The Crocus List

21

Asit turned out, George had not had to stir up the matter of Miss Tuckey himself. It arrived at his desk, as he had privately hoped, simply because he was the long-stop for security/intelligence matters that nobody else wanted to field. It had not been the Army which first noticed her disappearance, but an old Resistance colleague. Forty years after the event, the survivors were a sociable group with their own small London club and a way of closing ranks that, in wartime, had needed to be desperately widespread. The file brought with it a twinge of now-familiar guilt and a covering note from Army Intelligence: Will you please try and persuade the creepy-crawlies that we have neither the facilities nor any reason to investigate this lady's apparent disappearance. Even if she fails to turn up for her next set of lectures there is nothing we can do but not pay her. Sir Bruce had a low opinion of civilian intelligence officers.

The usual 'open end' at MI6 was a small bird of a man whose telephone voice sounded permanently pained. "My dear George, we haven't any interest in the woman, missing or not. If the Army doesn't care what happens to its lecturers then that's no skin offour nose. As you know perfectly well, and I'm sure they do, too, we can't mount any active investigation in this country"-just as if six had never done such a thing."We only got involved because we're being badgered by one of our ex's, an old friend of hers, I believe. They were in the Resistance together, that sort of thing. We took him on after the war, when we were a bit short-handed. He retired some time ago; had a stroke, I understand." The sentence ended on a high, uninterested note.

"What's he worried about?" George asked.

There was a pause; there almost always was when you asked a question of the Secret Intelligence Service. After twenty years, George still couldn't decide whether they spent the time thinking or it was just to show they needn't really answer anything.

"You've got our note? That's really all we know. She vanished, it was reported to the police, they couldn't find anything criminally suspicious. We at least went to the trouble of asking them."

"Is he going to make a fuss?"

Pause. Then the voice said distantly: "He certainly should know better. But he was rather… wartime."

"If he had any idea of what she was doing for us, Mo D doesn't want it spread around. Would it help if I go and lend him a sympathetic ear?"

This time, the voice after the pause might, by MI6 standards, have been described as faintly eager. "If you really feel like doing that, George, by all means. I've got his address around here somewhere. It could be the best thing, might even do some good. "

Clenching his teeth, George had to remind himself that he had now got just the endorsement he wanted.

Edward Marriage, Secret Intelligence Service (retired) managed a small boat-hire yard on the Thames below Oxford. There were five boats moored to the shored-up bank, all with names beginning Duke, hung with bright blue fenders that hadn't saved them from long scratches and stains. Behind, in a tilting wooden boathouse, a youth with cropped hair was tinkering with a partly stripped engine. The place smelt of oil, paint, damp and slow failure, and Marriage himself sat with his back to it in the cold sunshine, looking across to the willows and alders of the far bank and the fields beyond. It was very still, with the landscape painted in shades of smoke.

They drank tea out of mugs labelled Captain and Bosun brought by his wife, who was small, bright-eyed and determinedly busy. The stroke had left Marriage hunched and rigid; he turned his head slowly and his smile had become a lopsided leer. His legs were wrapped in a tartan rug and he was fortressed by small tables, stools, a frameto help lever himself upright. George had an old kitchen chair brought from the boatshed.

"We never met," Marriage said carefully. "1 got my Little Problem before you became involved in our side. You were at Number 10? But you aren't there now?" However carefully he spoke, he still released a litjtle dribble from the stiff side of his mouth and wiped it away with a routine gesture of his left hand. His right hand was permanently supported by a strap around his neck.

"No, I'm back at Mo D, security and intelligence, on thepolside. That was why Miss Tuckey's file came across my desk."

"Yes… are you allowed to tell me anything about her?"

"I was rather hoping you could tell me. I'm afraid she's just a name to me."

