Dead Letter Drop

19

I drove a few miles out of Guildford, down the bypass, and turned off at a signpost marked Milford. It was a country road, just about two lanes, and every few hundred yards were sets of gateposts, ranging from the ordinary to the baronial, beyond which stretched rhododendron-lined gravel driveways up to hidden houses. There was thinning shrubbery on either side of the road, mostly brown or bare in its winter state, with the occasional splash of evergreens. I drove over a small hump-backed bridge and came to a parade of shops and a village green which was evidently the cricket pitch in summer.

I obtained directions from a newsagent and carried on. After a mile or so I found what I was looking for: Scatliffe’s house. It was the type of house any self-respecting stockbroker might have owned. Mock Tudor, built probably in the late twenties, set about 50 yards back from the road, and no shortage of gravel and evergreen shrubbery in front of it; it was by no means a magnificent dwelling but it was smart. There was a mud-spattered Mini Metro in the driveway, and I noticed the front door was ajar.

I drove on past, then turned around, pulled over well into the side of the road and switched off the engine. It looked to me as though Mrs Scatliffe was about to go off shopping, which suited me fine; whilst Scatliffe was now high up the scale he didn’t yet rate a police guard on his house, although the local constabulary would no doubt keep a closer watch on it than on most. From the information from Wotan I knew that there were no live-in staff and a char came only three days a week and this wasn’t one of her days. There was a part-time gardener but he only came afternoons.

I lit a cigarette and turned on the radio to see what was going on in the world. Radio Four was occupied by a passionate do-it-yourself Christmas-decorations maker; she was explaining how to make paper chains out of cornflake packets. Radio Three was into Brahms. Radio Two had Jimmy Saville holding his own with a heart-transplant surgeon. Radio One was analysing the chart potential of a record called ‘I did Dung’ by a new group called Filthy. The world was going on as normal.

I thought about Sumpy; she’d be back in New York by now. I thought about Christmas and wondered where I would be. I looked at the dust that had gathered in a hundred places inside the car — above the dashboard, on the steering column, over the dials — and wondered when I’d have the time to give her the spring-clean she needed.

The nose of the Metro appeared out of the drive and amid a cloud of steam and smoke from the choked engine on this cold morning the car turned out onto the road and drove off away from me.

I started up and followed, to make sure she wasn’t just going to the shops nearby. She drove down onto the bypass, then turned left towards Guildford. I turned back, drove on past her house out of sight of the drive, pulled over onto the verge, wrote a note stating ‘Broken down’, stuck it on the windscreen, raised the bonnet, and set off briskly for the house. I reckoned on a good hour before the local bobby would start showing any interest in the car. Parking a car in the countryside is always a problem; in a town, nobody takes any notice but to a dutiful bobby a parked car in the middle of nowhere is as suspicious as a man walking down a street in a black mask, carrying a bag labelled Swag.

Mrs Scatliffe couldn’t have been planning to be away long — she hadn’t even locked the front door. Just to be sure no one was in I rang the bell, with a spiel ready about a mix-up between the local water board and gas board, resulting in a gas leak in the water pipes, and fingered my identification card from the gas board in my pocket. But the spiel wasn’t required and I let myself in.

The house was decorated much as the exterior had hinted; it was comfortable, well carpeted and parqueted, and the furniture was mostly comfortable-looking conservative and reproduction antique. There was a strong bias towards the nautical in the paintings and prints, not surprisingly since Scatliffe had spent a good deal of his life in the navy, although mainly in Admiralty House rather than on ships.

I quickly checked all the rooms in the house to ensure there were no visitors anywhere that I ought to know about. The house was empty.

I settled into Scatliffe’s study and started a routine systematic search. The system I used was one Scatliffe himself had devised.

