Making Enemies (27 page)

‘I don’t give a horse’s arse what you think, lad. I want you out of ’ere now. Do I make myself clear?’

The woman who’d opened the door reappeared, holding a mug of tea. ‘I’d hear the young man out, Nat,’ she said. ‘It never harms to listen.’

She came into the room and sat down on the sofa. She patted the seat for Naismith to sit next to her. ‘His bark’s worse than his bite, dear, don’t mind that. I expect you’re something to do with Mr Watson-Jones, are you, dear? Yes, I thought so. Money, Nat.
Money and power have been in bed together since the world began. Never spit at money, I say, if you know what’s good for you. Now come and sit down, Nat, and stop being a silly boy.’

‘Women,’ Naismith said to me. But he sat down none the less and took his mug of tea.

‘My name’s Vi, dear. You can call me Vi. Everyone does.’

Her comforting, motherly appearance and the sweetness of her smile made her an unlikely ally. I sat down and began again.

‘I wondered why you wrote that article,’ I said.

‘Never ’ad to work for anything in ’is life,’ Naismith said. ‘Born with so many silver spoons in ’is mouth it’s a wonder ’e didn’t choke to death in ’is ’igh chair. ’E’s everything I despise, that man.’

‘Now, that’s not right, Nat, is it?’ Vi turned to me. ‘He likes to think he’s a great hater, does Nat. But he’s a real Cadbury when you get to know him. Hard on the outside and all soft and gooey inside. Aren’t you, love?’

‘You keep your mouth shut, Vi.’

‘Nat.’ A silent battle of wills was going on. I waited. ‘Why not tell the young man what happened,’ she said.

Naismith gave her a look which was a mixture of affection and despair. ‘It wasn’t my idea, that piece, I’ll admit that. I was asked to write it.’

‘Who asked you?’

‘I don’t tell tales out of school, lad.’

I didn’t like Naismith. He was too pleased with himself to listen to any opinion that didn’t agree with his. What baffled me was how a sweet woman like Vi could put up with his bluster.

‘What are you after, dear?’ Vi asked. ‘You want something, don’t you? I can tell. You aren’t Sagittarius, are you?’

‘Have you seen this article?’ I asked.

Vi shook her head. ‘All this politics stuff goes right over my head, dear. I leave all that to his lordship here.’

‘It takes an axe to Watson-Jones. Blood all over the place. You can’t expect him to ignore it. He’s not that kind of man. You know he’ll come after you and anyone else involved. He’s got the money and the will and you’ve made him angry enough. I can’t believe that’s what you want him to do.’

‘I ’ardly started in that piece,’ Naismith said. ‘I could say ’ell of a lot more in the ’Ouse and there’s bugger all you could do about that.’

‘He’ll come after you outside the House. That’s what his lawyers are advising.’ It was a reckless statement, but I had to puncture Naismith’s confidence somehow if I was to scare him into telling me who was behind the article and why.

‘’E can do what ’e likes. I’ll be ready for ’im.’

It was bravado and Yorkshire stubbornness, I was sure, but I didn’t know how to shake it. I appealed to Vi. If there was a weakness in his armoury, I hoped it was her.

‘I’m here to see if we can close this thing down as quickly and quietly as we can,’ I said, trying to sound conciliatory. ‘Surely you can see the sense in that?’

‘I knew you and I were going to get along,’ Vi said. ‘As soon as I saw you I did. Are you Taurus, then?’

‘You tell your boss ’e can do what ’e likes,’ Naismith said, raising his voice. He was angry with me now. ‘So long as ’is wife lets ’im use ’er money.’ He turned to Vi. ‘What kind of a man is that, eh? Sponges off ’is wife.’ I could hear disgust in his voice. That sort of thing wasn’t done in Yorkshire.