Marriage took a moment to assemble his thoughts. "I don't get out much, just sit here pecking out letters to old friends"-there was a portable typewriter on one of the tables-"and she was coming to tea last Monday. Liz had it all ready-but she didn't show up. That's not like Dot, I felt if she'd been called away she'd have got word to me somehow so… so that's why I rang the Firm. Of course, I hardly know anybody there, not now…"

The file had shown that Miss Tuckey had had no official connection with the Intelligence Service since turning down a backroom job there in 1946, the year Marriage himself had joined them. After losing most of its wartime recruits back to the universities and the law, the Service was determined to maintain its new influence, in Whitehall if not the world. The gap was filled with people who had learnt something about intelligence and too much (in the Service's view) about weaponry in the Resistance schools of the Special Operations Executive. But they remained second-class citizens as the Service restocked itself with young men of the right background from Oxford and Cambridge. After all, with the sunset of Empire and most departmental requests becoming for economic intelligence, you need trained minds who understood international banking, surely George could seethat? So the Resistance-trained amateurs were gradually shuntedto filing jobs or forgotten overseas stations where they needed do nothing but show an invisible flag and curl a lip at the way the CIA did the real work.

George asked: "Did she say anything about her job?"

"Oh no. Dot never would. But I knew she was giving a series of lectures somewhere, and they weren't being reported, and there's only one thing you'd ask Dot to lecture on, so…" The mouth did its best to become a wry smile. "I just guessed you were getting interested in the old Winter Garden stuff…"

"Winter Garden?"

Marriage's smile became slightly superior. "Before your time, of course. And that was the Americans." He called them Amurricanes, in a heavy stage accent that came over as an envious sneer.

"An American Resistance movement?"

Mrs Marriage came up tentatively along the line of boats, making sure she caught her husband's good eye before she moved into their circle of secrecy. She wore a faded anorak over her long cardigan. "I'm just popping into town to pick up a parcel from the station. It could be the parts John was wanting. Can I make you some more tea before I go?"

"No. We're both swimming in tea, we're both sinking in tea." Marriage's tone became abrupt and petulant.

She just smiled. "All right, dear. And shall I see when the garage can take in the car? The clutch really does need-"

"There's nothing wrong with the clutch. It's the way you drive it."

"It's snatching. I really think it's getting dangerous."

"It's the way you drive it."

"I'll see what the garage says. Don't get cold out here. Get Mr Harbinger to help you if- "

"Mr Harbinger's got better things to do than help an old cripple around. I'm not getting cold."

"Very well, dear." She smiled at George and walked briskly away.

"I don't know why I'm so bloody to her," Marriage grumbled, "except that shetolerates me. God knows I got enoughofthat inthe Service." They heard the car start atthe third try and roar jerkily up the track behind the boathouse, leaving a faint cloud of blue smoke drifting around the corner.

"I should have asked you if you wanted more tea," Marriage said, suddenly remorseful. "But perhaps you wouldn't mind something a bit stronger? There's a bottle of vodka in the cupboard over the desk in there. It's all I can offer, but if you felt like pouring us a couple, then topping it up with water… Liz doesn't like me having a snort before sundown."

For once in his life, George would have been ready to forego a drink. But there was a gentle desperation in Marriage's crooked face, and his hand crawled on the rug like a dying spider. "Don't worry about me," he said. "Half my brain cells are dead tissue anyway, so a few more won't make much odds. She can't countthem."

Did one more matter? The man was already living beyond sundown, George told himself. "Actually, I happen to have a flask of Scotch on me, just in case I broke down on the road…" He tried to force the joviality that was usually so easy. Marriage watched as George filled two of his silver cups, refusing water with it.

"It's good to taste the real thing for once; that vodka's mostly water by now." He poured the neat whisky into the corner of his mouth and wriggled with slow, painful relief. George's drink tasted of shame, but he needed it too, by now.

"The American Resistance movement," George prompted delicately. "Was that Winter Garden?"

"In the early Fifties, we all started setting up Resistance networks again, all over Europe, when it looked as if the Soviets were going to come west on the next train. The Air Force was particularly interested: escape routes for aircrew and so on. The Americans took it very seriously; of course, it was the Company by then." If Marriage knew the current jargon for the CIA, he didn't bother with it. "And they'd learnt a fair bit in the war, with their OSS -Office of Strategic Services, same as our SOE. I know they were collecting recordings of all the national songs, so they could set up a Radio Free Norway or Denmark or Italy somewhere, after…"

"And a Radio Free Britain?"

"Oh yes. The trouble was, we could believe in the Continent being overrun again, but we couldn't face up to it happening here. So the Amunicanes wanted to do it, and we let them."

"An American network in Britain."

