The Sixth Directorate

1

The heavy prison buildings had ceased to interest me some while back. Before, during the first months — first couple of years indeed — I’d struggled against the bars as it were, knowing it was quite the wrong thing to do, that survival came from blocking out all the terrible minutiae of the place, all the insulting brick, and thinking of anything else.

Originally, to set against the hopeless impotent struggle I made against my anger, there had been twenty or so other prisoners in the new security wing, who, even if one saw them rarely, one could occupy one’s thoughts with. At exercise or in chapel — my goodness, how we all believed then — there was little opportunity for talk, but one soon got round that. The trick was to memorise the odd words, particular faces, momentary vignettes: how one man held his dinner knife like a penholder, another lifted a cup like a Duchess, a third spoke in the purest tones of Stockbroker Surrey. And then one would take this visual and aural booty back to one’s cell, to feed on it, rationing it out, during the eighteen hours solitary we did every day then. One’s company, in those few moments of company, became transfers which one took back and coloured in one’s mind, vehemently, with daring strokes and bright hues, giving the train robbers and rapists a brilliance which, despite their previous activities, they never possessed inside. Men who had hiked a million from a mail train and had had the imagination to invest most of it in Post Office bonds before they were caught, here became monumental nonentities, empty spirits, razed tablets. So that afterwards — at the end of table tennis or Steptoe and Son in the hall — I would bring these skeletons back with me to my cell and put flesh on them bit by bit, and then set them moving as bearable, even interesting companions.

I would take a single characteristic of a man I’d exchanged no more than a few words to at exercise, a child murderer perhaps — a habit, say, of rocking on the balls of his feet, hands dug deep into his jacket pockets, and from this isolated trait I would form a whole new character and set him free in some happy context.

From such unpromising material one formed a whole repertory of imagined characters and serial dramas and I eventually learnt to occupy myself continuously with my unknown friends about the building in this way. All one needed, like a sleeping pill, was that one initial characteristic, some dull reality — a certain hairstyle or an extended ear lobe — which then became a talisman for all sorts of high and quiet adventure. Some people, I learnt — often those of an academic or artistic bent — think of nothing but violent sport in prison, motor racing and such like, pursuits which they had no interest in whatsoever when they were free. I on the other hand, who had once been fond of such athletic activities, would create fantasies of leisured, rather donnish talk in musty circumstances — a recreation I should have loathed in the real world.

A long prison sentence, inexorably, invents and opens up all the possibilities of the world for you — a lifetime’s subscription to the National Geographic magazine running through one’s head night after night. That, indeed, is the punishment. One creates the Monaco Grand Prix or the easy chat at the high table with a sharpness and reality which is only matched by the subsequent realisation that such things can never be part of your future. Thus one comes to regret one’s imagination. And the hours that you had looked forward to, alone with it, building the world, become hours dogged with the knowledge of a sour end — like evenings with a girl that you enjoy as much as ever in an affair that she has told you has no future.

So it had been for me in Durham. In the first two years there had been my anger; anger at being framed by Williams to save his skin — an anger so fierce that for days on end I thought it would literally eat me away with its violence, an anger that was absolutely isolated, a monument on an empty plain. And because of it I couldn’t talk, or eat or sleep then. Later, when I had come more to ‘accept matters’ (yes, learning to live in prison is like coming to terms with the loss of someone loved, even though it was oneself) there had been the brief company of the others, and, for all its dying falls, there were the invented Odysseys and conversations I’d made with them. But then Mountbatten’s ‘top-security’ reforms were questioned; his idea of corralling so many dangerous louts together seemed an increased risk, and one by one my library of characters was dispersed to other jails so that eventually, by the spring of 1971, there were only half a dozen of us left in ‘E’ wing and finally only one other man, one of the train robbers, whom I barely saw at all.

I ceased to care then.

I learnt the final trick of prison life: how to sleep twelve or fifteen hours a day. I became a vegetable, without pain, and had to be literally forced to my feet by warders with cold sponges, waking into the terror which every moment of consciousness had become, to defecate, to eat, to prove to the prison commissioners and the taxpayers that there was life yet, one live prisoner present and accounted for. To live was the only pain then; to get through those few waking hours was like living an imminent death, due at any moment, which one loathed yet longed for. And they realised this, of course, so that it became far more important that I should stay alive than that they should prevent my escaping. Gradually my cell and everything I might use in it turned softer, was padded in foam rubber, while implements of every kind turned to wood or polythene. The fibrous grit, the hardness, was taken out of everything — so that in keeping me alive they sent me back to the womb; finally I was sleeping nearly all the time on a rubber sheet, half drugged under a quilted Swedish duvet. Even the moody, inventive Swedes, they knew, hadn’t yet learnt how to strangle themselves with an eiderdown.

Latterly, they had moved me from my cell in the middle of ‘E’ wing to an improvised hospital ward at the end of the corridor — two cells with the wall between bashed out — and two beds, one for me and the other, empty, for the train robber, who had kept his mind intact with purposeful dreams of escape and the money somewhere under a stone in the Surrey woods. This fellow, with fourteen years in front of him, lived at the far end of the corridor, taking adult education courses in Spanish and Business Management and beating off offers from the popular Sundays to do a weekly column of investment advice. I suppose he’d already bought a suite of offices in the big new Alcoa building on Copacabana beach and was considering copper futures in the light of Allende’s recent victory on the other coast. While for my part, when I was not asleep, my only thought was to get to sleep.

I lay on my stomach and face, struggling in various positions, legs straddling imaginary fences, trying to ease the permanent feeling of cramp and strain in every muscle, arms crabbed over my head, sweating and shivering, like a man locked in a permanent hangover, longing for oblivion. For exercise I was forced up and held by two warders and frogmarched up and down the corridor, while the train robber played bar-football with another warden at one end, the two of them looking at me with real horror as I came towards them and left again, a Lazarus, a perpetual yo-yo.

I remember from that time, really the only clear thing, the viscous metallic clamour of the football machine and the invigorating cries of the two men, the displaced Cockney warder and the train robber, so that when my back was turned, going away from them, I was easily carried into the frenzied world of a real game, the swaying mass of red and white Arsenal hats and scarves, like curling surf, when there were near-goals. The robber was a Londoner too, from Islington. And warders are human enough, especially on a basic of £21 a week with six children and the mother-in-law in the back room. And their charge must often have seemed to them a living proof of the chance of eight home draws on next week’s pools. He had half a million under a stone somewhere outside, all the fun of the world in six years’ time, with remission — and good luck to him.

I, on the other hand, was a ‘traitor’ which was something they didn’t really follow. My ‘crimes’ — the political charges, giving ‘succour and support to Her Majesty’s enemies’, like a cow, the clause in the Official Secrets Act under which I’d been sent down for twenty-eight years four years before — all this was gobbledegook to them. I’d been a spy, a double agent with the KGB, I’d betrayed the Queen. These bare bones, which they knew of, meant nothing to them, since there’d been no sex or guns, or champagne or swimming pools involved. I was a contradiction in terms for them — a dull spy, as far removed from their routine as an atom scientist might have been. Thus the only badge they could pin on me was that of confidence trickster and intellectual from a class way above them. I was someone — a real rogue, top of the ladder — in that criminal category of fraudulent stockbrokers and crooked captains of industry; old-school-tie boys, class enemies and remittance men from the Home Counties Jaguar-and-pine belt; cads whose richly deserved comeuppance was appropriately equalled only by the length and severity of their punishment.

And if I didn’t occupy the worst prison category, that of child molester or murderer, it was simply because they thought I was homosexual. Spies who were caught, without trying to shoot their way out, were always queer; they had vexatious, doting old mothers in Bexhill and spent their money on puce-coloured socks and Mantovani instead of dark glasses and golden Dunhills.

2

When he came he said ‘Good morning.’

It sounded like an old radio comic — ‘Goodmorning — Goodmorning!’ until I realised he’d simply been repeating the phrase over and over, leaning across my bed, trying to wake me, for I’d been deeply asleep.

‘Good morning, Marlow. How are things? How are you?’

What a grandmother of a man McCoy had always been. The more he observed the proprieties the more dangerously stupid one knew he was being — or going to be. In those days, when he planned things for Williams in Holborn, how well I had come to know his hopeless foolishness, his sycophantic flourishes, his acid disdain for people in the field.

And I should have remembered McCoy at once for all these lying niceties if I’d not become so numbed in the four years since I’d left his Mid-East section — that awful anonymous building in Holborn whose only virtue lay in that Henekey’s long wine bar was only ten minutes walk down the Strand. But now his polite inquiries had the intense familiarity of a recurrent dream; remembered accents from a real character, clouded in sleep-thoughts, that one tried desperately to place in a real world.