His desk revealed nothing, except that he appeared to support a considerable number of charities, including being a member, for some reason, of the Water Rats. He was a month overdue with his American Express bill, about which a computer had written him a caustic letter; he had just applied for a credit account at Harrods; and he was collecting estimates for a switch from oil-fired central heating to gas. I was amused to discover correspondence in which he had been attempting unsuccessfully to persuade Scotland Yard to intervene on his behalf in cancelling half a dozen parking tickets: an extremely rude letter to him from the Chief Commissioner accused him and his whole department of a cavalier attitude towards yellow lines, and a general wholesale contempt for the motoring laws of the country.

Relationships between the Yard and the Department were frequently less than amicable, with the Yard regarding us as a bunch of privileged thugs who went around doing whatever we wanted, leaving them to clear up the messes we left behind. In a way they had a point. They dealt with the enforcement of the written laws of the land, adhering as closely to the book as possible. Our work had little to do with these laws and we abided much of the time by nothing but the law of the jungle. The police could measure their results by numbers of convictions and annual increases or decreases in the crime rate. We never had yardsticks; there is little that is black or white in the murky world of espionage and counter-espionage: one is perpetually scrabbling and scratching around in an endless blanket of grey.

Never was this blanket more apparent than today, sitting in Scatliffe’s study, searching for God-knew-what — some little scrap of paper that would make my hunch a certainty — listening for the engine of Mrs Scatliffe’s Metro — a noise, which, if I missed, would result in my being drummed out of the Department by the seat of my pants, my short and curlies, and anything else remotely grabbable.

I found the safe. Scatliffe had made little effort to hide it; it was behind a leather-bound collection of John Buchan novels, and it opened within 30 seconds. There was nothing in it. Nothing. I stared inside, then felt the base plate. There was a little give and after a few moments of jiggling with my knife blade it came away, revealing a combination dial underneath; it was more than a little crafty. The dial was harder to crack and it was a full couple of minutes before the door swung up and I pulled out the contents: a sheath of documents and two small heavy boxes.

The documents were uninteresting, mostly share certificates, and the boxes contained Krugerrands; about £10,000 worth at today’s prices. I was disappointed and put everything back as I had found it.

I made a brief but reasonably thorough search of the rest of the house and turned up nothing of any interest. I could find no other hidden safe nor hidey-hole and, short of a search that would leave his house in a similar state to that in which I had found my own, there was little further I could do. I let myself out and walked back down the drive; just before I got to the gates I heard a car slowing down and within seconds of my disappearing into a particularly accommodating rhododendron bush, Mrs Scatliffe came sailing into the driveway.

I felt a lot happier when I was back in the Jaguar, cosseted by the smell of old leather and warm engine oil, with the throaty roar of the exhaust as I drove out past the far side of Guildford, past Basil Spence’s towering red-brick monstrosity of a cathedral, heading towards the M3 back to London.

I rarely enjoyed poking around other people’s houses and I enjoyed poking around Scatliffe’s least of any; there would have been a lot to answer for if I’d been caught. As I drove, I began to unwind, my heartbeat slowing down from cerebral haemorrhage level to its more normal coronary arrest level.

I was disappointed my trip down here hadn’t been fruitful, but I knew I would have been very lucky if Scatliffe had been careless enough to leave anything lying around. I thought about Charlie Harrison, now better known to me as Boris Karavenoff, and hoped he was doing his stuff. I hoped that Arthur Jephcott was as trustworthy as Fifeshire had assured me he was. I hoped I wasn’t making a terrible mistake; I was going to look more than a little foolish if I was wrong. I checked the mirror constantly for signs of a tail but the road behind me was clear.

Until Wetherby had surfaced, I had no idea who was after me; I’d figured it must be the Russians. But the appearance of Wetherby had changed all that, or so it seemed to me; it was my own side that were after me. I didn’t yet have any proof, but the facts tallied. Maybe Wetherby was a double agent. Maybe. Maybe he was working under instructions from the Pink Envelope. Maybe he was the Pink Envelope; but Karavenoff had said the Pink Envelope was in a very senior position in Whitehall — Wetherby had been transferred to Washington. My gut-feeling was that it was Scatliffe; but I had no evidence. None at all. But if not Scatliffe, then who?

