The Spy Game (2 page)

T
wo days earlier, the previous Saturday, 7 January 1961, twenty minutes past three in the afternoon. T Two people come through
a ticket barrier at Waterloo Station. The man who is watching notes them soon as they get out of the train, though there is
nothing particular about this pair to set them apart from other men and women on platform fourteen. Perhaps he, like the eight
others on the train itself and in the street who have been set to watch them on this and past days, recognises them from photographs.
Perhaps he has observed the same couple before. Of course he has been trained how to look: to identify what distinguishes
an individual's appearance, to register hair colour, eyes, build, pattern of movement, to estimate height and weight and put
together a precise and communicable description. To anyone else what is most apparent about this couple is their ordinariness,
the ordinariness of so many of the passengers beneath the platform lamps and the late daylight that seeps through the dirty
glass roof of the station, drab men and women with winter overcoats and brown hats and tired London faces.

There are other papers besides
The Times.
I have ordered the
Guardian,
the
Telegraph
and the
Daily Mail
for the same dates.
The Times
is available digitally; the others only on microfiche. The film comes on old-fashioned spools, a bore to load and to crank
through, and then to position and focus. Here and there one of the papers has a picture, small by today's standards, poorly
rendered on paper and worse on the screen: a man or woman, just a face, the subjects grouped in some old snapshot, an item
of evidence, the scene of the arrest. Enlarge the image and it disintegrates into no more than a series of formations, concentrations,
of grey dots. The library where I work is stuffy, windowless. A dozen strangers breathe the same air in dim booths, yawn above
the soporific tap of keyboards.

The watchers, the watched, the passers-by.

One form merging into the next, heads passing, shoulder brushing against shoulder, gloved hands holding bags, hands in pockets,
dark shoes treading an intricate and abstract intersecting pattern across the station floor. Nothing to indicate who is who;
no sign of the veiled concentration in the eyes of MI5 agents, the alertness that must surely run like an adrenaline current
behind the bland faces of the spies, the anxieties, hopes, intentions of any of the travellers around.

Where the crowd funnels at the exit on to the Waterloo Road, the watchers hasten suddenly, looking about them, keeping track
in the confusion, to relax only as the couple separate from the rest and become a distinct pair walking south. And the watchers
slow again, hands back in pockets, sauntering now some way behind, unseen by their subjects, never seen but only watching
as the police cars swerve in.

'The hunt
is
over. Scotland Yard for you!' says Superintendent 'Moonraker' Smith, spycatcher extraordinay
.

Did a policeman ever really speak like that?

The newspapers bring back that time not only by their meaning but by their style: the clichds of the popular press, the restraint
of the broadsheets. In this I hear the talk of my father and those around him, the generation who grew up in the war and composed
themselves so carefully after-wards and put it behind them; who established about them what they saw as the civilised rhythm
of post-war life, which was perhaps a shadow of life before: a drink at six, dressing for dinner (being who they were, being
the class that they were, reassuring themselves of its changelessness even then on the cusp of change), the Nine O'clock News,
Sunday lunch. The newspaper advertisements represent the time as effectively as the stories. There are advertisements for
Manikin Cigars, Mappin & Webb, Land Rover, 'Good old Johnnie Walker', illustrated with line drawings and photographs that
appear now to have a parochial naivety; advertisements for British things conjuring a peculiarly British reality: familiar,
named, secure, where everything and everyone, child and adult, had their place, and what did not fit was not acknowledged
to exist.

The booth next to mine was empty when I came. I chose this position because of that, and because it was at the end of the
line. It has been so long since I have done research like this, not since I was a student. Easier not to be observed fumbling
with the spools; nice anyway to have space about me. Now a young Indian woman in jeans and a turquoise tunic has taken the
spot, placed file and notebook on the desk and is taking out the first of a small stack of films. She looks as awkward at
it as I was earlier, reading the instructions taped to the side of the booth, threading, unthreading, setting the whole clanking
thing into motion and winding the first film back so far that it winds right off the spool.