‘Hello, Marlow. I’ve come to see you — if I may …’

I thought I was dreaming, and it was this that woke me, startled. During the first few years in Durham I’d dreamt indeed; a whole extra-territorial life; serial dreams and play-of-the-month productions; engrossing entertainments which one could question and relate the morning after like a Christie addict, or Maigret querying the stain on the brothel curtains.

‘Mr Marlow …’

A face. Round. A chin too many. Older than the bland doctor who came to see me most days, talking behind the screen about sugar content and drip feeds. A tightly knotted, striped old boy’s tie; white detached collar, dark suit; austerity in everything, except the face which rose up from the tight neck like a pastry; puffy, substantial but without any definition.

‘I’m Donald McCoy. You remember — your ACO in Holborn. You were in Library and Information. My office was on the floor below, next the annexe. You remember …’

I remembered the accents then. It was the only thing McCoy remained true to in the constant temporising and prevarication which was his life — the tough and broad, yet often elusive tones. McCoy the scholarship boy, Belfast man and non-conformist; of course I remembered him.

He sat on a chair now, next the bed, seeming perplexed; a traveller who had come home to find a relative far worse than he expected, having to think of undertakers instead of grapes.

‘I’m sorry to wake you. But it’s important. Would you like to sit up. Have some coffee? You used to smoke, didn’t you? Can I get you some cigarettes?’

I hadn’t smoked for a year either; taste had gone as well as dreams; all the interpretative senses. But he got up and went outside, returning with the doctor and a warder with a trolley of coffee, biscuits and two packets of Players. They must have been waiting outside, on cue. The trolley interested me, more than any of the people. It was new, lacquered in dull gold with a handled tray on top, like nothing we’d ever had in Durham. And I thought — he’s brought the lot up with him from Holborn, the ten o’clock coffee ritual, the trolleys in the corridor, the tough little Irish and Jamaican ladies hovering outside the senior offices waiting for the disdainful Tunbridge Wells secretaries to make an order. Again, I’d not thought about Holborn in a long while, and now each moment of McCoy’s presence brought something of it back. He was picking up the bits of a puzzle I’d once been part of and that had been smashed and thrown away years before; picking them up and offering them to me. A messenger would come in through the cell door at any moment with a pile of ‘Extras’ and ‘Ordinaries’, the flimsy internal memos with the different security ratings, and by mid-morning my copy of last Saturday’s Al Ahram would arrive with Heykal’s weekly message for the whole world.

The doctor said to McCoy: ‘Here you are, Mr Hewlett. Let me know if there’s anything else.’ And then to me, leaning down as though to a child: ‘This is Mr Hewlett. Come all the way from London to see you. So do be a bit bright about it. We’re doing our best.’ He fixed a brief smile onto his face, as quick as a franking machine running over an envelope with the message ‘So much for humanity’ and then he was gone.

Hewlett? I pushed myself up and got the pillow behind me, sensing a return of all the old anger in me, bitter ironies forming again: Hewlett. They couldn’t ever let up, could they? Couldn’t go ten miles out of London without aliases, subterfuges, games; letter drops, cut-outs, surveillances.

McCoy got up, meticulously, as if on cue for a master shot in a film, and walked over to the trolley. And his words came as if from a script too — well-worn, tired, the twelfth take of the same scene that morning in a B movie.

‘Hewlett, yes.’ He paused and poured. ‘Yes, indeed.’ He licked his top lip judiciously. ‘As far as they’re concerned I’m your accountant, come about your financial affairs. Hewlett — of Carter, Hewlett and Bagshawe, Red Lion Square.’ He was pleased with the conceit, isolating the idea to himself, like a stage-struck juvenile pondering a great character role. ‘They don’t know. About Holborn and that, except the governor.’

‘You are a fool, McCoy. A bloody fool. Besides, I’ve got no accountant.’

I hadn’t voiced such a direct opinion in years and my throat felt cracked and dry as though I’d made a long speech. I’d shocked myself far more than him. He put a cup of coffee on the table next to me and I wanted it now, like iced water, but didn’t dare, knowing I’d spill the thing in physical confusion. Thought had come again, a creaking process, unearthed feeling groping for words and finding true sentences first time round. I might not be so lucky again and feeling was still miles away from action.

‘They tell me you’ve been getting pretty low here, Marlow. Not — facing up, eh?’

‘Not —’ I’d wanted to say ‘Not taking it like a man’ but couldn’t. The ‘t’ on ‘taking’ threw me completely.

‘No need to force it, Marlow. I know what it must feel like. Just listen for a minute. I’m Hewlett because what I’ve got to suggest is just between you and I; no one else. So don’t rush it. I’ll be here overnight. We’ll be seeing as much of each other as you need. You see, they may have made a mistake, you see. All of them, I mean. About you, about your trial. And I want you to help us put it right.’

McCoy was a great believer in self-help. For him the sin would always remain, indelibly struck on the man, even if he were later proved guiltless. Even then, four years later, in the matter of my trial, it wasn’t a question of my having been right and everyone else wrong. His non-conformism demanded that he excuse his own mistakes in the matter by spreading the fault equally amongst everyone involved. No one could ever be free of blame in McCoy’s Old Testament canon; except himself, for he had seen the light and had a permanent message for all the fallen men of his department. McCoy believed deeply in other people’s original sin. How he must sometimes have longed for the original faith itself, where, bleeding, he could have put himself upon a cross.

‘You remember, at the trial? Your defence tried to show that Williams had been a double, a KGB man for years — how, when you learnt this in Egypt, Williams framed you by getting Moscow to abduct your wife and then displaying her in Moscow. At the time it all added up perfectly. Your guilt, I mean.’

‘Yes. Perfectly.’

McCoy ran on, encouraged. I stretched out a hand for the coffee. ‘Here, let me help.’

‘I’ll do it myself.’ And I did.

‘Well, we lost the whole Cairo-Albert circle out there. And only you had been in touch with them all. Then you turned up back in England, remarkably, in the circumstances. How could the Egyptians have missed you, we thought, when they got everyone else? Because the Russians organised your escape, you were one of them, being sent home to roost again. We couldn’t really come to any other conclusion. You were the deep-cover man in our section, not Williams.’

I liked McCoy’s extra-legal, seventeenth-century use of the word ‘we’ in his précis, as though judges, in matters where the security of the state was involved, were no more than venal hacks, bewigged, red-faced oafs who could be paid off later with a yard or two of ale and a night out with John Cleland. ‘Cairo-Albert circle’: the ridiculous code designation rang out for me that morning like a distant ‘Tally-Ho!’ heard by a vegetarian, an omen of danger and disgust, swelling on the wind again, attractive and repellent in equal measure. For it is the unpleasant parts of old life that really stay with us, even when we have learnt the tricks of denying them any currency.

Yet somehow one is grateful, too, for this horrifying renewed evidence of a life once badly lived; for these viscous images, once resurrected, burn with a fierce warmth, while others, which were purely happy, seem beyond recall. And I was grateful that morning for anything, however shabby, which linked me indubitably to a past existence, which proved I had lived once, however badly.

And that must have been exactly McCoy’s intention — the thought behind his précis, with which he had to jog my heart. I would be no use to him, I was dead unless he could re-invest me with my previous identity, tempt me with the evidence of an old role. He knew the rot, the pretence, of offering anybody the chance of ‘turning over a new leaf’. He knew that what we really want is a future in old and rash ways, subtle approval of a lost excess — knew, with the perception of a psychiatrist, that if we are all prisoners (and there could be no doubt about that in my case) the grudge we bear for this insists that, for release, we must take up where we left off, not start afresh. And so that morning he called up for me my old self, the men, and all the details of the Cairo-Albert circle four years before, all the shabby folly of those times, as one drags a rotten carcase across the land to stir a fox.

‘What could we do? The evidence seemed …’

He shook his pulpy head in amazement as if the evidence had been as awful and incontrovertible as a quartered body in the well of the court. Whereas it had been as thin as paper, as insubstantial as the blurred photograph of a woman in Moscow in one of Springer’s scandal rags.

‘How could we have seen it?’

‘By looking beyond your nose. If you could.’ McCoy was prodding me, tempting me, searching out the vengeance, blowing the embers. And they were there, too. He knew that. I’d begun to feel the little heats myself.

‘There are mistakes. People —’

‘Lucky they’ve done with the rope then.’

‘People can be wrong. People —’

‘The law is an ass.’

‘One can be made a fool of — I don’t deny it. The Russians, the Americans too —’

‘Twenty-eight years is quite a price to pay — even for a fool.’

‘The evidence —’ he said. I interrupted him. Now I had suddenly found my stride in fury.

‘Fuck the evidence. And four years locked up alone in this place is quite a payment on account. What would you say the interest was on that — my interest? The compensation.’