I churned over all those I had met since joining MI5. I hadn’t met many people — it had been policy, ever since Philby, to discourage socialising and friendships within the Department. But Karavenoff said the Pink Envelope was powerful; I had certainly met all of those who were powerful: Fifeshire; William Carreras, head of MI6; Scatliffe; Euan Wagstaff, deputy head of MI6; Sir Maurice Unwin, head of MI6 Washington; Granville Hicks, his deputy; Sir John Hobart, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Major Sir Nyall Kerr, head of Combined Central Information, the organisation at Hyde Park, with Arthur Jephcott and the quiet boffin Norman Prest directly under him; Guy Cove-Eastden, head of the Armoury, with Leslie Piper, in charge of the dirty tricks department, and Charles Babinger. the ballistics expert, under him; John Terry, head of Public Relations, and his second-in-command, Duncan Moss; Recruiting was headed by Gordon Savory, with Harold Townly and Wetherby under him; Anthony Lines, the Home Secretary, to whom the whole of MI5 was ultimately responsible; and others too, any of whom could quite well qualify.

I had met many of them at a cricket match in which I had been invited to play. Invited, that is, in a manner not inconsistent with the manner in which I had been recruited into MI5. The British Secret Service is not a place where niceties, such as the option to refuse something, are a customary part of life; nor, in my limited experience, are they even an exception to the rule: they simply fail to exist.

It was in this sense of the word that the Home Secretary invited me to play in his team, in a curious match he was instigating that he hoped would become an annual event on the calendar: MI5 versus MI6. Two old enemies.

The invite greatly annoyed Scatliffe and not without reason, since I was far junior to everyone else who was going to be playing and I was an agent, and agents are meant, by policy, to be kept in the dark and not exposed to the gods that control them, except when it is vital, and in Scatliffe’s view the shortage on the Home Secretary’s team did not constitute something vital. But there was little he could do about it; it was a Friday afternoon during my year’s hard labour for him, and Scatliffe was discussing with me a report I had made, when Lines strode into his office.

There was little doubt in anyone’s mind in the whole country that Anthony Lines would be the next leader of the Conservative Party and that he would serve more than one term as Prime Minister. The media already took almost more notice of what he said and did than the Prime Minister, and he certainly shone through the media with a magnetic charisma. Serious but genial, incisive, tough, fair, ever on the ball, a brilliant fielder of awkward questions and a lethal bowler of challenges, a batsman who had had a long and striking innings, yet who gave the impression that his innings had only just begun; it wasn’t surprising he wanted to organise this match.

He held out his hand towards me. It was warm, small, exquisitely manicured, a delicate white as if it had been sprinkled with talc, and had a softness about it which suggested that if ever during its 50-odd years of life it had held a spade, it had been wearing a kid glove at the time. This hand for sure had never held any rougher instrument of manual labour than the microphone of a dictating machine.

Like so many people in public life, he was smaller than I had imagined, no more than 5 foot 8, and his face was less assured, more nervous than that which I had seen on television and in the papers. It was a good-looking but basically weak face, with a boyish cut of fair hair, and blue eyes that squinted slightly, with heavy bags underneath. ‘How do you do, Max!’ he had said on being introduced by Scatliffe, using the American technique of jumping straight to the first name, and smiling a benign smile that had the warmth of an outdoor lavatory in January.

‘Well, thank you, sir!’ I buttered him up with the ‘sir’ bit and it earned me several more seconds of benign smile.

‘Do you play cricket, Max?’

I hadn’t played cricket for ten years and wasn’t particularly good when I did. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

‘We’re having a little game this Sunday and I’m a man short in my team — perhaps you’d care to play?’

Scatliffe’s face turned apopleptic: his most-hated minion being invited to join the brass hats at play! ‘I don’t think it will be possible, Minister, for Flynn to play — I believe he’s on an assignment over the weekend, aren’t you, Flynn?’ He gave me a hard stare.

