Secret Kingdom (30 page)

The internal telephone rang. The porter on duty at the main door said: ‘There’s a young lady down here, sir, asking for you.’

‘Who is she, Mason?’

‘Foreign type, sir. Won’t give her name.’

‘All right. I’m on my way.’

Reluctantly Martineau put on his jacket and went down in the lift. The porter, a former sergeant in the Marines, was waiting in the hall. Through the open door Martineau saw a thin figure in a faded dress, hair falling over her eyes, clinging to her bicycle as if her life depended on it.

‘Won’t be parted from her bike, sir. Wanted to bring it inside. Can’t allow that, sir, can we?’

‘It’s all right, Mason. I know who she is.’ He smiled at Dora. ‘Good to see you,’ he said in Hungarian. ‘Come along in.’ She looked uncertain. ‘It’s all right. Mason will take care of your bike, won’t you, Mason?’

‘Guard it with my life, sir.’

She was paler than he remembered, with dark rings under her eyes, and thinner too. He was struck by how strongly, from some angles, her features resembled her mother’s, like the sketch for a painting. He felt a sharp moment of longing for what he had lost.

‘What can I do for you?’

She didn’t answer at first, but when she spoke the words came out in a rush. ‘I came to tell you that I have failed my exam.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘You don’t understand, do you?’

‘You’ll have to explain a bit more.’

‘Now I will never become a doctor.’

‘Can’t you retake your exam? Have another go at it?’

Suddenly she burst into tears. He gave her a handkerchief which she held to her face while she explained haltingly what had happened. It had been her ambition for as long as she could remember to become a doctor. She had worked hard this past year; all her teachers were sure she would pass the entrance exam for medical school, but when the results had been posted on the board, she discovered to her horror that she had failed. Her teachers were as shocked as she was. With their encouragement, she had asked for her papers to be looked at again but the examining authorities had refused. For a while her teachers had protested on her behalf, then suddenly they too had refused to help, and now they hadn’t time to talk to her. She knew what that meant.

‘The result won’t be any different however many times I try. I will fail for reasons that have nothing to do with my answers.’

He saw the brutal lack of subtlety in their method. What better way to intimidate than to leave your victim alone and damage those closest to her, particularly if they were innocent. Getting at the mother through the daughter was intended to hurt. What bastards these people were. Anger and remorse blazed silently inside him. Now he understood why Dora had come. He too had a hand in her suffering.

‘What will you do now?’ he asked.

‘What can I do? Try to become a schoolteacher, I suppose, if they’ll let me. Perhaps they won’t. Perhaps they will always stop me doing what I want to do.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, only too aware that his reaction was inadequate.

‘You couldn’t have known.’ Her eyes filled with tears once more. ‘Why did you leave my mother? She says you quarrelled, but I don’t believe that.’

‘Let’s go out,’ he said. ‘We can talk more easily then.’

Was he becoming paranoid? They weren’t on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain now, they were in a secure room safe inside the British embassy. No one was secretly listening to their conversation, there were no hidden microphones. No, he reassured himself, it was a professional instinct. Never let your guard slip. That way you survive longer.

‘It would be good to get a breath of fresh air. This place is stifling.’

He steered her out of the embassy, asking Mason to stow her bicycle safely until they returned. They found a café a few streets away and sat outside, under an awning.

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ she said.

‘Why I left your mother?’

He had never talked to anyone about Eva, except Carswell, and that was an interrogation which didn’t count. That was why the pain of their separation had lasted so intensely for so long. His memories of her, the crisis of their sudden parting, all remained locked inside him, denying his emotions any escape route, burning away the foundations of his being.

‘Were you in love with her?’

If she was suffering because of his relationship with Eva, she wanted to know that the pain was not for nothing.

‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Yes, I was.’

‘But you left her even though you loved her?’

He had forgotten how young Dora was, how little she knew of the world.
I left her because I was ordered to do so. I had no choice.
That was the truth he couldn’t tell her. Had he now sunk to telling lies to a sixteen-year-old?