‘Be reasonable, Marlow. Rationally —’

‘Where’s the application form, McCoy? One of those chits Miss Charlbury dealt with in the annexe? What’s owing this time? “Out-of-pocket expenses”? Right then. Item: to four years wait, sixteen seasons — how many holidays would that make in Normandy? How many lobsters in season with Muscadet? Or even the odd bottle of Guinness in Brighton? Anyway, item: missing the rain, drying in the sun, drinking myself silly — oh yes, McCoy, item: how much will you pay for a thousand opening times and friends in the evening? And how many women, McCoy, could you fit in afterwards, three long winters lying in different beds? Item: to a dozen casual girls — or perhaps one or two real ones — missing. And sometimes, McCoy, oh yes indeed, I used to watch cricket in the summer, tumbling out of bed with someone before lunch on Saturdays. Lords, and even the Oval. And there were the papers on Sundays. You’d have been surprised with my Sundays, McCoy, how little I did with them. But they were mine to lose. Item: to how many lost weekends? How many items for Miss Charlbury, McCoy? How many,howmany?’

And then I was at him, uncontrollably, with what I thought all the precisely dictated fury of an animal. I was standing over him, squeezing his throat dry, my fingers crushing the old starched-white collar. I expected his eyes to bulge and choking noises but there was nothing. He sat on the chair impassively, his suit smelling of too much dry-cleaning, his torso shaking gently under what I felt was a barrage of force. When he started to push me away I thought my grip unbreakable so that I was amazed to see my hands slip from his neck, lightly and easily, as though they were oiled. When the warder came in I was lying on the floor, shouting. ‘When will I be paid, McCoy, for all that, all that …’

And McCoy was happy, helping me back onto the bed. There was lightness in his face, a relief, the expression he’d assumed in the old days when some bureaucratic ploy of his had come off, when someone, like Henry, had just left his office and had started on his long journey down the river. His face reflected a professional’s joy in a point well taken; he had discovered my enmity again, accepted in my lifeless fists the crucial transference which signals a cure. He had wound me up secretly, compressing the vehemence, like a toy. Then he had slipped the catch.

We were alone again. I was cold. Suddenly the quilt had no warmth in it and I wanted sheets and blankets. I drank the coffee and it had a taste The cigarette seemed fragrant as woodsmoke.

‘What were we fighting about, McCoy? I don’t remember. Except that you realise I was framed. You’ve found out about Williams. So now what do you want? I’m free —’

‘Yes, we’ve found out — something. Not about Williams. So don’t jump too soon. That depends about your being free. Depends on you, in fact.’

I could see it already. Another plan, no doubt as careful as the one that had sent me after Henry and given me a life sentence. But in this case it would take me out into a world whose flavours I had just begun to sense again, and I had to remember not to snatch at it, not to show too willing. For the truth was that I’d have done anything to have been in London that weekend, to book a hotel room there and disappear into life.

‘Listen, Marlow, just listen. Then you can take it — or leave it.’ McCoy looked about the cell and up at the small window with its view over the roof of the old laundry if you stood on tiptoe. The day was grey and wet, a smell of sodden ashes coming on the wind from the garbage dumps on the other side of town. I knew what he meant. He went on confidently now, as though recounting an old chestnut that yet never failed to please. ‘A week ago we took a man in London, fellow called George Graham, deep-cover KGB. An illegal. He was on his way to start a satellite circle in the United States, one they have to spy on the spies there. Just a lucky chance, one in a million, that we got on to him. He used to be involved with our circle in Beirut and afterwards in Cairo, but before your time there. His cover till now has been as a Senior Reports Officer with the COI, advising on overseas propaganda, doing radio and television programmes and such like. He’s forty, dark hair, pretty well built, fluent Arabic, few connections — he’s been out of the light for a long time, but he knows the ropes all right. He’s quite a bit like you in fact, Marlow. And he’s going to New York next week …’

‘And he’s dispensable — just like me,’ I said when McCoy had finished outlining his ‘suggestion’ as he put it. ‘The old story, I’ve heard it before. It’s what put me here.’

‘And it will take you out. Dispensable, yes. But that will be up to you. If you survive, you’ll stay out. All this — will be forgotten.’ He looked around him again.

‘I’ll get a medal.’

‘None of us are indispensable,’ McCoy said quickly, as if to forestall an accusation of cheating. And for that moment I believed him, sensed that, at heart, he recognised his own failures intimately.

‘Besides, you’ll survive. You’re just as much an unknown quantity as this other man. Most of your trial was in camera. The photographs the press dug up on you were from five and ten years before. And no one will know you from Adam in the United Nations. Point is, Marlow, we’re going to turn you into a completely new man — new name, new background, new future. That should be your cue — a real chance to start over again.’

‘Jesus, you like the games, don’t you?’

‘You tell me a better way of setting you on your feet? Ten years as Reports Officer with us, Arabic, the right accents — you’ll pass as someone born to the job in the UN. And the Third World they’re always talking about: you know about that too, don’t you? — all those grubby backstreets in Cairo and bilharzia in the canals.’ McCoy raised his eyes again to the high window and the dark grey clouds like smog rolling over the city. ‘That’s what should worry you, Marlow.’ He nodded sagely at the bruised view, curling his lips a fraction, like a picture restorer contemplating a hopeless canvas. ‘That should be your first concern. Fresh fields and that. Isolation kills more than anything. You’ll be doing yourself the favour.’

‘And you.’

‘And us, Marlow. All of us are going to be happy. I’ve thought a lot about it.’

‘I’ll bet you have. Another plan up your sleeve for dumping me somewhere worse than this.’

‘What could be worse than this, Marlow?’

The main door into ‘E’ wing opened and slammed. I heard the milk lorry leaving, the churns bouncing over the little concrete ridges they had before Main Gate to slow the traffic down. Then the train robber’s door opened down at the end of the corridor. He was going out for exercise. The dogs had been shut in between the new electric fence and the east wall. A siren shrieked, then died, in the town. Automatically I knew the time, the date, the day. The Governor’s twelve o’clock lunch, lamb chops and HP sauce, the tin canteens that would come up from the main kitchen to our wing, to be left untouched. Then the doctor’s orders, the hospital food that was just as unpalatable. I’d come to live on crackers and honey at that time, listening to the talk of drip feeds behind the screen.

The only thing I really doubted then was my strength to play the role McCoy had offered me. I had already accepted it, there was no doubt about that, listening to the robber’s footsteps, his high-pitched laugh with the warder, as they went out to walk those concrete circles in the gloom. He would always be stuck with the man he had been, the failure of his past. Even if he reached Copacabana beach he would never throw off his grubby identity; he would always inhabit the same devious turns of mind, trying to swindle Allende now, instead of the Postmaster General. But I was being offered a whole fresh personality, a cure which would really make a new man of me. It would be a matter of survival to forget my own past, not to look backwards, to live in a new present: rehabilitation in the grand manner. I might learn to forget vengeance, too, and the other acids that eat up time, forget disenchantment in the swirls of another man’s future. That was the theory anyway.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘All right then. You’d better give me the details.’

The rain started in earnest. All morning it had fluttered minutely on the window pane, spotting the glass in odd hurried squalls before dying. But now when it came the sky was so black and full and close that it was hard even to imagine fair weather. McCoy’s face darkened in the gloom but the features were clear enough — those of a smiling conspirator, of a boy who sets out happily once more from the softly lit stairhead into the darkest recesses of the house, hiding from Nanny before bedtime.

McCoy got up and switched on the light.

‘You’ll be out of here by morning. We’ll do the rest in London. You’re being transferred, Marlow. Another jail. Place isn’t safe enough to hold you. They’re dispersing all the dangerous fellows, you know. Sending them all over England. Into the wide world.’

I spent a long time that night taking McCoy’s plan apart, isolating the pieces, looking for the flaw, the other plan he had for me behind the first. There were a dozen awful possibilities, besides the one of twenty years more inside, and before I slept I was sick of thinking of them, knowing, as McCoy had, that I’d risk anything to live again with alternatives, whatever they were, for that was the world.

3

Alexei Flitlianov — now Timor Gregorian, an Armenian business man from Beirut — looked out from the bedroom window of his hotel just off Marylebone High Street — gazing at the doorway of the apartment building to his right some way down on the other side of the street. It was his third day in London and his second morning’s vigil. The man he was looking for had neither left the building at breakfast time nor returned there in the evening and the lights in the front room in the apartment had never been switched on.

George Graham had disappeared. Perhaps he’d simply left town to say goodbye to a friend or relative in the provinces. But more likely he’d been caught. Flitlianov had always feared that it had been Graham’s voice which their KGB London Resident had originally picked up on the telephone which British security had been tapping. But Flitlianov had no way of finding out now. All he could do was wait and watch until the day Graham had been due to leave for New York and hope that he’d turn up.

