Author: Peter James
Category: Literature
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‘Well, old boy, you’re in a spot of trouble.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Spot of trouble all right; oh dear, oh dear.’
He did not give me the impression of being a man under arrest. ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.
‘Me? Heard you were in a spot of bother – just popped in – see how you’re getting on.’
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Hot in here,’ he said. ‘Bad on air-conditioning, the French. Can’t understand it – always hot summers, always no air-conditioning. Not much in England either. No. Americans have it. They all have it.’
Wetherby was looking smug. In fact he was looking pretty damn pleased with himself. His arrival in this room placed an extremely odd complexion on things. Extremely odd. He looked decidedly as though he knew something, and I was more than mildly curious to find out what. ‘Will you tell me who the hell you are?’
‘Long sentences, drugs, in France. Very long. Hard labour. Nasty prisons. No remissions. Heroin – minimum of five years. Yes, minimum of five years. Never usually get that. Fourteen, fifteen, maybe less; twelve, perhaps. Not good, heroin.’ He patted his thighs again; it was an irritating habit. ‘Murder’s very bad. Very bad. Still got the guillotine; rarely used, though. Usually life. Long time, life, in France. Twenty years. Maybe thirty. Not good.’
There was a long silence – very long. Oddly I felt calmer. I wasn’t so scared now, scared the way I had been during the past week. There was something about this peculiar man that was comforting.
Then I felt it all welling up inside me again, churning my stomach inside out. I was in here for real. This was a real prison. I was a real criminal. I wasn’t at school any more, about to be gated or caned for a misdemeanour. I wasn’t at Sandhurst, about to get a right dressing down for blowing up a dummy tank half an hour before the Field Marshal came to inspect the exercise. I was a heroin-runner and a murderer. A court of justice would dictate my future and they were going to put me behind bars until well into my middle age. I felt myself quivering, and started hating and loving and hating and loving Wetherby; hating him because he had been responsible for putting me here, loving him because – somehow, somewhere, someplace along the line – he had to represent hope. He had to. ‘Help me.’
He shoved his hands into his mac pockets. He drew his cheeks in and then opened his lips with a popping sound. ‘Not a good place for a young man,’ he said. ‘Not good at all.’
There was another long silence. I waited.
‘You got there early. Very early. Unfortunate. Might have missed the whole thing if you’d arrived there on time. Eleven o’clock you were told. Might have missed the whole thing if you’d gone at eleven. On the other hand, you might not. Lot of shooting. Lot of bullets.’ He pulled a crumpled white paper bag from his pocket and proffered it to me: it contained monkey nuts. I declined. He took one, and started shelling it, slowly. ‘Lot of shooting. Must have handled yourself very well. Very well.’ He paused to munch his nuts. ‘They can’t all have been rotten shots.’ He started to attack another shell. ‘You’re in big trouble, I’m afraid. Don’t need me to tell you. Interpol’s been after this lot for a long time. Long time. Big ring. Big trouble. Heroin. Gun-running. Other things too. Not much in your defence. Judges could be lenient. Twenty years for the lot. That’d be light. You’d be lucky for that.’
‘What’s the way out? Or did you just come to tell me the bad news?’
‘Expensive. Very expensive.’
‘I don’t have a lot of money.’
He broke another shell in half, and shook his head. ‘Money’s no good. Don’t want that. No. Don’t want that at all.’
‘What do you want?’
There was another interminable pause. Wetherby sat back in his chair with a whole handful of nuts to shell. He worked on them one by one. When he had finished he stared me straight in the face. ‘You,’ he said.
‘Pardon?’
Suddenly Wetherby ceased to be an overweight peanut-guzzling slob; his face sprang alive; it was intelligent and tough as iron. ‘We want you to come and join the British civil service.’
‘The civil service? Are you joking?’
‘No, Mr Flynn, I am not joking.’
‘You want me to come and push a pen in Whitehall?’ I was stunned.
‘Not exactly, old boy.’
‘But what do you mean. For how long?’
