Secret Kingdom (2 page)

Why hadn’t she done this the moment she’d got back? Why wait until now? Opening the door of her house in Moore Street on that bleak morning all those weeks ago, she had seen the painful reminders of his absence from her life – a pair of his shoes under the coat-stand, unopened letters on the doormat, a note in the kitchen reminding her that he would be back late because of a meeting at the Institute – and her heart had come close to breaking a second time. She had sat down on the stairs and cried, her strength pouring out of her with her tears.

In the empty days of madness that followed, she retreated inside herself. She saw no one, did nothing. She did not answer the telephone and after a while it stopped ringing. She went out only for the bare essentials. She lay on her bed for days, living with Joe in her imagination, wrestling with competing explanations of his absence. Where had she failed him? Why had he gone without a word? What had she done to make him behave like that? There was no escape from her guilt. She blamed herself because there was no one else to blame, and she was used to blaming herself for what went wrong in her life. His disappearance was her fault, she was sure of that. But what the fault was she had no idea.

Even then she hadn’t dared to search his possessions for evidence of what might have happened because she was afraid she might find something she didn’t want to know. It was easier to wake up each day believing that Joe might return than face the certainty that he had gone from her life for ever. In her vulnerable state of mind, she preferred ignorance to disappointment.

The briefcase yielded nothing, no mysteries, no secrets, only the detritus of his working life. She hadn’t expected it to provide the answers she was looking for, but you had to start somewhere. She
turned to his desk. The top two drawers were crammed chaotically with letters and papers; the rest were almost empty (paper clips, a ruler, a box of pencils, some unused envelopes). Mechanically, she took each letter and read it before carefully putting it back again. When Joe returned, and now everything she did was centred on the moment when Joe returned, she didn’t want him to know what she’d done.

There on the desk in front of her, secure in its gilt frame, was the photograph she loved best, taken one summer afternoon in Cambridge five years before. She is smiling, happy, leaning on his arm, gazing at him. He is standing self-consciously (‘I hate having my photograph taken’) staring at the camera. Not solemn, but not smiling either. Was he thinking of her, or something else? (How could you tell what went on inside his head?) But he was there beside her, that was what mattered; he was standing next to her, accepting her presence in his life.

‘That woman is in love,’ she said out loud to the image of herself.

That night they had slept together for the first time, and she had discovered a side to her nature she had never known existed. Joe overwhelmed her then, he invaded her soul, he became the meaning of her life, its very centre. From that moment on she could not imagine a single day without him. She knew they had to be together for as long as they lived. That was what she had told him in the morning. He had smiled but said nothing.

‘And that man?’ her image enquired. ‘Is that the look of a man in love?’

She had the photograph enlarged and framed, and had given it to him as a reminder of the happiness he had brought her. He had put it on his desk. She hadn’t asked him to do that but he knew it was what she wanted. Wherever the desk had been, in his rooms at Cambridge, in his awful dingy flat in Victoria, here in her house in Moore Street, there too was the photograph. Was that the act of a man who did not return her love?

Impatiently she pushed the letters and papers back into the drawers. There was no point in going on, she wouldn’t find anything here. Joe wouldn’t leave clues in his desk. When he wanted concealment, he said nothing. Silence leaves no evidence, he’d told her once. That’s why it was the best hiding place. Penetrate the enigma of his silence, understand what he didn’t say, tunnel your way inside
his mind and then perhaps you might reach the answers you wanted. With Joe, there were never any certainties. Why was it that, after so many years of trying, his silences still defeated her? What secrets was he keeping from her? Did you have to find a way to break his silences before you could know what he was thinking?

‘This Leman business, Gerry. I hear Harry Watts is sniffing around. I don’t like the sound of that. Watts can be a real terrier when he wants to be.’

With so much else on the agenda, Pountney hadn’t anticipated Watson-Jones would bother about Leman. How unpredictable the man was. Whenever you thought you’d got to grips with how his mind worked, he caught you on the hop. He was going to be difficult to get to know.

‘He’ll nag away until he turns up something.’ When his political antennae sensed danger an edge crept into Watson-Jones’s voice and it was audible now. ‘We all know what happens when he does that, don’t we?’

