London Match

  ‘I don’t think so, but if he brings up the subject, you just say you haven’t seen her since she left England and went to Berlin.’

  ‘You’ve got me worried now, Bernard.’

  ‘It will be all right, Tess.’

  ‘Suppose they know?’

  ‘Deny seeing her. If the worst comes to the worst, you could say you reported it to me and I told you to tell no one. You say you took that instruction literally.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that get you into trouble?’

  ‘We’ll sort that one out when and if it comes. But I’ll only help you if you’re really serious about stopping this idiotic affair with Dicky.’

  ‘I am serious, Bernard. I truly am.’

  ‘There’s a lot of trouble in the Department right now. There’s a lot of suspicion being directed at everyone. It’s a bad time to step out of line.’

  ‘For Dicky?’

  ‘For anyone.’

  ‘I suppose they still think you had something to do with Fiona going away?’

  ‘They say they don’t, but I believe they do.’

  ‘She said she’d made a lot of trouble for you.’

  ‘Fiona?’ I said.

  ‘She said she was sorry about that.’

  ‘She was the one who ran.’

  ‘She said she had to do it.’

  ‘The children never mention her. It worries me sometimes.’

  ‘They’re happy children. The nanny is a good girl. You give them a lot of love, Bernard. That’s all children really need. It’s what we needed from Daddy, but he preferred to give us money. His time was too precious.’

  ‘I’m always away or working late or some damned thing.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, Bernard. I didn’t mean that love can be measured in man-hours. You don’t clock in for love. The children know you love them. They know you work only in order to look after them; they understand.’

  ‘I hope they do.’

  ‘But what will you do about them? Will you let Fiona take them?’

  ‘I’m damned if I know, Tessa,’ I said, and that was the truth. ‘But you must stop seeing Dicky.’

  21

  The newly formed committee that took charge of the Stinnes debriefing lost no time in asserting its importance and demonstrating its energies. For some of the newcomers the committee provided an example of Whitehall’s new spirit of intradepartmental cooperation, but those of us with longer memories recognized it as just one more battlefield upon which the Home Office and the Foreign Office could engage forces and try to settle old scores.

  The good news was that both Bret Rensselaer and Morgan spent most of each day in Northumberland Avenue, where the committee had its premises. There was a lot for them to do. Like all such well-organized bureaucratic endeavours, it was established regardless of expense. The committee was provided with a staff of six people – for whom heated and carpeted office space was also provided – and all the paraphernalia of administration was installed: desks, typewriters, filing cabinets, and a woman who came in very early to clean and dust, another woman who came in to make tea, and a man to sweep the floor and lock up at night.

  ‘Bret will build himself a nice little empire over there,’ said Dicky. ‘He’s been looking for something to occupy himself with ever since his Economics Intelligence Committee folded.’ It was an expression of Dicky’s hopes rather than his carefully considered prophecy. Dicky didn’t mind if Bret became monarch of all he surveyed over there as long as he didn’t come elbowing his way into Dicky’s little realm. I looked at him before answering. There had still been no official mention that Bret’s loyalty was in question so I played along with what Dicky said. But I was beginning to wonder if I was being deliberately excluded from the Department’s suspicions.

  ‘The Stinnes debriefing can’t last for ever,’ I said.

  ‘Bret will do his best,’ said Dicky.

  He was wearing a denim waistcoast. He had his arms folded and was pushing his hands out of sight as if he didn’t want any flesh to show. It was a neurotic mannerism. Dicky had become very neurotic since the night he’d had dinner with Tessa, the dinner at which she was supposed to tell him that they were through. I wondered exactly what had happened.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not alone there,’ said Dicky. ‘Thank your lucky stars that you’re not running backwards and forwards for Morgan and Bret and the rest of them. I got you out of that one, didn’t I?’ He was in my miserable little office, watching me work my way through all the trays that he’d failed to cope with during the previous two weeks. He sat on my table and fiddled with the tin lid of paper clips, and the souvenir mug filled with pencils and pens.

