The Clown Service (8 page)

‘Let me put that another way,’ he continued, before I had time to answer, ‘can you put whatever you’re up to aside for a bit? I need you to help me with a thing.’

‘A thing’. This casual attitude towards operations was part of the military affectation. They were quick to insist others stuck
to operation classifications and code names but spent their entire careers involved in ‘shindigs’, ‘ruckuses’ and ‘bits of business’. Perhaps it made them sleep better at night, downgrading their acts of murder or terrorism to nothing more than ‘little barneys overseas’.

‘What do you need?’ I asked, but he had already begun to walk off down the corridor, obliging me to follow.

I shoved my paperwork back in a desk drawer, locked it and gave chase as he made his way downstairs.

‘Got a little picture show for you,’ he was saying, his rich voice being sucked up by the stairwell like nourishment. ‘Chap I want you to take a look at.’

The screening room was part of our production house facade, a small cinema filled with tip-up seats grown shiny through use and the ghosts of dead cigarettes. We all smoked in those days – tobacco was as ubiquitous as water and we thrived on it. It kept the smell of the building at bay.

‘Maggie,’ said the Colonel, shouting at a small woman whose head sported a cheap perm and bright pink spectacle frames. ‘Get Shining a coffee, would you?’ He didn’t bother to consult my wishes on the matter; I would accept this token of civility whether I wanted it or not.

She sighed and rose to her feet under the great weight of all that curled hair. ‘Milk or sugar?’ she asked, with the enthusiasm of a woman about to clean up after her dog.

‘Both please,’ I said, knowing that the coffee would need all the help it could get in order to achieve flavour. Those were the days of powdery, instant, light brown flour that managed to look vaguely like coffee when water was added to it but had long given up on tasting like it.

We entered the screening room, the Colonel waving me to a seat as he moved towards the projector.

‘Never know how to work the wretched thing,’ he admitted. ‘Where’s Thompson, damn him? He’s the only one that understands its arcane bloody ways.’

He stepped out for a moment, hunting for Thompson, a pleasant young man whom I hoped would one day come to his senses and find a better career.

I sat and smoked.

I was used to hanging around the place at the casual beck and call of others. I was like a cherished stapler, passed between offices and frequently lost under a pile of expenses claims.

‘Sorry to keep you,’ said Thompson as he entered at the back, which just goes to show how polite he was. After all, it hadn’t been him that was detaining me. ‘Nobody else seems able to work the projector.’

‘I’d have been willing to have a go,’ I declared, ‘but I didn’t want to confuse our superior by showing excessive signs of intelligence.’

‘Certainly doesn’t pay in our line of work.’ Thompson smiled.

‘Ah!’ said the Colonel, once more gracing us with his presence. ‘All set then? Good man, Thompson. Reel on top.’

The film opened with a blurry shot of the Oceanic Terminal at Heathrow. A Vickers V10 was disgorging its passengers onto the tarmac. The camera man was no threat to Hollywood. The lens jerked around until he managed to focus it on one passenger in particular, a middle-aged, dark-haired man who was so bland in appearance he could only be a spy.

‘Know him?’ the Colonel asked as the camera followed its target towards the terminal entrance.

‘Should I?’

‘We think you soon will. Russian, by the name of Olag Krishnin. Our dossier on him is so thin we have to put a paperweight on it to stop the wind blowing it away.’

‘But there’s enough in there to mark him out for special interest?’

‘We think he’s working in a similar field to you.’ The Colonel became evasive; nobody liked discussing my field. I imagine vice squad have the same problem: everybody talking around the subject. ‘He’s published a couple of papers in your line.’

‘Such as?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s all beyond me. Distant viewing or something …’

Remote
viewing, I decided. The esoteric spy’s Holy Grail.

‘When was this filmed?’ I asked.

‘A couple of days ago. The Met flagged him up and eventually I got to hear about it.’

I could smell the brandy and cigar smoke of the Colonel’s club. People like him did most of their work via the old boy’s network.

‘Any idea where he’s gone now?’ I asked. It was all very well to show the man getting off a plane, but if the surveillance had stopped there then how was I to know whether he had subsequently got back on one?