‘I was putting your mother in danger,’ he said hurriedly. ‘She might have come to some kind of harm. That would have been too awful to bear. We agreed we didn’t have any choice.’

The girl laughed bitterly. ‘You were too late, weren’t you? The damage was already done.’

Was she blaming him alone for what had happened, or her mother too?

‘I’m sorry,’ he said once more.

She might be young, sometimes she looked little more than a child, yet she was already a victim of this intolerable regime. Her political education was outrunning her schooling. How could these men face themselves when they got home at night? Hadn’t they got children of their own? Or had their experiences eroded all trace of feeling for their fellow human beings? Forgiveness had no place in this society. Its crimes against humanity demanded the harshest retribution.

‘Would you see my mother again?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Did she send you to ask me that?’

‘She doesn’t know I’m here.’ She looked up at him. ‘Will you see her again?’

‘Would it help you if I did?’

The girl thought for a moment. He saw in her expression the depth of her concern about her mother. He wanted nothing more than to leave the café now and go with Dora to Vaci Street, to hear the sound of their footsteps as they ran up the stone stairs, to know that Eva would be there at the door, smiling, arms open, waiting for him. He wanted to put the clock back, to reclaim the love that had been taken from him and make it his own once more.

‘When Julia died my mother’s heart was broken,’ Dora said. ‘Our life changed overnight. All the excitement went out of it. When she met you, she recovered, and for a time she became once more the woman I’d known all my life. Then you left. You can imagine what has happened to her now.’

It was as direct an appeal as she was capable of making. Dora had understandably placed some kind of moral obligation on him. He had little room to manoeuvre. It was madness to agree, but he allowed himself no choice.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Ask her if she can find somewhere safe for us to meet. She mustn’t contact me. That’s important. She mustn’t try to write or telephone or speak to me in any way. That could put her in greater danger. You’ve got to act as the messenger. The only answer you can come back with is an address, a day and a time. Is that clear?’

She nodded. ‘Thank you for listening to me.’

He was committed now to helping this poor girl. By agreeing to meet Eva he had made it his quarrel. He was caught up in the fight at which up to now he had been only a spectator. He’d given himself no escape except betrayal and as he looked at her face, already shadowed with suffering, he knew that was impossible. Whatever happened now, he had to go through with it. He couldn’t let Dora down a second time.

‘I must go home.’ She stood up and smiled at him. Then she kissed him on the cheek. He walked back across the square with her in silence.

‘Needed a bit of looking after, sir,’ Mason said, wheeling out the bicycle. ‘Tightened the brakes. Spot of oil. Here you are, miss. Right as rain and good as new.’

‘Why do they punish those I love, Koli? Why do they always leave me alone? That’s what I don’t understand. What are they trying to do to me?’

Did they want to destroy her? Was this torture the penalty for daring to discover what had happened to Julia? Or for falling in love with Martineau? Somehow,
somehow
, she had to survive the worst they could do. She had to resist them, for Julia’s sake and now for Dora’s. She would have to fight for the living and the dead.

‘If I knew the answer, I would tell you,’ Koliakov said. ‘But I don’t.’

As they walked beside the Danube, she poured her heart out, telling him what she had discovered in Julia’s secret file, how she had fallen in love with Martineau and the heart-rending pain of their separation, and how Dora, poor Dora, had seen her dreams crash around her as punishment, she imagined, for what her mother had done.

Koliakov listened intently, saying little.

It was risky speaking so openly, even to Koli. She was aware of that. She could imagine circumstances when he could use what she’d told him as a bargaining counter, when he might decide that it was better to sacrifice her friendship than his own life. But staying silent wasn’t an alternative. In her desperation she had to turn to someone. He was the only person she knew who could help, and he would expect her to be candid.

‘Why did you break up with Martineau?’ he asked.

‘Falling in love with an Englishman was madness. Folly. I don’t know what possessed me.’

Forgive me, Bobby.

‘Did you end it? Or did he?’

‘I did.’

‘There were no signs that your affair had been discovered?’