‘No idea, old boy. But it’ll be better than this. And damn well paid.’
‘What do I get: local planning or child welfare?’
‘Neither, old boy. The Home Office; in the department which deals with security – and I don’t mean locks or pensions – The British Security Service, originally Department 5 of Military Intelligence and better known by its abbreviation: MI5. You’ve heard of it, I’m sure?’
I nodded weakly.
‘We think you’d be a good chap to have on board; need young fellows with drive, initiative. Of course, there’s no obligation on you.’ He reached for another shell. ‘No obligation at all. But I personally think you’ll find it worth a try.’
‘I don’t seem to have much choice.’
‘Well. We’ll see. Put you through the training. If you make the grade, good.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘France has no statute of limitation for murder, old boy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In some countries if a crime is committed and the police don’t prosecute within a certain period of time – maybe five years, ten, fifteen – then the criminal goes scot free. In France they don’t have that. They can go for you tomorrow, or in six months . . . or in forty years’ time.’
I stared at Wetherby a long, long time. His face had slackened again and his interest was once more turned to his nuts. If this was a standard procedure the British Secret Service had a pretty damn strange method of recruiting.
9
I awoke to the strange heavy-breathing sound of the wall-to-wall underfloor heating ducts pumping in a dosage of hot air to keep the temperature up at its present level. Whoever had set it must have suffered from low blood pressure. It was boiling.
I didn’t stir for several moments as I didn’t want to wake Sumpy, then I heard the sharp flick of the page of a paperback book and realised she was already awake and reading, filling her mind at this early hour of the day with the drivelling dialogue of yet another modern romantic novel: ‘Oh Rodney, darling, why don’t you tell Mary about us today?’ ‘I can’t, my angel, it’s the kids’ first day home for the summer vacation.’
For a bright girl, she really read rubbish. Maybe she found it therapeutic, an escape from the pressure of her work. She was an authority on Impressionist painting: a consultant to Sotheby Parke Bernet, on retainer, but she worked mainly freelance, valuing pictures for prospective purchasers. It had its own strains and stresses. Nobody would be too thrilled with her if they forked out a couple of hundred thousand dollars on a painting of a bowl of apples only to later discover it had been done by an unknown child of 4.
‘Morning!’ I said, turning and looking up at her; she really did look terrific in the morning – a great virtue in my book.
She tore herself away from the page to give me a quick peck on the cheek. ‘How about some coffee?’ she said.
‘Sure; and some eggs, bacon, tomato, sausage, fried bread, beans, mushrooms, toast, marmalade and cornflakes to go with it.’ I slid out of the bed and waded through the warm shag broadloom over to the window. I drew back the curtains and stared through the treble-glazing onto a mid-December New York morning. The sky was a stark red; some sleet was falling and there was a thick white frost on the grass below and on the windows of the parked cars. Out over on the Van Wyck Expressway a solid queue of cars crept along towards Manhattan, narrowing to a sausage to squeeze past some obstruction – an accident, probably – that was marked by the twin, intermittent, flashing red lights on the roof of a patrol car.
I got back
into bed, lay against the pillows, and started to gather my wits and my thoughts; the more I gathered them, the more I wished I hadn’t woken up at all. They say that problems look different after a good night’s sleep, and they’re right; mine certainly did – they looked one whole lot worse.
Sumpy got out of bed to go to the washroom. As soon as the door had closed behind her I leaned over for her handbag. I poured out the contents then pulled up the bottom liner, which I’d carefully glued down the night before last, and removed an envelope from under it, then replaced the liner and the contents and put the bag back on the floor.
The envelope wasn’t addressed to me but to my boss, Sir Charles Cunningham-Hope, better known to all by his code name, Fifeshire. I was sure he would not mind my opening it, since he was currently out of any active service.
I held the envelope out in front of me, thankful that nothing had happened to it. It was a soft pink colour, and round the middle of it was a bright blue ribbon, neatly tied into a bow.
