The Cilla Rose Affair (4 page)

“What was it like?” Wally Green said, leaning forward, cosily. “Give me an idea of a typical day on board the ship.”

Darrow chuckled. “It was pretty grotty, you know. We went in three week cycles—two weeks on, one week off. We each had our own cabin, and we used to eat in the galley with the captain and his crew. We had a TV and plenty of cheap Dutch beer and cigarettes, and the tender used to come out once a week with provisions—newspapers, food. Our lifeline to shore, that tender was—the only way you could go or come.”

“And the ship itself was an old World War Two minesweeper, if I’m not mistaken.”

“That’s right, Wally. The
Cilla Rose
. She ran cargo after the war then went for a refit in Florida. She was Panamanian registered, 150 feet long, 450 tons. I have fond memories of her.”

“And you were on the air for how long?”

“Not long at all, really. Only a couple of months before she sank.”

“And very tragic that was, too. You weren’t actually on board the night it happened.”

“No,” said Darrow, “I was lucky. I had shore leave. A gale blew up in the night and she went down very quickly. There were ten people aboard the
Cilla Rose
, DJ’s, engineers, the captain and his crew, and only three managed to hang on until help arrived. I was devastated, of course, when I switched on the radio the next morning and learned what had happened. I did a great deal of soul searching after that, believe me.”

“Well,” said Wally Green, “on to happier topics. You’re currently celebrating your 25th year on the air, Simon, and we’ve arranged a little bit of a do for you tonight—”

Evan stopped the tape. “The rest is fluff,” he judged.

His son had gone back to the manuscript. “One of your TV contemporaries in the sixties did something at a pirate radio station…didn’t he?” he said, thinking.

“It was McGoohan,” Evan replied, rewinding the cassette. “Patrick McGoohan.
Danger Man
. The last episode of the third season—
Not So Jolly Roger
. They shot it at one of the wartime defence towers in the Thames Estuary—I believe it was Radio 390 at Red Sands.”

“Murder, intrigue and treachery,” Ian said, darkly. “What happened the night the
Cilla Rose
went down?”

“I’d got a message from Mark. We’d agreed on that ahead of time: if something urgent came up, if he was in trouble or he had news that couldn’t wait, he’d radio ship-to-shore with a coded message that would alert me. I’d go out to visit him, and then anything he had to pass along could be hidden in the binding of a book, which he’d hand to me without attracting undue attention to himself. The book that week was
Muirhead’s Short
Blue Guide to London
. I’d just come back from a location shoot in the country when I got Mark’s message. I went out with that evening’s supply tender. There was very little he could say to me openly: he gave me the distinct impression he was being watched very closely. He managed to slip me the book—but when I got back to London, there was no message.”

“Intercepted?”

“Probably.”

“So he was blown.”

“Something happened.”

“And then she sank. Very conveniently.”

“A deliberate scuttling, we always suspected. Either to silence Mark or to conceal something aboard the
Cilla Rose
they were afraid we’d discover. Perhaps both.”

Ian spiked another prawn. “So you’ve been tasked to ferret out Victor Barnfather. What does he have to do with the
Cilla Rose
affair?”

“Barnfather was an up and coming young agent with MI5 in 1966. A contemporary of Simon Darrow’s. I would be very surprised if there weren’t some secrets traded…some tidbits of information that would mean nothing to the average person…but something to the principal players…”

“So you start with Simon Darrow. And then…?”

“Then,” Evan said, sitting down with the telephone and dialling Darrow’s number at the radio station, “we follow the little trail of crumbs all the way to the gingerbread house.”

Monday, 19 August 1991

Evan paid his admission and rode the slow lift to the north landing, wandering casually among the exhibitions detailing the history and engineering feats of Tower Bridge, and the development of London’s docklands. He carried on to the enclosed high-level walkway that connected the north and south towers, where Simon Darrow was perusing the scatterbox jumble of London’s architecture along the mud-brown stretch of the Thames.

He looked, Evan thought, every inch the broadcasting mogul: yacht racing and expensive gold wristwatches, comfortably cool in a blue-striped shirt and canvas-coloured trousers. “Good afternoon, Simon.”

