The One a Month Man (9 page)

‘Just a big thank you.’

‘I’ll deliver tomorrow.’

Sarah, working from our laptop, made speedy headway. For several years the national records’ office of births, marriages and deaths had gone online. Although she had only Tina’s name, that was sufficient. She didn’t even need to know the year or location of the marriage, which were bonuses for the search. And there it was before her eyes: Tina Marlowe joined in wedlock with Sergi Cornikov at Marylebone Register Office on 3 July 1979. His age was given as thirty-four; she was twenty-one. A fascinating feature was the groom’s address. Apparently, without inhibition, he’d actually used the Soviet Embassy. There was no reason to doubt the Paddington address ascribed to Tina; that appeared to be a neat fit. So we had the Russian’s name well in advance of Sean’s contribution, but this information didn’t assist us one jot in learning anything of the wedding aftermath. Sarah Googled the name Sergi Cornikov, but it didn’t produce a single hit.

I haven’t the patience for treading water gracefully, but
alternatives
were limited. We were in the cramped office I’d been allotted in Oxford, where there was just enough room for us to
sit next to one another at the desk, staring at the
computer-screen,
tapping in key words and clicking on ‘Search’, and bombing out. Like playing Patience and becoming more
impatient
by the minute.

‘Something doesn’t quite stack up for me,’ Sarah said, idly, filling in space.

‘Let’s hear it,’ I said.

‘Tina was a victim of the so-called “One-A-Month Man”. She was traumatized, naturally.’

‘
Naturally
,’ I intoned.

‘She couldn’t articulate her feelings with her parents because she was emotionally frozen, all of which is well-documented, routine reaction to such experiences.’

‘So?’ I said, somewhat inanely.

‘So what strikes me as
unnatural
, to put it mildly, is that she could possibly have turned to whoring. I’d have understood if she’d been turned off men for ever. Or had become a serial killer of men. Wouldn’t that be more natural and understandable?’

‘Nothing so strange as folk and the human psyche,’ I said, perhaps a shade too glibly, because Sarah nailed me with a look that was sharp enough to impale me to the stucco wall behind us. ‘Maybe she wanted to make men pay,’ I added, giving the subject the serious consideration that it warranted. ‘Pay literally. Hit them where it hurts men most; in the pocket. More painful to many than a kick in the balls. Who knows? This is Freudian territory, where we’re not qualified to roam. Leave the head-digging and mental excavations to the shrinks. It’s not our job to trawl the murky, labyrinthine corridors of the human brain, which too often are more polluted than a sewer. Understanding and
interpreting
behaviour isn’t really our remit; we merely act upon it and that’s hard enough. If murder is committed, we catch the killer. It’s up to others to make sense of it; more often the
nonsense
of it.’

‘That’s not entirely true,’ she argued, always ready to joust.

‘No?’ If I sounded huffy, I was.

‘No. We have to provide a plausible motive and that demands getting inside heads.’

‘Yeah, but with the help of other experts, specialists in that area of expertise. We sub-contract to shrinks, the brain-benders.’

‘OK, but don’t
you
find it odd that, after all Tina went through and how she froze out her parents, she could so soon drift on to the game and then marry a punter for money?’

‘Well, if it was claimed she’d married a punter for love after just one dirty weekend with him, I’d have found that harder to swallow. Look, we’re not machines.’ I tried not to lecture, but I was. ‘You can’t calculate in advance how our chemistry is going to interact with other elements.’

‘I see what you saying,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘Such as with shock.’

‘Exactly. A mother can lose her only child in a road accident and the first thing she says is, “Oh, goodness, I haven’t put on the dinner! My husband will be home in half an hour and I won’t have a meal ready for him.” Cold as an Arctic winter. And she can remain that way for months.’

‘Then it hits her and she crumbles into a nervous breakdown,’ said Sarah.

‘Delayed shock can play cruel tricks. It’s a tripwire,
camouflaged
, out of sight, waiting to give the vulnerable a fall. There’s no template for human nature; no norm. Tina’s terrifying ordeal could just as easily have driven her to promiscuity as into the man-hating camp.’