Fifeshire was the Director-General of MI5, and was directly answerable to the Home Secretary, currently Anthony Lines. I first met him six years ago shortly after my press-ganging by Wetherby, as he insisted on meeting all new recruits personally and expounding to them his view of the role of MI5, his role, and how the recruit’s role was to fit into the overall scheme of things.
For reasons that one cannot define – some call it chemistry, some vibrations – we hit it off immediately and he took me under his direct wing. I was lucky. Most of his agents had a thankless task. They had rotten jobs – rotten, stinking lousy jobs. They had to grub around the surface of the earth, furrowing and burrowing like maggots and weevils and moles and voles; they froze and hurt and hid, pretended and lied and twisted and turned; they inhabited cheap hotel rooms and expensive hotel rooms; they never had friends and never had wives and children, and were frequently dead within ten years.
My assignments were no different from anyone else’s; they were equally foul. But Fifeshire did at least thank me at the end of each one and dole out generous portions of whisky or sherry, or anything that took the fancy, in his cavernous, oak-panelled, sound-deadened office in Carlton House Terrace, overlooking the Mall and the stone pillbox-shaped and ivy-camouflaged building that had covered the Admiralty communications headquarters, deep in the vaults below, during the Second World War.
But in spite of the cheery reception he gave, Fifeshire always kept a distance. Most agents he called only by their numbers and referred to them only by their numbers, not that he referred to them much. He believed in isolation; that agents should never meet one another; that they should train in isolation, work in isolation and, when necessary, die in isolation.
Fifeshire had a country estate in Gloucestershire and a flat in Wimpole Street. He had never married, to anyone’s knowledge, and worked continuously, never stopping, whether he was in the office, or pacing the floors of his flat, or leading a bucolic weekend as the country squire. He had a missionary zeal for his work, to try and maintain the credibility of British Intelligence, to try and hold it together and build it stronger and stronger.
At his core he was tough as steel, quicker-thinking than any calculator, and ruthlessly hard. At the start of the Second World War he had joined the army and shot through the ranks to Major-General. Before his luck ran out and a German shell removed the head that contained his outstanding mind, the talent was spotted; he was airlifted out of the front into Whitehall and had remained there ever since.
Bombs had ceased to rain from the sky; the war passed and truces were made, but for Fifeshire the war went on, and would go on for ever. Cold war, warm war, bloody war, silent war – it made no difference, it all boiled down to the same thing: survival. He intended to survive, and for that to happen his world had to survive; and for the world to survive on terms he could accept, his country had to survive and be able to stand up and be counted. And so he fought – day in, day out.
In the post-war period, a number of events, highlighted by such major fiascos as Philby, and Eden’s stunning lack of foresight in the Suez crisis, had a devastating effect in the United States on the credibility of British Intelligence; Fifeshire therefore had an unenviable task.
And yet he was succeeding. Since he took command in 1957 all the major Western powers had come to look to him as one of their most reliable sources of information. Whatever they might have thought of the governments and the politicians that comprised them, Fifeshire, and the outfit he had honed and ground and sculpted and built, they listened to.
Facts were what Fifeshire sought to acquire during all his waking hours. He believed implicity in facts. Like Dickens’s Gradgrind, he instilled the message in his pupils; ‘What I want is Facts . . . Facts alone are wanted in life.’ Fifeshire lusted after facts. They were the life-blood of British Intelligence. His agents were merely tools for obtaining them. He wanted to know everything about everyone; no one was to be left to chance, no one to be trusted, not even those who worked for him – especially those who worked for him. ‘What good is the whole of British Intelligence,’ he would say, ‘if there’s one damn spy in it?’
I was deployed to spy on the staff of MI5. For the last six years I had followed various members of staff to shops, to cinemas, to the lavatory, to hookers and massage parlours and mistresses, to holidays in Bognor and Tenerife and Nassau and Moscow; I had seen husbands hanging from chandeliers while their wives beat them with willow canes, and a 60-year-old spinster secretary roller-skate naked around her living room; I had recorded a thousand meetings on sound-tape, video-tape, celluloid, hung around a thousand windswept street corners, eaten a thousand miserable ham sandwiches in ten seconds flat, and I hadn’t yet found a single damn traitor.
