Legacy (15 page)

‘Rover.’

‘Good.’

‘Quite an old one.’

‘Better. Now, the chap we’re going to meet, Bernard Kent, one of their top people, hates us. There are a few fuddy-duddies over there who do, just as we’ve got a few cowboys
who hate them, but there really isn’t much of that sort of thing now, if there ever was. Though you do come across it now and again, in both services. Regrettable, silly, all fighting the
same wars, serving the same interests, after all. Not much of it, fortunately.’

Charles nodded.

‘Though, I must say, they are as a whole pretty dour and stick-in-the-mud. Terribly territorial. And some, like Bernard, just can’t stand us. You’ll see.’

Charles did not see. Bernard Kent was a big, pale, quiet man occupying a director’s office with a long, highly polished table. He was unsmiling but his manner was not unfriendly.
Charles’s write-up and Hugo’s accompanying letter were on the table. ‘They’re putting you through the wringer on this one,’ he said as they shook hands, then paused
while his secretary delivered coffee and biscuits. ‘The important thing from our point of view, as from yours, Charles, is of course to establish whether what is said about your father is
true. That’s going to take some time. The secondary question is to decide what it tells us about the man you call Lover Boy.’ There was an edge of distaste to his voice. ‘It
appears from what you say here that he straightforwardly avowed his KGB provenance. Very unusual thing to do in a western capital, especially here where they know we’re pretty ruthless at
kicking them out. We must be very sure before we re-categorise him. This sort of thing affects a man’s entire career throughout large parts of the world, postings, visas, everything, whether
he’s aware of it or not. And you say he hasn’t tried to recruit or use the prostitute?’

‘No.’

‘So it’s a private initiative? He’s going off the rails?’

‘Seems so.’

‘Foolish boy.’ At the end Bernard summed up the main points, dutifully noted by Hugo. ‘As you’re doubtless aware, Charles, this now has to be a Security Service
investigation,’ he concluded. ‘I must therefore ask you to do nothing more with Lover Boy until we’ve got somewhere with our enquiries. That may, as I said, take some time.
Meanwhile, please come over if there’s anything you want to discuss or if there’s anything –’ he hesitated, choosing his words – ‘from your family background or
from your memories of your father that you think would have any bearing on it, either way. It’s bound to be a difficult time for you, at home and at work. I hope your future won’t be
too much affected. Good luck with your course.’

In the Gower Street foyer Hugo once again put on his coat, adjusted his suit and shirt cuffs and positioned his hat. ‘See what I mean?’ he murmured, his back to the guards.

‘Not really, no. I thought he was quite friendly. I can see he could be formidable, though.’

‘Well, he put the kibosh on our operation for a start. That’s not very friendly.’

‘But from their point of view –’

Hugo nodded. ‘Exactly. Got it in one. That’s the trouble.’ He stepped purposefully and immaculately onto the street and looked about proprietorially, forgetting his
umbrella.

Charles collected it. ‘It’s very heavy. What’s it made of?’

Hugo didn’t answer until they had crossed Gower Street and were heading briskly towards Tottenham Court Road. ‘Swordstick.’

‘It’s a swordstick?’

Hugo nodded, looking firmly ahead. His trilby was the only one in sight and walking with him made Charles as self-conscious as if he had been wearing it himself. However, possession of a
swordstick gave Hugo an almost romantic appeal. ‘Are they legal?’ Charles asked.

‘Depends what you do with them.’

‘Didn’t the first chief, the original “C”, have one? Take it on operations and so on?’

‘That’s not why I have one. No delusions of grandeur. In fact, not even sure I’d want the job if offered it. Life-long headache, if you ask me.’

‘I’m sure. But why do you –’

‘Happy with my pension and a CMG, if so honoured. Or an OBE. More often earned despite its unjust reputation for being Other Buggers’ Efforts. Doesn’t come up with the rations,
which Call-Me-Gods generally do.’

There was another pause while they waited to cross the Tottenham Court Road. ‘No, but you never know,’ Hugo said, when they reached the other side.

‘You never know?’

‘When you might need one.’

There was another pause. They were heading down the road but it wasn’t clear whether Hugo had privately decided they should walk back to Century House or whether he was on his way to
another meeting somewhere else and intended, if he had thought about him at all, to leave Charles at the door.

