Madrigal for Charlie Muffin

2

The office of the intelligence director was on the Waterloo side of the Thames. Sir Alistair Wilson asked the driver for the cross-over route through Parliament Square; purposely early for the meeting with the Permanent Under Secretary responsible for liaison between the department and the government, he’d heard the displays were particularly good this year and he wanted to see for himself.

The rose beds in St James’s Park were by the lake, bursts of Ophelia and Pascali and Rose Gaujard. He leaned forward, studying with an expert’s eye the colour lustre and feeling the texture of the leaves. Growing roses was Wilson’s hobby and he liked to see a naturalness about their arrangement, not this patterned rigidity, as if they were sections of some jigsaw puzzle. But over-arranged or not, the blooms were better than his. It had to be the soil in Hampshire, full of chalk. When he got the chance, he’d talk to the gardener about increasing the compost to balance. Wilson smiled at the thought; he was going to do so much, when he got the chance.

Distantly, somewhere in the direction of the Mall, a clock bell chimed and he set off towards Whitehall. For a man who until five years before had commanded a Gurkha regiment and been seconded to intelligence with a reputation for efficient discipline, Wilson’s appearance was a personal contradiction. Careless of the obvious amusement it caused within his working circle, he wore a deerstalker, because it had flaps he could bring down over his ears in the winter and after so much time in India he suffered from the cold. The suit was good but neglected, thick tweed – again for the cold – but the trousers were absolutely without crease: although there were lots of the wrong sort, crimped tiredly behind the knees and elbows. The overcoat, of forgotten fashion, was too long and over-padded at the shoulders and cuffs, and again at the elbows the wear was obvious; in another six months, it would be threadbare.

He was bonily thin and the face was hawkish, big-nosed, with sharp, attentive eyes. Greying hair escaped from beneath the hat, like a plume, heightening the bird-like appearance. He moved awkwardly, limping where the left knee refused to bend. Wilson had come unscathed through Europe, Korea and Aden but almost lost his leg when a polo pony fell and rolled on him in Calcutta. For years it had irritated him, because of the physical hindrance, but now he was only aware of it in the coldest weather, when the ache settled deep in his calf.

After the confetti of memoranda and demands for speed, Sir Alistair knew that the location of the leak, coupled with the timing, would increase rather than diminish the pressure. It was like sailing out of the fog and seeing the rocks only yards away.

Sir Berkeley Naire-Hamilton hurried fussily across the office to meet him, hand outstretched. ‘Good to see you, my dear fellow. Good to see you.’

‘And you,’ said Wilson.

‘I’ve tea. Earl Grey, I’m afraid. All right? You’ll take it with lemon, of course?’

The man bustled around a side table where the tea things were set, asking the questions automatically without any wish or expectation of a reply.

Wilson accepted his tea and, instead of returning to his ornate, over-powering desk, Naire-Hamilton seated himself opposite the director on a matching, wing-backed chair.

‘Delighted to hear there’s a breakthrough,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure you will be,’ warned Wilson.

‘What do you mean?’ demanded the permanent civil servant. Naire-Hamilton was a florid-faced, balding man, a rim of tightly clipped white hair hedged around his face. There was the hint of a minor stroke or some facial paralysis, which had caused the left-hand side to collapse slightly, making one eye more pronounced than the other. Naire-Hamilton had a tendency to the flamboyant, with broadly striped suits and pastel shirts with matching ties. It went with the vague foppishness of the office. It was traditional Whitehall, like bowlers and striped trousers with black jackets and vintage Dow with Stilton. The furniture was predominantly Georgian, bulbous-calved with a lot of leather, and there were ceiling-to-floor bookcases with volumes that couldn’t easily be removed because they’d remained unread for so long that the covers were stuck edge to edge. The walls were panelled and hung with portraits of bewigged chancellors and diplomats and there was a large and heavily decorated grandfather clock. It ticked with a constantly sticky, hesitating tick, demanding to be listened to in case it didn’t reach the next second. Wilson found the clock irritating. He wasn’t sure about Naire-Hamilton either.

‘Rome,’ announced Wilson.

‘You can’t be serious!’ Naire-Hamilton brought his hand up over his sagging eye, a habit of embarrassment.

‘I wish I weren’t.’

‘That’s… it’s…’ Naire-Hamilton’s hand moved from his eye, in a snatching gesture, as if he could pick the proper expression from the air.

‘…where the traitor is,’ said Wilson.

Naire-Hamilton carefully replaced his teacup on a wine table beside his chair and said, ‘Tell me why you’re so sure.’

‘Four months ago we started transmitting in monitored batches through normal Foreign Office channels an apparently genuine advisory document, recommending the manner of British response to Russian efforts to increase its influence throughout Africa.’

‘Why Africa?’

‘Because we had a lot of embassies to cover and the size of the continent gave us sufficient number of towns and cities.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The document was identical, but each message listed a different African city or town from which the intelligence prompting the cable was supposed to have come. And each receiving embassy was accorded an identifiable capital; the effect was to make each cable individual.’

‘Jolly good,’ said Naire-Hamilton. It sounded as if he were applauding the winning six during the annual Eton-Winchester cricket match.

‘Three days ago the document was relayed from Moscow to all the Warsaw Pact embassies. Our source checked back with Prague, for clarification, as we instructed. And got the reply that the message emanated from Cape Town.’

Naire-Hamilton frowned but, before the question came, Wilson said, ‘Cape Town was the code allocation we gave Rome. There can’t be any mistake.’

