I’m letting you take over this whole department,’ he said at last. ‘Now don’t get all excited, it’s only going to be for about three months, in fact less if I’m lucky. You are a bit stupid, and you haven’t had the advantage of a classical education.’
Dalby was having a little genteel fun with me. ‘But I am sure you will be able to overcome your disadvantages.’
‘Why think so? You never overcame your advantages.’
It followed the usual pattern of our preliminaries. We got down to business. The handing-over ceremony consisted of Dalby and Alice showing me how to work the IBM. I had a feeling that a certain amount of the documentation had been removed, but perhaps that’s just me being paranoiac. He was moving out the next day and he wasn’t telling me what he was doing. I asked him in particular about Jay. Dalby said, ‘It’s all in the documents. Read it up.’
‘I’d rather hear it from you, get the hang of the way you’re thinking.’ Of course, I really wanted to avoid reading all that damn bumf.
Anyway, Dalby gave me an outline. ‘When Jay settled in London in ’50 he was working on smalltime espionage for the Americans. We didn’t want him, in fact, doing just economic and industrial work, it wasn’t really our decision. He had an office in Praed Street and seemed to be doing OK apart from his homework for the Yanks. The first time we got interested in him was the Burgess and Maclean business. We had a memo in saying we mustn’t pull him for it. We didn’t have any idea of doing so, but it started us off thinking.’
I interrupted, ‘Who sent the memo?’
‘It wasn’t written or recorded. I wasn’t in charge then. If you ever find out let me know. It’s one of my big unsolved mysteries. But he has friends upstairs.’
There was only one level that Dalby called upstairs.
‘The Government?’ I said.
‘The Cabinet,’ said Dalby. ‘Mind you, don’t quote me, we have no evidence at all, not one thing that connects him with any illegal dealings since ’50. We checked Jay’s movements during the Burgess and Maclean business. They definitely correlate. When Maclean was Head of Chancery at the British Embassy Cairo, Jay was in Cairo twice. Although we have no trace of him visiting or phoning Tatsfield where Maclean lived, they did cross paths.
‘On the 25th May ’51, Maclean drove with Burgess in a hired car to Southampton. At twelve the Falaise cross-Channel packet left on a round trip to St Malo and the Channel Islands with Burgess and Maclean and Jay aboard. Of the three people, only Jay returned to England.
‘When, a lot later, two bank drafts arrived each for £1,000 and both for Mrs —* (Maclean’s motherinlaw) and drawn on Swiss Bank Corporation and Union Bank of Switzerland respectively, another bank draft followed, this time for £25,000. It was drawn on the Swiss Bank Corporation and paid into the London and S. Hellenic Bank to the account of Mr Aristo. I need hardly tell you that Mr Aristo is Jay, or there’s nothing illegal in receiving twentyfive thousand quid. I think Jay is in the import and export business as his cards say, but he finally found that the second most valuable commodity today is information.’
‘And?’
‘The most valuable?’
‘People with information,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, that’s what I think, but you’ll not get me to say so at this stage in the game.’
‘Was that fellow Raven we grabbed at Baalbek part of this scene?’
‘He was the chemical warfare biochemist from the Research place at Porton. But the number of people they take are very small. Naturally the Press Department (Security) keep any names out of the papers. We’re not having another Burgess and Maclean shindy, questions in the House and all that.’
‘You think the work Carswell is doing has Jay involved?’
‘No, I think that although the money Jay gets for a B & M operation is vast, he is smart enough to realize that to continue that is to live on borrowed time. I think he grabs an S.1 now and again when he needs some mad money but certainly not on the sort of scale that Carswell is talking of. He’d have to run coaches and advertise in the Observer. I’d leave Carswell right out of your calculations until he starts getting something a little more concrete. You’ll look an absolute clown talking to the Permanent Under-secretary about…’ He turned to the list I’d pinned up ‘…righthanded “concens” with fever.’ He eased his weight off my desk and bent his knees, quickly sweeping his hand under my desk top. He switched off the miniature tape recorder I had had going. He walked to the door, then came back. ‘Just one more small thing, you secret service man, you, try and have a haircut while I’m away and I’ll use my influence about your back pay!’
I heard him clumping down the back stairs shouting to Chico to prepare the film he wanted to see before leaving. I collected up my history books, cameras and my sugar, and moved into Dalby’s office.
