Legacy (7 page)

‘Not straight away. I didn’t see him for a while. And then all in a rush.’

‘Did he pay you from the start?’ Russian officials were lowly paid and meeting Claire’s rates must have been a struggle.

‘Not at first. I wanted to encourage him, you see. That’s the sugar-child bit. I thought he was nice. I still do, cunning sod though he is.’ She lit another cigarette.
‘You’re not in league with the income tax, are you?’

‘No.’

‘And the KGB aren’t going to duff me up or anything if they find you’re on to it?’

‘No. Has he ever mentioned the KGB or anything to do with intelligence?’ She shook her head. ‘Or has he ever asked you to do anything unusual?’

‘I told you, he’s very straightforward like that. Not like some of them, wanting you in plastic wrappers and whatever.’

‘I mean, has he ever asked you to find out anything for him, or get anything, or get to know anyone?’

‘Can’t think of anything. He doesn’t ask questions much. Nor does he like being asked a lot, either. But I do sometimes, just to tease him.’ She smiled.

Others joined them in the lounge and he ended the evening counting out her money in Park Lane. She agreed, as if it were a mere matter of course, to report on Koslov. He tried to hand over the
wad of notes surreptitiously, without the doorman seeing.

‘Taxi home?’ she asked, once the notes were in her bag.

He took out his wallet again and handed her a pound note. ‘Keep the change.’

She grinned and waved the note at the nearest cab.

Avoiding the doorman’s eye, he went straight to his room where he made his own contact notes on Hilton paper. There was no need now to stay the night but the room was paid for and the
large wide bed looked greatly preferable to his mattress on the floor in Queensgate.

‘I hope you are not lonely in there tonight,
monsieur
,’ she had said with a smile as she got into her taxi, resuming her Chantal persona and theatrically holding out her hand
to be kissed.

C
olin Newick, formerly a novitiate monk, touched his glasses before speaking. ‘No, but it was an unequivocal set-up by Gerry. Heartless.
“Pick up a stranger in a bar,” he said. “That’s all you’ve got to do. Get his identifying details without his realising you’re doing it and without him getting
yours. It’s a bit ritzy, the bar in question, so look smart.”’

As he touched his glasses again he caught Charles’s smile. His habit had been mercilessly highlighted when he was interviewed on film by a former ambassador during an exercise.
‘Don’t you start,’ he continued. ‘You haven’t even got specs. What makes it worse is that everyone who has has started doing it back to me and then I can’t help
doing it even more. It’s contagious, like walking alongside someone with a limp. Wait till you need glasses.’

Charles ordered two more beers from Harry, the Castle barman. They were in the mess before dinner on a Thursday, normally a good evening because Friday was effectively a half day and the
forthcoming weekend was free, with no exercise.

Colin described how, in a velvet jacket borrowed from Desmond Kimmeridge, he was directed to the roughest and least ritzy of dockland pubs. There he was rebuffed and all but set upon by men he
tried to speak to until he feigned toothache, got the publican to recommend a dentist and spent the rest of the evening hearing the tale of woe that constituted the publican’s life history.
‘Got all his details, though,’ he said, ‘in spades. More than I wanted. But it was rough, that place. I’ll get Gerry back somehow. Make him think I’m having a raging
affair with French Kisser.’

French Kisser was Gerry’s nickname for a girlfriend acquired during his recent posting in Paris. Revealing neither her real name nor her nationality, and vague on other details, he
chronicled with morbid pleasure the decline of their cross-Channel relationship. His ambiguous jocularity made it impossible to know whether he was putting a brave face on something he
couldn’t stop himself talking about, or simply found it an entertaining conversational football.

‘You’re lucky you missed that exercise,’ said Colin. ‘They’re bound to clobber you with something later. Ian Clyde got the wrong pub, of course, missed the minibus
back and lost his notes. This world should be grateful he gave up medical practice. The next should notice a drop in arrivals.’

They were joined at the bar by Rebecca. All the men were in suits and that night she was the only woman. She wore a pleated tartan skirt and her hair was newly washed and untied. Charles and
Colin briefly competed to sign her drinks chit. Charles won.

‘On condition you let me buy a bottle of wine with dinner,’ she said. ‘It’s awful here otherwise. No one ever lets me buy a drink.’

