The House of Rumour (30 page)

He remembered what they used to say in the Political Warfare Executive: ‘There’s no such thing as intelligence, only counter-intelligence.’ In the last few days he had spent more time on his private narrative than with the official report. A personal account on how the case had marked his career, betraying a few secrets, offering a few conclusions. And something of a memoir of his own life. A chapter in his autobiography. Who had hanged the Hanged Man? He doubted if they would ever know for sure.

The story was in his briefcase. He was taking it with him. Completely against the rules, of course. He should have either submitted it or had it destroyed. But they didn’t have to worry about him going public. It was for his own amusement as much as anything. A souvenir for his own archive. A fragment of memory saved for posterity.

He said goodbye to the director and went out into the street. He hailed a cab and went to dine at his club. There was nobody there he knew. Such a lonely business, eating by oneself. For a moment he was overwhelmed with melancholy. He thought of Clarissa, his wife, who had died nearly twenty years before. The marriage had been a bit of a mistake really, but in the end they had learnt to bear each other’s company. He regretted that he had never found the time to thank her for putting up with his life of duplicity.

It was getting dark when he got home. As he was paying off the cab he saw the tart he had spotted that morning in Shepherd Market. Sturdy-looking and big-boned. A bit top-heavy. Oh yes. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in its proportion. He went up to her.

‘Would you care to join me for a drink?’

She smiled.

‘You’re a naughty boy, aren’t you?’

‘Oh yes. Come back to my place.’

She didn’t waste much time once they were in his flat. She carried the collar and leash in her handbag. It often came in handy on occasions like these. Playing away from home.

To finish she allows him to masturbate on her boots then lick them clean. He begs her to stay just for a little while longer. He wants to talk.

He has been so lonely for so long. He needs to share something of his own secret life. He feels that she knows the code somehow, that she understands the double world.

‘What’s your name?’ he asks her.

‘Vita. Vita Lampada.’

‘Oh yes.’ He laughs gently at her cover name. ‘Like the Newbolt poem. “Play up! Play up!” ’

‘I’m on the game!’

They laugh together now. She indulges him. A real gentleman, she decides. Only public-school boys ever get the joke of her name.

‘I’m on the game, too,’ he tells her.

‘Why, you naughty boy,’ she purrs. ‘Well, don’t expect me to pay you.’

‘Of course not. It’s another game I play. The Black Game.’

‘The Black Game?’

‘Telling lies and making up stories.’

‘What sort of stories?’

‘I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.’

‘Naughty boy. Are you some sort of spy?’

‘I’m retired. Well, they never quite let you go. I’ve been pulled back for this wretched business at Spandau.’

‘Spandau?’

‘Look, I really shouldn’t be telling you anything.’

‘Like the Spandau Ballet?’

‘Yes, it was rather like a dance. A sort of quadrille between the Four Powers. You know, it was the last thing the wartime allies continued to do together. To guard an old man.’

‘I knew them, you know?’

‘What?’

‘Spandau Ballet. They used to come to Billy’s and the Blitz. I preferred Danny Osiris and Black Freighter.’

He frowns at her. He has no idea what she is talking about.

‘I used to be a bit of a New Romantic,’ she tells him.

He smiles. And he feels compelled to answer:

‘I used to be a bit of an old romantic.’

But he knows it’s a lie.

He falls back into his armchair. Exhausted. Sated. He lets out a satisfied sigh. Now he feels he has finished his job, though little flashes of Hess run through his mind. The Spandau Ballet: what made her say that?

‘I’d better get going,’ she is saying.

‘Yes. I hope you don’t mind me not seeing you out. I’m rather tired.’

He has already paid her. No need for that awkward ritual at the door.

‘See you again, perhaps.’ She grins and her eyes flash for a moment.

And she is gone.

She sees the briefcase in the hallway and says to herself, no, it’ll only get you into trouble. Her hand is already on the latch; she is ready to let herself out without looking back. But at the last moment she turns and grabs it, swinging it out of the door with her.

Back in her little studio flat she lights the gas and turns the case out onto the hearthrug. A copy of
The Times
and an A4 manila envelope. She opens it and pulls out a sheaf of papers. A manuscript. She sits down and begins to read.

12

the hanged man

My first job in the Service and my last. There’s always a danger of giving random events undue significance but it was hard not to see a pattern in the Hess case. His flight marked a curious apex in the rise and fall of the Third Reich; his death now becomes part of the Cold War endgame. But years of study have rendered little of substance or meaning. Perhaps he merely represents something of my generation of intelligence. A Secret Service tradition that went from fighting a war we had to win to facing off a war that we could never allow to happen. Now it appears that the latter game is over too. By all accounts the Soviets were finally ready to let him go. Then suddenly his suicide. Eric Judd calls Hess the Hanged Man, which seems an appropriately mysterious symbol. Because whatever you believe, there was an occult aspect to this case. After all, what ‘occult’ means is to be hidden or obscured.

What you have to remember is that none of us involved in the affair ever knew the whole story. I for one was only ever told about a plan to reactivate our tame Nazis in the Link, that pitiful bunch of Fifth Columnists run by the Political Warfare Executive, and even that was quickly aborted when Joan Miller’s cover was blown. Everyone close to it picked up strange clues and hints that something very odd might have transpired but nothing could be proved or verified.

It’s true that after the capture of Hess in Scotland, Commander Fleming did issue a memorandum recommending Aleister Crowley as an advisor in his interrogation. But there is certainly no record that the Great Beast played any part in a scheme by elements within the Service to lure Hess over. And if any of the files of Operation Mistletoe ever see the light of day, they will probably merely hint at a vague disinformation campaign that used faked paranormal material to provoke the superstitious elements within the enemy. It was certainly part of our broader strategy. The Political Warfare Executive eventually employed its own astrologer, the rather absurd Louis de Wohl, who was given a captain’s rank on the understanding that this was a mere payroll technicality. He caused great embarrassment to our department when he was spotted in Piccadilly, sporting a very shabby uniform that he had acquired for himself. The colonel in charge of our section said he looked ‘just like an unmade bed’.