It was easily the lightest room in the building, and if you didn’t move more t
han a couple of feet from the window you could see to read a newspaper.
There were plenty of newspapers. It all had that brown veneered respectable look; on the wall were a couple of well-framed military prints of soldiers in red coats and shakos, sitting on horses. Under the windows was Dalby’s latest toy—a low, grey IBM machine. Dalby was a young ambitious man, active and aggressive and one of the best bosses I ever had, but no one could suggest that he had ever had an original idea in his whole life and he’d never missed them. He recognized one when he saw one—he fought for it, utilized it, and what’s more, gave its originator all the credit.
This IBM machine was the key to WOOC(P)’s reputation, for it enabled us to have files of information around which no one could correlate except with the machine set the correct way. For instance, a list of three hundred names meant nothing, a list of three hundred house numbers meant nothing, a list of three hundred street names, cities, and a pile of photos meant nothing. On the machine and suddenly—each photo had an address. On the machine again and thirty cards were rejected, and only Dalby knew whether those thirty were lefthanded pistol shots, Young Conservatives, or bricklayers fluent in Mandarin. Dalby liked it, it was quick, more efficient than humans, and it made Dalby one of the most powerful men in England.
Sunday I went along to the office about ten-thirty. I didn’t normally go in on Sunday but there was a book in the information room I wanted. I got there about ten-thirty and wandered into Dalby’s office. The Sunday papers were there in place on top of Saturday’s. The cover was off the IBM machine, and I could hear Alice fiddling about making coffee. I sat down behind Dalby’s magnificent oiled teak desk. Its smooth light-brown top had the sensual colour of the beach at Nice, when it is covered with girls, you understand. Inlaid with old English craftsmanship into the Danish teak desk top were four metal switches and coloured lights, BLUE, GREEN, RED and WHITE. The BLUE switch put any calls being made in the building to tap into the phone here. GREEN made a tape of what was being said. WHITE switched any calls made in Dalby’s absence into the tape so that he could play it back next morning. RED was to call every phone in this building simultaneously—no one can remember it being used except once when Dalby shouted for some ink over it.
I looked up. Alice was standing in the doorway, holding two willow-pattern cups. She wore a floral print dress of the sort favoured by Mrs Khrushchev, heavy nylons and strap shoes. Her hair was almost feminine today but that did nothing to offset the sourness of her white regular features.
‘Coffee,’ she said. I didn’t contradict her, but Alice’s fusion of milk, warm water and the coffee powder was like something flushed from a radiator.
‘That’s nice of you, Alice,’ I said. ‘You really don’t have to work Sundays, too, do you?’
Her face screwed into a smile like an old gardening glove. ‘It’s quieter on Sundays, sir—I seem to get more done.’ She set the cups down and looked around the room. It was untidy again and she tutted and straightened up a pile of newspapers, took my raincoat off the chair and hung it behind the door. ‘You’re managing to work the machine now?’ she asked.
‘After a fashion,’ I told her. ‘There are still a few things I don’t understand. The selector for the photos for instance.’ I passed her a package of photos with the strip of perforated paper along one side. Alice took the bundle without looking at it, her eyes were level with mine. She said, ‘You are an awful lot too honest for this work. You’d better learn who to confide your weaknesses to before it’s too late.’
I said nothing, so she said, ‘I’ll go and get my glasses and see if I can make the photo-selector work.’
Old Alice was getting quite mellow. I wondered if I could ask her to sew up the trousers I had torn at the Barbarossa Club.