‘Maurice Lydd might,’ said Charles. Lydd, a smooth and genially plump former journalist from Glasgow, was already known for his practised sharpness in the matter of expenses.

‘Actually, he did.’

‘Apparently he keeps a bottle of whisky in his room so that he can come down with a glass already in hand and avoid the danger of having to buy a round if he goes to the bar,’ said
Colin. ‘Of course, Rebecca’s problem would fade away if we had women on the course. Gallantry would become too expensive. Why don’t we recruit female intelligence
officers?’

‘We do,’ said Rebecca, ‘in theory. Apparently, we used to quite a bit after the war and SOE and all that, then they had a run of disasters and stopped. Arabs wouldn’t
speak to them, couple of nervous breakdowns, one ran off with a target, usual sorts of thing. So they decided to recruit only from within. Which is why we have a sprinkling of senior women and a
shortage of younger ones coming up. But they’ve decided to start recruiting again, according to Personnel.’

Colin looked about. ‘Where are they, then? Can’t find any, I s’pose. Don’t know where to look, or something pathetic.’

‘Why don’t you apply for the intelligence branch? You’re a graduate, aren’t you?’ Charles asked. ‘Unless you’re put off by us.’

‘When I can be a secretary and do a job like this, looking after all you babies and reading your files and knowing all about you and no other woman in sight? I wouldn’t have anything
like this access to you if I were one of you. I’d have to be much better behaved.’

‘You’ve been disappointingly well behaved up to now, so far as I can see,’ said Colin.

‘Change your optician, Colin.’ She smiled. ‘No, I’ve sort of half thought about bridging but I’m waiting to see how the course pans out, to see if I like it. I
might hate it. Meanwhile, I think I can put up with being the only woman around. I’m not about to burn my bra over it.’

‘What’s this about bras?’ Christopher Westfield joined them, slipping his arm around Rebecca’s waist. ‘G&T, while you’re about it, Charles. Ice and
lemon.’ He turned to Rebecca. ‘We’ll have to call you Need-To-Know. It’s all you ever tell us about anything. But will you tell us when we really do need to know?’

‘Depends, Chris. What d’you think you need to know?’

‘I need to know if you’ll be my exercise wife in a little plan I’m hatching for Danish Blue. I need a wife to support my cover.’

Danish Blue was a travelling exercise for which they were having to prepare their own legends, routes and itineraries. There was intense suspicion that unpleasant surprises were to be sprung on
them.

‘You’d better ask your non-exercise wife about that.’

‘Can’t. She doesn’t need to know. If you don’t agree I thought I’d ask Gerry if I could borrow French Kisser for a few days.’

‘You’re welcome to French Kisser.’

‘What’s she like? Have you met her?’

‘No, but I’ve heard enough about her.’

Harry rang the ship’s bell for dinner. Despite the Castle’s military origins, a preponderance of ex-naval staff made some of its traditions nautical. Thus, although the mess was not
a wardroom, its bedrooms were cabins; the parade ground was not a deck but leaving the Castle was sometimes described as going ashore. The ship’s bell, taken from a Second World War
destroyer, had been donated by an early post-war course.

Charles and Colin sat either side of Rebecca. Gerry, who was late, took the last empty place opposite. ‘All done?’ he asked her. She nodded. ‘Great stuff. You missed a good
exercise yesterday,’ he told Charles.

‘So I hear.’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll arrange a nasty surprise for you later, won’t we, Becks?’ He laughed.

‘I’ve a bone to pick with you,’ Rebecca said quietly to Charles.

The phrase had uneasy resonances from childhood and youth, when it was used by parents and teachers to presage something more serious than the playfulness suggested. The last time he had heard
it was on his father’s lips, when his father had learned that Charles was – against all expectation – joining the army, but not the Royal Engineers, his father’s corps. His
father had used the phrase jocularly but beneath it, Charles realised, there was some hurt. ‘What?’

‘You shot me.’

‘Not you. Just your picture.’

They were taught elementary two-handed instinctive shooting with standard Browning 9mm pistols by Little Tom, the towering ex-Marine.

‘Makes a break from sitting on your bums and listening,’ Gerry said.

The morning of Charles’s return Little Tom had inserted a full-faced picture of a smiling Rebecca amongst the films and stills of armed men they had to hit. Everyone had withheld fire
except Charles, who had shot her in the mouth and left eye.