‘It still takes some believing, though.’

‘The suspension of disbelief is mandatory if you’re going to be a successful cop.’

‘I thought that applied only to fiction.’

‘Fiction has to be plausible. We deal with the implausible. Think about it. The plots to most of the cases that have tested us to the limit have been too improbable for the crime-fiction genre.’

These ruminations dominated the remainder of our day, mainly because there was nothing else to do until we heard from Sean. Even our pillow talk that night was an extension of the topic that had teased our brains for more hours than it deserved.

Next day, Sarah and I were just preparing to leave the police station for an early lunch, around noon, when Sean came between us, via my mobile.

‘Are you alone?’ he enquired, his voice muffled, the way spooks are always so secretive, even if the only information they have to impart is what colour socks they’re wearing.

‘Yes,’ I lied, for the sake of expediency, winking at Sarah.

‘OK, well, I’ve bottomed it out for you. The attaché’s name was Sergi Cornikov.’

I didn’t tell him that I already had the name. Spooks sulk very easily, especially if they feel upstaged or undermined.

‘He’d made several overtures to our agency,’ he rattled on, his tone hush-hush, as if he had a hand cupped to his mouth. ‘But he didn’t have enough to trade with, apparently. He said he could get hold of some really sensitive stuff, but he seemed so desperate that the opinion was that he was too unreliable, an unstable wild card.’

‘You mean it was feared that any information he eventually passed on might be made up, just to please you folk?’

‘Something like that; pleasers are notoriously bad risks. It was tempting, though, if only as a PR exercise. The publicity could have been used to embarrass the Soviets.’

‘Did his people have any idea he’d made an approach?’

‘I’ll come to that.’ Typical of a spook, he wanted me hanging on breathlessly for the punchline, even if there wasn’t one.

‘After the wedding in London, the couple went to ground. For a few days the Soviets said nothing, then reported Sergi a missing person. A week later, he allegedly phoned his embassy to say that he’d fallen in love with an English girl and had
married her. The Soviet ambassador demanded that Sergi be hunted down and returned to them. He accused British Intelligence of having conspired with Sergi, encouraging him to defect. The ambassador said the wedding should be annulled because it was nothing more than a fraudulent stunt and Sergi would be packed off to Moscow, where he would face the
consequences
for being a traitor, possibly imprisoned for life or even shot.’

‘There’s no record of this in the media,’ I said.

‘That’s because it was never filtered into the public forum,’ Sean explained. ‘It was restricted to the diplomatic airways, which became red hot.’

If the pun was intended it didn’t resonate in my ear. I had an urge to remind Sean that Tina was my only interest and I wasn’t concerned with Sergi’s fate, but I was reluctant to offend him, especially as he was doing me a favour that was unlikely ever to be reciprocated.

‘How was it settled?’

‘I’m coming to that,’ he said, reprovingly. ‘Because the Soviets apparently were so keen to retrieve their lost property, our boys delighted in taunting their opposite numbers, pointing out that the attaché had legitimately married a British girl on UK soil and he was entitled to stay.’

‘Was that the end of the stand-off?’

‘Not a bit of it. Sergi was suddenly hot property.’

‘Simply because the Soviets were throwing a wobbly?’

‘But of course! We weren’t interested until they started stamping their feet.’

‘Then your predecessors realized he must be a bigger fish than first thought?’

‘I reckon it was more bloody-mindedness than anything else. The Soviets’ pride had been punctured. Our natural response was to further prick and prod that tender spot.’

‘So your lot went after Sergi?’

‘The fear was that the KGB would hunt him down first and kill him, to make an example, setting a benchmark, so it was imperative that our side got to him first.’

‘I assume the operation was successful?’

‘Sergi and Tina were in a boarding house in Weymouth, an old-fashioned seaside town in Dorset.’

‘I know where Weymouth is on the map,’ I said, indignantly. ‘Signed in as Mr and Mrs Smith, no doubt?’

‘No, Mr and Mrs Sergeant.’

‘Not very smart,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t have taken the Russians long to have matched Sergi to Sergeant.’

‘But we won the race.’

