The Dark Chronicles (51 page)

It transpired that Severn had used her as a courier, giving her packages to deliver to dead drops around Rome. She told me how she had gone about the job quite happily, not thinking too much about what it might mean – until the bombs had started going off.

‘In Milan?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, ‘this was earlier than that. They were smaller scale. Charles had been frantic and nervous enough already, but now he was at fever pitch. I noticed one morning that he was reading the newspaper very intently over breakfast, and then rushed off to use the telephone. I looked at the page he’d been reading: it was about a bomb somewhere in the north of the country. A few people had been killed, and the thing had been blamed on some Marxist group. Bits and pieces of conversations I’d overheard suddenly seemed to make sense. The next time he asked me to do one of his late-night deliveries, to a churchyard in the south of the city, I opened the package.’

‘What made you do that?’

‘Well, he’d insisted so much that I never open any of them, and I was worried that they might have something to do with these bombs going off. I thought he might be involved in something… outside the remit of the embassy.’

‘Working for someone else, you mean?’

She held my gaze for a moment. ‘Yes.’

I considered this. ‘All right, so you opened the package. What was in it?’

‘Codes,’ she said. ‘Lots of documents in code: one-time pad stuff. I panicked because I couldn’t find a way to reseal it so it didn’t look like it had been opened. But eventually I did, and I thought the chap
who picked up the message wouldn’t notice. But he did, and he told Charles about it, and Charles went completely mad. He screamed at me, asking me dozens and dozens of questions until I just broke down and told him I’d been curious but hadn’t understood any of it. That seemed to calm him down a bit. He made me promise never to mention any of it to anyone else or he’d…’ She grimaced. ‘… or he’d kill me.’

I tried not to think about what sort of marriage they had had, and what had happened to her in this cell. I asked her to carry on.

‘Well, he never mentioned the packages again after that, and I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. But then the message came through that you were being sent over from London, and Charles seemed to panic a little. Towards the end of Thursday afternoon I found myself alone in the Station: Cornell-Smith and Miller had gone home to get ready for dinner in the embassy, and Charles had left to collect you from the airport. Last year, he gave me the combination to his safe as a contingency – if anything ever happens to him, I’m to take everything out and burn it. So I went into his office and opened it. I just had to know what was going on. After looking through several dossiers, I found some one-time pads and documents that contained photographs of some of the drops I’d been sent to. And there were numbers – lots of them. Dates. I recognized them.’

‘The dates when the bombs had exploded?’

‘Yes. But the thing that really scared me was that some of the documents I saw had been stamped with Service seals. Charles isn’t working for anyone else: it’s an officially sanctioned operation, codenamed “Stay Behind”.’

I stared at her, and let the silence envelop me for a moment. A chill crept through my bones.

Stay Behind.
Was it possible?

Yes, I thought. Of course it was…

‘Breakfast in Europe and lunch in Asia!’ cried the ambassador’s wife as the motorboat drew up to the landing-stage. ‘I shall never get used to the decadence.’

‘We do our best,’ smiled Joan Templeton, stretching out an arm to help her ashore. She alighted with an unladylike squeal, but swiftly recovered and handed small bouquets of wild flowers to Joan and her daughter, Vanessa. The ambassador made the leap unaided, then turned back and muttered instructions to the crew, half a dozen young men in starched white shirts and matching pantaloons. They swiftly removed the Union Jack from its position by the wheel, folded it away, and seated themselves cross-legged on the cushions on deck – I guessed they would wait here until required for the return journey.

On land, everyone greeted one another with polite pecks on the cheek, and the ambassador asked Vanessa how she was enjoying her final year at Badminton. His wife, meanwhile, had caught sight of me standing to the side and immediately leapt over.

‘I was
so
sorry to hear about your mother,’ she said, taking my hands in hers and clutching them urgently.

‘It was perhaps for the best,’ I told her. ‘She had suffered long enough.’