‘Turns out he has a house over here, bugger’s been living on our doorstep for eighteen months. Bloody embarrassing, frankly. Our friends in Special Branch have been keeping an eye on him, but they’re getting restless.’

This was normal. Nobody enjoyed the mind-numbing aspects of surveillance and it was a frequent complaint by Special
Branch that they had enough on their plate without having to act as watchdogs for us.

‘So I should take over?’

‘There’s no point in just pulling him in,’ said the Colonel. ‘We need to know what he’s been doing here all this time. Keep tabs on him, size him up, give me something to work with.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘give me what you’ve got and I’ll liaise with the boys in blue.’

You couldn’t blame Special Branch for balking at surveillance duty. It was (and is) the most excruciatingly dull business.

Krishnin had taken occupation of a little terraced house just off Farringdon Road. Using their usual persuasive tactics, Special Branch had forced their way into the house opposite. Having been convinced that their cellar was about to fill with sewage unless fixed by the local council, the occupants were now taking a holiday with the wife’s sister in Cornwall. We’d slap a little concrete around once done and they’d be none the wiser.

Their bedroom window gave a good view of Krishnin’s house. My predecessors had shifted a cheap dresser out of the way so that a desk and chair could be placed there, shaded by net curtains.

We made an unwelcome intrusion in that little room of frilled valances and floral wallpaper. A bored copper had been poking around – there was evidence of his nosiness all over the place. I did my best to cover up after him, strangely uncomfortable – given the reason I was there – with intruding into their lives. The bedroom was littered with personality, pictures in frames, pots
of half-used make-up, opened letters (which I had no doubt the previous surveillant had taken the time to read). We never think how we might look to others as they poke through these, our private spaces, rooms that are extensions of ourselves.

Nobody had had the opportunity to install listening devices across the road so I was soon left to wonder what point I was serving, sat there staring at a house’s empty windows. I would know if Krishnin left the house or if anyone visited him. As intelligence went this was pathetically thin. The fact that he had been there for some time just made it worse.

It’s not that it was unusual to discover a foreign agent living on our soil – the Russians weren’t idiots; they knew their tradecraft. There were bound to be enemy agents working under cover identities up and down the country (we certainly had a number of our people behind the curtain, after all). Espionage would be plain sailing if we knew everything the moment it had happened. Still, the fact that Krishnin had been present for so long and yet had remained beneath our attention either meant he was up to nothing of any great importance, or he was playing a decidedly long game. One had to assume the latter, of course – spies are paid to be pessimists – but I couldn’t see how our limited surveillance was going to bring us any closer to the truth.

I had hired a private contractor so that I had cover should I feel the need to do anything radical like sleep. He was a burly private detective by the name of O’Dale. He’d acquitted himself well in the war and came vetted for Service use.

He arrived a couple of hours later and immediately started earning his wage by putting on the kettle.

‘This the sort of job where I get to ask questions?’ he said
while carrying two mugs into the bedroom. I could have pointed out that he was already doing so.

‘You can ask all the questions you like,’ I told him, ‘but I doubt I’ll be able to answer them. We’re just keeping an eye on someone. Watching pavements and waiting to see if he’s a waste of our time.’

He pulled a chair over and settled in with his tea. I was surprised at his appearance; I had been expecting a functional rock of old tweed and flannel but he was quite the dandy, in a three-piece suit and hat.

‘I’ve done my fair share of this sort of thing,’ he admitted. ‘You lot only call me in on the boring jobs.’ He took off his hat, a perfectly brushed, brown bowler, and sat it upturned in his lap as if he intended to eat nuts from it. ‘I suppose that’s only natural; you’re hardly going to go private with the juicy stuff.’

‘You’d be surprised how little of it
is
juicy,’ I told him. ‘It’s not the most exciting profession in the world.’

‘You want to try my line of work. Coma patients get more action.’

We agreed a rota that would see the house covered all day and he left me to it, promising to return at six. By then I had decided to attempt something new – you can only look at lace curtains for so many hours before deciding your plans need readjustment.

In those days my list of agents was negligible. Thankfully one of them was exactly what we needed in order to get things moving.