Flitlianov started to move away from the window but just as he did so he noticed a very muddy car drawing up at an apartment doorway twenty yards down from the hotel on the same side of the street. There was something official about the large new saloon, he thought vaguely — something institutional in its dark blue paint, its small two-way radio aerial on the roof. Three men got out. And now Flitlianov was sure there was something unusual about the vehicle. For two of the men had the knowing solidity of plain-clothes police everywhere in the world, while the third, a taller, younger man, had all the marks of a prisoner — weak, unsteady, at a loss in the strong light, the noise and bustle of the city. After more than twenty-five years close observation of the clandestine Flitlianov recognised these characteristics almost automatically. The party disappeared into the doorway of the building. It was almost opposite Graham’s block on the corner of the High Street. Was there any connection between them, Flitlianov wondered? He settled down again by the window to wait and see.

4

‘We’ve just three days before your boat goes,’ someone called Harper said to me, with a face like a piece of bad carpentry, looking at me unhopefully. We were in the front room of a third-floor apartment next-door to a hotel just off Marylebone High Street, where I’d been taken direct from Durham that morning. The furniture was covered in dust sheets and there was a faint smell of gas in the rooms. Harper opened a window and I noticed the weather in the south had taken a turn for the better, brisk and cold, and bright — big-city weather with the houses like white cliffs and the sun as sharp as silver paper. Footsteps shot up from the pavement below with a metallic clatter which was quite unreal to me. Now that I was face to face with it I had no conception of people walking freely in a street and felt the need to keep away from the windows, as though crippled with vertigo.

Harper went over to the window. ‘His apartment is there, opposite us on the corner. You’ll be moving in tonight. This meanwhile will be HQ Ops. as it were. We’ve rigged up some data for you next door.’ We walked through into what had been a dining-room but was now cleared of most furniture. Instead there were photographs of Graham and other blow-ups, of his handwriting, letters he’d written and received, and suchlike, fixed onto a row of insulating boards which had been set up about the room. The dining-table had been left and on it were Graham’s personal effects, the last known bits of his life: a tweed jacket, flannels, latchkeys, wallet, a square-faced gold-cased Hamilton watch, an old Mentmore fountain pen, long-stemmed briar pipe, roll of Dutch aromatic tobacco, a catalogue of Warhol’s Graphics from the Mayfair Gallery, some restaurant bills and two paid accounts, one from the Express Dairies and the other from a car-hire service which had taken him to Wimbledon for some reason a week previously. The room was like the remains of a bad accident in which the body had disappeared completely, disintegrated by the force and thrown in pieces to the four winds. Harper bent down, turning on a radiator.

‘Tailor fellow’ll be coming later for any alterations. Bringing shoes too. We don’t seem to have had the shoes. Try the jacket on for size. Just been cleaned. Had any experience of this sort of doubling?’

‘Who has?’

‘No. I suppose not.’ I put the coat on: ‘Not bad. Sleeves could come out an inch. You’re about that much taller than he was.’

‘Was?’

‘To all intents and purposes. Don’t worry. You’re not going to bump into him in the street.’ Harper laughed, ‘Used to do it at school — the dressing-up bit. Every Christmas. Midsummer for us actually in Australia. Lot of horseplay.’

‘Nothing so funny as horseplay — as horseplay with death.’

‘Yes … Well, then. Let’s take a look. The face is a more difficult business.’ We moved towards a series of enlarged full-face and profile shots of Graham. Harper looked from me to them. ‘Nothing much there I’m afraid. A fuller face altogether. And more hair. Prison doesn’t help, of course, with you. And Graham was leading the good life by all accounts. Eating in all the best places in town; cinemas, theatres, museums, art galleries — the lot. You’ve seen the details already, haven’t you? — the Special Branch reports?’

‘Yes. But you’re not going to try and fake my face, are you?’

‘We thought of it. But there’s no point. No, the point of all this is that we have to make you feel completely in his shoes. Confidence in that is everything. Second skin — and you’ve got to really feel at home in it. Now, to do that you’ve somehow got to get to like this man. Then you’ll come to look like him. To all intents and purposes. Sympathy is the second thing, Marlow. And let’s hope that’s not too difficult. He seems to have been quite a likeable fellow, by all accounts. Apart from his politics, of course.’

I looked into the large eyes, the curiously circular, rather than oval lids in the photograph, the police measurements graded off round the edge of the print. Other than being a necessary part of the many parts that go towards making up something called a face, Graham’s eyes expressed nothing; nor did the other parts. He looked straight through the lens towards me with all the expression of a painted balloon. Yet a pin-prick would prove this bag less than insubstantial; it had no existence. This man had already destroyed his identity and I felt angry at the mechanisms in the world that had brought this about. Graham had nothing left to leave anyone. If I stepped into his shoes there would be nothing there: no one would be forced out, for he had released himself forever some time before from every pleasure and pain.

Harper bent down to pick up another photograph that had fallen, pinning it back on the board. I thought for a second that it was a different man. But it was Graham, talking to a turbanned Sikh, standing up in the corridor of a train.

‘A year ago. Some COI work with Indian railways. Reporting on the new Delhi — Calcutta Express. Can you imagine? Never at a loss for good cover, this fellow.’

Here the skin had every natural ornament. By comparison with the first photograph this one was a moving picture; one felt all the mobility that had gone into his life before and after the captured instant: gestures, words, the hard bright light through the window, the folds in the turban — each was part of a continuing fabric, and in Graham’s face one clearly saw all the happy marks of a long endearment with these moments, a firmly held commitment to the briefest values. His whole bearing, somewhere in India, was a forward position in a world where others often turned and ran, his expression an exposed asset in the general conspiracy — so much so that through his smile at that moment one could almost hear the words, coming out of the two mouths that hot afternoon:

‘Only thing you don’t have on the train is a bar.’

‘Well, that’s why we’re going to Calcutta.’

It was a good photograph. In the other a whole life-style had leaked away. And in the comparison all Graham’s politics slipped away for me too.

I didn’t care how many manifestoes he’d swallowed. I saw him now as one of those few expatriate communists who don’t give the movement a bad name, deviant because he was a person concerned with people not committees, a character out of a lost book on the faith. I wondered only where his blindness lay that had allowed him permanently to compromise his intelligence and affection, for he must have known the communist reality better than most — known that, before the millennium, his men would ruin Man in getting there, just as the other men would.

Perhaps it wasn’t blindness, but a sad knowledge of this that made him smile for the moment, flashing through the famine lands of Bihar state — and the same true sense of the priorities that took him in search of Romanian Art at the British Museum, Bratby in Wimbledon and snails at L’Etoile. Perhaps he had seen the bitter culs de sac a long way off, the horrors that are due to great ideas, and had quietly resigned his politics over the years. Instead, long before, he had launched himself on the little roads that went somewhere — to museums in the London suburbs, to the restaurants in Charlotte Street.

It wasn’t a question, I felt then, of replacing him, of copying his guile, for that had only been his cover in life. Instead I would pick up his life where he had dropped it and live it for him, like a memorial. I would continue something, replace nothing. Now I had no real need of Harper and McCoy; I was no longer on their side, I was on Graham’s. And I knew, in those terms, I could make myself indistinguishable from him though physically we so little resembled each other. It was an idea that I had to take over, not a body. What I needed now were the real details of this man’s life, the clear shapes of his affection, not this cold data that Harper had put about the room like a black museum.

‘Have to put a bit of weight on,’ Harper said. ‘You’ll have time on the boat. Graham was partial. You look as if you’d spent a year in bed.’

‘I have.’ We’d moved over to another board, headed ‘Eating Habits’.

‘It’s all here. Born with a silver fork in his mouth.’

‘Olives?’ I said, looking at one of the first items.

‘Yes,’ Harper said slowly. ‘Little bastard always went Continental. You don’t have to.’

‘I like olives.’

A cloud ran across the silly shapes of Harper’s face.

‘You’re welcome. You’re welcome to it,’ he said savagely.

‘You said I ought to try and like him. “Sympathy”, you said.’

‘That was my advice to you. I don’t have to take it myself.’ Harper moved off round the room pointing out the other boards.

‘“Physical Characteristics, Family Background, Education, Career, Personal Habits, Hobbies, Peculiarities” — some sound tracks, even a film show — the lot. You and I will take a rough look at it now. Then this evening we’ll break each classification down with the experts — McCoy and the man who took him, fellow from Special Branch.’

We’d stopped by the board marked ‘Peculiarities’.

‘No. Not queer,’ Harper said, as if some axiomatic law of nature had been detonated. ‘On the other hand very few women. And then only casuals. Hardly more than tarts.’

‘Perhaps he was Irish. Or Australian.’

Harper scowled against my smile.

Under ‘Peculiarities’ I read off the names of the various Art galleries and museums I’d heard about from McCoy. And at the end was the fact that he subscribed to Country Life.