‘What’s she like, this – er – Chantal?’ Hugo asked.

Charles described her.

‘One of the troubles with the office,’ Hugo continued, ‘is that as you get more senior you get less fun. You drive desks, not cases. How long’s she been on the
game?’

Charles became uncomfortably aware that Hugo turned frequently and closely towards him, as if seeking visual confirmation of agreement. Charles widened the gap a little.

‘And how much – you know – does she charge for a quickie?’ Hugo asked. ‘Not that I’m interested, mind.’ He barked sharply and turned again. Charles
realised now that he was checking his reflection in the shop windows they passed.

‘I’m not sure about a quickie. Less than a night’s rate, presumably. I’ll ask.’

‘Not that I’m interested, as I say. Quite happy with present arrangements. I was thinking of a pub lunch.’

‘Well, I daresay she’d –’

Hugo barked again. ‘I mean for us, you nitwit.’

Lunch was crowded and noisy. They had to stand. Hugo talked about the German spring offensive of 1918 while Charles pondered the mystery of what Hugo called his ‘present
arrangements’. It was not easy to imagine how he and Anna had come to be joined together; it was neither easy nor pleasant to imagine they still were.

After lunch they found Martha in Hugo’s secretary’s office, her imposing presence and her refusal either to say what she wanted or leave plainly irritating the secretary.

‘Love one, dear,’ she said, sitting heavily when they got into Hugo’s room.

Hugo was seeing to the hanging of his coat and hat. ‘D’you mean coffee, Martha?’

‘’Course I do. Run out down there. Why else d’you think the mountain would come to Mahomet?’

‘We’ll get you some. Charles?’

‘Please.’

Hugo hesitated, then left the room. Martha chuckled. ‘If that was deliberate, I take my hat off to you. But I see from your face it wasn’t. He wasn’t asking you, dear, he meant
you to get it.’

Hugo reappeared, looking cross. ‘Somebody will bring it.’

Martha eased her chair closer to his desk. ‘Hugo, you kill me every time I think of you. Did you know that? Never mind, dear, don’t trouble your head about it. You’ll never
understand why. Now, let me lay my cards on your grade 4 table.’

She laid out half a dozen densely-written filing cards, three with photographs of the same man. ‘Your man Igor. Here he is, see: Igor Smoletsky, Ministry of Foreign Trade, or so he tells
the world. Identified intelligence officer by the Danes, on the basis of his behaviour pattern and contacts – my guess is they had a DA alongside him – and suspect IO according to the
FBI. Not his real name, of course, but the one he most often travels under.’ Her long red fingernail separated three of the cards. ‘These are dates and places of his known travels. I
take it that’s what you’re most interested in.’ Her dark eyes, magnified by her glasses, rested on Charles. ‘I’ll leave these with you so you can check them. But I
must have them back by close of play. Pain of death. Promise?’

‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ said Hugo.

Charles could see at a glance that Igor was a man photographed with his father, and that some at least of their travels coincided.

‘Directorate N, no doubt,’ said Hugo. ‘Illegals support officer.’

Martha’s jowls wobbled as she shook her head. ‘Not for my money, not their pattern. Nor our old friends and opposite numbers in the First Chief Directorate, either. No, I think your
man here is Second Chief Directorate, the KGB equivalent of MI5. If the case that interests you began on Russian, or Russian-controlled, territory, then 2CD might have done it and kept it to
themselves ever since, without telling their overseas brethren in FCD, or the Illegals directorate, or the GRU or anyone at all. Or perhaps only bringing them in later when they needed help. My
guess, given Igor’s age and his travel pattern, is the case goes back a long time, that the agent was an occasional rather than a frequent traveller and that Igor was always his case officer.
That would be most unusual in the other directorates. Must have been an important case.’

Hugo was taking notes again. ‘That would explain why none of our defectors had ever heard of it, or anything like it. They’re all FCD, Directorate N or GRU, the sort of people we
have contact with. Next to impossible to meet the 2CD, let alone in recruitable circumstances. Martha, you’ve done in a day what MI5 reckon it will take them weeks to do.’

‘Not all my doing, dear. Theirs too, though they don’t know it yet. I talk to my opposite number, Doreen, every day. We do each other favours. You’ll get your official answer
from MI5 as soon as they get round to asking Doreen.’