She tilted her head and gazed at me for a long moment, her eyes large and liquid with sympathy. I gave a tight smile in return: I knew this was one of many such exchanges I could expect to face
in coming weeks. While we spooks were housed in the city’s Consulate-General – the old embassy, a magnificent nineteenth-century
palazzo
– the regular diplomatic corps were based out in Ankara, an arrangement that suited us rather well. But in summer they descended on Istanbul, their arrival presaged by a flurry of thick crested invitation cards embossed with gold type. My usual existence, in which I saw less than a dozen colleagues regularly, was about to be overturned with two months of cocktail parties and picnics.

Today was the opening of the season, the Templetons’ annual lunch party, which one had to take a ferry to reach as they lived in Beylerbeyi, a pleasant suburb on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus. Like many others out here, the ambassador and his wife had known my parents in Cairo. I had spent much of the previous summer, my first in the city, fielding anxious enquiries over Father’s disappearance at the end of the war and my mother’s continuing ill health. But with Mother’s death a couple of months earlier I had become an orphan, so I was braced for an even higher pitch of concern.

Had she known the truth about my parents, the ambassador’s wife would probably have recoiled in horror. My mother had hailed from an old Swedish family that had settled in Finland in the nineteenth century. Father had been introduced to her at a ball in Helsinki in 1923 when she was just nineteen, and they had married soon after and moved to Egypt, where Father had been Head of Station. I had been born in London a couple of years later – I was to be their only child.

Shortly after my birth, it had become clear that beneath Mother’s poised exterior lurked serious problems. She suffered from continual headaches, and became increasingly demanding, rude and, eventually, hysterical. Her father had been killed in the civil war by the Red Guards, and as a result she harboured a deep hatred of the Soviet Union. She was also virulently anti-Semitic, and would often refer to Jews in public as ‘vermin’.

All this proved to be highly embarrassing for Father, whose career in the Service was flourishing. In 1936, he was posted back to head office in London. As the Nazis in Germany became more powerful, he had advocated closer ties with them, becoming one of the leading lights of the Anglo-German Fellowship. He was also an admirer of fascism – he was briefly Treasurer of the Nordic League – and argued strongly in favour of appeasement. However, he had swiftly abandoned this line once it had become clear that war was inevitable, and following the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact he had publicly cut all ties with fascist groups and become staunchly anti-Nazi as well as anti-Communist. But Mother’s ‘condition’, as everyone had started to call it, was much harder to disguise.

Things had come to a head in early September 1939, when she had announced at a party in Belgravia attended by several government ministers that Hitler was the strongest leader Europe had seen in generations and that he was fully justified in his persecution of the Jews, who, she had added for good measure, were also natural enemies of England. Father had been advised by friends in the War Office that she was a liability, and that if nothing were done the three of us could be interned. As a result, he had had her shipped off to Finland, where she was cared for by private doctors at a remote estate. I came home from school to be told that Mother was ill, and that it might be some time before I saw her again. In the event, it wouldn’t be for another five years.

In late 1941 Britain had declared war on Finland, and Father had had her shifted again, this time to a clinic in Stockholm. I had visited her there briefly early in 1945, but she hadn’t even recognized me: either madness or medication had frozen her mind. She had remained in the clinic after the war, and had finally passed away after a series of strokes in April. Her funeral had been a quiet affair near her family’s home in Helsinki. I had attended and spent a few days there, and then flown straight back to Istanbul.

The ambassador’s wife let go of my hand, and Joan Templeton led us beneath some parasol pines and into the house. We walked
through the cool shade of the living room and out to the sunlit garden, where several cane chairs were arranged beside a table laden with salads, cold cuts and a large dish of pigeon with rice.

‘Colin’s just upstairs with some guests,’ Joan said. ‘Colleagues from London. He’ll be down shortly, I’m sure. Can I get you both a drink? Colin made some of his punch.’

‘That sounds just the ticket,’ said the ambassador, and his wife nodded her approval from beneath the brim of her hat. Joan headed towards the table to fix the drinks and everyone seated themselves. Vanessa settled into the chair next to mine and gave me a mischievous grin. She was seventeen now, and had blossomed into a classic English rose. She was lively company, but my thoughts were still entirely consumed by another woman: Anna, the nurse who had treated me in Germany six years earlier, whom I had loved and had planned to marry – and whom my own father had murdered before turning the gun on himself.