‘You come with something up your sleeve, don’t you, dear,’ Vi said, responding to my overtures. ‘It’s us, isn’t it? Me and this old hunk of Yorkshire pudding. I’m his fancy woman, dear, and I don’t mind who knows it. I care for the old bugger, which is more can be said for that Lady Muck in Yorkshire, I can tell you. I’ve looked after this old man for years now and I’m too old to be hurt by what anyone thinks.’

‘Are you?’ I asked Naismith, hoping I sounded unscrupulous and threatening. He took his time to reply. Putting Vi in the firing line was not what he was after.

‘I’ll be frank with you, lad. There’s many people know about Vi. It’s one of those secrets you get about Westminster. Everyone knows and nobody says. I’m not the only one, I can tell you. It would make your blood run cold if you knew the things I know.’ He was sounding chummy now – we were all boys together, we could keep our locker-room secrets dark, couldn’t we? ‘If I could ’ave married her all those years ago, I would.’

‘Get away with you,’ Vi said teasingly.

‘But I couldn’t and that’s a fact. Least, not without giving up my seat. So Vi and me, we came to an understanding. That’s all. No ’arm in that, is there?’

His change of tone told me he feared that the rules of the club
he’d joined so long before might not be shared by younger men like Watson-Jones. The cosy certainties he’d lived by could now be undermined, if not destroyed, by the harsher realities of the post-war world. Naismith was on soft ground. It was the only opening he’d given me, so I took it.

‘Watson-Jones is one of the new breed,’ I said, hoping I sounded convincing. ‘The old loyalties don’t apply any more. The world’s changing.’

‘Aye, lad. And not for the better, either.’

‘People like him are making the rules now.’

‘That’s what I’m told and I don’t like it.’

‘This isn’t your quarrel, is it?’ I said. ‘We both know that. Why not let those who want to pick a fight with him come out of the shadows to face him on their own?’

‘What are you saying, lad?’

‘I’ll guarantee Watson-Jones’s silence if you tell me who’s behind this business.’

‘Very clever, lad. Very nice.’ He smiled indulgently at me.

‘What about it?’

‘That might put me in the clear with you, lad, but I’m in the shit with them, aren’t I?’

‘So there is someone behind all this?’

‘I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.’

‘No deal then?’ It was an appeal and he took it as such.

‘Not that I can see, son, no.’

‘That doesn’t seem right to me,’ Vi said. ‘My stars said I’d meet a handsome stranger today and he and I would get along.’

‘Then your bloody ’oroscope made a cock-up this time, didn’t it, girl?’ It was said with affection. Naismith put his arm round her shoulder and pulled her, unresisting, against him. ‘You wouldn’t want to hurt my little girl, would you?’

‘If I don’t go back to Watson-Jones with something,’ I said, my exasperation breaking through, ‘he’ll come after you like an elephant gone mad. I can’t stop him.’

‘I may have been a fool to put my name to this piece but if I say any more I’ll make an even bigger fool of myself. There’s too much at stake for that. I’d like to help Charlie, ’e’s a good man even if ’e does support the wrong cricket team. But there’s now I can do for you, lad. You’ll have to leave here empty-’anded.’

He’d called my bluff and there was nothing I could do about it.
I rang Charlie as soon as I got back to Strutton Ground. He sounded distant and reluctant to talk.

‘If you’ve got someone with you,’ I said, ‘I can ring back later.’

I sensed a moment of hesitation. I was sure he was not alone. Perhaps Watson-Jones was with him again.

‘No. Go ahead.’

I explained I had had no luck with Naismith. ‘He won’t talk. But he admitted he wrote this thing for a favour. So we know there is someone behind it, though not who.’

‘Progress,’ Charlie said. ‘Good. Sleep on it. We’ll talk about it in the morning.’

I was dismissed. It wasn’t like Charlie to do that. I put it down to exhaustion and the illness. If anyone had an excuse to be short-tempered after a day like this, Charlie did.

I rang Sylvia Carr and she suggested I go to her flat for a drink, ‘though God knows why you think I should be able to help you.’

‘I want you to help me for Charlie’s sake,’ I said when I got there.