‘Three cheers for the Brits!’ I said, sardonically. Anyone would have thought Sean was talking about winning Olympic gold. ‘Was Sergi taken into protective custody?’

‘No, that would have involved your lot, almost certainly resulting in publicity. All police forces are leaky ships when it comes to confidentiality.’

How very true,
I thought, sadly.

‘He was taken to a safe house.’

‘What about Tina, his
beloved
wife?’ I said, mockingly.

‘She wanted to go her own way, to sod off with her loot.’

‘You’re intimating that she was restrained.’

‘I wasn’t around in those days, remember. I’m relying on files, old sepia reports.’

‘I appreciate that,’ I said sympathetically, doing my utmost to show gratitude and to placate him.

‘It appears that she was advised to hang around, just in case the KGB tried to get at Sergi through her. Sergi had told his embassy that he’d married an English girl. They may have unravelled the marriage details in a matter of minutes. If they were already snapping at Sergi’s heels, they could have been close to bagging him. There was also the possibility that they might have had Tina in their sights, too.’

‘Are you talking
literally
now?’

‘No. I mean they might have seized Tina if she’d broken loose and then they’d have tried to broker a swap for Sergi.’

‘So she was moved into the safe house with Sergi to continue cohabitating as husband and wife?’

‘For a while, yes.’

Sean ignored my sneering aside. ‘Sergi demanded protection.’

‘Cheeky bastard! The mess was of his own making. I wouldn’t have thought he was in any position to start making demands. After all, you’ve already stressed he was of no use to you spooks.’

‘Top brass decreed we had a moral responsibility.’

I manufactured a contemptuous laugh. ‘I fail to see where
morality
came into this.’

‘He couldn’t be thrown to the wolves. Neither could Tina.’

‘The taxpayers might have thought differently,’ I said.

‘Whatever the rights or wrongs, Sergi was given a new identity.’

‘What about Tina?’

‘She, too.’

‘I trust you have the minutiae for me?’

‘Sergi became Paul Barker; very Western. Not a hint of East European in it. He was provided with a council flat in Milton Keynes, a bank account, a job as a hospital porter and a plausible legend.’

He knew that I was
au fait
with spook-speak.
Legend
stood for a fake background and biography.

‘Tina was given the pseudonym Juliette Trayner, a single woman whose parents had died in a road accident when she was a child and she’d been brought up by grandparents.’

‘What about accommodation for her?’

‘A bedsit in Brighton; rent paid for three months in advance.’

‘So she’d bagged a bonanza for getting into a bogus marriage and then the state forked out for her pad! What incentive is there for leading a decent life, like mine?’

His chuckle was unforced, I believe. ‘If you’re decent, I’m a saint. You’re a hard man, Mike. Tina had been through a lot. One could argue she deserved a break.’

‘Along with thousands of other young women who’d had it tough but had steered clear of the gutter.’

‘Pointless being judgmental now,’ said Sean, always one for homespun philosophy.

He was right, of course. All that I was now hearing was declaring null and void almost everything related to me by Cullis.

‘Was
she
found a job, too?’

‘Yep, in marketing, with a hotel chain.’

‘Handy for hooking.’

‘Give it a rest, Mike,’ he protested, still affable, though.

‘What about the marriage?’

‘Just left on the books.’

‘Not annulled?’

‘That would only have drawn further unwanted attention to it, requiring explanation to lower echelon bureaucrats and possibly opening up the proverbial can of worms.’

‘How long was Sergi mollycoddled by your lot?’

‘Not long. As soon as he moved to Milton Keynes, he was more or less on his own.’

‘I guess the same applied to Tina?’ I queried.

‘Even more so.’

‘And on that note your files are closed, I assume?’

There was a pause that stretched like elastic having its tensility tested. It was the sort of hiatus that, unlike a vacuum, was bristling with bottled vitality.

‘Oh, no, not a bit of it,’ he said, eventually, a ripple of
frisson
lacing his voice. ‘I don’t think we should continue with this on the phone. Where can we meet?’

W
e went for a stroll in the park. Hyde Park.