Carswell had spent about a week on S.1’s who had suffered from housebreaking or burglary with an eye to espionage by this means. He was getting very interested in the patterns and needed Murray to help him tie it down. Murray was a bit reluctant to leave his ‘concens’, but they were now finding smaller concens throughout the whole period. What had looked most mysterious in terms of one high point per year could now be seen as a wavy line of varying height. It was just a matter of how far above average was abnormal. As Carswell had most reluctantly agreed, there are also geographical areas which at any one time are abnormally low in S.1’s. He had drawn this up, marking the areas in varying shades of green crosshatched mapping pen lines according to percentage below average. The areas were called evacuations, and the individual S.1’s temporarily out of the areas called ‘evacs’. I am not a statistician but it all struck me as being pretty damn foolish. Carswell wasn’t the type for a legpull, but he was the only person in the building from whom I could take the idea of ‘evacs’ without getting the needle. We had done pretty well by the old man. I just wasn’t sure whether he wasn’t trying to dig himself a niche in the time-honoured army way. I was getting pretty fed up with his housebreaking stats, too, and began to feel that those two were taking me for a ride. I think Carswell could see I was getting fed up with it. On Tuesday I had Carswell in for a drink in the office. He seemed a bit depressed. He had three beers in quick succession and then began to tell me of his childhood in India. His father had insisted upon Carswell going into the regiment. The polo, the pig-sticking, the punitive actions against the tribesmen who enjoyed the fighting as much as the young English aristocrats did, the sun, horses galloping in the open hill country, drinks and mess dinners, the other young subalterns wrecking the mess in horseplay. All these things were things of his father’s life, and when his father died he immediately asked for a posting to another unit. He chose a unit as diametrically opposed to his father’s as he could think of; Indian Army Statistical Office, Calcutta. He had no interest or aptitude for the work. He did it as quiet rebellion against his life until then.
‘For perhaps two years the work was pure drudgery; especially since, for a brain as inactive as mine was, the elementary calculations were slow and tedious. But after a little while I got used to the tedium, understanding that these parts of my work were as essential to the arabesques of the final pattern as the rest bars are to a symphony.’
He was telling me not to be bull-headed in a nice sort of way. Carswell must have been the only officer in the entire British army who had deliberately thrown away a commission in a crack cavalry regiment in exchange for a dreary office job that had left him nudging sixty, a substantive captain, with little or no prospect of a move past substantive major, if that.
I think we had both been overdoing it from a work point of view. We decided to go home. Through the window I could see the delicatessen crowded with people in wet raincoats. I phoned down for Murray, and asked him if he would like to come up for a drink. My red emergency phone rang before I’d put the internal one down. The operator with the Scotch accent said, ‘CRO calling you, sir. Class four, priority. Please scramble.’
I pushed the scrambler button and switched in the green switch of the recording apparatus. I heard the operator tell them they were through to me.
A high-pitched falsetto voice that I had spoken with before said, ‘Hello, Criminal Records Office, Scotland Yard. Military Liaison Officer Captain Keightley speaking.’
I said, ‘Yes, Keightley?’ I knew my evening by the coal fire with a history book had gone bang.
* * *
*Name withdrawn from MS.
Chapter 11
[Aquarius (Jan 20-Feb 19) Don’t be surprised if trips to other people’s houses bring whispers of insincerity for you will also discover a new friendship.]
‘We’ve had a call from Shoreditch Police Station, sir. Frightfully funny business really.’ All Keightley’s ‘r’s were pronounced like a ‘w’. ‘They have a fellow there. Traffic accident. His car scraped a traffic signal I believe.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So?’
‘Well sir, the constable asked him for his licence and so on…’
‘Keightley, get to the poi
nt please.’
‘Well, sir, this johnny in the car. We’ve no record here at the CRO, not a white card that is, but there is a green card for him. You know it’s for suspected persons without a criminal record.’
‘Yes, I know that. Tell me, how did you locate his card? Did he give his name?’
‘No, sir. That’s just it. You see, this johnny is dressed up in a Metropolitan Police, Chief Inspector’s uniform. Luckily the constable had worked in CRO for a year, recognized him and remembered the face. He thought we had a white card but we only have a green one. It’s endorsed to your department, with one of those star marks for top priority. So I phoned you. What we want to know, sir, is, shall we tell Shoreditch that there is a green card? There may be an Interpol card of course. Do you want him? That’s what I want to know, sir.’
‘Listen, Keightley. Tell Shoreditch I want this man held. In fact I want him stripped. I want them to be most careful. Watch for cyanide pills. This could be very important. Tell the chief there that I’m holding him personally responsible for the prisoner’s safety. I want him under lock and key from the minute you finish talking to them, and he’s to be kept under constant observation. Oh, yes, and make sure the constable that brought him in is available—they should make that copper a sergeant on the spot. Pulling in an inspector, indeed: some nerve; and tell them I’m leaving right away. I’ll be there before 7.30.’