Watts was a backbench MP, a former Glasgow docker who had worked his way up through the union and was now making a name for himself at Westminster as the self-appointed conscience of his Party. That he was both disliked and dismissed by many only confirmed his view that he was unpopular because he was doing work ‘that needed to be done, sniffing out corruption’.

‘It won’t come to that,’ Pountney said, trying to sound reassuring. He was still feeling his way with Watson-Jones. He hadn’t got the measure of the man yet. Early days.

‘How do you know?’

‘There’s nothing for him to find.’

‘Then why does Leman’s name keep popping up, regular as clockwork? If you people write about him, Gerry, there must be more to this business than anyone’s letting on, and that worries me. It won’t look good if Harry Watts knows something I don’t.’

Some interfering busybody had discovered that Leman was working as an economic analyst at the Institute for Soviet Affairs in St James’s Square. It was enough of a connection for his unexplained
disappearance to become a sensitive issue. He was a fluent Russian-speaker and he had access to sensitive material. What more needed to be said? The wounds of earlier defections had not yet healed; the memory of the traitors Burgess and Maclean was still too raw to be ignored. Better to be safe than sorry, that was the guiding principle. Cover your arse. Which was why Harry Watts was sniffing around and memos on the missing Leman featured in Watson-Jones’s boxes. Thank God the press hadn’t got hold of anything yet.

‘The fuss will die down when Leman turns up.’

‘But he hasn’t turned up, Gerry, has he? That’s my point.’

All Pountney’s careful planning for this meeting (he’d been working on the papers until well after midnight) had been derailed by Watson-Jones’s concern about someone he didn’t know, wasn’t likely to meet, and yet who in some obscure way appeared to threaten his own political well-being. Was it always going to be like this?

‘Perhaps some of my colleagues are overreacting,’ Pountney said. Damn. Too neutral. He’d slipped up there. Watson-Jones would take pleasure in making him pay for it.

‘You know what happens to people who spend their lives sitting on fences, don’t you, Gerry? They have arses like hot cross buns.’

Now the bastard was laughing. He liked to laugh at his own jokes, particularly when they were at someone else’s expense. The Watson-Jones jibe. Never rise to the bait, his predecessor had warned him. That was the rule. Keep your powder dry. He clenched the arms of his chair to stop himself from saying anything he might later regret.

‘You don’t think Leman could be a spy, do you?’

The laugh had vanished too quickly, the change of tone catching Pountney on the hop. More evidence of Watson-Jones’s mercurial nature.

‘We’ve spoken to Merton House. Not one of theirs, they say.’

‘I meant a spy for the Soviets,’ Watson-Jones corrected him tartly.

‘They claim he’s not on their list of suspects.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me.’ Watson-Jones stared over the rims of his glasses. ‘Merton House is crawling with Reds.’

He’d been warned about that too, Watson-Jones’s hatred of the Intelligence Service. Another potential quicksand in their relationship.

‘Given the nature of my source, we must accept their word.’

‘You’re too trusting, Gerry. I shall have to change that. Give me time and I shall make a cynic of you yet.’

The laugh was knowing, superior, confident in its rightness, and for some reason today it hurt. Water off a duck’s back usually. He’d let his guard slip this morning. He mustn’t let that happen again.

They sat on a terrace watching the Danube and drinking beer. Hart caught for the first time that tantalizing trace of danger that runs like an electric current through the city, and he responded to its excitement. This was it, the battleground where the ideologies of East and West faced up to each other, head to head. The training and simulation had ended. The contest was real now. The enemy was out there in the street. He was at the front line in a secret war. In the thick of it.

‘What brought you into this line of business?’ Martineau asked.

‘Difficult to say really,’ Hart replied, wondering how much of the truth he should tell. ‘The shock of failure, probably.’

He regretted what he’d said at once. Martineau would think that what he was doing was second-best. That wasn’t true, was it? Surely not.

