The One a Month Man (8 page)

‘Were you able to reassure her?’

‘Only marginally. I couldn’t tell her much more because I was almost as much in the dark as she was.’

‘But she went for it?’

‘I knew she would. I was in the office when they met. He wasn’t my image of a Russki.’

‘So what
was
he like?’

‘Neat black hair, cut short. Tall and slim, pale-faced. He wore a sober lounge-suit and white shirt with a starched collar.’

‘Do you always have such detailed recall of your ancient punters?’

‘This one turned out to be very memorable. I guess he was about thirty years old. Good-looking in a conventional,
conservative
way. Very polite. Very courteous to Tina. She took to him straightaway, especially when he handed over the grand to her in readies, within five minutes of shaking hands. She asked him where they were going and he said he’d rented a cottage in Dorset at Lulworth Cove, apparently a smugglers’ paradise in Long John Silver’s days. The girls always liked us to know where they were being taken; you know, for security.’

‘Was she OK with that?’

‘Couldn’t wait to get on the road with the loot and punter. I could tell she was confident he was ripe for more milking;
cash-register
signs flashing in her eyes.’

‘Was this punter married?’

‘Not then.’ For some reason my question had struck a
funny-nerve.

‘Was he using an official embassy car?’

‘Apparently not. He said he’d hired one from Hertz for the weekend.’

‘So off they went?’

‘As happy as Larry! And on the Monday afternoon she called the agency, wanting to speak with me, urgently. Simone asked if she could take a message, but Tina insisted that it had to be me.’

‘Where were you?’

‘At home. Simone called me right away and I rang Tina. By then, she was back in London, in her flat.’

‘Had something gone wrong over the weekend?’

‘That’s what I feared. Thought she might have been raped. By a Russki. That’s all my agency needed, to be responsible for World War Three! But no. Get this: she wanted me to give her
away. The perishing Russki had proposed to her on the Sunday and she’d said yes.
Yes
! They were getting married. Shocks don’t come any bigger. Life’s rich tapestry, eh?’

C
ullis was almost hyperventilating; he was so eager to return upstairs to push on with his pleasures, which had been put on hold. Nevertheless, there were a few more questions that had to be asked, much to his tumescent frustration.

‘Did it happen; did they get hitched?’

‘Damn right they did – Marylebone Register Office.’

‘There’s something missing in all this,’ I said, puzzled.

‘There’s something missing for me, too, and it’s waiting on ice upstairs,’ he protested, his eyes throwing flares.

‘Just a few more questions and I’ll be gone into the ether,’ I promised, struggling to keep this alight, like a candle in the rain. ‘Am I supposed to believe that Tina was bowled over in a couple of nights by this Russian?’

‘As Tina Turner sang so often, what’s love got to do with it?’ A ghost of a grin told me that I was expected to acknowledge his smart repartee. I obliged, mimicking a laugh. ‘Must have a drink,’ he said, shuffling with constipated inertness to a cabinet, where he poured himself a whisky. Declining to offer me one was an elaborate gesture; it wasn’t just a matter of deliberate inhospitality, he was anxious not to extend my stay so that he could surrender to the reverse pull of gravity, upwards, without too much further delay.

‘So it was a marriage of convenience?’

‘Very
convenient
.’

‘For whom?’

‘Both.’

‘Spell it out for me, Mr Cullis, then I
really will
be on my way.’ This clumsy dance of diplomacy was becoming increasingly hard to sustain.

‘The Russki wanted to defect.’

That didn’t surprise me; those were the Cold War days. ‘But he didn’t need to get married for that, surely,’ I said.

‘Oh, but he did.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he wasn’t privy to any great state secrets of Soviet plans. Nor was he a scientist or military specialist. He had no info about his country’s nuclear programme or military
intentions
to trade with.’

‘He’d have known something about the Soviet’s spy network in this country; after all, he was one of them.’

‘Worthless info. From what I gathered, our MI5 already knew the identities of most of the spies over here.’

‘But perhaps not the double agents,’ I said.

‘I don’t know about that,’ he said, pecky as a parrot now. ‘But this fella was too far down the ladder to be trusted with really sensitive stuff, I should imagine. The truth was, he’d acquired a taste for our liberal nightlife. Get me?’

‘So what was the deal?’

‘Tina banked twenty grand.’

‘And how much did you pocket?’

‘What makes you so sure I got anything?’

‘Because you don’t strike me as the kind of businessman who’d trade just for sweet fanny.’

‘I didn’t know nothin’ about the plan and the offer until the Monday.’

‘But you did give away the
blushing
bride.’

‘Fuck you, yes! So what? It was a privilege.’

This was too much, but I didn’t want to sever the pipeline, so I chilled.

‘Do you remember the groom’s name?’

‘Not a chance,’ he said, petulantly.