Cyril Luckwood was a strange little man. He worked for the post office, shuffling and sorting mail. An undemanding job that suited him. It gave him time to think and Cyril had always been a big thinker. Whenever I saw him he had stumbled on a
new idea, from an innovative design for vacuum flasks to using bleach to run car motors. Nothing ever came of these ideas. For Cyril it was all about the dreaming. He was a man that liked to solve problems people might not be aware existed.

I met him in a little pub called the Midnight Sailor, further down Farringdon Road. It was the sort of pub where the carpet was on forty Woodbines a day and the tables felt like they contained hearts of sponge.

‘Now then, Jeremy,’ said Cyril as I joined him at a table he had taken in the far corner, ‘you know all the nicest places.’ To Cyril I was Jeremy; I’ve had so many names over the years.

‘How are you keeping?’ I asked him.

‘Can’t complain. Margery is barely talking to me but that’s hardly unusual. I think it’s the lino that’s got her wound up?’

‘The lino?’

‘In the kitchen. I cut a whopping great square out of it because I wanted to test its resistance to heat.’

‘Should I ask?’

‘Probably not. Just a thought I’d had. I might be on to something in the field of culinary insulation, not that this appeases her. Margery is not a woman who is interested in breaking new ground.’

‘But you are.’

‘Exactly.’ He took a sip of his pint and sighed. ‘Enough of my problems. What are you up to?’

‘Surveillance job.’

‘Obviously. Can I ask about him?’

‘You can ask … but if I knew anything I wouldn’t have needed to call you.’

‘Fair enough. I’ll be going in blind as usual.’

‘As usual.’

He shrugged and took another mouthful of his beer. ‘One day you’ll be the death of me.’

‘I do hope not.’

‘I know you do. Which is the reason I stick my neck out anyway. You ask for a lot, but you do it nicely.’

We finished our drinks and I walked him to Krishnin’s house, being careful to take the long way around, coming in from the top end of the street.

Inside our cuckoo’s nest, I led Cyril upstairs to O’Dale, who was sipping without enthusiasm at some soup he had brought in a flask.

‘I could tell you how to keep that hot for days,’ said Cyril, but O’Dale showed the idea as much interest as the soup.

‘One more pair of hands is it?’ he asked, looking at me. ‘One of your lot?’

‘I’m a freelancer,’ said Cyril with a smile, ‘like you, I presume?’

‘Not another private lad?’ O’Dale was clearly put out that I might have gone to another agency.

‘No, no,’ Cyril replied, ‘I work for the government. Just up the road in fact. Mount Pleasant Sorting Office.’

‘You work for the bloody post office?’

‘For ten proud years.’

O’Dale didn’t really know what to say to that so he returned to his soup and left the subject alone.

‘Cyril Luckwood,’ said Cyril, holding out his hand in greeting.

O’Dale looked at me again and I shrugged, reassuring: ‘You can trust Cyril.’

‘He officially vetted?’

‘Don’t be a prig,’ I told him. I hated it when agents tried to vie over each other in a nonexistent pecking order. ‘Cyril’s fine.’

‘O’Dale,’ the detective said, returning Cyril’s offered handshake.

‘Pleased to meet you. Do much of this sort of thing?’

‘A fair bit.’

‘Gets you out of the house, doesn’t it?’ Cyril turned back to me. ‘When do you want me to go in?’

‘As soon as we can get you kitted up,’ I told him. ‘There’s no point in hanging around longer than we have to.’

‘You’re sending him in there?’ said O’Dale, clearly not impressed with the idea.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Cyril assured him, ‘I have a rather special skill when it comes to infiltration.’

‘You’re familiar with the concept of “going grey”?’ I asked O’Dale. ‘Making yourself blend into the background, to avoid being spotted by the people you’re observing? Of course you
must
be in your job …’

‘I tend to find people walk around with their eyes closed,’ O’Dale admitted. ‘It’s surprisingly easy to avoid being noticed.’

‘Well, in our trade it’s a little more difficult, as you tend to be expecting surveillance. In Cyril’s case, he has an advantage.’

‘Who’s Cyril?’

‘The man you’ve just been talking to.’

O’Dale shifted uncomfortably in his seat and I couldn’t help but smile at this proof of Cyril’s abilities. ‘I wasn’t talking …’ He looked around. ‘Hang on … there was … something about Mount Pleasant.’