‘So there are two Marthas?’ Hugo laughed and blinked.

‘One’s enough. Make the world lopsided otherwise. She’s half my size, Doreen. Poor girl. Seems to put up with it, somehow.’ She laughed throatily. ‘But back to
business for a moment.’ She looked again at Charles. ‘It’s not for me to enquire beyond what you choose to tell me but I couldn’t help noticing a certain family resemblance
in the piccies you showed me and I have to tell you that if you sought confirmation that someone was doing something, this circumstantial evidence is the firmest you’ll get short of outright
proof. There are lots of coincidences in spying’ – she put one heavily-ringed finger on each of the cards in turn – ‘but not this often, not this many. Yet what they were
doing may not be quite, or all, you think. Remember that.’

‘I think you know rather more than we’ve told you, Martha,’ Hugo said.

‘Just remember what I said, dear.’

Charles drove down to his mother’s house on the Friday night, following an early pizza with a former girlfriend who was soon to get married. Most of his friends appeared to be in, or
moving towards, that state. Wedding plans and discussions merged in his mind. It didn’t trouble him not to be part of it. In fact, it suited him that his sister Mary would not be at home that
weekend, not only because there would be less wedding talk but because he wanted his mother to himself.

The pizza lasted longer than intended, though, so the evening chat he’d hoped for with his mother was no more than twenty minutes by the fire. She was already in her dressing-gown and
drinking her Ovaltine. She talked of Mary’s wedding.

‘She says you’re buying her friend’s flat in the Boltons,’ she said.

‘I haven’t seen it yet.’ He was supposed to have rung to view it.

‘I do think it would be a good idea if you could. It’s a nice area and it’s time you had somewhere.’

‘Yes, no, I shall.’ It had been more on his mind to leave a note on the windscreen of the Bristol 405.

After she’d gone to bed he reopened
Middlemarch
, which he was attempting for the third time, but soon got up and went to his father’s study at the back of the house. It was
almost a shrine to his father, filled with the furnishings of his father’s life – the books, the Fribourg & Treyer pipes, the blotting pad and heavy glass inkwells, the school
ruler, the tweed jacket with worn leather elbows hanging behind the door, the ancient Windsor chair, the polished brass 25-pounder shell case filled with walking sticks, the First World War
bayonet-cum-poker in the hearth, the battered spectacle case and many other inanimates, all articulate of his father’s presence. The presence would fade, of course, and when the memories that
preserved it were themselves extinguished such inanimates would be the only relics, by then unrecognised.

Meanwhile, it still smelt of his father, a combination of tweed and corduroy, logs in the fire-basket, pipes with tobacco left in the bowls. Charles had changed nothing, had not scraped out a
single pipe. Now, as he surveyed it, leaning against the oak door he had closed behind him, he imagined sweeping it clean, scourging it, removing all trace of the man. But his imagination baulked
at explaining to his mother. He took a few steps around the room, picked a blackthorn walking stick, felt the smoothness of the battered spectacle case, ran his fingers down the sleeve of the
jacket. Did such things now stand for something different, or had they never stood for what he thought they had at all; or were they, at some level he could not imagine, compatible with the new
truth after all? Was it possible that the man he thought he knew well could have been a continuum, not a fractured vessel? Was it possible to have been what these relics represented, and to have
done that?

He pulled out the Windsor chair and sat at the desk. The rain tapped at the windows. With the curtains undrawn, he could see the water-blurred reflection of himself, pensive, sitting as his
father might have sat, and becoming more blurred, like that image. If there were ghosts, he thought, let it be now; a sign would be sufficient, anything.

The wind buffeted the windows and the intermittent musketry of the rain became fusillades, perhaps like those that had prompted Edward Thomas’s reflections on such a night of the fate of
‘soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice’. Could this be why his father had done it? A sense of compassion, of mission, perhaps as pure in its origin as it was divorced from its
consequences? Communism had always done well out of compassion. Yet for his father never to have shown the slightest inclination or sympathy must have been a consummate performance, almost
schizophrenic. Every believer, surely, over years and decades, would betray something to someone; they all had, the well-known spies, Philby, Blake and so on. All had confided or given clues; and
Viktor had described it as an ideological recruitment.