Darrow turned around. The walkway was hot. In the distant summer’s haze, the rounded dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral was barely recognizable. Further to the west, the slim, pointing finger of the Telecom Tower was all but invisible.

“What can I do for you?” he said. He’d been waiting for Evan for half an hour.

Evan produced Yuri Gregchenko’s obituary—a small mention taken from
The Times
.

“Yuri Gregchenko,” Darrow said. “Never heard of him.”

“I’m not surprised,” Evan replied. “He’d apparently heard of you, though, Simon.”

He’d brought the manuscript with him, in a large brown envelope. Withdrawing it, he leafed through the pages, studiously and with a faint touch of the theatrical.

“Here we are, Simon.”

He watched the man’s face as he read Gregchenko’s account of the recruiting of a young, up and coming broadcaster named Simon Darrow who was coerced into monitoring the activities of an MI5 agent installed aboard a pirate radio ship anchored in the Thames Estuary. A broadcaster named Simon Darrow who had saved the day for the Soviets by intercepting an urgent coded message the MI5 agent was preparing to pass on to his Canadian contact.

Evan watched the broadcaster’s face closely, but, aside from a slight twitching of the man’s lips, there was no outward betrayal of his emotions.

“It’s fiction!” he said, finally, forcing a laugh. “Preposterous fiction. Where did you get this?”

Evan took the manuscript back into safe-keeping. “Where do you think?”

“Now you listen to me. I can state categorically that what you have there is a complete and utter fabrication. I don’t know what Gregchenko’s motives could have been in naming me as a Soviet informer, but he’s wrong. I don’t deny being aboard the
Cilla Rose
—that’s where I began my broadcasting career—but I most certainly wasn’t any sort of spy. Good heavens, I wouldn’t know the first thing about it.”

“Not an awful lot to know about spying, Simon. Keep an eye on the target, watch what he does. Steal into his cabin while he’s on the air and remove the message you know he has hidden in the binding of
Muirhead’s Short Blue Guide to London
. Report your success to your KGB contact when you next go ashore. You had shore leave, in fact, the night the
Cilla Rose
went down.”

“Damned good fortune on my part,” Darrow maintained.

“It would make an interesting story, though, wouldn’t it, Simon, if news of this was somehow leaked to the press. Say…the
Sunday Mirror
? Or the
News of the World
? I don’t imagine your old pals in what’s left of the KGB will be all that amused—but then, all sorts of revelations are creeping out of that corner of the world these days.”

“I’ll sue you,” Darrow exclaimed, in disbelief.

“I’m quite certain you will. Your solicitor will undoubtedly advise it, anyway. You’d better be absolutely certain of your innocence, though, Simon—the tabloids revel in a good scandal, especially when the sordid details of a public figure’s personal life are dragged out in court.”

Darrow glared at him. “What do you want, Harris?”

“The name of the Soviet agent who was running you. The details of your meetings.”

“And if I refuse…?”

Evan let his eyes wander across to a discarded copy of one of that morning’s newspapers, headlined with news from Moscow that was already outdated and changing by the moment.

“You,” Darrow said, shaking his head, “you are—”

“A menace?” Evan suggested, pleasantly. “Just doing my job, Simon. Acting isn’t my only occupation, after all.”

“Does your occupation include blackmail?”

“I prefer to think of it as professional advice,” Evan said, easily. He jotted his telephone number down in the margin of the obituary. “Give me a ring when you’ve made up your mind, Simon. I’ll arrange a time and a place that’s mutually advantageous to both of us. I look forward to hearing from you.”

“That’s rattled him,” Ian said, into the small microphone clipped to the inside of his shirt collar. “Stand by—here he comes.”

He took up his position on the pavement as Simon arrived back at street level and began the long walk down to the narrow lane behind Tower Gateway DLR, where he’d left his Porsche.

“Anything…?” Evan checked.

“Negative. He’s going straight to his car. I’ll let you know if he makes any outgoing calls.”

Ian climbed into the van he’d parked several spots behind the Porsche, started the engine, and waited. While he was waiting, he took off his sunglasses, and pulled on a baseball cap, altering his appearance just enough for Simon not to remember him, should he happen to glimpse into his rearview mirror.

