The Russia House (32 page)

We couldn’t tell him we had been admiring photographs of her for the last week, so we took his word for it.

At eleven, complaining of the time difference, Barley flopped. We stood in the hall watching him haul himself upstairs to bed.

‘Anyway it was good stuff, was it?’ he asked as he clung to the banister and grinned down at us through his little round spectacles. ‘The new notebook he gave us. You’ve looked at it?’

‘The boffins are burning the midnight oil over it at this moment,’ Ned replied. He could hardly say they were fighting over it like cats and dogs.

‘Experts are addicts,’ Barley said, with another grin.

But he remained on the half-landing swaying, while he seemed to search for an appropriate exit line.

‘Somebody ought to do a bit of work on those body microphones, Nedsky. Bloody saddle-sores all over my back. The next bloke you send had better have a thicker hide. Where’s Uncle Bob, by the by?’

‘He sends love,’ said Ned. ‘Business is brisk at the moment. He hopes to catch up with you soon.’

‘Is he out hunting with Walt?’

‘If I knew I wouldn’t tell you,’ said Ned, and we all laughed.

That night, I remember, I received a particularly irrelevant phone call from Margaret, my wife, about a parking ticket she had picked up in Basingstoke – in her view, unfairly.

‘It was
my
space, I had put my indicator out when this bloody little man in a brand-new Jaguar, a white one, with slicked black hair –’

Unwisely I laughed, and suggested to her that Jaguars with slicked black hair had no special dispensation at parking meters. Humour was never Margaret’s strong point.

The next morning, the Sunday, Clive again required my attendance, first to pump me about the previous night, then to hear me ‘talk turkey’ with Johnny on such esoteric matters as whether Barley could legally be styled an employee of our Service and, if so, whether by taking our shilling he had renounced certain rights – his right to legal representation in the event of a dispute with us, for instance. I was Delphic, which annoyed them, but basically I said the answer was ‘yes’. Yes, he had renounced those rights. Or more exactly, yes, we could gull him into thinking he had, whether he had in law or not.

Johnny, if I have not mentioned it already, had graduated from Harvard Law School, so for once it was not necessary for Langley to send us a chorus of legal advisers.

In the afternoon, Barley being restless and the day sunny, we drove to Maidenhead and walked the towpath beside the Thames. By the time we returned, I suppose you could say Barley had been debriefed: for what with no questions coming down to us from our analysts, and his operational encounters already covered by technical means, there was really very little left to debrief him about.

Was Barley affected by our worries? We were as jolly as we could be, but I couldn’t help wondering whether the atmosphere of menacing stagnation was getting through to him. Or perhaps his feelings were such a maelstrom of confusion and anticlimax that he merely lumped us in with them.

On the Sunday night we ate supper together in Knightsbridge and Barley was so mild-mannered and reposed that Ned decided – as I would have done – that it was safe to send him back to Hampstead.

His flat was in a Victorian block off East Heath Road and the static surveillance post was situated directly below it, manned by a bright young Service couple. The rightful tenants had been temporarily resettled elsewhere. Around eleven, the couple reported that Barley was in his flat alone but prowling. They could hear but not see him. Ned had drawn the line at video. He was doing a lot of talking to himself, they said, and when he opened his mail, curses and groans came over the monitors.

Ned was unbothered. He had read Barley’s mail already and knew it contained no horrors beyond the usual.

Around one a.m., Barley rang his daughter Anthea in Grantham.

‘What’s an ig?’

‘An Eskimo house without a loo. How was Moscow?’

‘What do you get if you cross the Atlantic with the
Titanic
?’

‘About halfway. How was Moscow?’

‘What do you get if you cross a sheep with a kangaroo?’

‘I asked you how Moscow was.’

‘A woolly jumper. How’s your boring husband?’

‘Asleep, trying to be. What became of the cream bun you took to Lisbon?’

‘Rained off.’

‘I thought she was permanent.’

‘She is. I’m not.’

Barley next telephoned two women, the first a former wife over whom he had retained visiting rights, the second not previously listed. Neither could oblige him at such short notice, not least because they were in bed with their men.