Spooks have been addicted to talking while walking ever since they saw it on TV and in mid-seventies movies. Reality was soon stalking fiction after authors like John Le Carre had spooks rendezvous on benches in parks, then amble along circuitous paths among dog-walkers and beside lakes, feeding ducks while sharing intrigue and conspiracy that could help to unbalance the world power-structure. Always dressed in bowlers and pinstripes, and armed with a rolled brolly. The
caricature
became the true character of espionage.

However, the uniform of stockbrokers and City bankers had long ago gone to the charity shops from the spooks’ wardrobes. Sean wore jeans, russet-coloured ankle-boots, a matching leather jacket and an open-necked black, silk shirt. To complete his disguise, he even had crumbs for the amphibious birds.

Once again I’d left Sarah in Oxford. Taking her along would have been bad form. Spooks rarely do threesomes, believing
religiously
in one-to-one special relationships and possessive about contacts. As with a date or an invitation to lunch, you don’t take along an uninvited chaperon.

As for my attire, I had on my usual crumpled dark suit, scuffed shoes, a shirt that had once been white, and a yellow tie, which, sartorially, brought a splash of sunshine to the gloom within the rest of my appearance.

‘Pleasant day,’ said Sean, peering skywards. British spooks regularly relied on banality about the weather as a precursor to cloak-and-dagger skulduggery. ‘Any chance of my knowing why you’re so interested in the one-time Tina Marlowe?’

‘Sure. She was a victim of a very serious crime and could be a witness in a murder trial, if we’re lucky,’ I said, seeming to surprise him with my frankness, which he probably took for a bogus cover story. These people were not accustomed to trading in truth.

We’d picked up takeaway coffees at the park’s café near the Serpentine. I’d paid, of course; a matter of etiquette as he was doing me a favour, which came cheaply at the price of a
cappuccino
. We drank as we drifted aimlessly and westwards along the towpath.

‘This is very embarrassing,’ he said, turning away from me.

‘What is?’

‘The episode you’re delving into. You have to give me a promise.’ Now he turned to fix me with his penetrating and soulless grey eyes.

‘No blank cheques, Sean,’ I warned.

He drank some more, giving himself extra thinking time.

‘We cannot go on with this unless I have an assurance from you,’ he persisted.

‘What I’ve told you is the absolute truth, Sean. My brief is to locate Tina Marlowe, whoever the hell she is today and
wherever
the hell she is. Nothing else. No hidden agenda. I couldn’t care a rat’s arse about Intelligence cock-ups.’

Instantly, I knew I’d drilled into a raw nerve.

‘Then give me a guarantee you’ll never repeat what I’m about to tell you. If I don’t have that undertaking we’re at an
insuperable
impasse.’

‘You have my word. Satisfied?’

He stopped, took a few steps to the edge of the lake, finished
his drink and placed the plastic container on the ground, between his feet, before taking from a jacket-pocket a small cellophane bag, filled with breadcrumbs. In silence, he began sprinkling the crumbs into the murky water. Swans, as elegant as tall ships, glided gracefully towards us, leaving brown ducks, equivalent to bovine, chugging tugs, bobbing in their wake. I knew that it would be counter-productive to rush Sean, so I stood quietly beside him, waiting until he was ready to open up.

‘You said something about a cock-up,’ he said, eventually.

‘I was only speculating,’ I said, truthfully. ‘Educated
guesswork
.’

He aimed another handful of crumbs over the flotilla of swans to the straggling ducks.

‘Well, you were spot on. About a year after Sergi Cornikov was set up in Milton Keynes, one of our officers happened to be dining in the restaurant of a West End hotel.’

‘And he ran into Sergi?’ I speculated.

‘Wrong. He saw Tina. She was dining with someone he recognized immediately. A government minister.’

‘Who?’ I said, perhaps a shade too eagerly, my interest overtly salacious.

‘On a need-to-know rule of thumb you don’t need to know,’ he said, peremptorily.

‘Spoil sport!’ I said, hoping to lighten him up, failing, of course. ‘Did Tina recognize the Intelligence officer?’

‘No, she’d never met him. He’d been involved only behind the scenes in her case. Our man wasn’t working. He was with his wife. It was their wedding anniversary, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the politician and his dinner-date.’