‘No, sir, I have a free weekend.’

‘Good.’ The Home Secretary handed me a photocopy of a map showing how to get to the cricket pitch near the village of Fulking in the Downs behind Brighton. ‘Lucky for me you’re here, Flynn — no chance of getting anyone else at this hour on a Friday.’

Scatliffe contained himself admirably, I thought.

So I turned up on a grey Sunday morning at the cricket pitch, to join 21 men who between them had the job of hunting out the subversives among Her Britannic Majesty’s 1060-odd million Commonwealth subjects, and monitoring the rest of the world’s attitudes and plans towards what remained of the British Empire.

As the umpire signalled the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Sir John Hobart’s third wide in succession, and Scatliffe wearily rubbed his hands in the slips as the rain drizzled forlornly down, I looked around this strange bunch of middle-aged men in their white flannels and college jumpers, among whom my destiny lay, little realising that one day not long after, one of them, with the bizarre code name of the Pink Envelope, would be playing a game with me considerably less amusing even than this.

Success or failure for me would depend on how deeply the Envelope had buried his tracks; I had one advantage, which was that with luck none of them except for Fifeshire and Jephcott knew I was here, but I didn’t think that advantage would last very long.

I wondered about Wetherby; whether he was alive on the ocean waves and cursing blindly, or drowned by now, or on dry land, pacing the streets in search of me with a meat cleaver in his hand.

I was going to have to prove my case pretty damn quickly, because if time caught up on me and I didn’t have the answers, I was going to have one great deal of explaining to do and I wasn’t going to know where to begin. My having gone absent without leave from Intercontinental was, according to the rule book, a very serious no-no. I should have gone straight to Hagget, who was my chief there, and told him the facts, then waited for his instructions. There was a simple reason why I hadn’t; it was a sincere belief that if I had, I would be dead by now. I knew that I had stumbled into a deadly game of hide and seek, and it was too late to try and stumble out.

I just managed to avoid solving everyone’s problems, by halting two inches from the tail-overhang of an articulated lorry that didn’t go in for brake lights. For the next couple of miles I actually concentrated on driving, before once again lapsing into my normal pattern of deep thought punctuated by occasional glances through the windscreen.

I found Wetherby’s flat in a tatty building off Pembroke Square in Earl’s Court. There wasn’t even an entry-phone in the porch. I pushed the door and entered the building; it smelt, like many of London’s conversion buildings, of boiled cabbage.

Wetherby’s door was at the top of four steep flights, and there was no answer to my knocking; I hadn’t figured what I was going to say if he himself answered it but the problem didn’t arise. For an apparently insignificant flat it was remarkably well protected by locks; the custodians of the Bank of England would have eaten their hearts out if they could have seen the equipment he had securing that door to its frame. The door had enough ironmongery in it to keep a relay of safe-crackers busy for several weeks. It could have been used as the practical examination for the finals of a locksmith’s apprenticeship course. Without the right crate of keys nothing short of gelignite was going to open that door. Wetherby had made damn sure that entry through this door was going to be on a strictly invitation-only basis. As I didn’t happen to have an invitation I was going to have to find another entrance.

Wetherby’s next-door neighbour’s door was easier; it opened in about five seconds with my trusty AmEx card through the frame, tripping the latch. I let myself in and I found myself in a dim room which stank of joss sticks and burning hash, and was occupied by a hairy object, vaguely human, squatting on a threadbare carpet and jerking his head to the sound of a sitar coming from a portable cassette with nearly flat batteries. ‘Hey, man,’ it said, ‘you might have knocked.’

I stood dumbfounded for a second. It hadn’t actually occurred to me that this flat might be occupied. ‘The door was open,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ it said. It had almost lost interest in me.

‘I’ve locked myself out — I live next door — mind if I use your window?’

‘Use it, man, use it all.’ It lapsed into a trance. Or maybe it was deep thought.

