A Few Words for the Dead (4 page)

The officer sighed and moved over to the desk. He tried one of the drawers there and found it was also locked.

‘My darling boy,’ said April, ‘it just isn’t your day is it?’

The car had now left London behind and was cutting its way through the Hertfordshire countryside.

The further it travelled, the worse Shining’s mood became. The fact that they were driving him so far out felt ominous.

Finally, after a run of narrow roads, they pulled into the long driveway of an old farmhouse and drew to a halt. The house was surrounded on three sides by trees, which would have provided excellent cover in the summer, but the season had stripped their branches bare. Shining looked to the sky, noting the lack of phone and electricity wires. This was clearly a safe house for extremely sensitive subjects, isolated and secure.

‘Charming spot,’ he said as he was marched up to the front door. ‘I wonder how many bodies are buried in the back garden?’

Naturally he was offered no reply, just ushered in through the front door. The hallway beyond was utterly bare, this was not a house used for habitation, there would be no pictures on the walls, no ornaments on the shelves. This building was a place of practicality, somewhere to store secrets that still breathed.

‘Mr Shining,’ said the only officer to have spoken to him, ‘my name is Jennings.’

‘I believe you,’ Shining replied, in a manner that made it clear he didn’t.

‘I’m afraid I’m going to need you to empty your pockets,’ said Jennings. One of the other officers handed him a small cardboard box. ‘Your belongings will be quite safe but, for reasons of security, I need to ensure you have nothing on you.’

Like hell it was security, August thought as he dropped his wallet, keys and phone into the box. It was about stripping him of his possessions.

‘Your watch too, please, sir,’ said Jennings.

Shining sighed, removed his watch and dropped it into the box. ‘Are you sure you don’t want my glasses?’ he asked, half-removing them, ‘I’m sure the manual recommends taking them as a further aid to disorientation.’

‘That won’t be necessary, sir,’ Jennings replied, walking off with the box.

August was led through into what would once have been a dining room but was now used for what a politician would call ‘interviews’ but everyone else would term ‘interrogations’. A medium-sized table, four wooden chairs and a sideboard with recording equipment. A small digital camera was mounted on a tripod, pointing towards the table. The windows had been boarded up so that its inhabitants couldn’t see outside. This was also why they had taken his watch of course, the hope being that, after a couple of days, the subject would no longer have a firm grip on what time of day it was.

Sat at the table was a tall woman in her early forties. She was doing her very best to appear severe, pinstripe trouser suit, black-framed glasses perched on the end of her nose, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. She was reading from a large dossier and made a point of not looking up when Shining entered. Not being a naughty schoolboy or nervous job interviewee, Shining cheerfully ignore the theatrics, sat down at the table and smiled.

‘We both know that if there’s still sections of my file you haven’t read then you’re an idiot,’ he said cheerfully, ‘and I like to think the best of people so let’s assume you’re not. In which case, we can skip all this nonsense and get on with having a useful chat.’

She looked up, and Shining revised her age. She was much younger but trying to hide the fact. Which made her seem a little insecure, a fact he filed away should it later be useful.

‘And what do you think we’re here to talk about?’ she asked.

‘No, no, no…’ Shining shook his head. ‘I’m sorry but I’m not playing silly games about this. You’ve been tasked with interrogating me about something, fine, do your job, I have absolutely no problem with that. But I have grown ancient in this business and been sat in your position countless times. As I said before, working from the position that you know what you’re doing – and I have no doubt that you do – let’s skip all the nonsense they teach us during training and get on with it. I haven’t the first idea what you want to talk to me about so might I suggest you tell me, Ms…?’

She stared at him for a moment before answering. ‘Ryska.’

‘Excellent. I know they say we shouldn’t give our names either but we both know that’s hogwash, you get far more out of an interrogation if you just sit down and talk. All this gamesmanship is counter-productive as anyone who’s actually been in the field knows only too well.’

‘Lucas Robie,’ she said, and Shining felt as if the chair beneath him had given way.

‘I thought that might shut you up for a minute,’ she continued. ‘I appreciate you have been in the service a considerable time Mr Shining but that doesn’t mean I’m going to sit here and be lectured, is that understood?’