‘That must have gone down like salmonella with his wife.’

Still no smile.

‘They were very animated together. Both very tactile. They knocked back two bottles of wine. Large brandies with coffee. In
his report, the off-duty officer described Tina as looking like a “princess”.’

‘Not like a tart?’

‘Top whores are as clever at concealment as top-flight Intelligence officers.’

‘And there speaks a man who’s in the know!’

A wisp of a self-congratulatory smile flickered
momentarily
, like a candle in the wind. This was a mountain-climb for me.

‘Was any of their conversation overheard?’ I added, genially.

‘Apparently not. The officer upset his wife by insisting they stay in the restaurant until Tina and her escort shifted.’

‘Then they followed, like a Mr and Mrs Clouseau?’ I said, immediately regretting my flippancy.

Sean grimaced. ‘Tina and the minister didn’t leave the hotel. Instead, they headed for the lifts.’

‘So she was back to her old
tricks
,’ I said, the double entendre wasted on Sean.

‘Our conscientious off-duty man made a call.’

‘To base?’

‘That’s one way of putting it. His rank entitled him to pull someone out of bed.’

‘Not Tina or the errant minister, though,’ I said, once more misusing my mouth.

‘Our man at the hotel waited to be relieved.’

A very rude retort popped into my head, but I managed to keep that one suppressed. I’d already gambled enough with my irreverence.

‘Not the best of ways to round off a wedding anniversary evening,’ I observed, visualizing the scene: stiff upper-lipped spook in dinner-suit, wife in evening gown, the pair skulking behind a mock-marble column in the atrium, under glittering chandeliers. Very spoof James Bond.

‘His wife lost her rag and left him to it.’

‘Bravo!’ I said. ‘Women’s lib rattled yet another musty male cage.’

Sean still wasn’t amused. ‘Do you want this story or don’t you?’ he said, petulantly.

‘Sorry,’ I apologized.

‘Yes, well, a surveillance op was mounted.’

‘On Tina or the minister?’

‘Both.’

‘So two were pulled out of their sacks?’

‘Male and female. The man was assigned to Tina, who exited the hotel at around 4 a.m., taking a cab to an address in Church Street, Kensington.’

‘Classy neighbourhood. What about the politician?’

‘He left the hotel about half an hour later.’

‘Obviously had trouble getting his socks back on.’

Sean’s groan was all in his eyes and expression. ‘He went by taxi to his flat in Westminster.’

‘Which wasn’t his family home?’

‘His main home was in his constituency.’

‘And where was that?’

‘How naïve do you think I am? Identifying his constituency would be tantamount to naming him.’

‘Not even a good try, was it?’ I ridiculed myself.

‘Agreed. However, let’s stick with Tina because that’s your brief, right?’

‘Right.’

‘She was renting in Church Street.’

‘Expensive.’

‘Yes, very, even for a basement flat.’

‘What about her Brighton pad?’

‘She’d given that up within a few weeks of being housed there; her job, too. Inquiries were made discreetly in Brighton.’

‘Some gratitude for all the state’s generosity!’

‘It gets better.’

‘Don’t you mean
worse
?’ I said.

‘The more intriguing it becomes, the
better
it is for us. On the afternoon following her tryst with the minister, Tina went to another hotel in the West End for a rendezvous of some
significance
. Can you guess with whom?’

Frivolity again led me astray. ‘The US president? Mickey Mouse? The Pope?’

‘Have you always been such a pain?’

‘Ever since I was born. Nothing more painful than childbirth. Ask any mother.’

He sighed exasperatingly. ‘Waiting for Tina at the hotel was our dear old friend Sergi.’

‘A husband-and-wife reunion,’ I said, trying to remain inscrutable, though with mentally raised eyebrows.

‘While talking in the lounge, they also had afternoon tea.’

‘Very British,’ I said. ‘A real salad-days scenario. How long were they together?’

‘More than an hour. Then they stood, shook hands again, and she departed. He hung about for five minutes or so before also leaving.’

‘Where to?’