At one-forty the couple reported that Barley’s bedroom lights were out. Ned gratefully went to sleep, but I was already in my little flat and sleep was the last thing in my mind. Memories of Hannah were teeming through my head, mixed with images of Barley in the Knightsbridge house. I remembered his falsely casual way of talking about Katya and her children and I kept comparing it with my own repeated denials of my love for Hannah, back in the days when it endangered me.
Hannah looks a bit down in the mouth
, some innocent would remark every five minutes of my day.
Is that husband of hers leading her a dance or what
? And I’d smile.
I gather he likes to knock her around a bit
, I’d say, with exactly that same superior tone of detachment that I had heard in Barley, while the cancerous secret fires inside me ate away my heart.

Next morning Barley went to his office to resume work, but it was agreed that he would drop by the Knightsbridge house on his way home from work in case there were points to clear up. This was not quite the loose arrangement that it sounds, for Ned by now was locked in a serious shoot-out with the twelfth floor, and it was likely that by evening he would either have to give ground or face a full-scale battle with the mandarins.

But by then Barley had disappeared.

According to Brock’s watchers Barley left his office in Norfolk Street a little earlier than expected, at four-forty-three, carrying his saxophone in its case. Wicklow, who was in Abercrombie & Blair’s back office typing up an account of the Moscow trip, was unaware of his departure. But a pair of Brock’s boys in jeans followed Barley west down the Strand and, when he changed his mind, crossed with him into Soho where he went to earth in an afternoon watering-hole frequented by publishers and agents. He spent twenty minutes there, emerged still carrying his saxophone and looking perfectly steady. He hailed a cab, and one of the boys was close enough to hear him give the address of the safe house. The same boy bleeped Brock, who called Ned in Knightsbridge to say ‘Stand by, your guest is on his way.’ I was elsewhere, fighting other wars.

Thus far nobody was to blame, except that neither of the boys thought to take the cab’s number, an oversight that later cost them dear. It was rush hour. A trip between the Strand and Knightsbridge could take an age. It was not till seven-thirty that Ned gave up waiting and, worried but not yet alarmed, returned to the Russia House.

At nine when nobody had any sensible suggestions Ned reluctantly declared an in-house alert, which by definition excluded the Americans. As usual, Ned was operational cool. Perhaps subconsciously he had steeled himself for such a crisis, for Brock later commented that he slipped into a prepared routine. He did not inform Clive, but as he explained to me later, telling Clive in the present poisoned atmosphere was as good as sending a singing telegram to Langley.

Ned drove himself first to Bloomsbury where the Service listeners owned a run of cellars under Russell Square. He used a car from the pool and must have driven like the wind. The head duty listener was Mary, a compulsive eater of forty, rose-faced and spinsterish. Her only known loves were unattainable voices. Ned handed her a list of Barley’s contacts, compiled by the departed Walter from intercepts and watch reports. Could Mary cover them immediately? Like now?

Mary damn well could not. ‘Stretching regulations is one thing, Ned. A dozen illegal taps is completely another, can’t you even
see
?’

Ned might have argued that the extra numbers were covered by the existing Home Office warrant but he didn’t bother. He phoned me in Pimlico just as I was uncorking the bottle of burgundy with which I proposed to console myself after a dirty day. It’s a rather awful little flat and I had the window open to get out the smell of frying. I remember closing the window while we talked.

Phone warrants are in theory signed by the Home Secretary or in his absence by his Minister. But there is a trick to this, for he has provided the Legal Adviser with a delegated authority to be used only in emergency and accounted for in writing within twenty-four hours. I scribbled out my authority, signed it, turned off the gas – I was still boiling the Brussels sprouts – clambered into a cab and twenty minutes later handed the authority to Mary. Within the hour the telephones of Barley’s twelve contacts were covered.

What was I thinking as I did all this? Did I think Barley had done away with himself? No, I did not. His concerns were for the living. The last thing he wished to do was leave them to their fate.

But I considered the possibility that he had broken ranks, and I suppose my worst fantasy was of Barley loudly clapping as the Aeroflot pilot announced that his plane had re-entered Soviet airspace.

In the meantime, on Ned’s orders, Brock had persuaded the police to put out an emergency call for any metropolitan cab-driver who had picked up a tall man with a saxophone on the corner of Old Compton Street at five-thirty, destination Knightsbridge but probably changed en route. Yes, a tenor saxophone – a baritone sax was twice the size. By ten they had their man. The cab had started out for Knightsbridge but at Trafalgar Square Barley had indeed changed his mind and asked to be driven to Harley Street. The fare came to three pounds. Barley gave the driver a fiver and told him to keep the change.