‘Yet you can recall everything else, including the trivia.’

‘We’re still talking thirty years ago. Jesus!’

‘So, too, was the trivia, yet that’s stuck.’

After a sulk, he said, ‘His name was typically Russki. Got me tongue-tied at the time. I couldn’t pronounce it then, so no surprise it went out of my head yonks ago.’

‘Did you keep in touch with Tina?’

‘Hardly.’

‘I take that as a
yes
, right?’

‘She called a couple of times, that’s all.’

‘Did they set up home together?’

‘Not really. Apparently, he rented a place. I believe their names appeared on the electoral roll, just for appearances. But they never lived there together. Certainly not after the first couple of nights.’

‘So the marriage
was
consummated?’

‘Consummation took place a few weeks
before
the wedding.’ This amused him.

‘So there was no house-warming party?’

He sidestepped the frivolity. Instead, he answered a question that hadn’t been asked.

‘Tina left the country with her money.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because she phoned me, to thank me for everything, the night before she flew out.’

‘Where to?’

‘The New World, the eternal land of opportunity.’

‘The States?’

‘Isn’t that what I just said?’

‘Did she say which city she was flying to?’

‘LA.’

‘To do what?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’

‘Because I bet you asked her. It would have been the natural thing to do: you know, “How are you going to survive?”’

He downed his whisky with one head-jerk, banged down the glass as if using a gavel on my head, and folded his gorilla arms, resting them on a flabby cushion, his paunch.

‘She said something about trying to get into the movies. I didn’t take much notice. It was bullshit talk. Sort of thing all airheads say when breezing off to Tinseltown on a whim and a prayer.’

‘But she was no
airhead
,’ I pointed out.

‘You wouldn’t have thought so,’ he agreed, somewhat
churlishly
. ‘Nevertheless, I took it with a pinch of salt. I just said, “Oh, yeah. Best of luck, kiddo. Take care of yourself.” She thanked me again and that was it.’

‘Was she travelling alone?’

‘S’pose. As I said, she’d already ditched the Russki. Neither of them had any more use for the other.’

‘Did you ever hear from her again?’

‘Nope.’

‘You sure about that?’

‘Scout’s honour! Now, are we done?’

‘Almost.’

‘Holy Moses!’ he fretted.

‘You wouldn’t know if she travelled under her maiden or married name?’

‘No, I don’t know, though I’d have thought it highly unlikely that she’d have had time – or the inclination – to get her passport changed from Tina Marlowe.’

‘Good point,’ I complimented him. ‘Enjoy the rest of the day. Plenty of time left to visit your wife … I’ll let myself out.’

‘No, you won’t. I want to escort you off my property. I want to watch you disappear into the sunset. I want your footprints rubbed off my land and out of my life.’

‘You’re a real gent,’ I said, my smile as phoney as everything else in that room, especially Cullis.

On my drive back to Oxford, I stopped for a fast-food meal at a motorway service station, where I called Sarah. While munching on French fries and a chilli burger, I briefed her synoptically on my day. ‘So tomorrow you can abandon the death-trail and concentrate on marriages,’ I said. ‘Should be a doddle. We have the year and the location of the crime.’

There was a vacuum, diluted only by breathing that amounted scarcely to more than a murmur. Finally she spoke, much to my relief, proving that my staccato account hadn’t rocked her to sleep. ‘Since when has marriage been a
crime
?’

‘When it’s a sham. When it’s to open a back door to illegal entry.’

Later, in bed, we talked through our respective schedules for the following day. While she was searching records of marriages, I intended making overtures to the spooks at MI5.

‘Spooks don’t do co-operation,’ she said. ‘Secrecy is their MO. Even what they have for breakfast is protected by the Official Secrets Act.’

‘I have contacts,’ I said, optimistically.

‘Contacts who were in Intelligence all those years ago?’

‘No, but that’s why my prospects are good. The info I’m after isn’t current. It’s something from the archives. Although they wouldn’t have been personally involved, they’ll have the means at their fingertips to backtrack.’

‘Seems to me we’re wasting our time in Oxford, then. Although it all started here, it moved on long ago.’

‘I agree we are rather misplaced,’ I said, sort of helplessly. ‘Trouble is, old Pomfrey sees this case as an ideal opportunity to purge his major irritant from his system.’

‘And I’m dragged under in the wash of the sinking ship.’