‘Yes,’ Shining said. ‘Lucas Robie is dead.’

‘Yes,’ Ryska agreed, ‘and that’s precisely what we want to talk to you about.’

‘Thirty years after the fact?’

Ryska didn’t reply, just closed Shining’s file and continued to stare at him. After a moment, Shining tired of the pointless silence. If he was the only one willing to fill the vacuum then so be it.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Your mission to Berlin.’

‘It’s all on record.’

‘Nonetheless, I’d like to hear about it.’

Shining sighed and leaned back in his chair. ‘Fine. I just hope you’ve filled the larder because we’re likely to be here some time.’

Was there ever a golden period for espionage? I’ve hovered over this hateful business for decades, the Ghost of Intelligence Past, Present and Future, and I’ve never really known one. I remember old Len Sampson bemoaning the state of the department and taking it out on an onion he was dicing (when Len wasn’t lying to someone in a distant corner of Europe, he was in his kitchen, making something delicious). ‘What we need, August,’ he said, ‘is a bloody good war. Then perhaps we’d see an end to the petty games and an Intelligence service that worked together rather than constantly poking itself in the eye.’ Maybe he was right. Or maybe a job that requires duplicity, emotional coldness and an obsession with ‘the bigger picture’ is always going to encourage a lion’s share of bastards.

That accepted, the early Eighties seemed even more hateful than usual. All the old soldiers were being pensioned off and the young bucks were spending as much – if not more – of their time spying on and manipulating each other as they were handling external threats. It was a selfish time the world over. I suppose it would be naïve to expect the service to be any different.

I’d been increasingly sidelined over the last few years. The brief boost of my professional fortunes following Operation: Stoker began to fade when Callaghan came into power, becoming even more insubstantial under Thatcher. I could hardly claim to be alone in that.

My office was moved to its current location in Wood Green and, for the first six months of 1982 I’d lived in the safe house on Morrison Close, having been forced to siphon some of my own money into operations and therefore failing to keep up the rent on my own flat.

The call from Oswald Battle came as something of a surprise. It was the first inter-departmental communication I’d had for knocking on three months and, to begin with, I assumed he had the wrong number. My friends at Six just didn’t call in those days. You may not remember Oswald but he was one of the fading old guard. Ex-military with a name that sounded like a Sussex village. Straight as an arrow but so set in his ways it was a wonder he hadn’t been shuffled into a private office somewhere to slowly expire. It was generally assumed this could not be long in coming. In the late Sixties he’d lived a charmed existence, renowned for his intelligence. Now he was running a single network out of Berlin, the meat of which was becoming particularly thin. He had always had his eye on the Berlin desk but that had gone to someone far more well connected. Instead he was left with his token offshoot. In the old days it had been a valuable resource, run as an adjunct to our main Berlin operations, independent and totally under Battle’s control. As the network began to dry up, he was stranded with it, neither a solid part of the Berlin office nor the respected private player he’d once been. It was a matter of open knowledge that his network was soon to be closed down, putting both him and his agents out of productive work.

‘How are you fixed at the moment?’ he asked, once I’d confirmed he really hadn’t been meaning to speak to someone more important. ‘I could really do with borrowing you for a few days.’

In the old days this sort of assumptive behaviour had used to irritate me. Several section heads had treated me as a resource to pick up and drop whenever the need arose, regardless of what other work I might have had on my desk. When Oswald asked, I was so surprised I forgot to be angry with him.

‘I might be able to spare you a little time,’ I admitted. ‘What’s it all about?’

‘Lucas Robie,’ he said, and with that any pretence of playing hard to get was lost.

Luxembourg is a wonderful place. It always struck me as the lovechild of a Gothic fairy tale and Wigan. Lucas and I had first met there in 1974. He’d been drifting around the friendly parts of Europe, leading a charmed, indolent existence. I’d been looking into a reported labour camp for telepaths, the usual dead end of course, nothing but hearsay and imaginative writing in small press magazines. Once upon a time I had the patience to investigate all these things.