‘We had only one man at the hotel. He followed Tina to her Kensington flat. The whole case had to be reopened and reassessed. At a case conference, it was decreed that there should be round-the-clock surveillance on Tina
and
Sergi, and that the government minister should be watched as much as possible, though that wouldn’t be so easy.’

‘Was the surveillance to incorporate electronic
eavesdropping
?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I’m asking.’

‘There was bugging, yes. Don’t forget our deal on this; nothing goes beyond this moment.’

‘Everything you’re telling me is ring-fenced. It stays here.’

Poor old Sean was still as cautious as a tightrope-walker without a safety net. ‘It was essential we bottomed out as quickly as possible what was going on. Three days after Tina’s tea-time meeting with Sergi, she took a call from a man who introduced himself as a friend of a government minister, whom he named. He said that she came highly recommended and wondered whether she would dine with him.’

‘And she said?’

‘She’d be delighted to, but obviously needed to know who he was.’

‘And who
was
he?’

‘Again I’m not divulging.’

‘OK, but did
he
tell
her
?’

‘He said to call him John and hoped she’d be content with that, for the time being.’

‘Did your people identify the caller from his voice?’

‘Oh, yes, there was no doubt about that. There’s much more, though, to this than you might be imagining. They arranged a date for that evening in the Ritz. She asked him if she should go “prepared for a late night”.’

‘I just love those euphemisms,’ I said. ‘Top-drawer whores have a way of sanitizing everything. They’re alchemists, trying to gold-plate everything about their tatty lives. What was his answer?’

‘He said that, in his job, he was accustomed to all-night sessions, to which she replied, “I understand. I’ll come prepared. Are there any special requirements?”’

‘And were there?’

‘He said that anything of that nature could be negotiated over dinner, rather than on the phone.’

‘Rather late for circumspection,’ I commented.

‘Even more significant is what followed. As soon as that call was over, Tina phoned Sergi, giving him chapter and verse, seeking instructions.’

‘So Sergi was handling her?’

‘Totally.’

‘For blackmail?’

‘Not conventional blackmail. It became transparent that Sergi had never really been serious about wanting to defect. In essence, he was still working for the Soviets. Their protests about his marrying an English girl and settling in the UK were pure theatre. He was acting under orders, a puppet of the KGB.’ This didn’t take much computing and I was instantly ready with my next volley of questions.

‘Was he still slumming it in Milton Keynes?’

‘Very much so.’

‘And his place and phone were bugged?’

Sean simply nodded, almost indiscernibly. ‘Soon after Tina had agreed to the dinner-date at the Ritz, she called Sergi, outlining her itinerary – and, importantly, asking him for suggestions re the way she should play it. She’d become a
sister
, that much was indisputable.’

Again he fell back on the international jargon of spooks: a
sister
was a female agent whose job was to seduce and sleep with
targets
.

‘What directions did he give?’

‘He said not to press him on anything, that she should allow him to make all the running and allow the conversation to take its natural course. He knew the minister would immediately become suspicious and guarded if a whore began asking
questions
about, say, nuclear physics.’

‘Just a little bit!’ I laughed. ‘Even if the whore had been to Oxbridge.’

‘Sergi’s guidance to her was instructive for us. He said, “Just compromise him; that’s all we need. Do that and we have him on a leash for life.” He told her to do anything possible to entice him to her flat. Not to fuck at the hotel, which wouldn’t have been wired.’

‘Did she succeed?’

‘Without much effort. Around midnight, after several bottles of wine, including champagne, enticement was unnecessary and hidden cameras captured them fucking. Tina’s flat had been secretly entered and searched at some stage. No damage caused. Everything left as found. She’d never have realized there had been a forced entry. The peeping-tom cameras were located; state-of-the-art gear; professional equipment. Unless Tina was an electronics wizard, she’d never have been able to install such sophisticated hardware. Neither could she have operated it by herself.’

‘What happened to the compromising pics?’

‘The first part of my answer is conjecture: they were probably filed away in the Soviet Embassy, with the idea of using them for political – not financial – blackmail. The prime minister was tipped off. Two politicians were confronted and demoted. Returned to the backbenches.’