The Double Bind of Mr. Rigby (24 page)

I did not enjoy his conversation at all. I have always disliked the word ‘normal’. It can never be defined. What, after all, is normal? I knew more or less what he meant, but I doubted that I could do it. I had suffered the horrific trauma of seeing my dearest friend murdered in cold blood at a time when I might have saved him. Although I understood that from the time he was captive, hooded and in that Mercedes, he was a condemned man and nothing could save him, I saw his death as my fault. The guilt for his murder was seared into my soul. It was as if I were the murderer.

I put down the telephone and digested what Arne had said. I signalled to Rovde and as I turned to join him, again the woman at the desk called out. There was now someone else for me on the phone. It was my editor from London. The
Journal
had heard about the dockland murder and he wanted me to write a story about it. I stalled. I said that the news was still breaking but that, of course, I would follow it up before I flew out. Arne’s words came back to me: I had to continue as usual. It was natural that the editor should contact me. It was also entirely natural that I should find the task distasteful.

I did my duty. Rovde, full of sympathy, took me to the mortuary. Halfway there, I almost broke down. I reminisced about the good times that Mark and I had enjoyed together in London. Uri was kind, considerate of my fragile feelings, and said without any prompting from me that the Agency would be looking very closely at Arne and the whole Myrex operation.

‘I don’t know whether we’re right or not, but we see a connection between this murder and big money interests. Myrex is a major player out here. There is doubt about the legitimacy of some of their projects. We’re watching the Myrex house and doing some pretty interesting surveillance. Paul is going to be useful in that respect.’

That was of some comfort to me. It was minimal: Mark, my friend, was dead. My soul was empty. I had great difficulty holding on to reality. It struck home when I viewed with Uri Mark’s sad corpse. It was no longer my dear friend. As always with those you love, once dead, the life force gone, what is left is a vacant shell, a useless, discarded raiment, fit only for burial or burning. That is what I felt and it made me infinitely miserable. I stood looking at Mark’s face made presentable by some anonymous mortician and silently cried. Tears came slowly: then I gave way and sobbed involuntarily. I was overcome by a peculiar despair. What was I doing? What a way to spend my life. My best friend, my confidant, my
intime
was no more. Uri put an arm round my shoulders and said it was time to go.

‘Come on, old buddy. We can’t do any more here,’ he said. We concluded the identification formalities and walked for half an hour to the English Café.

Then there was trouble. When I arrived back in London, the first thing I had to do was to write the
Journal
article on Mark’s death for the editor. I rehashed what the Tallinn newspapers had said. I described how his body had been found floating in the dock. I repeated the theory of criminal, underground conspiracy. Mark’s connection with the world of high finance was obvious. There was a well-known Russian, Italian and American presence in Tallinn. The city was full of rumours. Hotels and restaurants, import and export businesses, were all alleged to be vehicles for the laundering of illicitly made money. Particularly Russian businessmen were making huge fortunes, from smuggling a variety of Western goods into the new Russian Federation. Drugs went the other way, crossing the Russian border into Estonia from the southern republics. Mark’s murder was inevitably and intricately bound up with that underworld activity in the popular Estonian mind. The discovery of his body was not even a headline. It was not exactly an everyday occurrence, but that sort of thing did happen from time to time. The Estonian government could not wait for membership of the European Union. They anticipated more help, financially and practically, in policing the expanding trade that was taking place with Russia.

So I held to what was conjectured in Tallinn. I made no mention of Myrex. What really happened out there in Paldiski did not feature. I wrote no revelatory exposure of crime and corruption in the business community. Such an article would have made my name in other circumstances.
The Sunday Times
would have given me a contract. I would have commanded an astonishing salary as a television journalist. It was impossible: I could not write against Myrex. I had seen one friend killed in front of me. I could not witness Mo’s murder because of my actions. Her life was in my hands. My moral dilemma was dire, but my decision had been taken. My regret that I did not save Mark’s life was profound. I could not have any more lives on my conscience. My principles were nothing.

My article was number-three story on page one. It was preceded by an account and commentary of an Israeli occupation of a West Bank town, and a report on the implications of the Monetary Policy Committee’s decision to lower the Bank of England’s interest rate by a quarter of one per cent. My article ran over on to page two for half a column.