I’d spent a pleasant but fruitless day hiking, before returning to my pension hotel, a tiny place that didn’t ask too many questions and was happy to accept me as a visiting lecturer on ferns (always pick a boring cover story; nobody wants to draw you on it for fear of expiring from boredom at the result). I was sat in the hotel’s small restaurant staring miserably at some mushroom soup when Robie entered. He was one of those people that altered a room simply by entering it. Quite literally, as I would later discover.

The hotel owner metamorphosed completely from being a sullen misery, staring at a damp patch in the corner of the room and wishing everyone would just eat their damn food and leave, to an exuberant bundle of neurotic excitement.

‘Good evening, Mr Robie,’ he said, his voice gushing as forcefully as the hotel showers didn’t. ‘I’m so glad you could join us for food. I’ll have chef create something special just for you. Cutlet? Dumplings?’

I looked around at the other diners, wondering how they were taking such blatant favouritism. To a one, they were gazing towards Robie, with looks of undisguised admiration or even, in the case of a couple of the more shameless diners, lust.

‘I’m not all that hungry actually,’ said Robie. ‘Perhaps just a small steak and salad?’

The owner panicked for all of five seconds before giving a low bow and dashing out of the room. Less than a minute later I saw him running up the street, tugging on his coat, clearly making a dedicated shopping trip in order to satisfy the desires of his most preferred resident.

I turned my attention back to Robie, who was flicking through a copy of
Jaws
. He seemed utterly ignorant of the effect he was having on his fellow diners, blind to their attentions.

It was difficult to pin down the attraction. He wasn’t ugly but was certainly not attractive either. Mid-thirties, his hair a thin, light brown mess that was receding early. His nose was larger than the rest of his face could comfortably accommodate and his lips had a thin sneer to them as if he found everything around him ridiculous. Perhaps he did – living with a talent like his it would have been no great surprise if he’d developed a critical view of the world. His best feature was most certainly his eyes, made all the more striking by the fact that they were each a different colour, one light blue the other brown.

He caught me observing him and smiled. For a moment I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. Look away and pretend I hadn’t been staring or return his smile? In the end, I plumped for the latter.

‘A fellow Englishman abroad?’ I said.

Robie folded down the corner of the page he had been reading and placed the book closed on the table. ‘I’ve been seeing the world,’ he admitted. ‘Well, Europe at least. I haven’t crossed many oceans yet.’

‘There’s plenty to see without getting your feet wet,’ I told him. ‘Where’ve you been so far?’

‘I’ve been working my way east,’ he said, ‘Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, skirting past Austria and Czechoslovakia.’

The notion of anyone working towards the East set a spy’s heart fluttering, but Robie seemed so open, so guileless in his manner, that I took him on face value, a tourist with a surfeit of time and money.

‘Sounds delightful.’

‘It’s been fun,’ he admitted. He pointed at the spare chair at his table. ‘Come and join me, saves us shouting across the room.’

I did so, curiously aware of the looks of jealousy on the faces of a number of the other guests. By joining Robie at his table, I had upset the rest of the room. I looked at him and saw that he had noticed. He hid it well, returning his attention directly to me. He was always very good at that, seeming to focus on you so strongly, so completely, that you felt special. A charmer, that’s what I thought. Later I would capitalise it and use the word to define his gift.

He stared at my soup, thin and filled with fungus.

‘You enjoying that?’ he asked.

‘I’ve eaten worse.’

‘Not exactly a glowing recommendation. “Try the soup, there are more unpleasant foods.”’

I took a sip of it. ‘Maybe I’m wrong too, now I come to think of it. Still, we don’t all have your skill for avoiding the menu.’

Robie smiled. ‘He asked me what I wanted and I told him, honestly.’

‘Simple as that.’

‘Yes.’ Robie continued to smile and we both knew he was lying through his teeth.

‘Perhaps I might join you for breakfast,’ I said, ‘as long as you do the ordering.’

‘Bacon and eggs all round.’

‘You read my mind,’ I replied, wondering if he had. Always the problem with being open to the unusual, any old thing seems possible.