But there was one. I was sure of it. Fifeshire was sure of it. And he knew that if he kept on looking, and I kept on looking, and the others he deployed kept on looking, sooner or later, whoever it was would make a mistake.
It was in the fourth year of my work that I ran foul of Scatliffe. He had a hawk-nosed, skinny, wrinkly tartar of a secretary, who looked like a giant eagle that had escaped from its cage. She was one of those very meticulous people who keep everything carefully in its place and a careful record of the place it’s kept in. She was also, I discovered, an incredible hoarder.
She had a large flat in a decaying Georgian terraced house in Westbourne Terrace, off the Bayswater Road. It was packed to the gills with the most incredible rubbish: cartons upon cartons of tights reduced in a Debenham’s sale; hundreds of empty plastic powder puffs; piles of men’s nylon socks, reduced in another sale; rows and rows of different-sized shoes; magazines and newspapers dating back decades; empty food tins washed out and stored away. She had evidently seen the boom in old bric-à-brac and was determined not to miss out next time around.
Under every single object she had carefully placed a hair. By checking the positions of the hairs she could tell if anything had been moved. It had taken me days to search through it all and I hadn’t noticed the hairs. She arrived home early one day, having left work with a migraine, and spotted me leaving the building. She checked the position of the hairs and put two and two together. She reported to Scatliffe that I had been spying on her.
Commander Clive Scatliffe was second in command to Fifeshire. He was a waspish man in his late forties, short, thin and wiry, with greying hair swept back in a rakish manner that didn’t suit him, and made him look like a cross between a concert pianist and a second-hand car dealer. He had small, penetrating, ice-cold eyes, that forever darted around, never looking anyone straight for long; a small thin mouth that pursed tight, spat out words, then pursed tight again. His skin was pasty white, looking like it never saw sunshine, and his hands were small and bony, and rarely stopped clenching each other. He exuded a constant atmosphere of high pressure.
Scatliffe had come up through the ranks from out of left field. Three years ago no one had heard of him. But he worked like a demon, was extremely intelligent,
kissed every ass that was attached to anyone of importance, then followed them round as they turned to say thank you and stabbed them in the back. He had been a close friend of the previous Home Secretary and now had Anthony Lines eating out of his pocket. Few people liked him, including Fifeshire, who never openly declared his hostility towards Scatliffe, but I could tell. The one undeniable fact was that Scatliffe was heading for the hot seat. Even Fifeshire declared that he was his most likely successor. He was professional enough to admire the man’s capabilities, though he made no secret of the fact that his personal choice was Victor Hattan, the well-liked director of Security for SIS.
Scatliffe was mad as hell that I had been spying on his secretary. He hauled me into his office and screamed at me for a full ten minutes. He didn’t care if God himself had instructed me, his personal staff were beyond scrutiny; for them to have to undergo surveillance was a slight on his judgement. He kicked up such a stink in the department that in the interests of peace and harmony the normally unshakeable Fifeshire was forced to soft-pedal and leave Scatliffe and his staff to their own devices for a while.
Some months after the dust had settled Fifeshire told me he felt I should try and make peace with Scatliffe. Ever since the incident Scatliffe had had the boot in for me, unfairly, as Fifeshire agreed, blaming me rather than Fifeshire for the incident. Fifeshire said that he would one day be stepping down – not for a while, but within a few years – and that when he did, Scatliffe would replace him; unless his vitriolic attitude towards me could be softened before then, I would be in for a rough ride.
I told Fifeshire it wasn’t possible for anyone to give me a rougher ride than he himself did. He assured me it was. The way he said it was such that I didn’t bother to argue the point. He’d convinced me.
I was assigned to Scatliffe for a twelve-month period. He was a man with less warmth than a cryogenically preserved corpse. He likened agents to insects, referring to them as common or garden spies, and treated us with as much respect as a gardener tending greenfly with a spray can of DDT.