‘What did old Charlie ever do for me except say no?’ It wasn’t a question to which she expected an answer. I asked her if she’d read the article about Watson-Jones. She hadn’t and she took great delight in my description of it.

‘Why didn’t they ask me to write it?’ she asked. ‘I’d have done a far better job.’

‘It wasn’t Naismith’s idea. Someone put him up to it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve talked to him. He admitted as much.’

‘Then why have you come to me?’

‘Who might have talked to Naismith?’

‘How should I know?’

‘These are your people, Sylvia. You’re part of their world. You know your way around them. I don’t.’

‘Meaning I’ve been to bed with too many of them, is that it? I’m sorry. That was cheap and uncalled for.’

‘Someone struck a bargain with Naismith. Help us and we’ll help you. That’s why he won’t talk.’

‘We all know what Naismith’s after. He’s been waiting for years with his tongue hanging out. Arise, Sir Nat.’

‘Who has the power to deliver that?’

‘Who has the power to make Naismith believe he can deliver? That’s the real question.’ I waited for her to answer. ‘Senior members
of the Party. A Party grandee in the Lords. Very senior civil servants. Someone with connections or influence, a route to the decision-makers. It’s a pretty messy business, Dan, whatever the public face. A lot of mutual backslapping goes on.’

‘I need names,’ I said.

‘I know you do,’ she said.

‘They’re your friends.’

‘You make it sound as if I’d committed an offence.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘You’re an unlikely sleuth,’ Sylvia said. ‘And I’m no Watson to your Holmes.’

‘Will you help me?’

She kissed me lightly on the cheek. ‘All right, darling, you’ll see I’m a woman who keeps her word. I’ll see if I can find your villain for you. But I’m promising nothing.’

‘Why in God’s name waste time on an unknown general who poses as much of a threat to the future of the Soviet regime as a cold in the head?’ Rupert said angrily at the start of our weekly meeting. ‘He’s far too low down the pecking order to count.’

We were in for a bollocking and we got it. Time wasted, resources squandered, getting nowhere, blind alleys. We weren’t spared the full force of Corless’s frustration.

‘The Soviets have suffered a massive setback through the explosion at their laboratory. Maybe there’s an opposition to Stalin, maybe there isn’t. My masters want to know what’s going on inside the Soviet Union. Who’s hard, who’s soft on the nuclear issue. When I come to this Committee for answers, what do I find? You’re running around like headless chickens after a second-rate general no one’s heard of. Well, that isn’t good enough.’

We were instructed to redirect our scant resources into a search for credible opponents to the system, and to come up with answers rapidly. Wearily we returned to our rooms, reopened the files and began a new investigation. Mysterious dates, suicidal soldiers and commanders of tank regiments were out of bounds.

‘We’re victims of Rupert’s theory of the immaculate conception,’ Adrian Gardner said with more bitterness than usual. ‘Cock-up begets cock-up.’

A day later
The Times
’s Moscow correspondent reported the accident in laboratory D4, and there was immediate public speculation about the impact of this on the Soviet bomb and whether the subsequent delay (estimated, as we knew it would be, by Professor Stevens and others at between six months and a year) would create any political opportunities. Stevens wrote a piece arguing that our national energies would be better deployed using this unexpected
event to reach agreement with the Soviets on the total banning of nuclear weapons than joining an arms race in which our participation would probably come close to bankrupting us.

Corless’s anger erupted again. ‘This is one of the men responsible for setting up the infrastructure to make the British atomic bomb.’ He banged the flat of his hand on the opened page of the newspaper. ‘Reading this, anyone would think he worked for the Soviets.’ He looked round the room in fury. ‘Now, I wonder where I’ve heard that before?’