‘Now that was peculiar,’ Harper said.

‘Must have been for the saleroom notes at the end,’ I said. ‘And the pictures of antiques in country mansions.’ Country Life had been one of the most popular magazines amongst the old lags in Durham.

‘Wrong. He got it for his mother in South Africa. Sends it to her every week. You’ll be writing to her. Let’s go back to the beginning.’

We moved up to ‘Background, Education and Career’ at the end of the room where the sideboard would have been.

‘Never trust these schoolteacher fellows, can you?’ Harper said to himself, running his eye down the paper. ‘Always something whacky there.’ He paused. ‘But of course that was your stamping-ground, wasn’t it? I forgot. Anyway, as regards his “career”, we’ve got quite a few papers on that. And there’s bound to be more in his flat and his luggage. You can bone up on it on the boat.’

‘What about his flat?’

‘He’s packed nearly everything. What he isn’t taking is being stored. Pickfords are coming tomorrow. The only people you should be meeting. You’re off the day after.’

‘The keys and so on. The rent?’

‘All paid up. Keys go back to the Traherne estate office in Welbeck Street. It’s not a service flat. No porter.’

‘And what about all his friends?’

‘Think he left last week. Didn’t McCoy tell you?’

‘They may write to him. Or visiting firemen. They know he’s gone to the UN.’

‘Have to make sure you don’t give them a bed then.’

‘Relations?’

‘Really only his mother. In Durban. He typed most of his few letters to her and you’ll have his signature off pat when you start.’

‘And nobody else?’

‘Yes, his father’s family. Scottish, from outside Aberdeen. An uncle and cousins. The uncle comes down every second year to London for the Calcutta Cup. So you’re all right there. Two years to go till the next one.’

‘Must have been someone he was closer to. At the office.’

‘Oh yes. He had a lot of friends. But he was British, you know — colleagues, you understand. Kept his distance. Gave a drinks party for them all before he left. They’ll have forgotten all about him in a week.’

‘And no women. You really think that’s likely?’

‘Not no women, Marlow. I didn’t say that. None we’ve traced, that’s all. You may be luckier — what with all these new singles bars I hear about in New York. The point is, Marlow, this fellow didn’t cultivate close friendships. For the job in New York he had to keep himself as clean as a whistle. Then he could start living. Now let’s see the film and the recordings.’ Harper drew the curtains and started to fiddle incompetently with a projector at the end of the table. ‘Give you some idea of the living man.’

They were all street shots, mostly in the Marylebone area: coming out of his apartment, going into restaurants, walking in the little park behind the ugly Kellogg building in Baker Street, where the film car couldn’t follow him. He disappeared among a crowd of old pensioners sitting in the sun on benches and one could just see his head bobbing away behind the shelter in the middle. Another sequence followed him down the High Street in a shower. A girl came towards him, trying vainly to open an umbrella. They nearly collided. Then he helped her with it.

‘Gallant,’ Harper said. ‘Thought she might have been a contact.’

Once Graham seemed to look straight into the camera for a long moment, standing at the kerb, about to cross.

‘They always do that some time or other. Can’t see a thing of course. Gives you the creeps though. Notice the way he walks?’

‘How?’

‘He doesn’t hang about — looking for green stamps, bargains in the windows and so on. Not even in the antique shops. Always seems to know exactly where he’s going.’

‘Unusual?’

‘It can be. We thought at first he knew he was being followed. You don’t slow down then.’ Harper was depressed at the man’s decisiveness. ‘It’s as if he’d mapped every pace down to the last foot before he left home.’

‘Why not? You said he was out to enjoy himself. Why waste time?’

There was another shot of him now, coming out of a Sicilian restaurant in Frith Street.

‘Mafia I suppose. He’s with the mob, not the KGB.’

Harper was disgusted. ‘I don’t know what they were paying him for.’

‘Not your typical rat, is he? — crawling along alleyways in dark glasses with a ․38, moseying round Wimbledon Common looking for letter drops. It’s upsetting.’

They’d collected some of Graham’s radio tapes and documentary films from the COI and, more daringly, a recording of him ordering dinner in Chez Victor.

The voice wasn’t like his walk. I was surprised. There was no speech hesitancy, but it ambled rather, tended to double back; it seemed intentionally oblique and diffident, rushing into high notes over the contents of an hors d’oeuvre; slumbering, almost dead, in its comments on a beef casserole. I wondered what gave it this vivid yet indecisive character before deciding that Graham had all the varied tones and rhythms of a natural actor who yet loathed self-advertisement.

One felt, in his accents, some huge sense of excitement within him which he wished to restrain, as a liability in dull times and as a danger to his work. The little dramas in his voice had been put there as an eccentric diversion, which, because they so nearly mirrored his obsessive taste for life, would all the more certainly put people off the track of this, his real nature. Graham’s mild histrionics were a role indeed, covering all his real history. He knew what he wanted on the menu all right, but he wasn’t going to let anyone know of his enthusiasm.

‘So?’ Harper drew back the curtains.

‘He’s nothing much like me.’

‘Apart from all his Mid-East experience. And being a teacher and a Reports Officer — like you. And the coat, Marlow. If the coat fits … And it fits you pretty well.’

I stood up. I had forgotten I was still wearing it.

‘There’s food in the kitchen. And the bed’s in the usual place. The others will be here in the evening.’

Harper went out and locked the door. I watched him from the window, crossing the road, going down towards Oxford Street. He stopped and talked to a man on the opposite pavement.

McCoy arrived with a small man called Croxley just after six o’clock. McCoy was impatient. The small man behaved as if he’d been sniffing gas leaks and looking round such dust-covered apartments all his life.

‘Had a good run through with Harper?’ McCoy’s dramatics were so thin.

I said, ‘Yes. We couldn’t find the fellow’s shoes though.’

‘What do you want his shoes for?’

‘I’m getting everything else about him — why not his shoes? Somebody who knew him — first thing they’ll notice: I’ve got the wrong feet on. It’s a point.’

‘You’re beginning to enjoy it all, are you, Marlow?’

‘I know. You’d like to put the smile the other side of my face.’

McCoy left shortly after. ‘I’ll give you his shoes,’ he muttered. I think he felt he was slipping.

‘How do you feel about the man?’ Croxley said when we had got into the dining-room. The light was still bright and slanting with long shadows outside. We’d had an extra hour of daylight all winter, on European time, and now it was really beginning to tell. I wished I’d been able to make better use of it.

‘He seems to have been a likeable fellow.’

I was fed up with McCoy and Harper, but Croxley seemed to have wider sympathies.

‘Yes. Yes, he was. All this’ — he looked round the line of boards — ‘can’t give more than a trace of him. But we like it — thinking of people as bits of paper. Photographs.’

‘It’s the curse of the age.’ And Croxley sighed too for bureaucracy.

‘All you need from these are the factual details, or as much as you can absorb. In case there are queries. But the real business, you’ll have to create that yourself.’

‘Queries?’

‘Yes. I imagine McCoy only touched on it. The “stayer”. The man who contacts you. He may have some way of making sure of your identity.’

‘He may have seen “me” before. Awkward.’

‘No. Not on the job you’re doing. Won’t know you from Adam. That’s absolutely the point. He’ll just give you the names Moscow wants a check on — potential “unreliables”. And we know from Graham that most of these KGB people, not necessarily all Soviet nationals, are currently placed in the UN, either in the Secretariat or in one of the delegations in New York. That’s why Graham was aimed for the job. The stayer will probably be in the UN too. So he’ll have time to check up on you before he makes an approach.’

Croxley sat at one end of the table thumbing through some notes.

‘These transcripts aren’t of much use. What checks this contact may make I can’t say. Graham didn’t know, wouldn’t know. So it could go wrong from the first; he may never make a contact. On the other hand, in the nature of your KGB job, the stayer should know nothing about you or your past. Graham was let lie fallow for years precisely in order to avoid the chances of any substitution, so they won’t suspect that, nor will the stayer. He’ll just have been told your name and number in the UN. You see, Graham had no identity among his own, so you too should be safe enough.’

‘Who does Graham report to — and how?’

‘Only to the few very senior KGB men who were involved with his recruitment and training.’ Croxley paused, as though sorry for some deserving party who had been left out in the reading of a will.

‘And you have their names?’

‘Yes. We have his name.’

‘I suppose that’s how Graham lost his shoes?’

Croxley looked at me for a moment, sadly. Then he suddenly found his place again.

‘A senior KGB officer stationed in Beirut who recruited Graham in 1952 is the crucial figure; he runs Graham, though Graham said he hadn’t seen him for more than ten years. A man named Alexei Flitlianov. He has some mild cover job with the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow. Allows him to travel about. In fact he heads the KGB’s Second Directorate, their internal security division — as well as a satellite security bureau — which Graham was working for — quite outside the main organisation, reporting only to Flitlianov. This fellow comes to America from time to time. He’d be coming to hear from you, probably a couple of months after you get there. Graham didn’t know exactly when. Let’s hope we can get the word to you when he does. In fact though, with any luck, you should be out of it all by then. And we should have the name we want.’