I embraced her, pulling her close, so that our flesh bonded, the
coupling sympathetic rather than sexual. Her eyes were
melancholy
, but not gateways to her soul; their softness was an optical illusion, fortress walls rather than windows. One moment she could be so open, the next moment so closed, but it was this enigmatic chemistry to her personality that made her so piquant. She would never
belong
to anyone again, something that pleased me. Relationships should never be about ownership. No person should ever be someone else’s possession. Every partnership should be renewed each day. You should wake and consciously make a decision that the person at your side was the one you wished to continue to call your partner. Conversely, you should be free to make the reverse decision; to walk away unfettered, no one’s vassal. Relationships, especially in marriage, could so easily become claustrophobic and suffocating; a union should be a consensus, a unanimous democratic vote. Sarah and I gave each other breathing space. Spending the rest of my life with her hadn’t crossed my mind. The next forty-eight hours were far enough ahead for commitment; Sarah’s philosophy, too.

Sleep came to us virtually simultaneously, without any further demands from either of us, perhaps underscoring our quirky compatibility.

Next morning, I gave veteran spook Sean Cassidy a call on his mobile. After the mandatory preamble when two people haven’t been in touch for a few years, I said, ‘I wasn’t sure if you were still a paid servant of HM government.’

‘Not long to go now,’ he said, without enthusiasm and
exaggerating
his Belfast accent. Sean had been recruited into British Intelligence during the worst of the terrorism in Northern Ireland. He came from the Roman Catholic community of Belfast, but he’d never had any sympathy for the IRA, although his father had been a staunch Republican. Ironically, his father had been killed by a bomb blast and his mother had lost both legs in the same act of terrorism, for which the IRA had boastfully claimed
responsibility. For ten years after the explosion that blew away his father and left his mother in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, Sean had worked as a double agent, trusted by the hierarchy of the IRA because of his father’s Irish patriotism and anti-British fervour. When the peace deals were being negotiated, Sean was brought in from the cold and had been desk-bound ever since as a handler, naturally specializing in Northern Ireland
antiterrorism
. Promotion had been his reward for putting his own life on the line, night and day, for so many years, willingly betraying his parents’ culture and political religion because of their obtuse bigotry.

‘I want some help,’ I said.

‘You won’t get anything that might jeopardize my pension,’ he said, immediately on his guard.

‘What I’m after is really low-grade stuff.’

‘Says you,’ he said, sceptically. ‘Don’t forget, I
know
you of old.’

‘I’ll explain and then you can decide.’

‘Oh, I
will
, rest assured. OK, let’s hear it.’

‘Are you recording this conversation, Sean?’

‘What do you think?’

‘You’ve answered my question,’ I said. ‘So I’ll be circumspect.’

‘You mean you’ll lie.’

We could have circled the issue endlessly, so I stopped the roundabout.

‘I want to talk Cold War days.’

Although he stayed silent, I sensed that the tension was seeping from him in the manner of a slow puncture.

‘London, some thirty years ago,’ I said. ‘There was an attaché at the Soviet Embassy who wanted to defect.’

‘Didn’t they all! Name?’

‘That I don’t know; that’s where I hope you come in.’

‘Before my time, dear boy.’ Sean was no Irish Mick. His education had been polished at Trinity College, Belfast.

‘Of course I know that! Long before my time, too. Your files may be closed, but never shredded. Apparently, this guy was small beer. Not much use to your lot or your sister agency.’

‘So we told him to sod off?’

‘Something like that. But his overtures would have been
documented
. After rejection, he hired an escort girl for a weekend jolly and, while fucking her senseless, he proposed to her.’

‘Proposed
what
, exactly?’ said Sean, the way spooks always played games.

‘Betrothal.’

‘And she accepted?’ he asked, astonished.

‘For a price.’

‘Good old-fashioned entrepreneurial spirit at work there. I assume you have
her
name?’

‘Tina Marlowe.’

‘So what
exactly
do you want from me?’ he said, seeking clarity.

‘Firstly, confirmation.’

‘Secondly?’

‘The sequel. The Soviets would have caused a ruckus. They’d have wanted their man back – dead or alive.’

‘Despite the fact that he was the lowest denomination currency?’

‘Pride, old boy,’ I said, mimicking Sean. ‘Ownership. He
belonged
to them.’ Back to relationships – a different sort from those strung together by emotion, but shackling was still a central issue.

‘It was probably untangled at diplomatic level,’ he reasoned.

‘And that’s exactly why I’ve come to you.’

‘Let me get this clear in my head: you want the name of the attaché? You want the outcome of the loveless wedding? Anything else?’

‘Yes. Where they settled, if at all.’ I wasn’t going to take Cullis’s account as gospel. ‘The Russian is only of relative interest to me. I’m seeking Tina Marlowe.’

‘Which is unlikely to be her name now.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Up to a point, this should be a soft pedal for me,’ he predicted. ‘However, the
point
at which my tracking ends may not take you far enough.’

‘But it may drop me at a useful crossroad.’

‘True,’ he conceded.

‘How long will it take you?’

‘Depends what’s in it for me?’

‘How about a kiss on the bum if you deliver within a couple of days?’

‘And if I wrap it up for you by tomorrow?’