The Porsche pulled out and, two car-lengths behind, Ian kept an ear tuned to the intercept device he had installed in the van, a computerized bloodhound using software especially written to track the signals of any mobile phone operating within the national network. Simon habitually talked on the phone while he manoeuvred through the London traffic. His routine had been studied, his daily practices duly noted in the preliminary report his father had worked up in the few days prior to their meeting.

Today he was silent, and Ian was surprised. The plan had been to panic Simon, to put the fear of God into him and then see who he tried to contact for further instructions.

Simon wasn’t playing the game.

Yet.

The darling of British broadcasting maintained two places of residence—a rambling cottage in Epsom and a town flat in Wimpole Mews, W1, next door to Harley Street and not far from what had once been the residence of Stephen Ward and his infamous houseguest, Christine Keeler.

Turning into Wimpole Mews, Simon disappeared. Ian parked the van on the road a block away, then sprinted back to the flat next door to Simon’s, the owners of which had been persuaded to take a week’s vacation out of the country on very short notice. The flat’s upstairs bedroom had been outfitted as a small listening post: receivers were paired to the transmitters inside Simon’s rooms, voice-activated tape recorders occupied dressing tables and chairs.

Clipping on a pair of headsets, Ian sat down on the bed to wait, and to listen.

Still nothing.

He’d have been tempted to believe there was a serious malfunction somewhere in his equipment, had it not been for the peripheral noises in Simon’s flat—the unmistakable sounds of someone pouring himself a stiff drink, having a shower, drying his hair.

There was the sound of a motor on the roadway outside, and Ian got up to have a look. A tall woman with shoulder-length black hair was climbing out of a taxi. She paid the driver, then let herself in through Simon’s front door.

Wife
, Ian noted on his log.
18:45
.

The recorders on the dressing table began to whirr. Mrs. Darrow was in a conversational mood: renovations to the cottage in Epsom, a neighbour’s marital troubles, Simon’s upcoming appearance at a charity benefit, Mrs. Darrow’s recent picture in a glossy magazine, their plans for the evening.

Everything but Simon’s meeting with Evan at Tower Bridge.

Simon had switched on the television in one of the rooms. Ian listened as footage of armoured personnel carriers and tanks in the streets of Moscow was shown, with comments supplied by CNN reporters…as the voice of Boris Yeltsin was broadcast, denouncing the coup…and a source close to the State Committee on the State of Emergency denied rumours that Gorbachev was dead.

Checking his watch, Ian rang his father on the mobile phone he’d brought in from the van.

“I don’t think this is working,” he said. “Simon’s either totally unconcerned or so totally terrified he can’t even bring himself to ask his wife for advice.”

“She probably doesn’t know anything about his previous career, old son. After all, there are things I routinely kept from your mother. The day is young. What are his plans?”

“They’re doing a play tonight and then they’re going back to Epsom.”

“Which play?”

“
When She Danced
,” Ian said, consulting his notepad. “It’s got Vanessa Redgrave in it.”

“Hang on.”

There was a moment of silence while his father paged through an
Evening Standard
. “Globe Theatre, W1, eight o’clock,” he said. “One day in the life of Isadora Duncan.”

“Don’t drive fast in an open car if you’re wearing a long scarf,” Ian said, humorously.

Evan didn’t say anything.

“I’ll let you take over from me as soon as they leave,” Ian said. “I’m going to Epsom. And by the way, you got the story wrong.”

“Which story’s that?”

“
Hansel and Gretel
. The crumbs and the gingerbread house. The children drop pebbles as they’re being led into the forest, and they follow the pebbles back to their own house. The next time they’re taken into the forest they drop breadcrumbs, but the crumbs are all eaten up by the birds. So they wander around lost until they hear a little white bird in a tree singing a beautiful song, and they follow the bird, and it’s the bird that leads them to the gingerbread house. Not breadcrumbs.”

There was another long silence on the other end of the telephone.

“I just thought you’d want to know,” Ian said.

“Go to Epsom,” his father advised.

Wednesday, 21 August 1991

If, Evan thought, Simon Darrow had felt any need to consult with a third party over his dilemma, he certainly hadn’t exercised the option while they’d been listening. In fact, the two days that had passed between the time of their first encounter and now had been remarkably humdrum, the only highlight being the telephone call Simon had made to Evan to confirm an agreed-upon time and place for their second meeting.