The Cambridge Theorem (33 page)

“The car? It runs well, very fast. A little stiff through the gears. The other vehicle?”

“I called today. We get it tomorrow, a place called Leytonstone, east of London. Then we meet Painter, tomorrow night.”

“That should be interesting. What do you have to eat? I am half starved.”

“Help yourself,” said the older man, replacing the pistol and turning again to the television, which gave out a sudden roar as a contestant advanced to the next round. “I couldn't wait, so I went and bought something.”

“Pizza? Pizza? We get to go abroad for the first time in two years, we have unlimited expenses, and you buy pizza?”

“What can I do? You are late with the car, this shit-hole is miles from anywhere, I am on foot. Go out and get something else, if you like.”

The taller man stepped over the bag of weapons and wireless equipment at his feet and took a position opposite his friend on the end of his bed. He tugged a slice of pizza free and raised it vertically until the strands of cheese snapped. “You have beer or vodka?”

“In the bathroom. Ah look, this is sickening. This man, he gets everyone excited about these toast makers and televisions he gives away to this idiot. It is not even a Japanese brand.”

His friend was walking to the bathroom. “The fish-and-chips is better than pizza, you should know, Alexei,” he said, his mouth full. “Or the pork pie. The pork pie is especially good.”

Smailes had been right about the news value of the Bowles inquest.
The Evening News
that day was preoccupied with page after page of news of the British task force which had set sail for the Falklands, and the furious diplomatic efforts to avert war. The report on the inquest had merited a few paragraphs on page six under the weak headline “Dead Student Was Brilliant But Unstable—Coroner.” Smailes was relieved that nothing had emerged about Bowles' research, because the absence of any splash meant he could continue to test those waters discreetly, if he chose. Although it was nowhere stated explicitly in his files, Smailes had become convinced that Simon Bowles had been seeking to identify a British spy of the same importance as the four Cambridge compatriots who had been unmasked to date. That would square with Iain Mack's theory of a ring of five spies who had burrowed into the Establishment and had been the crowning accomplishment of the Kremlin's courtship of British intellectuals in the thirties. It might also explain the ellipsis of Bowles'
Gang of Four…
file heading, if the “gang” were generally accepted to comprise five. Smailes felt somewhat frustrated that Bowles' file did not discuss the careers of these men after after they left Cambridge, and in his curiosity turned to other sources.

In one of the Bowles research texts, Smailes found a compelling section that recounted in detail the activities of the four men who had done so much damage to Western interests throughout their careers. It was an improbable tale. The most unlikely was Guy Burgess, flamboyant homosexual and drunkard, who would often boast of his work for the Comintern at the wild parties he threw at his West End flat. Meanwhile he had pursued an erratic career in the BBC and Whitehall before his defection with Maclean in 1951. The feckless and neurotic Maclean had risen steadily through the diplomatic service until he held a senior position in the British Embassy in Washington after the war. He returned to take a position in London in 1950, by which time an error by a Soviet cipher clerk had alerted the CIA to a high-ranking spy inside the British diplomatic mission. By the time British intelligence had conclusively identified Maclean as the mole, serious damage had been done. As a member of the Committee for Joint Atomic Development in Washington, Maclean had access to high-grade scientific intelligence that helped accelerate Soviet development of the atom bomb in the late forties. When Philby learned of the impending interrogation of Maclean, he despatched Burgess, who was staying at his house in Washington, to orchestrate his escape. Burgess effectively blew Philby's cover and career when, against orders, he accompanied Maclean all the way to Moscow. Blunt, it appeared, had refused to defect when encouraged to do so by his Soviet masters after suspicion had settled on both him and Philby after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. He had left active intelligence work at the end of the war, and now relished his eminent position as head of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. He was also in a happy, stable relationship with a former guardsman who shared his flat above the Institute. All told he survived eleven interrogations before he was definitively unmasked in 1964 and forced to confess. When the story was finally told in 1979 he was stripped of his knighthood, his official duties and his Trinity fellowship in the furor that ensued. He was not punished in any other way and asserted to the end that he had not betrayed his conscience.

The most successful and damaging of the Cambridge spies, however, was Philby. He had succeeded brilliantly in disguising an overtly communist past (he had even travelled to Vienna in 1934 to join the communist guerrillas fighting the fascist Chancellor Dollfuss) and adopted the mantle of a neoconservative in London before the war. He travelled to Spain as a freelance journalist during its civil war, from where he wrote pro-Franco despatches. Then, under Burgess' aegis, he was able to join the burgeoning intelligence community at the beginning of the war, eventually finding himself head of the Iberian section of the Secret Service, or MI6, by 1941. His crowning accomplishment, of course, was to inveigle himself into the position of head of the newly-established section nine, the Soviet counterintelligence unit, in 1944. Thus Philby was able to effectively neutralize any measures contemplated against Russia or its satellites in the closing stages of the war, and was strongly suspected of betraying the Bletchley intelligence to his employers. In the Cold War that began immediately after Germany's surrender, Philby's treachery defeated a number of counter-revolutionary moves attempted by Western intelligence, including a joint MI6/CIA-backed invasion of Albania. He had duped his colleagues so successfully that he began to be groomed as a future Director-General of MI6, first as station chief in Turkey and then as the prestigious liaison officer with the FBI and CIA in Washington. And despite the suspicion that fell on him following Burgess' disappearance, he was able to defy his interrogators and even achieve partial rehabilitation as a field agent in Beirut, where he worked under journalistic cover for four years. He finally defected in 1963 when incontrovertible evidence of his treachery was provided by the high-ranking Soviet defector Anatoli Golitsin and confirmed by a former Party member in London.