  ‘And I’m grateful,’ I said. ‘But I mean I don’t like what’s happening over there.’

  ‘What is happening?’

  ‘They’re taking evidence from everyone they can think of. There’s even talk of the committee going to Berlin to talk to people who can’t be brought here.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘They’re supposed to be managing the Stinnes debriefing. It’s not their business to go poking into everything that happened when we enrolled him.’

  ‘On principle?’ said Dicky. He was quick to catch on when it was something to do with office politics.

  ‘Yes, on principle. We don’t want Home Office people questioning and passing judgement on our foreign operations. That’s our preserve – that’s what we’ve been insisting upon all these years, isn’t it?’

  ‘An interdepartmental squabble, is that how you see it?’ said Dicky. He unbent a paper clip to make a piece of wire, then he looked round at the cramped little office that I shared with my part-time secretary as if seeing the slums for the first time.

  ‘They’ll want to question me, perhaps they’ll want to question you. Werner Volkmann is coming over here to give evidence. And his wife. Where’s the end of it? We’ll have those people crawling all over us before that committee finishes.’

  ‘Zena? Did you authorize Zena Volkmann’s trip to London?’ He ran a fingernail up the corner of a bundle of papers, so that it made a noise.

  ‘It will come out of committee funds,’ I said. ‘That’s the first thing they got settled – where the money was to come from.’

  ‘Departmental employees going before the committee will not have to answer any question they don’t consider relevant.’

  ‘Who said so?’

  ‘That’s the form,’ said Dicky. He threw the paper clip at my wastepaper basket but missed.

  ‘With other departments, yes. But this committee is chaired by one of our own senior staff. How many witnesses will tell him to go to hell?’

  ‘The D-G was obviously in a spot,’ said Dicky. ‘It’s not what he would have done in the old days. He would have brazened it out and held on to Stinnes in the hope we’d get something good.’

  ‘I blame Bret,’ I said. I was fishing.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘He’s let this bloody committee extend its powers too widely.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ Dicky asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ There was still no hint that Bret was suspect.

  ‘To make himself more important?’ persisted Dicky.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘The committee is stacked against him, Bernard. Bret will be out-voted if he tries to step out of line. You know who he’s got facing him. He’s got no friends around that table.’

  ‘Not even Morgan?’ I said.

  It was not intended as a serious question, but Dicky answered it seriously. ‘Morgan hates Bret. Sooner or later they’ll get into a real confrontation. It was madness putting them together over there.’

  ‘Especially with an audience to watch them wrangling,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dicky. He looked at me and chewed his fingernail. I tried to get on with some paperwork, but Dicky didn’t budge. All of a sudden he said, ‘It’s all over.’ I looked u
p. ‘Me and your sister-in-law. Finito!’

  What was I supposed to say – ‘I’m sorry’? Had Tessa told him that I knew, or was he just guessing? I looked at him to see if he was serious or smiling. I wanted to react in the way he wanted me to react. But Dicky wasn’t looking at me; he was looking into the distance, thinking perhaps of his final tête à tête with Tessa.

  ‘It had to end,’ said Dicky. ‘She was upset, of course, but I was determined. It was making Daphne unhappy. Women can be very selfish, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said.

  ‘Tessa’s had a thing about me for years,’ said Dicky. ‘You could see that, I’m sure.’

  ‘I did wonder,’ I admitted.

  ‘I loved her,’ said Dicky. This was all something he was determined to get off his chest and I was the only suitable audience for him. I settled back and let him continue. He didn’t need encouraging. ‘Once in a lifetime, perhaps, you find yourself in a trap from which there is no escape. One knows it’s wrong, knows people will be hurt, knows there will be no happy ending. But one can’t escape.’

  ‘Is that how it happened with you and Tessa?’ I said.

  ‘For a month I couldn’t get her out of my mind. She occupied my every thought. I got no work done.’

  ‘When was that?’ Dicky getting no work done was not enough to give me a reference to the date.