'Do you know how to work these things?' An apologetic whisper.

'Only just.'

Her voice is that of an educated Indian from India; she looks earnest, with heavy brows and dark-rimmed spectacles, bangles
on her arm. A Ph.D. student perhaps, not so young as all that - as one gets older, other women begin to seem younger than
they are - or a lecturer even, someone with a proper reason to be here.

There is nothing for it but to get up and try to help, ineffectually, until a librarian comes and saves us. Then I can return
and begin a systematic working through of all the sources: the referenced dates of arrest, trial and sentencing; details of
identities, contacts, methods. Just in case there is something there.

I had expected there to be acanteen, somewhere to eat, at least a pleasant cafi near by. Whenever I come to London these days
I notice how many nice cafis there are, people eating out everywhere, sitting out even in April eating Mediterranean food;
so much more happening than in the few years I lived here in the Seventies. But this place where the library is can hardly
be called London; it is only some shabby northern suburb, whose name one knows from the tube map, out almost to Edgware on
the Northern Line. The institutional red brick of the building seems misplaced on the poor terraced street, no shops in sight
but a dingy newsagent and a greasy cafi of a kind I have not visited in thirty years, not since the days when I was a student
myself. I order what I might have ordered then: strong tea and a bacon sandwich, on bread, not toast, white factory bread
with the grease soaking into it. At least today I am hungry enough for that.

The cafi is busy. It must really be the only one around. The Indian woman is sitting alone and I take a seat at the same table.

She has nothing but a cup of tea.

'I did not know,' she says, 'what I should be eating here.'

She does not know what an outsider I am here, how rarely I come to London, that I scarcely ever meet people like herself.
Will she be Muslim, Hindu, vegetarian? No bacon, anyway. I recommend egg and chips.

'I have a research grant,' the Indian woman says, looking out of the window, where a bus passes in the rain. 'Six weeks in
London. I have never been to London before.'

'Ah. Well, you must see some other places besides this.'

'I shall, if my work allows.'

'Definitely you must take some time to look around.'

'And how long will you be working here?'

'I don't know,' I say, though I do in fact. I have three days here in London and then I shall fly to Berlin. 'I'm here in
London for a bit, and then I'm going to Germany and Poland, well, not quite Poland actually but Russia.'

'It sounds very interesting.'

'Oh, it isn't really. It isn't my job or anything. I'm wasting my time really. It's just that now I have time to waste. My
daughter's grown up, she's off my hands now, and my husband said I might as well do it. It's nothing important, you see, just
a family matter. Just something I thought I might find out about, now that I have the time.'

It was to come out in court that the couple under surveillance had reached Waterloo by an unnecessarily devious route. There
was no suggestion as to whether this was the result of whim or accident, or whether it was a deliberate but amateurish attempt
to shake off anyone who might be tailing them.

They had come on the train from Salisbury, though they might have chosen to take one direct from Weymouth, having driven first
as far as Salisbury and then left their car there - because of the icy roads, they were to say, but then the train itself
had to be re-routed around Basingstoke, where previous heavy rain had washed away the line. If they had intended to do much
shopping up in London, they no longer had the time. They must limit the trip to a threepenny bus ride to the market in East
Street, Walworth, and be back by four-thirty for the meeting they had arranged.

Their names were Harry Houghton and Ethel Eliza-beth Gee, though Ethel was generally known as Bunty, the newspapers recorded.
Both were employees at the Portland Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment, Bunty a clerical assistant of the lowest grade
in the drawing-office records section, Harry a clerical officer in the innocuous-sounding Port Auxiliary Repair Unit, where
he had access to Admiralty fleet orders and charts and particulars of ships. The two of them occasionally made these trips
up to London, and once or twice they had stayed a night. (One of the newspapers refers to Bunty as a 'friendly spinster',
which seems a coy way of saying that she slept with Harry and that at the hotel they visited she slipped a ring on her finger
and pretended to be his wife.)