‘Not names?’

‘Well, yes, the names he gives you. But the stayer — that’s the man we really want. That man will have more names in him than any Resident. He’ll have been passing names for years, dealing out the execution cards, never playing the game himself. And that’s what makes it practically impossible ever to get such a man. He’s never involved in any action. He’s just a walking list of KGB operatives.’

‘But he’s never going to give me his name. I won’t even see him. I’ll just get a message. Over the phone.’

‘Maybe. And in that case we’ll just have to settle for putting the squeeze on the people he gives you. On the other hand, I have a feeling you will meet him. He’ll certainly come face to face with you, without your knowing it. Besides, where can he phone you? Only at your UN office, since he won’t know your home number. Those are practically open lines for the KGB — and for the CIA. He’s not going to risk it.’

‘Just give me an outside number to contact him, then. A call box between certain times.’

‘And risk being picked up at that number, between those certain times? No, I think you’ll see him. I don’t think he’s going to risk phoning you — or writing anything down on paper. But if he does, well, we’ll just settle for the names.’

‘You call these KGB men they want checks on “potential unreliables” — when we get their names, are they going to be all that use to anybody? Surely we want the names of the reliable men?’

‘Just the opposite. You think it out. The KGB is doing half our work for us — pinpointing their weak links, the people in their networks open to pressure. Now your contact with us, when you get any names, is through Guy Jackson, one of our men, already in the UN Secretariat. He works in the Secretary General’s political department, African Section. And you should be able to meet him quite openly — informally since you’re both on the British quota to the UN — and professionally, since your Reports work can easily be made to coincide with his interests at certain points. He’s been briefed on all this. You’ll have no trouble there. And he’s your link in New York if anything else untoward happens.

‘Now, let’s go through the details of your UN posting. I have all Graham’s papers here on that — seems like a good job, lot of money, tax-free, and a lot of allowances. Even without a family.’

‘I hope I won’t have time to enjoy it. And — the family won’t need it.’

A little nervousness moved over Croxley’s face.

‘Yes. I remember. Your wife. You were with Skardon four years ago, weren’t you? Got you twenty-eight years. I thought it might have been a frame-up, that. I think he did too. But the Crown insisted. Rotten business.’

‘My department insisted.’

‘Comes to the same thing.’

‘Yes. I don’t suppose the Queen was consulted.’

Croxley opened a folder and drew out a large printed sheet headed: U.N. Secretariat: Salary, Grade and Allowances.

‘And I don’t suppose this will sweeten things that much either.’

‘Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.’

‘They’d have left you in Durham, wouldn’t they?’

‘Yes.’

Croxley looked sad again. He had a facility that way. But it was a true gift. The light was dying now outside, even with the extra hour, and I felt sleepy again. The room was hot, I’d eaten nothing, and the whole long day had done nothing but repeat the promise of summer, full of the free, fine weather I’d thought never to know again. I felt all Graham’s appetites now, and more.

‘Listen, Croxley,’ I said. ‘I’m finished with being locked up. I’m doing the job, so let’s stop this zoo nonsense. I want some air, a drink. I’ll even settle for some olives.’

‘Why not?’

Croxley was like an absent-minded aunt being at last reminded of the real interest of her visit for her schoolboy nephew — a ten-shilling note to blow in the tuck shop. ‘I can tell you about the job outside. There’s a pub round the corner. Wine bar, too, if you like that sort of thing. And a good Greek restaurant next door.’

5

Graham’s apartment was at the top of a narrow, ill-lit, almost grubby staircase, on the first floor, above a firm of medical suppliers in Weymouth Street just off Marylebone High Street. The contrast was abrupt, not because Graham’s rooms were squalid, but because, in the darkness, with the scalpels and wheelchairs spotlit in the window, one seemed to walk into something sharp and anonymous as a hospital only to find oneself immediately translated into unkempt life.

One long front room looked over the street, with a large floppy sofa and two armchairs on an old but genuine Persian carpet. Three small rooms, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom gave off this to the back, their doors, together with the hall door, in a line along the wall like the set for a bedroom farce. At one end of the living-room half a dozen tea chests had been filled with books and papers and with small domestic objects — from the kitchen, the walls, shelves and tables. At the other end, a cabin trunk and three suitcases lay open and half packed with clothes. On a table next to the window were a duplicate set of keys, laundry book and parcel and a note from Pickfords confirming their arrival the next morning to remove the furniture and chests.

I turned the light on in the bedroom which was in the same confusion. The kitchen, on the other hand, was conspicuously clean and tidy. But then, of course, he had rarely used it.

The place had about it all the mundane doom of departure — old keys dug up from behind the fridge, last laundry lists and senseless, busy notes from Pickfords and the gas company. Graham had lived here for nearly ten years. It was hard to credit this in any measure of personal time. His jumbled possessions had reasserted all the predominance which they had had on Graham’s first confused day here, which they would always have in the end. They had been kept at bay by the force of his life in the place. Each moment he had spent there — active or even in sleep — the pots and pans, the furniture, the dirty shirts and the toothbrush had cowered from him, camouflaged in unwilling order. Now, as if sensing his demise, they had bloomed about the apartment with the speed and rapacity of weeds on a ruined estate. The armchair was an ambush finally that had once held him comfortably with a gin thinking of the evening — the sofa a booby-trap that had been carte blanche for many girls in all those ordered years.

Then the voice rose from the bedroom next door, suddenly and sharply, a man angry in a hard north-country way:

‘Tell her I’ve left the country!’

It was one of those few moments in my life that I wished I’d had a gun. Instead I looked around for something. There was nothing except a battery-operated gas light, like a child’s ray gun. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do with it.

‘Leave it,’ the man shouted again. ‘Keep away from the window. And stay there. If anyone comes, tell them to get out.’

He was expecting the gas man or Pickfords sooner than I was. What a fool I’d been — going straight into it again, the oldest trick in the world, taking you at the last moment just when you felt in the clear. The voice was McCoy’s of course. He’d left the other apartment hours before and had hidden in Graham’s bedroom. Now his real plan for me would emerge. He went on in a different voice, dramatically confiding, really establishing his role in some wretched play. I’d hardly have credited him with the imagination but excitement will reveal quite unexpected resources.

‘The windows were closed,’ the voice said heavily. ‘The heat struck up at them from the linoleum. There was a stink of rubber and wax. One curtain was slightly drawn.’

I looked around the kitchen. Everything was almost exactly as he said. I wondered how on earth he could see me through the wall.

‘All right, McCoy,’ I said, hoping to calm him. ‘Take it easy. I’m here. Come on out and tell me all about it.’

But instead he continued: ‘Gaunt reached out to pull it.’ I was sure now that McCoy had lost his head, become the mad paranoic that I’d felt had always lain at the bottom of his character.

‘The calendar on the wall advertised a firm of Dutch diplomatic importers …’

I moved my head a fraction. The calendar in Graham’s kitchen was by courtesy of a local delicatessen. McCoy seemed to have lost his grip completely. I stole towards the living-room and stopped just outside the bedroom door.

‘… it’s like a prison cell, he thought; the smell was foreign but he couldn’t place it.’

I swung the bedroom door open softly with my foot.

‘“Well I am surprised”, Gaunt was saying. “This is Mr Harting’s room. Very gadget-minded, Mr Harting is”.’

I went in and saw the radio next to Graham’s bed. It was a powerful mains receiver connected to the light switch which I had turned on at the door. BBC Radio 4: A Book at Bedtime. The announcer came in: ‘You can hear the next episode of John le Carré’s A Small Town in Germany tomorrow evening at eleven o’clock: episode three — The Memory Man.’

And I was sorry then, for a moment, that it hadn’t been McCoy — that I hadn’t come back among him and Harper and Croxley, into a world of devious ploys. For Graham’s apartment was appallingly arid, so empty of everything, that one might even have welcomed McCoy’s deceits into its vacuum as evidence, at least, of life. The place badly needed people, arguments, chatter, even lies. Now it was just four walls where all the clues, like Graham, had been packed up and put away.

I spent most of the next thirty-six hours unpacking them, looking for some real leads to the previous man. In the tea chests there were a great many papers, mostly copies of his African reports, but not many letters, apart from his mother and one or two other people.

There were some yellow Kodak folders with a collection of rather uninteresting photographs of Graham and his family, together with the original negatives — the two seemed not to have been touched since they’d come back from the chemists thirty years before: childhood cameos for the most part: Graham at the zoo, the boy and the monkeys both grinning badly; Graham shivering on a Scottish loch, a boy from one of Arthur Ransome’s stories.