  ‘Long ago,’ said Dicky. His arms still folded, he hugged himself. ‘Did Daphne tell you?’

  Careful now. The red-for-danger light was glowing inside my head. ‘Daphne? Your Daphne?’ He nodded. ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘About Tessa, of course.’

  ‘They’re friends,’ I said.

  ‘I mean did she mention that I was having an affair?’

  ‘With Tessa?’

  ‘Of course with Tessa.’ I suppose I was overdoing the innocence. He was getting testy now and I didn’t want that either.

  ‘Daphne wouldn’t talk to me about such things, Dicky.’

  ‘I thought she might have poured her heart out to you about it. She pestered several other friends of ours. She said she was going to get a divorce.’

  ‘I’m glad it’s turned out all right,’ I said.

  ‘Even now she’s still very moody. You’d think she’d be overjoyed, wouldn’t you? Here I’ve made Tessa unhappy – terribly unhappy – to say nothing of my own sacrifice. Finito.’ He made a slicing movement of the hand. ‘I’ve given up the woman I truly love. You’d think Daphne would be happy, but no…Do you know what she said last night? She said I was selfish.’ Dicky bared his teeth and forced a laugh. ‘Selfish. That’s a good one, I must say.’

  ‘A divorce would have been terrible,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what I told her. Think of the kids, I said. If we split, the children would suffer more than either of us. So you never knew that I was having an affair with your sister-in-law?’

  ‘You kept it pretty dark, Dicky,’ I said.

  He was pleased to hear that. ‘There have been a lot of women in my life, Bernard.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘I’m not the sort of man who boasts of his conquests – you know that, Bernard – but one woman could never be enough for me. I have a powerful libido. I should never have got married. I realized that long ago. I remember my old tutor used to say that the trouble with marriage is that while every woman is at heart a mother, every man is at heart a bachelor.’ He chuckled.

  ‘I have to see Werner Volkmann at five,’ I reminded him.

  Dicky looked at his watch. ‘Is that the time? How that clock goes round. Every day it’s the same.’

  ‘Do you want me to brief him before he sees the Stinnes committee?’

  ‘The Rensselaer committee, you mean. Bret is very keen it’s called the Rensselaer committee so that we’ll keep control of it.’ Dicky said this in such a way as to suggest that we’d already lost control of it.

  ‘Whatever it’s called, do you want me to brief Werner Volkmann about what to say to them?’

  ‘Is there something that we don’t want him to tell them?’

  ‘Well, obviously I’ll warn him he can’t reveal operating procedures, codes, safe houses…’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ said Dicky. ‘Of course he can’t reveal departmental secrets.’

  ‘He won’t know that unless someone tells him,’ I said.

  ‘You mean we should warn all of our people who are called to give evidence?’

  ‘Either that or you could talk to Bret. You could make sure that each person called to give evidence is told that there are guidelines they must follow.’

  ‘Tell Bret that?’

  ‘One or the other, Dicky.’

  Dicky slid off the table and walked up and down, his hands pushed into the pockets of his jeans and his shoulders hunched. ‘There’s something you’d better know,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘Let’s go back to one evening just after you came back from Berlin with that transcript…the German woman who disappeared into the Havel last Christmas. Remember?’

  ‘How could I forget.’

  ‘You were getting very excited about the radio codes she used. Am I right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘Would you like to tell me that over again?’

  ‘The codes?’

  ‘Tell me what you told me that evening.’

  ‘I said she was handling material, selected material, for transmission. I said it was stuff that they didn’t want handled by the Embassy.’

  ‘You said it was good. You said it was probably Fiona’s stuff that this woman was sending.’

  ‘That was just conjecture.’ I wondered what Dicky was trying to get me to say.

  ‘Two codes, you said. And you said two codes was unusual.’

  ‘Unusual for one agent, yes.’

  ‘You’re beginning to clam up on me, Bernard. You do this sometimes, and it makes my life very difficult.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but if you told me what you were getting at, I might be able to be more explicit.’

  ‘That’s right – make it my fault. You’re good at that.’