‘None that I knew of. We were very careful.’

‘Have you seen him again, since you broke up?’

‘No, of course not. Why reopen something that has no future? I couldn’t go through all that again.’

‘Martineau’s job at the British embassy provides the cover for his work as an intelligence officer. We first came across him in Moscow
during the war. You were in greater danger than you knew. For your own safety, you must never again have anything to do with him.’

‘I didn’t know,’ she said, sounding horrified. That wasn’t true. Her instinct had always told her Martineau was more than he said he was. She had resisted asking him questions about himself because she had been afraid that what she might learn would end the relationship even sooner.

‘Either they have found out about you or they suspect something. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for Dora’s suffering.’

‘I don’t care about myself, Koli.’ She took his arm. ‘Dora’s set her heart on being a doctor. Failing her exam has devastated her. I’ve got to do something. I can’t leave things as they are.’

She hadn’t asked for his help, not directly, but he’d know anyway.

‘All right.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I’ll speak to someone. Find out what I can. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll do my best. I’ll need a couple of days at least.’

He squeezed her hand gently. ‘I’ll do what I can. Don’t expect too much.’

‘It’s Nigel Carswell.’ The voice at the other end of the line was anxious not to be overheard. ‘I was wondering if we could have a quiet word before long. Just the two of us.’

‘Of course.’ Pountney was surprised at the request. He had met Carswell briefly on a couple of occasions some months before but their paths had not crossed since. Unofficial meetings between senior members of the Intelligence Service and the Foreign Office were rare. He wondered what Carswell wanted.

‘I would normally suggest lunch at my club.’ Carswell hesitated, as if embarrassed to make explicit his reasons for not doing so this time. ‘Could you bear to trek north to a little spot in St John’s Wood? The food’s just about bearable and it’s got a passable cellar. One can never guarantee complete discretion but at least it’s off the beaten track. Would dinner on Wednesday suit you? My secretary will send you the details.’

*

Carswell arrived ten minutes late, very apologetic. ‘I’m so sorry. Domestic crisis. One of our cats has gone missing.’ He grinned ruefully. ‘Great leveller, domestic life, don’t you find?’

He sat down, mopping his brow. He wasn’t built for evenings as hot as this one.

‘You’ve got a drink? Good. Now, what shall we eat?’

He ordered potted shrimps and a lamb chop without looking at the menu, urged Pountney to follow his example (‘Not much damage you can do to either, is there?’) and proposed a bottle of claret. The food, as Carswell had predicted, was bearable, the claret excellent.

‘You must be wondering what’s behind all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. Perhaps you think we always behave like this.’

‘It had crossed my mind.’ Pountney grinned.

‘Sadly our lives are much more mundane.’

‘I’m not sure whether I should be relieved or saddened to hear that.’

‘What I’m about to tell you,’ Carswell said, his mouth full of shrimps and toast, ‘must remain confidential for reasons that will become abundantly clear.’

‘Of course.’

‘That’s why I thought it best if we talked away from the crowd.’

Pountney looked around the restaurant. Only one other table was occupied and that was at the far end, by a young couple absorbed in each other. Little chance of being overheard, unless the two waiters were Soviet agents. He looked at their bored expressions as they stood around the almost empty room. On balance, unlikely.

‘Early this year we took a decision at Merton House to commit ourselves fully to this damnable Suez business and to ignore Hungary and the other Soviet satellites. Nasser opening the door of Africa to Soviet domination was, as we saw it then, the greater threat. That is where all our effort has been concentrated. While our attention has been on the Middle East, a potentially dangerous situation has built up in Hungary and is now approaching crisis.

‘What kind of crisis?’

‘For some time now, our people in Budapest have been warning us that the Hungarians will rise up against their Soviet masters and
demand their freedom. We have done nothing about that intelligence. We closed our eyes to Hungary because we believed we had to. We now know we were seriously mistaken.’

He was a large man, florid in appearance. Sweat continued to pour down his face despite his ministrations with his napkin. He waited in silence while their plates were cleared away before continuing.