There were other folders, too, packed tight with the detritus of life, odds and ends that are kept in the hope of a fascinating maturity — copies of his school magazine, a reference to his tennis skills in the junior championships, his University notes and the beginnings of a diary he’d kept on his first arrival in Beirut as a teacher. I thought this might prove significant but it stopped after the first few pages which included nothing but the usual traveller’s notes on the more obvious aspects of the city and its history. His university papers, too, suggested an intellectual approach which was traditional, even dull: a model student marking time.

Graham from the first seemed intent on creating a very different image: something at once more formal and less true to himself — the image of a man with safe, unambitious appetites. He must, in fact, have entered his cover in boyhood — prolonged the natural adolescent differences with his parents in his hidden profession. And there were, of course, no documents on this lifelong disguise, no clues which suggested Graham’s real animation. He must have intentionally destroyed everything, the smallest item, which could give a lead to his real political character. The image here was of the completely reliable civil servant, the hack without inspiration or any other deviant quality. And yet one knew that he had been otherwise — that beyond his real politics he had been a happy man: a man sure in his own small pleasures, certain of the wider folly and frail in any other belief. And of this creed I could find nothing either, as though Graham had looked on such optimistic evidence as damning as the phone number of the Russian Embassy found in his notebook.

But I had my answer next morning. A collection of letters came for Graham that had been delayed for more than two months in the national postal strike earlier that year — business letters and bills for the most part, and one from his mother in South Africa. But three of the letters — or rather one long letter in three separate parts — were quite different, from a woman, without signature or address, postmarked Uxbridge, the large sprawling handwriting falling over the pages in a long hurry. These were the real clues I’d been waiting for — something no one could have foreseen. As I began to read them I realised I had left Harper and McCoy well behind now, feeling Graham’s real identity coming over me properly for the first time.

Dear darling — he didn’t find out, he doesn’t know. I’ll write and even if this strike comes on it doesn’t matter — you’ll just have to read these letters like a book later, whenever you get them. I won’t say anything rash — just I must, I want to write. I’ll have to put up with him for the moment, that’s all.

It’s as it was before we met — a terrible depression, living in a continuous drizzle from one day to the next, when I thought it would never happen again — you know, being excited — not knowing that there were even going to be good days again whenever I saw you. And when we loved each other, that it was going to be so easy, willing a thing — that it had nothing to do with disguise and cheating, I mean — with hotel bedrooms and porters in the middle of the night and all that. It wasn’t being in a strange place at all. We made up everything — absolutely — between ourselves.

The point is I won’t be with him for ever, not for any longer than can be helped, he knows that. And that length is for the children, as soon as I can be sure of a proper settlement over them. I hate all this legal business. But having gone through with it in the first place legally I’m determined to get out of it properly in the same way. That’s a habit.

It’s a habit too, the remnants of a stiff background as much as other needs, that makes me write to you in this almost indecipherable way, not giving a name or address and so on. I don’t want you to get involved in some boring divorce case with adultery as the reason. I want the grounds to remain ‘incompatibility’ or whatever — the truth just, of a bad marriage, and not the fact that I met you halfway through it. The facts of us should have no bearing on my failure with him — that you and I were so quickly together in hotels: that shouldn’t come into it legally, or in any way except for us. It was dead with him long before you arrived. I’ll go on with this later.

Who was this woman? How long had she known George Graham? There were no answers to this. One could only imagine. How many months or years had they been slipping in and out of back doors and hotel beds, phoning on the dot at midday, two rings and the next one is from me? How long had there been the business of codes on the telephone, poste-restante addresses, and slipping her letters into the box next Mac Fisheries in Uxbridge on soaking Monday mornings? I hadn’t expected the clandestine everywhere in Graham’s life, with women as well as with Moscow. Couldn’t he do anything straight? But then I supposed, like all such lovers, they would have said it wasn’t their fault.

A married woman, husband, children: Graham hadn’t had much luck — fighting and losing on two fronts, the personal and the professional. And these letters were the only clues to the affair, the only lifelines left, written to a man who was another man now. It was beyond irony.

Wednesday

It’s now six years since that party for the Africans in your office when we met. That man you brought back with you from Kenya working on the film with you, the one who was so keen at being at ease with whites that he did his best to get off with me, while you just stood there. He nearly succeeded too, one of those Belafonte men in a Nehru jacket, you know, without a collar, edged with gilt braid. Pretty handsome. Your secretary brought him over, Sarah something who had such dark eyes and spoke French. And I thought, I was sure, when they came across to me, that she was yours — you know, in that way. And that was the first time, the sense of disappointment. I felt it then before I ever thought of wanting you: a sudden feeling that I’d been caught doing something guilty, I didn’t know what. And then I knew what it was: I wanted to be with you and not Belafonte.

I looked up Graham’s curriculum vitae. He had come back from East Africa in the spring of 1965 — six years of clandestine effort, emotional and sexual. I wondered if the woman was really being true in thinking that hotel bedrooms and hall porters had added nothing to their relationship. Deceit will lend all the more impetus to an affair when we openly admit and discount that element in it from the start, for what we do then is to indulge in a stronger excitement than simply the illicit, which is to anticipate, to visualise, the strange wallpaper above the bed rather than waiting to be surprised by it.

But certainly there was nothing casually indiscreet about it all. Six years of such dissembling was proof of gravity and application at least, and these are real attributes of passion. Graham, of course, hadn’t ever risked a note to her, I thought. It wouldn’t have been in character. But I was wrong: these letters was where his real character lay, reflected back at me now in the daring intimacies of remembered affection. These were Graham’s proper secrets besides which my own and Harper’s inventions paled.

Saturday

… ‘Thank you for your letter’ — I feel like a secretary — ‘of the 17th. inst.’ I picked it up OK. Yes, Africa. Of course it was mostly South Africa for me — he and his parents and the high plainsland before the children came. The Kruger National Park. And the Elephant did all the nutty things then that they did with us on that trip we managed in East Africa — waddling across the road that evening with their great wrinkled backsides, our hearts stopped, the car inches away from them; the leopard with its eyes in the headlights for a second before it disappeared into the long grass; the snake we crunched over later on outside the game lodge — stomach-turning — and the three lionesses creeping round the waterbuck in the mists by the river next morning …

I was reminded of all that — and of some of the happy early years I had with him when we were a good deal more merry than we are now. He was someone in the country then, now just something in this city. He and I so nearly stayed out in Rhodesia there, farming and shooting, an animal life in every sense. And there are regrets, I’d be pretending otherwise — not for the better, because more simple life — it was a pretty mindless sort of existence we had — but regrets for all the horizons of the time. That was 10, 15 years ago, of course, before Sharpeville, before Vorster and the concrete mixers took over, before we knew much about Africa, knew or cared anything about the dark side of it, as we have to now.

We had an unreasoning Arcadia: for you Africa is a laboratory where the whole future of the continent has to be displayed, tested, catalogued. But in fact what you propagandists are doing there is making up the gunpowder, preparing the blood baths. I’m not running away from what will happen in Africa as a result of the old comfortable colonial paternalism and your new ‘development’. Just the opposite: I know what will happen: that when they have finished killing themselves out there as a result of both our efforts, whoever is left afterwards will really start concreting the grass. That’s what ‘progress’ will have amounted to, democracy or whatever other name you give the lie: somebody will be ‘free’ all right: the wrong people, in a world not worth living in.

I was surprised at this ideology. The affair seemed to have had far wider dimensions than those of a double bed. I had pictured a woman formidable in desire, perhaps, but not in political spirit. It seemed an unlikely relationship, this between a Marxist and an old-fashioned colonial Tory. Yet was she that? She seemed to be correcting my thoughts on her even as I read her letter, as though she were close to me, hearing her voice in the next room:

Thursday

I am not afraid of the future. I am not the ‘Natural Tory’ you once called me. It’s simply a determination to be happy, and having come half-way through life I’ve proved certain ways to this end, travelled some of them, and don’t believe I’ve got anywhere near the end yet. And those ways, that map, is for me most often in the past; in things half done then, not in new shapes and forms. We think we have experienced the past just because, willy nilly, we have lived through it, that we have completed it. But we haven’t. There were hundreds of turnings off the main street which we knew about then and never took. I want to take them now — not to re-live anything — this has nothing to do with nostalgia — but to live now all that was unlived then.

Pickfords removal van interrupted me later that afternoon, clearing the place out, leaving only the basic furniture that had come with the flat. Afterwards I didn’t feel like going on with the letters. I packed them up in his suitcase, along with the rest of Graham’s data. There was a last meeting with McCoy and Croxley opposite at their look-out post and then the Southampton boat train first thing next morning.