‘That couldn’t be worse.’

‘I thought it might be bad.’

The Permanent Under Secretary splayed his fingers, to tick off the points. ‘In three weeks’ time, Italy is hosting a Common Market Summit; every European president, prime minister, foreign minister and God knows how many other ministers will be there…’ The first finger came down. ‘Chief item on the agenda is an attack mounted by us against Italy, for using Market regulations to avoid their full budgetary contribution…’ He lowered the second finger. ‘We intend announcing our intention to lessen our financial commitment to NATO unless Italy gets into line…’ Down went the third finger. ‘This year Britain has the presidency of the Council…’ He threw up his hands in despair. ‘… and now we’re going to be shown up as the country to have right in the middle of everything a traitor leaking it all back to Moscow…’

‘I understand the difficulty,’ said the intelligence director. Naire-Hamilton seemed to have overlooked that there had been three assassinations; perhaps he didn’t have enough fingers.

‘Discretion,’ announced the civil servant.

‘What?’

‘It’s to be handled with discretion: absolute and utter discretion. No scandal whatsoever.’

‘We haven’t got him yet,’ said Wilson.

‘There can’t be any embarrassment,’ insisted Naire-Hamilton.

Conservative parties, Labour parties and even Social Democratic parties might fight elections and dream of power, but people like Naire-Hamilton regarded the changes like a bus driver allocated a temporary inspector: there might be occasional changes of route, but they were always in the driving seat.

Wilson straightened in his chair and the leather elbow patches squeaked against the seat. ‘Are you telling me you don’t want a trial?’

Naire-Hamilton sucked at his breath, noisily. ‘Just giving general guidance, my dear fellow. More tea perhaps?’

Wilson wished the other man wouldn’t keep calling him a dear fellow. He shook his head against the offer. ‘If there were an accident, you wouldn’t regret not being able formally to endorse the file closed?’

‘Admirably put,’ congratulated the other man. ‘And another thing…’

‘What?’

‘I think it would be best if you remained in personal charge. Confusions always arise if things as important as this get delegated.’

‘I hadn’t any intention of delegating anything,’ said Wilson.

‘Glad to hear it, dear fellow,’ said Naire-Hamilton. He raised his ever-moving hands against his forehead in a measuring gesture. ‘Up to here with traitors and super-spies,’ he said.

For some inexplicable reason, the Ministry of Works, which was responsible for government decoration, considered buildings south of the river to be modern, for which Wilson was grateful. There was the obligatory bookcase, with its stuck-together tomes, but otherwise he was spared Naire-Hamilton’s working conditions. There were even two Dora Carrington pictures on the wall. The window view of the river included St Paul’s and the furniture was sufficiently contemporary not to make the television set, on which Wilson sometimes watched afternoon horse racing, appear obtrusive. Since the Calcutta accident, racing was the nearest he got to horses: once they’d been a hobby, like roses.

Peter Harkness was waiting when Wilson returned from his Whitehall meeting. The deputy intelligence director was an undemonstrative man whose initial training had been as an accountant and who still worried about money. He lived separately but beneath the same Bayswater roof with a wife to whom he had been married for twenty years and wouldn’t consider divorcing because both were practising Catholics. Apart from church on Sundays, when he carried her missal, they were never seen together. She went to old-time dancing Wednesdays and Fridays, and at weekends, apart from church. Harkness sailed his radio-controlled model of the Cutty Sark on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Even then he wore a hard-collared shirt and a waistcoat.

‘What was the reaction?’ asked Harkness.

‘What I expected,’ said Wilson. ‘The instruction is absolute discretion.’

‘I thought that went with the job.’

‘No arrest or trial.’

‘Oh,’ said Harkness heavily.

‘It makes good political sense,’

‘What about moral sense?’

‘Naire-Hamilton’s morals are political.’

Harkness appeared about to challenge the assertion, but swallowed it back. ‘We’ve still got a lot of phoney messages to go. Shall I withdraw them?’

‘No,’ said Wilson at once. ‘People had to be involved at the Foreign Office: if we stop, they’ll know we’ve got a lead. They might even identify it, by a process of elimination. I’m not risking another Philby situation, a protector back here at base.’

‘All the Rome personnel files will be processed by tomorrow,’ promised Harkness.

‘We might get a lead,’ said Wilson doubtfully. ‘What about the embassy itself?’

‘Completely isolated from anything sensitive.’

Wilson leaned back reflectively in his chair; again the leather patches squeaked rudely. ‘We’ve got an advantage there,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The Summit,’ said the director. ‘We can move a squad into the embassy, as supposed security for the meeting.’

‘Any specific instructions?’

‘Not yet. It’s isolated, as you say. So there’s no danger any more. The only risk is that our man might get nervous and run; a defection could create the sort of embarrassment Naire-Hamilton is frightened of.’ Wilson swivelled his chair towards the window. Outside, a stacked jet, waiting for Heathrow landing permission, appeared to hover over the Houses of Parliament. ‘What about Hotovy?’ said the director suddenly.

‘His two boys are here, in London. But his wife is undergoing some sort of medical treatment in Brno.’

‘He won’t cross without her?’

‘No.’

‘Damn!’

‘He’s been as exposed as hell for six months.’

‘How long before she gets back?’

‘A week he thinks.’

‘There wasn’t another way.’

‘I know.’

‘If his wife’s back within the week, he’s still got a chance.’

‘Just a chance,’ agreed Harkness.