I lifted the window and leaned out. The next window, the start of Wetherby’s flat, was less than an arm’s length away. I wrapped my handkerchief around my wrist, leaned out and punched hard at the glass. It was double-glazed and exploded with a fiendishly loud bang, followed by a seemingly interminable series of smashings as chunks of glass fell down to the concrete basement. I ducked back smartly into the hairy’s room and waited some moments before daring to look out, but the noise didn’t seem to have attracted any attention.

I leaned right out and over, unscrewed the catch, and swung the window wide open. A few more chunks of glass fell out. I crawled out onto the ledge and heaved myself into Wetherby’s abode.

It was a dreary place, sparsely furnished with objects that were old without being of interest. Curtains and upholstery were in nasty cheap fabrics, in faded dull colours; lampshades were yellowing. There was an old record-player, an electric kettle sat on the drawing room floor beside the sofa, and on the far side of the room sat an old black-and-white television set that looked like it had been stolen from a 2-star hotel. And yet there were some objects of outstanding beauty among it all: there were a couple of fine oil paintings of ancestors on the walls, another oil depicted a Crimean war scene; a superb George III chiffonier stood against one wall, with a couple of fine Chinese vases on it. But mostly the flat looked the sort of place where secondhand furniture shops acquire their most miserable specimens.

It was clearly a bachelor flat, with bed unmade and the appearance of having been unmade for several weeks judging from the dust on the pillow, filthy crockery including a half-full cup of tea with mould growing out of it, socks and shoes and vests and dirty shirts piled around a bedroom chair. I worked my way carefully and thoroughly around. There was a small room that was his study; it had the only other decent piece of furniture in the flat — an Edwardian roll-top desk, but the appearance was spoilt by a complete absence of polish, and a nasty yellow anglepoise lamp plonked on the top.

I went through all his papers even opening his latest mail for him; judging from the postmarks it had been six weeks since he was last there. I pocketed the mail rather than leave it for him to discover opened, but it wasn’t of much interest. There was an offer from a mail-order bakery in Texas, wondering if he could survive Christmas without having cakes from their world-famous bakeries delivered to all his friends. A note from the Brompton library to say that These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer would be held for him for 14 days, and an application for tickets to the Founder’s Day dinner at Charterhouse were among the more exciting contents of the envelopes.

My visit looked as though it were going to turn out to be no more inspiring than my one to Scatliffe’s house, when the thought struck me that the kitchen looked a great deal smaller than it should have been for a flat of this size. I looked around it carefully but for some minutes I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Then I realised; from its position in the flat it should have run the entire length of the dining room. But it didn’t. It stopped, and yet the dining room didn’t extend into the area where it stopped. There was an area of about 20 square feet completely missing.

I opened the kitchen cupboards that backed onto it and removed a stack of Heinz beans; then I put my hands through and felt the back wall. What my hands touched gave me a shock: instead of plaster, it was wood. I slid my hands round further and found a bolt, which slid easily; suddenly the entire cabinet came free. I pulled it out, revealing a door. I went in through the door into a pitch-dark room. I lit my lighter and found a light switch, which I pushed; the room came to life in a dim orange glow. Looking around it gave me for the first time in the last few days more than just a little reassurance that I might after all not be completely and utterly mad: it was a very comprehensive photographic darkroom. In striking contrast to the rest of the flat this room was spotlessly clean and the equipment was up to date.

I searched every inch of the darkroom and went back out and searched every inch of the flat but nothing further of any interest yielded itself to me. I wished I could have found just one shred of evidence to put one more tiny piece of the puzzle into place. Whilst having a secret darkroom is distinctly odd there is nothing necessarily underhand about it; I knew damn well that it wasn’t for processing snaps of Welsh valleys but I couldn’t be sure exactly what it was for. If it was Wetherby’s quirk to pass his leisure hours munching peanuts in a hidden darkroom, then he was fully entitled to, all the days of his life. He certainly swept up the shells all right.