In the spring of ’42, Fleming came to Political for a liaison meeting. He was putting together a special commando unit for intelligence gathering. It was then that he told me about the queer book titled
Swastika Night
that he was certain had in some strange way predicted Hess’s flight to Scotland. He had even interviewed the author, who turned out to be a woman writing under a male pseudonym.

In 1985, an American publisher, the Feminist Press, reissued
Swastika Night
and revealed its author as Katharine Burdekin. I got hold of a copy and found that there was indeed a reference (on page 87) to a character called Hess leaving the Nazi inner circle and travelling to Scotland. It seemed an odd coincidence.

The next time I saw Fleming was in Normandy in ’44, just after the D-Day landings. I was with a reporting unit at Carteret where the Allied armies were regrouping before advancing to the north-east. He was with this commando squad he had formed, the 30 Assault Unit. He called them his ‘Red Indians’. I remember that bloodhound expression on his face. Handsome, dashing, keen for the fray. His battledress just a bit too clean and well tailored.

We got a chance to inspect the huge rocket installations the Germans had left behind: vast concrete bunkers, launch pads and gantries. We walked around dismantled missile parts, nose-cones and finned engine assemblies. In retrospect it was like the setting of one of his books. As we picnicked on K-rations amid futurist ruins, I asked him what he intended doing after the war. I nearly choked on my Spam when he replied: ‘Why, write the spy story to end all spy stories.’

For a moment I had a vision of him telling some imaginative account of Operation Mistletoe. I was professionally appalled but personally intrigued by the possibility of someone making sense of one of the greatest mysteries of the war. Perhaps it would make sense only as fiction. Maybe Fleming had worked out some sort of key to it.

It was a full ten years before his first book came out. I scanned it for any obvious clues but soon realised what a futile task it was to chase after hidden meanings in novels. Granted, the figure of ‘M’ in
Casino Royale
is clearly Maxwell Knight: everyone in the Service knew him as such (Fleming even gives him a Chief of Staff named Bill, just as Knight had). This was telling since really Fleming had dealings just with Knight over Mistletoe. And Joan Miller is certainly the template for the attractive assistant that Bond flirts with. Most playful of all was the obvious use of Crowley as inspiration for the villain Le Chiffre (French for cypher). But then this would hardly be the first time the Great Beast had been turned into a fictional character. And there was nothing else in the book that even hinted at any solution to the puzzle of Operation Mistletoe. I have to say that I was more than a little disappointed.

I was by then married to Clarissa Devereux, the third daughter of the Lord Marshalsea. It had been a brief engagement, just after the war when everything seemed hopeful. It’s shocking to think now how innocent we were, especially of sexual matters. Soon after our honeymoon I was posted to Kuala Lumpur as Security Liaison Officer to the Colonial Special Branch. It was the time of the Malayan Emergency and I was co-ordinating psychological warfare and propaganda strategies in the counter-insurgency against communist terrorists.

Clarissa took to the tropics at first. It was a big adventure for both of us and for a while it seemed like paradise. She spent a good deal of time and energy making our house beautiful. Most expat residences tended to be a little dreary, filled with gimcrack furniture, gaudy ornaments, tiger skins and the like. She supervised the decoration herself and made our bungalow bright and spare with clear lines. We had a long spacious veranda and a well-tended garden. Beyond it wild and lush foliage thickened along the bank of a broad and gently flowing river. Clarissa loved the astonishing natural world that surrounded us. When we could she liked to trek through the pathways in the jungle, to bathe in a nearby river pool so clear that one could see the golden sand of its bed.

But security was very tight for most of the time we were there. The communists were targeting rubber planters. Barbed wire went up around our little compound. She began to feel trapped. Clarissa had a charming obsession with Eastern mysticism but she soon found that colonial society was actually quite dull and suburban. Once the novelty wears off one can feel trapped in a sort of exotic boredom. I had my work, of course; I was absorbed by it. But Clarissa grew tired of the languid routine, the dreary cocktail parties.

It was all very disappointing for her and I couldn’t help much. There had been a spark to our marriage at first, but that’s all it was, a flicker that could so easily go out. I tried everything I could but I don’t suppose anyone would find my company particularly exciting. Intelligence work does tend to make men dull and introspective.

She began a prolonged flirtation with a handsome veterinary surgeon attached to the Commissioner-General’s office. Alan Munro was charming, sensitive and, above all, interesting. He knew most of the native fauna and could describe it exquisitely; he played the piano and read poetry. After six months of this I finally challenged her. I couldn’t blame her for having an affair but in my professional pride I could not bear being deceived.

‘But, darling,’ Clarissa assured me, ‘Alan’s queer. I thought you knew that.’

I did not but the thought of it suddenly unsettled me. Clarissa noticed it almost at once.

‘This business about Alan has really upset you, hasn’t it?’ she asked me later. ‘I didn’t think that you were particularly anti.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘What then?’

I couldn’t say. It was a sense of uncertainty, something disjointed and fugitive. Like a fragment of encrypted intelligence. An awkwardness developed in our relationship. We bluffed our way through our time in Malaya, keeping up appearances and following the pattern of a well-bred marriage. There were other postings: to Beirut, Cairo, Berlin. But each move in the Service seemed to consolidate the distance between us. Clarissa spent more and more time back home. When I finally returned to London, what was left of our shared life had all but reduced to the politeness of strangers.