The Fatal Englishman (44 page)

So a writ of silence ran between them. The subject of espionage was fit only for joky captions in the family photograph album. Perhaps when you came to think of it there wasn’t all that much to say: whatever they had done was past and seemed linked to a place they could never revisit and to an extraordinary set of circumstances that would never be reproduced. Whatever happened now was to be about them, and their new apartment in Washington, and his new job, and their pussy cat called Pooskat, and her new job working for a photographer, and their baby talk, and her red VW Beetle called the Flying Flea, and their happy new life of regular meals, and even breakfast, and only social drinking, and maybe one day babies, and not spying, only happy families …

The head of the
Telegraph’s
Washington bureau was Vincent Ryder; his number two was David Shears, and the
Sunday Telegraph
was served by Stephen Barber. Wolfenden’s arrival on 27 December 1964 made it a four-man operation, which, even by the standards of the day, was lavish. Jeremy and Martina had a modern duplex apartment on G Street in the south-west part of town. Stephen Barber and his wife Deirdre were their near neighbours and they saw more of them than of anyone else, including his old friend Godfrey Hodgson and his French wife Alice. Hodgson was surprised by this; he felt it was as though Barber had been told to keep an eye on Wolfenden and, perhaps, to keep him from his old friends.

Wolfenden told Martina he was happy at last: he used to be unhappy, he said, but not any more. She saw him full of spontaneity and joy; his reputation went before him, and everywhere they travelled people flocked to hear what he would
say. He never short-changed them: the fountain of epigrams was once more in flow, albeit fitfully, and edged with a sentimental tenderness. The Martinis in America, he remarked, were twice the size he had been used to at home; the Martinas, on the other hand, were only half the size of European ones. And she saw the shadow side of him; she could see even in the moments of domestic happiness that he knew he would not reach old age; inside he was on fire with some unquenchable misery.

He never stopped drinking. He had interludes of drinking less, but not long ones. David Shapiro, his old friend from the Naval Russian course, stayed for five days over Easter and it was clear to him that things were not good. Wolfenden was drinking huge quantities from breakfast onwards; he was not the reckless but essentially humorous pleasure-seeker of old: he was sullen and morose.

In April Wolfenden wanted to go to the Dominican Republic, but encountered difficulties with flights from Puerto Rico until eventually he persuaded Vincent Ryder to let him charter his own plane. He was introduced to a smart Puerto Rican with captain’s stripes on his shirt who was to fly the plane and to a second, scruffy man with no uniform at all who sat next to the pilot. Wolfenden and his suitcase took up the other two seats in an interior that was about the size of Martina’s Volkswagen.

The little plane bumped along the coast of Puerto Rico, then over to the Dominican Republic, where the second crew man woke from a deep slumber and radioed the ground. Inside the Arrivals building the man suddenly put on a uniform and demanded to see Wolfenden’s passport: part of the charter deal had apparently been that he should bring his own immigration officer. When he went through customs the same man popped up again, stamped all his papers and shook him warmly by the hand. Wolfenden told the story with delight. He was interested in the Dominican Republic, but feared to stay too long in case he should end up, like other journalists, by thinking the story was important. He wanted to be back with his wife and with the more significant events of the United States. He enjoyed his trips around the country, but part of him was reluctant to leave home:
it was almost as though he felt superstitious about it and couldn’t quite believe it was still going to be there when he got back.

In the early summer Martin Page went to the United States to publicise a book he had written about the fall of Khrushchev. Martina picked him up from the airport in the Flying Flea and Page travelled happily into town to see his old friend Mr Green, who, according to the gossip, had made a new and sober start to his life. He was dismayed to see the state of him – drunk, depressed, and unamenable. At dinner that night there was a naval physician from Bethesda who, in a ‘spontaneous’ move prearranged with Martina, urged Jeremy to go into hospital for some tests. Wolfenden shrugged off the suggestion and poured more drinks.

At breakfast the next day Page picked up a glass of what he thought was water. He spluttered to discover it was neat vodka. ‘I thought all journalists started the day with vodka,’ Martina told him. At lunch time Page went with Ross Mark of the
Express
to fetch Wolfenden from his office. The atmosphere was extremely tense and Wolfenden was incoherent. They took him to the Terrace Restaurant of the Willard Hotel, where, after two large vodkas, he rallied a little, though his condition remained deplorable. Later, at the National Press Club bar, which was full of beer-bellied journalists shouting at each other through a fog of cigarette smoke, Wolfenden told Page his life had been ruined by British Intelligence.

Each year on the day of the Queen’s Official Birthday the British Embassy in Washington gave a large reception on its lawns with champagne, strawberries and other traditional ‘English’ fare. Wolfenden duly attended for the
Daily Telegraph
and was in the middle of doing what he did best, drinking and talking, when a familiar and deeply unwelcome face came into view. It was, he later told Martin Page, his old control from MI5 in London. ‘Hello, Jeremy,’ he said, ‘it’s good to be back in business with you.’

It was beginning again. He had not escaped. This time there was to be a further complication: the Americans wanted a piece of him. For the next six months Wolfenden was required not only
to report to his British contact at the Embassy; he had also to have regular meetings with a man from the FBI. When he returned from these encounters he was in a desperate emotional state: it was so bad that Martina even suspected he might be having an affair with his mysterious contact. Wolfenden would never say who this person was or what he wanted. He began to drink even more and the passages of relative sobriety were forgotten. All the good that his loving wife had done was being destroyed; she saw the empty bottles going downstairs in brown paper bags, and this time she could do nothing to stop it.