Within hours we learned on the Whitehall grapevine that Stevens’s theme found favour with those Ministers who opposed the level of expenditure on nuclear research, and they were looking at ways to exploit this new situation. Large sections of the opposition were displeased. Among the more vocal was Watson-Jones, who saw the building of a British bomb as an essential condition if there were to be any hope of permanent peace in Europe. The Oxford Union held a debate: that ‘This House believes that now is the time to negotiate a nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union’, and the surprisingly high majority in favour was front-page news in the national press. At a deeper level, what we were hearing was a heart-felt cry for some kind of certainty in what looked to be a very uncertain world; for the removal of a new and terrifying threat to our lives.

*

I returned to my flat one evening in a mood of exhausted frustration after a day that had got us nowhere, and dug out the report I had asked Danny to write after his visit to Finland.

His verdict on Krasov was uncompromising. The man was a liar and should be neither believed nor trusted. Whatever he told us should be viewed with the utmost scepticism. However much it hurt, it was a judgement I had to sympathize with. I reviewed the evidence once more, this time with the cold eye Danny demanded.

It was hard to accept that our assessment of the damage to the Soviet research programme was not true. A hole in the ground was a hole in the ground, and first Martineau and now
The Times
had confirmed it was there. Dead scientists and technicians could not spring back to life. It would take some time to rebuild D4. But was this the only laboratory where such experiments could be carried out? If the accident had been caused by the Soviets getting it wrong, didn’t they possess the will and the resources to get it right? Wasn’t
it reasonable to suppose that we might be placing too much importance on a single event, that our reading of Soviet psychology at this moment might be wrong-headed? The Soviets were always at their most dangerous when they thought they were in a weak position.

I was on surer ground when it came to the question of an opposition. If the political analysts thought the conditions were unhelpful and we were unable to find a single candidate (apart from General Kosintzev) around whose leadership an opposition might emerge, couldn’t this mean that in all probability there
was
no opposition? It was possible to argue that our enthusiasm for the idea of a new leader was a direct response to our growing distrust of Stalin.

What was unsettling about this analysis was that some weeks after Danny’s meeting with Krasov, Peter had himself confirmed the points in Krasov’s statement that I was now challenging. That was where the difficulty arose. Our trust in Peter was rightly sustained by the continued quality of his intelligence. Again and again, as Corless argued relentlessly in his defence, Peter had proved to be right. The only blot on an otherwise near-perfect record was his accusation against Stevens, and the jury was still out on that one. Krasov’s credibility might not exist, but casting doubt on Peter was going to be next to impossible, particularly if Krasov was the source of the doubt.

The deeper I went, the more I became aware of an uncomfortable truth. The notion that because the Soviets were weakened by the damage to their nuclear programme, they now might be prepared to bargain with the West, even to negotiate a non-nuclear treaty, had little basis in fact. We had no firm evidence that this was so, only a carefully placed suggestion originating from Krasov and confirmed by Peter.

The theory had been cleverly planted on us, my sceptical interpretation went, and it had taken root, as no doubt our enemies had hoped it would, sustained by the verifiable evidence of the destruction of a laboratory. On that firm but narrow base, we had allowed ourselves (deceived ourselves?) to build a dangerously top-heavy construction of theories on which we were now acting
as if they were fact
. We wanted a way out of our own nuclear dilemma, and events in Moscow appeared to provide such a route. It was all too well timed, too neat and tidy. It had none of the roughness of reality, the jagged edges of actual events. In the midst of it all there was something I couldn’t put my finger on.

An hour later my anxieties had formed into a theory, the shape of which was as unexpected as the logic was inescapable and frightening. We were only too ready to believe that the Russians were in trouble and keen to negotiate because of our own reluctance to build a nuclear bomb. Look at the economic drain on an already exhausted country, the argument went, made worse by the American refusal to share their knowledge with us. How much easier and cheaper not to have to build the damn thing at all. What Peter told us about the delay to the Soviet programme and the possibility of internal opposition to the bomb was what we wanted to hear. The intelligence he passed us added up to a solution to
our
problem. That was where we were going wrong. With Peter’s encouragement, we were thinking about ourselves and forgetting the Soviets. All of a sudden I had the impression that we were being deceived into lowering our guard long before the bell had gone for the end of the round.