Smailes read that another distinguishing feature of Philby's career was that he was neither homosexual like Burgess and Blunt, nor bisexual like Maclean, despite Burgess' occasional drunken claims to the contrary. Indeed, he seemed to have considerable heterosexual charisma, was married five times and fathered seven children legitimately—five in England by his second wife Aileen Furse and two in Moscow by his Russian wife Rufa. It was also suspected that Philby, a tireless womanizer, may have fathered other, illegitimate offspring. And whereas Burgess and Maclean were given sinecures in Moscow and led dreary, aimless lives, Philby was made a general in the KGB and remained close to its inner circle, and was rumored to be a confidante of its current chairman, Yuri Andropov. It had been asserted that Philby had been the most successful and damaging Soviet agent in history, and even with his limited knowledge, Derek Smailes could understand why.

Smailes had two basic concerns when he contemplated the circumstances of Bowles' death. The first was that there was little evidence, despite Baddeley's assertions, that Bowles had been in any extreme frame of mind in the days and hours that led up to his presumed suicide. He had made trips to Oxford and London during those days, the second of which was important enough for him to cancel out of a family reunion, but the results of both trips were unknown. His second and more serious concern was that whatever Bowles had learned had seemed to inspire him to some sort of work from which he was loath to be interrupted on the evening of his death, and to which he returned from the college bar as soon as he was politely able. That work was either buried somewhere in the files Smailes had removed—Bowles never dated his work—or was missing altogether. Derek Smailes could not resolve in his mind the question of the stolen file, but it seemed a strong possibility that if someone had not tampered with Bowles' files while he was drinking in the college bar with his friends, they had done so the following day after Smailes had completed his inspection of the room. What had been stolen, the incriminating file that Bowles had completed before he committed suicide? Or was this after all a murder? What was most tantalizing to Smailes was the possibility that Bowles, as with his Kennedy investigation, had found missing pieces of evidence that had allowed him to compose a Cambridge Theorem as telling in its conclusion as the Kennedy Theorem had been, and that the discovery had somehow cost him his life. Had a
Cambridge Theorem
file, a triumphant summation that in fact identified a Fifth Man, been stolen from the room together with a Bletchley file? Had a Bletchley file been stolen to disguise the theft of a
Cambridge Theorem
file? Try as he might, Smailes could not remember seeing a file with this distinctive heading. He was convinced he would have remembered it.

He wondered whether the Bletchley note were not some pregnant truth like the geometric analysis of Dealey Plaza, a postulate that insisted on some other formulation than that accepted by the Establishment, and that the precision tool of Bowles' intellect had turned over a rock from beneath which something had leapt out to kill him. But if Simon Bowles had been murdered then the circumstances were peculiar indeed because it seemed certain Bowles had typed the suicide note himself, and if he had been overpowered and forcibly hanged then the act had been accomplished without damage to the room or to the victim's body. Smailes contemplated making inquiries with Allerton's brother in Oxford and at Somerset House in London, but he knew Dearnley would never approve the trips. He could make visits on the sly, but he ran the risk of alarming Bowles' family and angering George if word got back to either of them. And objectively speaking, Smailes had to concede that the truth was probably more ordinary, that the likelihood was still that something horrifying had happened to Bowles between the hours of ten thirty and one on the night of his death to cause him to take his own life. The conclusion rankled.

Doubts about the real circumstances of Simon Bowles' death continued to grate on Smailes like a toothache. One evening at home he was scanning Bowles' archival work from the Oxford library, hoping to strike something unusual, when he realized suddenly that for all his thoroughness, Simon Bowles had been denied one excellent source of information about activities in the thirties that was nevertheless available to him. These were the files of the Cambridge police force. All criminal records had been computerized for many years now, but the old manual files containing hard copies of all the criminal investigations conducted by the police force since its inception were stored in one of the government buildings out on Brooklands Avenue, Smailes was fairly sure. There might even be Special Branch files, he realized. Special Branch activities had come and gone at Cambridge over the years, but it seemed likely that there were some Specials stationed in town during the thirties, given the political turmoil of those years. They had certainly had a detachment at the station during the student unrest of the early seventies, and Smailes was aware that a couple of officers had begun operating out of the Cambridge station recently, to monitor the political activity of the peace movement people around the American bases at Molesworth and the Alconburys. The new cruise missiles were not due to be deployed until the following year, but the women down at the Greenham Common base were already beginning to attract a lot of publicity with their continuing demonstration. Nothing major had happened yet in the Cambridge area, but he knew the Specials liked to be on the scene early so they could infiltrate a group while it was still in its formative stages. No one said anything about the plainclothes men who operated out of an office on the third floor, but no one needed to. All the CID detectives knew who they were and what they were doing.

However, one big obstacle Smailes faced if he wanted to dig around in the old records was George Dearnley. Dearnley would have to sign off on any request to visit the archive, and was unlikely to react favorably if Smailes told him he was following up leads from the Bowles case. The case was thankfully closed as far as George was concerned, and he was certain to get irritated if he thought Smailes were still spending time on it. Neither could Smailes legitimately claim that twenty- or thirty-year-old records had any relevance to an investigation of a Sikh lorry hijacking. Any scenario he could think of had the same outcome—George would refuse to sign the authorization. Smailes chewed on the question for a couple of days and then made his decision. The afternoon before his next day off he strolled into Gloria's office, when he knew George was away at one of his regular meetings at head-quarters. He asked her casually for a Criminal Records Division Authorization Form, which she produced from a bottom drawer of one of the file cabinets in the bank behind her.