Other papers followed suit. Their stories were much the same. I reflected bitterly that Myrex would have no complaints about the coverage. There was no mention of Myrex: no implication. Only the
Financial Times
referred to the firm and that was in a subsidiary report on companies that were pioneering for British and European interests in the Baltic. The public impression, therefore, was that Mark’s death was an unfortunate result of the criminal conflict in Estonia.

My task for the editor done, I registered to myself that I ought to visit Willy at the St James’s house. Although Willy had told me that there was always a duty officer present on a Sunday who would know how to get hold of him, I decided to wait until Monday before doing that. I wanted him and the director to read the newspapers so that I could put them right about Mark’s murder when I spoke to them.

Sunday was a terrible day for me. I was deeply depressed. The popular view is of hard-bitten investigative journalists who do not suffer from ordinary ailments and complaints. Naturally that is not so. I was subject to awful depression. My mood was sombre. When I looked ahead, the prospects were starkly bleak. I was completely immobilised. Around lunchtime, my editor rang to say he liked my article but wondered why there was not more known of possible culprits. I had difficulty explaining and said that I was so fed up, shocked and depressed by Mark’s death that I could hardly write the article let alone discuss it any more. He understood and, both kindly and sensibly, suggested that I rang a friend of his who helped run the mental health trauma unit at the Tavistock Clinic. I thanked him and said that if I did not feel better in an hour or two, I would give his friend a ring. He said he would warn her that I might phone, and gave me her number.

Later, I reckoned there would be no harm in talking to someone about my loss of Mark. A Tavistock therapist might be a good thing, although I should have to be careful in what I said.

During the afternoon, I thought about Raoul’s next choice of victim, Mo. Why had he not chosen Uri. Perhaps it was because she was a woman. On the other hand it occurred to me that Raoul and his Myrex people did not take Uri seriously. It was just possible that they did not know who he was and what he was really doing in Estonia. It began to dawn on me that they simply thought him a buffoon, a sad American, bumbling through a life exiled from his home territory. It struck me that almost certainly they did not realise the threat he was to them. By the end of the day I resolved to talk with Rovde on the level with nothing held back.

In a way I was pre-empted. On Monday morning when I had finally arrived at the
Journal
’s offices, reports were coming in of a crisis in the Myrex Corporation in Estonia. Its chief man in Tallinn had been gunned down in an Italian-owned hotel in the centre of the old city. The man’s full name had been given; Kalja Arne Halvedi, had been shot by a lone gunman as he had left the hotel after meeting a Russian businessman. He had collapsed on the steps and died before he reached hospital. Speculation was that the growing Russian mafia had carried out the assassination. There was no doubt in my mind that Arne was the victim. The coincidence of names was too great for it to have been someone else.

My editor gave me whatever resources I needed to follow up on the story. Immediately I phoned Uri. He did not reply on his landline. I rang his mobile. ‘Rovde here.’

‘Uri. It’s Pelham. What’s happening? Is it Arne who’s been shot? I assume it is.’

‘Too right, old buddy. He’s out of the way. He was a danger to too many people. Anyway he was a latter-day Nazi.’

Uri spoke as if he or his colleagues had at last made a decision that Arne had to be removed from the Myrex scene.

‘Did the Russians get rid of him?’

‘I wouldn’t say that. Let’s just say that he was making lots of people unhappy, including us.’

I interpreted that as a covert admission that the Agency was involved in the removal of Arne. Uri cut the conversation short.

‘Look, I’m flying into London this afternoon. I have to be at the embassy in Grosvenor Square. Let’s meet late evening. How about it?’

Quickly, I thought to myself that now was the time to confess to Uri what had happened to Mark; it was time I told Willy and time I told the Yanks. Something had to be done about Myrex.

‘Gladly. There’s a restaurant at the top of Selfridge’s. Let’s meet there – around 7.30?’

‘If you don’t mind, by then I’d rather just walk. I’ll have been more or less sitting and eating all day. Could we stroll in Hyde Park?’

‘Of course. I’ll meet you at the Queen Mother’s Gates, the entrance into the park at Hyde Park Corner.’

‘See you there, buddy,’ and with that Uri rang off.