On this occasion it appeared that they were not planning to stay. Perhaps Bunty had to be home for the three old people she
cared for: her eighty-year-old mother, her bedridden Aunt Bessie, her Uncle John (or Jack as some of the newspapers had it).
Possibly Harry had some other intention. Surveillance on a previous trip he had made to meet his contact in London alone had
picked up a comment about a girl from South Africa. The implication that he had been two-timing Bunty was the sort of thing
people would have expected of spies, even if he was fifty-five and balding and had been living until recently in a caravan.

On returning to Waterloo Road Harry and Bunty crossed to the corner by the Old Vic. There a man walked swiftly to them and
they shook hands. Gordon Lonsdale, as he called himself (real name K. T. Molody) was dark and stocky, with a style and spark
to him that the others lacked. His manners too had charm, for he turned to Bunty and offered instantly to take the shopping
basket that she was carrying. A normal thing, she said she thought it was, for a gentleman to do.

I know the place. I have been to the Old Vic a few times, when I lived in London and once or twice since. I know the street.
It is a bleak street even now, the pavement running between the long blank wall of the theatre and the grimy breadth of Waterloo
Road, the sound of traffic and the fumes holding there between the road and the high wall. It would have been even bleaker
then, with the street line on the other side broken still by bomb and building sites. The only bright things to be seen would
have been the posters on the theatre walls, advertising the current production. (According to the theatre notices, an unseasonal
A
Midsummer Night's Dream, the saturday matinie playing within the plush warmth of the theatre as the spies walked by in the
cold.)

It must have been Lonsdale who chose that particular street, since he was the professional. He chose it for its anonymity
perhaps, or for the fact that it was wide and straight and open, without corners or doorways or crossings to produce surprises.

He had used it as a rendezvous at least three times before; twice meeting Harry and Bunty together, and once meeting Harry
alone. Once he had been observed meeting Harry elsewhere. On all these occasions they had been watched, shadowed, their conversations
overheard by discreet couples, idlers, newspaper sellers, some with micro-phones and tape recorders in coat pockets. For four
years now he or his colleagues or masters had summoned Harry by prearranged signals. The signals are of a type that make one
laugh, nowadays, so quaint and clichid they seem. In real life, this happened: a spy summoned by a Hoover brochure coming
in the post, or an advertising card (folded in half) for the Scotch House in Knightsbridge, to meetings in the London area,
in suburban pubs such as the Maypole in Ditton Road or the Toby Jug in Tolworth, where he must carry a copy of Punch, or hold
a newspaper in one hand or a glove in the other so that his contact could identify him.

It was almost dark by now, on a January day which had never quite become light, the damp surface of the road beginning to
shine before the cars. They walked fast because it was cold, and also perhaps because they were tense and they wanted this
over and done with, this meeting which was the greatest moment of danger for them all. Bunty walked between the two men, Lonsdale
closest to the wall on the pavement side carrying her basket. Did they speak? Of what? Of the next meeting, of the delays
of the journey, the rotten weather that made travelling such a nuisance, raising their voices as two lorries passed, a bus,
making it hard to hear?

And then cars pulled up and men were coming at them shouting.

'The next thing I knew we were absolutely swooped on,' Bunty says from the witness box. 'At that time, I could not imagine
what it was. I thought they were Teddy boys. Mr [Superintendent] Smith stood out. I could not imagine how one gentleman came
to be mixed up with a lot of Teddy boys. There was so much noise I could not hear a word. I did not know who they were.'

At the time all she said was, 'Oh.'

Harry said, 'What?'

Lonsdale said not a word.

In her shopping basket were found four Admiralty test pamphlets, each of many foolscap pages; undeveloped film containing
photographs of two hundred and thirty pages of Particulars of War Vessels, including specifications of HMS Dreadnought, Britain's
first nuclear submarine; a package from the newsagent's and a tin of tongue.