"Probably quite a good one, too. My Service wanted me to try and penetrate it, just on general grounds, but I told them: the whole point is not to have their name's on our files, all ready for the Soviets to take over. But I spent a few bob buying drinks for a couple of old OSS types who'd turned up in their London station and they took pity on me and let drop the codename: Winter Garden. And flower names for the different groups. At least that's what they told me, it could be sheer bull. But it was before they went in for all the cryptonyms and digraphs and five-letter codes because that's what computers like…"

A lone motor-cruiser rumbled upstream, tidily cluttered, steered by an elderly man with a blacklabradorsitting on the cockpit seat behind him. He waved and Marriage lifted his cup slowly in return.

"One of yours?" George asked politely.

"Private. Did you think this was a poor country? Hah. Just go and count the private boats up and down the river. Most of 'em don't get used more than a few hours in the year. A poor country. "

The boat left a wake that rocked the long drifts of dead leaves on the water and slapped against the quay below them. Marriage finished his drink and put the cup down very obviously.

My God, George thought, cringing, he wants me to kill offmoreofthatfossilised brain. And I'm going to do it, so that he might, just might, tell me something useful. Have I been sending people out to do this? Mind, he excused himself quickly, this is exceptional, quite exceptional. And difficult. Even a trained interrogator would have a problem here…

Thus excused, he poured the drinks. "Did Miss Tuckey have anything to do with that? Help them recruit or…?"

"But then she'd have their lists, wouldn't she? And they wouldn't want that, any more than they wanted the Firmto have them. Once you've got a list, you can drag in the whole network. That's what I'm worried about: if your people are… working along those lines again, and Dot's been helping out, somebody might think she'd gotyour lists. An old lady living alone in the country, you do see…"

George did, and yearned to tell him the Army had thought of it, that Maxim had mentioned how they worked under codenames, then wondered if the Army should tell Moscow that, too-and realised that he was after a list, as well.

Marriage misinterpreted his hesitation and said querulously: "Dot really didn't tell me a thing, nothing. I was just guessing. I don't want you to-"

"Of course not," George soothed him. "I appreciate your concern." And that at least is true, he thought, because if I were a crippled old man living on an early pension filtered through the Secret Vote-and thus controllable-I wouldn't want any whisper of indiscretion getting back to the Service. And probably you're in hock to the Service's banking friends (the Service always had banking friends) for this boatyard, too. They'll never foreclose, because they want you to die in debt. Controllable.

"Getting back to Winter Garden," George said confidently, no longer needing to invoke Miss Tuckey, "you might say it's up my street. What sort of training did they get?"

"Radio, cyphers, handling explosives, the sort of thing we got at Wanborough in the old days."

"Weapons?"

"I doubt most of them would need it; everybody did national service in those days, some would have been in the war."

"They didn't issue any weapons?"

Marriage looked at him oddly, wilting George's confidence. "Our people made it pretty clear there were enough guns still floating loose from the war and getting into the wrong hands. We did make them promise No Guns."

"D'you think they stuck to it?"

"You know, I rather think they did. Probably not forthe right reasons. A Resistance group should use enemy weapons, or stuff that can take enemy ammo-and the Company just didn't have enough Russian gear then, in the early Fifties. Now they could do you a boatload right off the shelf, nothing down and nothing to pay if you shoot 'em in the right direction."

"Would there have been any training indéstabilisation?"George had thought carefully about risking that word. But one thing he was sure he had learnt was that Marriage was no part of any conspiracy, had indeed no useful friends left. That was why he was reduced to talking to George Harbinger.

"Déstabilisation? God, no. You can't destabilise an occupying army, you've got to blow the buggers up. All that came later, when the Company reached the big time. "

"Sorry. And you think Winter Garden's all withered away now."

"Just think about it. They wouldn't have been recruiting schoolboys: they'd want mature people, organisers, types with a sense of responsibility and a bit of gloom, kids and a mortgage. You need to be pretty gloomy to think of Resistance in peacetime, don't you? So they'd have been picking people in their thirties then, now they'd be in their sixties. Past it, except for running safe houses. Dead of heart attacks, crippled old men like me. It's long past, now.

"As much as anything, it was the Company that changed," he mused into his cup, beginning to slobber the whisky now. "They got more confident-more money, too, of course. Not just giving radio sets to bank clerks, they were giving bank accounts to politicians. They didn't want to wait and react, they wanted the Other Side to react to them. That's when they began thedéstabilisationthing… but Winter Garden, no that's long past."