‘I thought I was meant to.’

‘No one else did.’

‘It was a manifestation of secret desire.’

‘Not a very nice way of showing it.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Little Tom says you’ve used a Browning before so I suppose you’re allowed to show off.’

‘Well, that was in Belfast. A place apart. Seems a long time ago.’

After dinner there was a case history concerning a senior Soviet bloc official who had survived undetected for thirty years as an agent and whose career was crowned by his secret exfiltration
and retirement, along with the latest diplomatic ciphers. Charles sat near the back with his pipe – a habit he had recently affected partly because of a sense that he lacked habits –
unlit. It reminded him of Hookey’s unlit pipe during their discussion. Perhaps the lighting of pipes whilst working was a sign of boredom and disengagement, something you didn’t do if
you were stimulated. Roger, he noticed, notoriously prone to postprandial drowsiness, had left his cigarettes open but untouched.

The story was told by the last of the agent’s many case officers, a tall, saturnine, good-looking man, now in Personnel. At the end he read extracts from the agent’s comments on his
handling over thirty years. The most serious criticism was of the frequency of changes of case officer, mostly dictated by the bureaucracy of postings and careers rather than by the demands of the
case itself, which was undeniably important.

‘On the one hand,’ concluded the case officer, ‘there’s some truth in the service’s dictum that no agent should be considered properly recruited unless he or she
accepts handover to a new case officer, demonstrating that the relationship is by then with the service rather than the individual. Nor should any agent dictate someone’s career. On the
other, an intelligence service which gives greater priority to its own administrative tidiness than to its casework is arguably not fully serious.’

Fully serious or not, secret service was turning out, Charles reflected, to be a pretty good choice. He enjoyed the course and liked the people, while the work so far had given him no cause for
the excited unease he’d felt before his first interview. People he knew who’d gone into business or other professions seemed more routinely exploitative and unscrupulous than this. It
answered, in fact, with everything he’d liked about the army – patriotic endeavour in a cause in which he could believe, a sense of belonging, the subtle satisfactions of service
– but without the detailed domination and invasiveness of military life. Now, in the intelligence world, he felt he was at the heart of the Cold War. He did not think of himself as extreme or
aggressive but he’d always had a desire to seek out the front line, wherever it was; a desire to be there, and to be able to feel later that he had been there. He sensed the same in some of
those around him.

They were let off soon after lunch on Friday. Charles was to spend the weekend at his mother’s house in Buckinghamshire and he looked forward to the leisurely drive in the Rover he had
inherited from his father. It was the big P5, the ministerial Rover with the thirsty V8 engine and enough wood and leather inside to furnish a London club. ‘The drawing room on wheels,’
his father had approvingly dubbed it. Charles kept meaning to exchange it for something more suited to his age, pocket and unaccompanied status, but there had been little time for looking around.
Anyway, it had been his father’s.

‘Going all the way in that?’ asked Desmond Kimmeridge, whose two-seater Mercedes was parked nearby at the edge of the parade ground.

‘About five or ten miles. Then the AA pick me up. You?’

‘House party in Shropshire, with prospects.’

‘Who?’

‘There’s only one and she’s very need-to-know. Hope you make it.’

‘Hope you do.’

Desmond grinned as his car hood slid silently down.

Conscious of the amount of washing he was bringing home, Charles stopped in Marlow to buy flowers for his mother. His sister, Mary, was also to be there and, as it was the first he had seen of
her since her engagement, he bought her some roses. There was a good tobacconist near the florist, so he bought an experimental tin of Balkan Sobranie and an unnecessary new pipe, his third since
the course had started. He felt agreeably relaxed and alive, with the light-heartedness that comes of youth, health, independence, financial sufficiency, a sense of purpose and as yet no burdensome
responsibility.

His widowed mother had remained in the family home, a 1920s house off a track in the Chiltern hills behind Marlow and Henley, backing westwards over the child’s-picture-book Hambleden
valley. His parents had bought it soon after the Second World War. His father, a surveyor, insisted that good houses of the twenties and thirties were the best of any period, combining Edwardian
spaciousness, detail and craftsmanship with better understanding of materials, heating and plumb-ing.‘Georgian for damp elegance,’ he would say, ‘Victorian for freezing solidity,
but these have warmth and dryness as well as grace and space. As places to live in, you can’t beat ’em.’