Uri turned up on time. He rolled along rather like an old sea salt still accustoming himself to dry land or more exactly like a patient cattle drover. He lent his bulk slightly backwards and swayed from side to side with his arms out at an angle as if at any moment he would shoo some straying cow back into the herd. We walked towards the Serpentine and the late sun disappeared to the west and left us in twilight.

I lost no time. I had already told Willy what had happened to Mark in that sinister warehouse in Paldiski. Now it was Uri’s turn to listen. He showed no surprise but was appalled by the fact that I had been subjected to that inhuman pressure. He gave me the impression without admitting any truth that the Agency had decided some weeks back to eliminate Arne. He was key to Myrex’s operation in Estonia and therefore in Russia. The chief cog in the machine had to be broken. He did not overtly admit that his organisation had carried out the shooting but he left me to infer that. He reminded me that the agency was aware of Myrex’s Paldiski development and kept watch on it. The Agency was not naïve or innocent of the knowledge. Where, I thought, had the Americans been on the afternoon Mark had died? Uri’s main conclusion was as we walked slowly back towards Apsley House that my journalistic investigations would in the future be extremely useful. I was to keep him informed and he would feed me what he could in the way of useful leads.

By the time I arrived back at my house, I felt I had been engaged by both MI6 and by the CIA. What worried me most seriously was that Uri had hinted to me that Raoul’s days were numbered. It was only that he had been inaccessible in Tallinn that Raoul had escaped a similar fate to Arne’s; but I had the impression that he was being tracked. That was what he implied without actually saying. I wondered how Raoul’s demise might affect my relationship with Roxanne.

In the late afternoon I telephoned the therapist my editor had recommended. Dr Linda Evans had followed a successful career in Oxford, Philadelphia and London. When I met her the following day, I eventually recognised her. She had appeared on
Newsnight
and late-night chat shows when her expert witness, or opinion, was quite often sought. From the first I thought she looked familiar: perhaps I had met her in London at some meeting or other, or in some restaurant with friends. Then I placed her. It was from the television screen that I knew her. She was in her early forties, good figure and features, her dark brunette hair obviously styled, cut severely at an angle from the back of her head to her chin. She was good-looking rather than beautiful; but there was a sensuousness about her lips and eyes. On the phone, she was understanding, and kindly said that in view of the editor’s request, she would fit me in the following morning if I turned up early at the Tavistock before her regular appointments started. Early for her transpired to be 9.30. I managed that, although once or twice I had second thoughts.

At first, even though I had slept badly, I did not feel inclined to get up. Yet I was able to be objective enough to see that it was a symptom of depression. I overcame it and went to the clinic. Linda Evans explained to me that her profession ensured our session had the secrecy and confidentiality of a priestly confessional. She made me describe carefully the cause of the trauma. I had no difficulty with that: I remembered all the details of the execution. From the moment of entry into that ghastly room in Paldiski, the sequence of events reeled across my mind. I could not erase the tape; and it kept rewinding and then playing again. She learned very quickly what I had witnessed and realised what I felt. I described the relationship between Mark and myself. She listened and occasionally prompted me. She made few comments and gave no advice. She told me she was treating the cause of the trauma. If I wanted treating, she could arrange for me to have a course of psychotherapy. Why not, I thought. I was in such a bad way.

She did say before I left that I should not be afraid to relive the terrible experience in my mind. Every time I ran through it, it was another catharsis. The moral dilemma I had been faced with would take a long time to fade. There had never been any possible chance that I could have avoided it. I had to reconcile myself to that. I would never know what would have happened if I had agreed with Myrex’s proposal before Mark’s death. Of course, I could not tell her why Myrex wanted my cooperation. The reason had to be couched in general terms of them wanting something I knew and their wishing to keep hold of me in the future. Any connection to Willy or even to Rovde I could divulge to no one. There my revelation ended. I needed her counsel. My depression and frustration, I felt, would otherwise destroy me. The psychotherapist sounded a good idea. At the time of leaving the Tavistock, I intended to proceed with the course.

I spent the rest of the morning at the
Journal
. In the afternoon, I had a meeting with Willy in St James’s; and that was the beginning of the situation I find myself in now.