*

In his last year at Cambridge Hart had drifted into taking the civil service examination for entry into the Foreign Office, not because he had a compelling desire to become a diplomat but because nothing better came up (or nothing that he imagined might be better. His knowledge of the world at that time was limited to say the least, which is why he was so difficult to please). At each stage of the recruitment process he remained one of a diminishing number who were whittled down to a couple of dozen for the final interview. His success gave him a brief and seductive notoriety he had never achieved during his time at Cambridge. While it lasted, he enjoyed it.

One morning, while waiting for the results of the interview, he found in his pigeon-hole an invitation to lunch from his tutor. Jervis Adams was an archaeologist who in his more mobile days (he was
hampered now by gout) had spent his summer vacations digging in the ‘sands of Araby’ as he called them, searching for the ‘splendours of the ancient world’. What his contribution was to our understanding of those distant times Hart had never bothered to find out, though there were a number of books co-authored with his friend, Brendan Waller, in the college library. The floors of his set of rooms were covered with beautiful richly coloured carpets; glass cabinets held shelves of ancient objects (booty from his expeditions?) and there was a persistent but unproven rumour that he was addicted to opium. Jervis Adams delighted in remaining a mystery to Arabists and non-Arabists alike.

The table in his study had been cleared and two places laid with silver and some exquisite china which Hart admired.

‘Spotted in the Lanes in Brighton before the war,’ Adams said. ‘Hand-painted Herend, early nineteenth century, very unusual to find it here.’ He picked up a plate, turning it over to display the markings. ‘Always had an eye for a pretty thing.’

They ate cold chicken floating in a watery mayonnaise, lukewarm potatoes and a battered lettuce – though the wine was delicious – while Adams conducted an unexpected interrogation.

‘You learned Russian during national service. Why was that?’

‘I thought another language might be more use than soldiering,’ Hart said, wondering why Adams should bring this up as he was about to leave Cambridge.

‘Tell me,’ Adams asked, as he offered him a choice between some ancient Cheddar and a rice pudding enlivened by a blob of Chivers strawberry jam quite outclassed by the silver dish in which it was served. ‘Are you set on a career in the diplomatic?’

A talk about his career, Hart guessed, was the purpose of the lunch. He wondered what was in store. He explained how the Foreign Office offered a convenient solution to someone without a vocation.

‘Vocations aren’t all they’re trumped up to be,’ Adams replied opaquely. ‘I was testing your sense of service, how deep that was. After all,’ he added tartly, ‘you avoided joining the infantry when you had the chance.’

He hadn’t really seen it in that light, Hart replied. Since the Russians were the enemy now, he’d thought he might be of more use to the country if he could understand what his enemy was saying
rather than learning to kill him, an activity at which he imagined he wouldn’t be much good.

‘And serving one’s country, where does that stand in your pantheon of usefulness to the nation?’

‘Certainly something worth doing,’ Hart was unnerved by this unexpected attack on a patriotism he had always taken for granted. He wasn’t sure where the conversation was leading.

‘You’re to be congratulated on getting as far with the Foreign Office as you have. It’s a good sign,’ Adams said. ‘I wish you success. But if you were to fall at the last fence? What then? Have you thought about alternatives?’

Not at this stage he hadn’t, he said.

Adams appeared not to listen to his reply but to pursue thoughts of his own. ‘We need good people, you see. There are never enough of them available.’

‘For what?’ Hart asked.

‘The work that never ceases.’ Adams smiled knowingly. ‘Watching the enemy.’

‘The enemy?’ Hart had no idea what he was talking about.

‘The kingdom of evil that threatens our existence as a civilized society.’ He put down his spoon and stared at Hart. ‘The Soviet empire.’

As he listened to Adams’s speech about the need for constant vigilance if they were to avoid another war, the essential role of intelligence in the never-ending battle against the enemy, and heard his blandishments about the attractions of belonging to an elite of intelligent men and women, united in a common cause, guarding the nation’s freedoms, the purpose of the lunch became clear. He was being sounded out. Adams had connections in Whitehall, he guessed, contemporaries and former pupils who called on his services when a likely candidate appeared. He saw no inconsistency between his activities as a recruitment agent for the Intelligence Service and his role as a tutor guiding the moral fortunes of his young men. One could very well feed the other. If the last fence was to prove too much, he was telling Hart in a roundabout way, there might be other openings.