By a small miracle of quick thinking, assisted by the late Walter’s records, Ned made the connection – Andrew George Macready, alias Andy, former jazz trumpeter and listed Barley contact, had been admitted to the Sisters of Mercy Hospice, Harley Street, three weeks ago, see scrawled letter intercept in pencil, Mrs. Macready to Hampstead, serial 47A, and Walter’s lapidary comment on the minute sheet:
Macready is Barley’s guru on mortality.

I still remember how I clung to the grab handle of Ned’s car with both hands. We arrived at the hospice to be told Macready was under sedation. Barley had sat with him for an hour and they had managed to exchange a few words. The night matron, who had just come on duty, had taken Barley a cup of tea, no milk or sugar. Barley had topped it up with whisky from a flask. He had offered the matron a dram but she declined. He asked her whether he might ‘play old Andy a couple of his favourite numbers’. He played softly for ten minutes exactly, which was what she had allowed him. Several of the nuns had gathered in the corridor to listen, and one of them recognised the tune as Basie’s ‘Blue and Sentimental’. He left his phone number and a cheque for a hundred pounds ‘for the croupier’ on a brass collection plate at the door. The matron had told him he could come back whenever he wanted.

‘You’re not police, are you?’ she asked me unhappily as we made for the door.

‘Good Lord, no. Whyever should we be?’

She shook her head and would not answer, but I thought I knew what she had seen in him. A man in flight, hiding from his own actions.

Using the car telephone as we sped back to the Russia House Ned ordered Brock to list all clubs, concert halls and pubs in the London area where jazz was being played tonight. He should distribute as many watchers as he could muster over these events.

For good measure I added the lawyer’s ten cents’ worth. In no circumstances was Brock or any watcher physically to restrain Barley or close with him. Whatever other rights Barley might have waived, he had not waived his right to defend himself and he was a powerful man.

We were settling for a long wait when Mary the head listener rang, this time all sweetness and oil. ‘Ned, I think you ought to get round here a tiny bit fastish. Some of your eggs have hatched.’

We tear back to Russell Square, Ned leaning the car against the curves at sixty miles an hour.

In her cellar lair Mary received us with the doting smile she reserved for moments of disaster. A favourite girl called Pepsi stood beside her, dressed in green overalls. A tape recorder turned on the desk.

‘Who the hell’s
that
at this hour?’ a stentorian voice demanded and I recognised immediately Barley’s formidable Aunt Pandora, the Sacred Cow whom I had entertained to lunch. Hiatus while coins were fed into the machine. Followed by Barley’s courteous voice.

‘I’m rather afraid I’ve had it, Pan. I’m kissing the firm goodbye.’

‘Don’t talk cock,’ Aunt Pandora retorted. ‘Some fool girl’s been getting at you again.’

‘I’m serious, Pan. This time it’s for real. I had to tell you.’

‘You’re
always
serious. That’s why you’re such a fraud pretending to be frivolous.’

‘I’m going to talk to Guy in the morning.’ Guy Solomons, family solicitor, listed Barley contact. ‘Wicklow, the new man, can take it over. He’s a tough little runt and he’s a fast learner.’

‘Did you trace the phone box?’ Ned asked Mary as Barley rang off.

‘No time,’ said Mary proudly.

From the tape we heard the renewed ring of a phone. Barley again. ‘Reggie? I’m having a blow tonight. Come and play.’

Mary handed us a piece of card on which she had written,
Canon Reginald Cowan, drummer and clerk in holy orders
.

‘Can’t,’ said Reggie. ‘Bloody Confirmation class.’

‘Ditch them,’ said Barley.

‘Can’t. Buggers are here with me now.’

‘We need you, Reggie. Old Andy’s dying.’

‘So are we all. All the bloody time.’

As the tape was ending, Brock came through on a live call from the Russia House asking for Ned urgently. His watchers had reported that Barley had looked in on his Soho drinking club an hour ago, drunk five whiskies then moved on to the Noah’s Arch at King’s Cross.