  ‘There were two codes. What else do you want to know?’

  ‘IRONFOOT and JAKE. You said that Fiona was IRONFOOT. And you said “Who the hell is JAKE?” Right?’

  ‘I found out afterwards that IRONFOOT was a mistranslation for PIG IRON.’

  Dicky frowned. ‘Did you follow that up, even after I told you to drop it?’

  ‘I was at Silas Gaunt’s house. Brahms Four was there. I just casually mentioned the distribution of material and asked him about it.’

  ‘You’re bloody insubordinate, Bernard. I told you to drop that one.’ He waited for my reply, but I said nothing and that finally forced him to say, ‘Okay, okay. What did you find out from him?’

  ‘Nothing I didn’t already know, but he confirmed it.’

  ‘That if there were two codes, there were two agents?’

  ‘Normally, yes.’

  ‘Well, you were right, Bernard. Now maybe we see the killing of the Miller woman in another light. The KGB had her killed so that she couldn’t spill the beans. Unfortunately for those bastards on the other side of the fence, she’d already spilled the beans…to you.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. I guessed what was coming, but Dicky liked to squeeze the maximum effect out of everything.

  ‘So who the hell’s JAKE, you asked me. Well, maybe I can now tell you the answer to that question. JAKE is Bret Rensselaer! Bret is a double and probably has been for years. We have reports going back to his time in Berlin. Nothing conclusive, nothing that makes firm evidence, but now things are coming together.’

  ‘That’s quite a shock,’ I said.

  ‘Damned right it’s a shock. But I can’t say you look very surprised, Bernard. Have you been suspicious of Bret?’

  ‘No, I don’t…’

  ‘It’s not fair to ask you that question. It makes me sound like Joe McCarthy. The fac
t is that the D-G is dealing with the problem. Now perhaps you realize why Bret is in Northumberland Avenue rubbing shoulders with those MI5 heavies.’

  ‘Has the old man delivered him to MI5 without telling him?’

  ‘Sir Henry wouldn’t do anything like that, especially not to one of our own. No, MI5 know nothing of this. But the old man wanted Bret out of this building and working somewhere away from our sensitive day-to-day papers while Internal Security investigate him…Now this is all just between the two of us, Bernard. I don’t want a word of this to go out of this room. I don’t want you telling Gloria or anyone like that.’

  ‘No,’ I said, but I thought that was pretty rich since I’d already got the gist of it from Daphne. Daphne was a wife with no reason to be friendly to him, while Gloria Kent was a vetted employee who was handling the sensitive day-to-day papers that Bret wasn’t seeing.

  ‘Bret doesn’t realize he’s under suspicion. It’s essential that he doesn’t get wind of it. If he fled the country too, it would look damned bad.’

  ‘Will he face an enquiry?’ I asked.

  ‘The old man’s dithering.’

  ‘Hell, Dicky, someone should talk to the old man. It can’t go on like this. I don’t know what evidence there is against Bret, but he’s got to be given a chance to answer for his actions. We shouldn’t be discussing his fate when the poor sod has been shunted off so that he can’t find out what’s going on.’

  ‘It’s not exactly like that,’ said Dicky.

  ‘What is it like then?’ I asked. ‘How would you like it if it was me telling Bret that you were JAKE?’

  ‘You know that’s ridiculous,’ said Dicky.

  ‘I don’t know anything of the kind,’ I said. Dicky’s face changed. ‘No, no, no…I didn’t mean you might be a KGB agent. I mean it’s not ridiculous to suppose you might be a suspect.’

  ‘I hope you’re not going to make a fuss about this,’ said Dicky. ‘I was in two minds whether to tell you. Perhaps it was an error of judgement.’

  ‘Dicky, it’s only fair to the Department and everyone who works here that any uncertainty about Bret be resolved as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Maybe Internal Security need time to collect more evidence.’

  ‘Internal Security always need time to collect more evidence. It’s in the nature of the job. But if that’s the problem, then Bret should be given leave of absence.’