‘Well,’ McCoy said pompously in the fading light, ‘anything new in your researches?’

We were sitting at the dining-room table again, surrounded by Graham’s shadowy remains. Croxley got up and turned the light on. Graham’s shoes were on the table.

‘Nothing,’ I lied. ‘But I see you’ve filled in a missing piece.’ I saw Graham’s bare feet now at the end of a body hanging from a rope.

‘But you are getting the hang of the man?’ McCoy said abruptly.

‘Oh yes. I’m beginning to see him very well.’

We went over all my routines again, checking everything once more. It was Croxley who nearly upset things at the end. ‘The postman,’ he said. ‘What did he bring Graham this morning? The strike’s finished. We saw him come.’

‘Yes. A lot of bills.’ I reached inside my coat, ‘I nearly forgot. And a letter from his mother.’

‘We’ll settle those.’ I handed the envelopes over, and Croxley looked through them.

‘Not much in eight weeks’ post,’ I said. But I didn’t press my luck.

‘He wasn’t the writing type,’ Croxley said. ‘In his position you don’t commit yourself, least of all to written confidences.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Just bills from the Gas Board.’

‘And his old mother in Durban.’

I was sorry to deceive Croxley.

‘Come on,’ McCoy broke in. ‘You’re not writing an obituary of Graham. Get into his shoes, Marlow. And go!’

The ship left at midday. Yachts were far out in front of us, coloured triangles heeling right over in a sharp wind and spray of Southampton water that did nothing for us at all. We had gone far beyond the natural elements in our steel hulk, were already a world within a world. The yachtsmen were real: they would go and they would turn round when the afternoon began to die far out, coming up the water in the evening on another tide, leaving the salt on their lips, like the memory of a kiss, tasting it as an elixir they’d missed all winter, the acid flakes summoning up long after nightfall in the club all the risks and pleasures of the day.

But for me the huge ship was a prison again, of another sort, and I gazed as longingly at the sea that morning as I’d watched the sky move past my Durham window. It was one of those moments when, in middle life, one makes a promise to renew the buried athlete in oneself, swears brief fealty to some natural order, thinking, just for a few minutes or so before sleep, that tomorrow one will break the cage of self, leap out of it at a bound — into falconry, mountain climbing, yachting or even golf. So, even in escape, in gliding down the water, feeling the first small butts and tremors of the channel, I wanted some other and greater escape.

I didn’t bother with lunch that day. I was so tired. Instead I lay down in my cabin amidships and took out the woman’s letters again.

… we walked to the top of a hill in Tsavo Park, with the warden and his stories about hippos on the banks of the Nile, where he used to be. Do you remember? How he and his wife met one walking by the river and hit it with his walking stick on the nose — and then hit it a second time. ‘Now I’m absolutely certain,’ he said, ‘that if you stand up and face these animals nine times out of ten they’ll break.’ A Jack Hawkins figure in an old bush hat and a Land Rover. The air was so crisp in the evenings, when it got cold and dark within half an hour, and the cedar roared in the grate, the Tilley lamps hissed, and people chatted and laughed over their beers before dinner …

I couldn’t quite make it out-the writer’s style, the knowledge; this recurrent African theme. There were the obvious images of space and freedom and something lost. But that wasn’t all. What had they been up to? A shooting safari? Who was this woman, what was she like? What else had happened in Tsavo National Park — and what, precisely, had happened at all the other times they’d spent together which I didn’t know about? I was already beginning to suffer the onset of that blatant curiosity that comes with shipboard, or any other enclosed life, though it might have been nothing more than the dregs of my profession stirring again, the never-dying taste for the curious that is the essence of the trade.

Falling in and out of sleep as the ship slid down the channel, the waves starting to boom gently on its flanks, I tried to fill in the gaps in her letters as in Graham’s notes and memos, trying to properly compose their affair like a Maupassant story or a new Brief Encounter.

I had to complete Graham’s reality in myself, polish it, make it shine perfectly. I had so far an unformed part, handed out by the script editor, the lines of character briefly drawn, and for my own survival I had to research the role to its limits. Very well, then. I would start by inhabiting Graham’s most intimate secrets — by imagining, inventing them.

… We had met that spring six years ago just after I’d come back from a trip to Kenya: under the chandeliers in the huge salon on the first floor in Whitehall: glasses falling about the place, the long table at one end littered with bottles, half a curtain drawn against the glare of evening light from the river; Africans standing up everywhere through the arid chatter, as significant on the horizons of the room as baobab trees on their own plainsland: the rich African’s Africa; the shapely, dusky confidence. And this woman had somehow stood out from all this, talking to Belafonte from the Voice of Kenya Radio who was doing a script with me. She had risen above this expensive gathering so that I had noticed her as easily as a potentate on a throne as I walked towards her with my secretary …

At what point had I realised that she was married, that her husband wasn’t with her? — when she had said something and looked at me candidly, pushing her hair backwards over each ear in the quick movements I was afterwards to become so familiar with, fingers moving from the parting in the middle of her forehead, raking the dark strands sharply several times either side as though seeking a way through undergrowth, looking for a path which she had to follow urgently. There was something of a hurry in her. The eyes always moved, were always swinging or lifting, like a commander at the head of an armoured brigade pressing into new country. She was commanding then? Yes, but with a deprecation, almost an apology, as though she had taken over the lead perforce, simply because the other officers had fallen by the way. Something around five feet nine inches, then, in a red and gilt brocade Kashmiri waistcoat, a smock dress with a lace bodice. Why not?

In the days that followed, in the empty spaces of grey and uneventful ocean, in the short times between one meal and another, in the good moments after dinner when I was by myself in one of the six bars, I passed the time by living the on-and-off incidents of the affair, building detailed pictures of the abrupt times we had spent together. This after all, I thought, was a story I had been licensed to invent. Luckily she and I had never managed to spend long in each other’s company — I should have needed a world trip to deliberate that — so there was no need to construct a continuous tale, with its flats and soggy shallows. I need invest only in quick and startling snapshots of desire, swinging the glass hurriedly over the bad times, quickly isolating the heart that mattered. I could indulge the slender moments, the thefts from ordinary time, which are the flavour of such secret appetites. I didn’t bother with the corollary: the husband rifling through her desk and laundry, the detective lurking in the laurel driveway. I contrived a properly salty and reckless scenario, such as any proper affair demands.

… we were eating together, somewhere outside London, an inn not far from the river which we’d been out on in a boat that afternoon. She had grazed her finger on the gunwale, or a splinter from the oar had pierced it just below the knuckle, and she’d bandaged the cut, from the hotel’s first-aid kit, wrapping up the fine bone of her long middle finger in a neat cocoon. And that night, lying on her back, hands raised across the pillow as in some vicious hold-up, the white cotton roll stood out awkwardly, temptingly, the last piece of clothing in a long desired nakedness.

For most of the first two days at sea I played with this woman, trying to piece together her relationship with Graham, with me — unwilling to free her from my imagination until I had properly completed her, fulfilled her destiny as a real person. Her reality had come to obsess me.

But then on the third evening, with more wine than I needed for dinner, I realised it was pointless, useless. I could invent only her physical traits, and some few imagined circumstances in which she had her being — nothing more. She was as void of any actual character as Graham was of his own identity. Only I was real. I had spent so long inventing affection and involvement in the isolation of Durham jail that I had been unable to stop the process in my first days outside.

Blue weather came half-way across the ocean as we cut through the gulf stream on the southerly route. I spent the first part of the morning walking the deserted decks and the second on a deck chair reading some of the books Graham had packed for his journey. Anthony Burgess’s Malayan trilogy, The Long Day Wanes, proved rewarding; Joyce Cary’s The Case for African Freedom I found less easy going. I kept well clear of organised ‘games’ in the afternoon and the casino in the evening. Instead I visited the cinema, the swimming-pool and the sauna, and rode much on a mechanical bicycle in the gym.

And I realised that the first few days out from Durham had been the dangerous time, when the sense of freedom had almost overcome me, inducing impossible visions, of falconry and bright women. I had gone on, as I had done in prison, imagining life, reaching out for it in places where it could not have existed: I had let my imagination run away with me. Now, gently, I was learning to see and take things as they were, to be happy in reality — alone, slipping off the skin of the past as we sighted land and glided through the Narrows towards Manhattan, a free man for the moment on the ship; unattached, unencumbered and unobserved.

Alexei Flitlianov had watched the man carefully, from a distance, during his last days in London, when he had seen him taking over Graham’s identity, and throughout the voyage across the Atlantic. He could see him again now, standing up with a crowd of other passengers by the starboard rail as the huge ship slid beneath the Verrazzano bridge, the city rising brilliantly in the distance.

Who was he? What was he up to? What would his contacts be? He would go on following him very carefully until he found out. For in him now, not Graham, lay all the dangerous keys to his future.