Anna had been a Russian, and over the course of our love affair had tried to convert me to Communism. She had come within a hair’s breadth of doing so, but her revelation that she was an NKVD agent and allegation that Father was using me to execute Soviets rather than Nazi war criminals had been more than I could accept. I had coldly rejected her, and immediately delivered a message to Father denouncing her as a spy. Her subsequent death at his hands had overturned my mind: as well as the devastation of the loss, it had seemed to confirm everything she had claimed, and I had been plunged into shock, grief and rage. The rage had soon won out, however, and it had been directed not just at Father, but at all he represented. The thought of Anna’s body laid out on the stretcher in the hospital, her skin already turning grey, tormented me. And so, as I had buried Father in the garden of the farmhouse in Lübeck, I had vowed to take my vengeance, by adopting Anna’s cause as my own.

She had told me that her handler was based in the Displaced Persons’ camp at Burgdorf, so I had taken Father’s jeep and driven
there. It had started snowing, huge flakes of the stuff, and by the time I arrived at the camp there was a blanket of it across the landscape. I presented the papers identifying myself as a member of an SAS War Crimes Investigations Unit and said I wished to interview residents of the camp as part of my team’s enquiries. My uniform was a mess, but I had placed Father’s leather jerkin over it, and after I had filled in a couple of forms, they had let me through with the advice to tread very carefully: several former SS officers had recently been discovered in the camp and nerves were particularly taut as a result.

I had walked around the main area for several hours showing the one photograph I had of Anna. Most people had clammed up as soon as I approached, but eventually someone recognized her and told me she had been an occasional visitor of Yuri, a Ukrainian doctor whose room was on the second floor of the old barracks. I made my way there and knocked on the door. After a few seconds, it was opened by a thin man wearing a greatcoat over a pair of pyjamas.

‘Yes?’ he said, peering at me. His face was cracked and leathery, as though he had spent most of his life outdoors, and he had tiny eyes, like sparks in a furnace. A snubbed nose gave him a faintly childlike appearance, but his hair was greying at the temples and I put him in his mid to late forties.

‘I believe we have a mutual acquaintance,’ I said.

He looked me over uncertainly, but then something registered in the eyes and I guessed he had recognized me from my file. He turned to speak to someone in the room, and a few seconds later a small figure scurried past me: a girl, fourteen or fifteen years old, wearing a thin nightgown. She looked up at me for a moment with startled eyes, then wrapped the gown tightly around her waist and disappeared into the corridor.

‘My daughter,’ said Yuri, his voice raspy. ‘I do not like to discuss my work in front of her.’

He opened the door wider and I stepped inside. The room was sparsely furnished: an iron bedstead with a dirty mattress, a couple
of wooden chairs, and clothes and books laid out on the floor. But he and his daughter had a room to themselves, which meant he was a very powerful person in the camp. I had seen rooms elsewhere that had been home to two and even three families. Presumably he was using his medical skills to gain favours and influence – and to seek out potential agents.

‘Anna should not have told you about me,’ he said, locking the door. ‘Why have you come here?’

‘Anna is dead.’ At first I wasn’t sure if he had heard me, but then he visibly crumpled, his body hunching over and his breathing coming in gasps. I made to approach him, but he held a hand up until he had recovered. When he looked up at me again, his eyes were wet with tears.

‘It cannot be,’ he whispered. ‘Not my Anna.’

‘Was she also your daughter?’ I asked, suddenly shocked at the thought.

He shook his head slowly. ‘But she could have been.’

He asked me what had happened and I told him, leaving nothing out. He listened very carefully, occasionally interjecting with questions to clarify a detail. When I had finished, he walked over to one of the chairs and perched himself on it.

‘Thank you for telling me this,’ he said. ‘Anna was one of my finest agents, but she is not the first to have been murdered by the British.’ He looked up at me sharply. ‘Can you believe that earlier this year your country and mine were allies? Now one would almost think we are at war.’