Wolfenden’s friends had started to notice an unpleasant smell about him, as though his internal organs were not functioning. At a press conference in September he passed out. He was sure it was just because the room was overcrowded or too hot; nevertheless, in October Martina at last persuaded him to see a doctor for a complete physical check. He had had hepatitis in Moscow and had never gone ‘dry’ to give his liver a rest; there was the possibility, the doctor thought, that the disease was still lurking in his system, but he could find no indication of jaundice. He advised Wolfenden to drink less, slow down, and avoid stress: otherwise, he said, there was nothing wrong with him.

Wolfenden continued to meet his contacts in the Embassy and in the FBI. He continued to do his work for the
Daily Telegraph
, but after a second trip to the Dominican Republic at the end of September he did not leave Washington. Christmas cast its long shadow. Wolfenden, ever since the day he had locked himself in his bedroom to avoid the children’s party, had hated such forced festivities. Everything was shut; there was no one to play with; there were no newspapers to read – and, significantly, no newspapers to work for. In those days, depending on how the festivals fell, the
Telegraph
might go for four or five days without publishing. With no prospect of being telephoned by London, some correspondents liked to take advantage of their freedom by indulging, uninhibited, their passion for alcohol. Wolfenden went for broke.

What happened next is known only to Martina Browne.

When I began to write the story of Jeremy Wolfenden it was clear
to me that I had to track down his widow. Whenever I interviewed his friends and contemporaries, which was usually easy enough to arrange – many of them could not understand why no one had written about him before – I always asked about Martina and if they knew where I could find her. They had peculiar and inconsistent memories of her. She was sometimes described as forceful, sometimes quiet, and often, with a lift of a fastidious eyebrow, as ‘not an intellectual’. Estimates of her physical attractiveness varied from plain to beautiful. That was not surprising since some remembered her as blonde, some as dark, some as red-headed. Then there was her accent – variously described as Irish, Scandinavian and Midlands.

Friends such as David Edwards could not fathom why Jeremy had married at all, since what made him happiest was chasing men. The consensus, no doubt affected by a glancing reference to her in a book about espionage by Phillip Knightley called
The Second Oldest Profession
, was that she was a spy, and that her marriage to Jeremy had been ‘arranged’.

The path to her door was a long and discouraging one. ‘Find the nanny,’ Knightley told me in El Vino, the Fleet Street bar where Wolfenden drank with Ricky Marsh on a panicky return trip from Moscow. ‘If you could get to the agent…’

But where was she? Most people seemed to think America, where she had lived before, escaped, and successfully reinvented herself after the Chisholm debacle. Only Martina would know the truth about Wolfenden’s last days; and it was the mysterious circumstances of his death which had done so much to increase his reputation.

After many months of dispiriting struggle with American telephone directories I finally tracked Martina Browne to the Republic of Ireland. There was some checking and vetting first, but she agreed to see me. She met me at the airport. She looked, unsurprisingly, unlike any of the descriptions I had been given: handsome, bright-eyed, well-dressed. She had charm and presence, but life seemed hard. We went to her house on a small estate. She is a social worker, specialising in grief counselling, but the Republic has had to suspend such programmes until it
receives more money from the European Union: grief is temporarily unassuaged.

Martina has a teen-ager daughter, to whom she introduced me. She also has a son by her second marriage. She called him Ruari after her old boss in Moscow, but the second marriage had ended in separation.

After she had made some tea she gave me Jeremy’s letters to her and showed me the monochrome cine-film of their wedding, which she had had transferred that morning to a video cassette. There they were on the steps of the church. It was all out of focus and trembly. I could vaguely make out young, smudged versions of Godfrey Hodgson and John Miller at the reception. In the final shot Jeremy turned, smiling, to the camera, knelt down on the floor, cigarette in mouth, drink in hand, and danced with a small girl. It was heart-rending.

I asked her about his final day. This is what Martina said:

‘I woke up late on the morning of December 27th, about ten am. We had been at home the night before and he had been drinking very heavily. We had a row and he passed out on the sofa. I got up and went to the bathroom. The door was locked. We
never
locked the door. I called out but there was no answer. I could hear the extractor fan going inside. I went and got a beer-can opener and opened the lock with it. He was lying across the room with his head up against the bath. I thought he had fallen. He was moaning and breathing. I put my arm round him and called out, “Jeremy”. I touched his face. His eyes were closed. Then they opened, looked round, and closed again. I went out and rang Stephen Barber and told him to come round immediately. I rang the doctor who had given him a check-up in October. He wasn’t helpful. He told me to ring an ambulance. So we got him to the hospital.

‘I had a sense of impending doom. I tried to get him to talk. He was making sounds, but nothing came out. In the hospital they kept shouting at me.’ ‘What happened? Where were you?’ They didn’t know what to do with him. I was in the waiting room with Stephen Barber. I think they gave him a lumbar puncture. I decided I had to go and ring his parents. I rang them and woke
them up. I went back to the hospital and as they came along the corridor I knew.

‘I went into his room and he just looked so peaceful. I sat with him. I was numbed. I wanted him to be alive. I think I tried to say a prayer. I wanted him to sit up. I rang his parents and told them. I was glad I’d warned them. Then Stephen Barber had to go off and ring the office. He had to get the news of Jeremy’s death into the first edition.

‘The front page of the paper the next day said he died “suddenly” and this may have led to the mystery. By the time the autopsy was done and the death certificate had been issued he was not news any more. I met someone in Washington who said he had heard Jeremy shot himself. The official cause of death was “fatty liver”. The doctor said it was “like hepatitis”, so Lady Wolfenden wouldn’t be too upset. He had had hepatitis badly in Moscow and never stopped drinking afterwards.

‘The following March when I was in London I had a call through Ruari Chisholm to go in and see Ml6 to talk about his death. They were thinking that the death might have been suspicious. It was part of the mystique around Jeremy that people would assume there had to be odd causes. The longer it goes on the more I ask myself: Did I miss something?’

I said: ‘Was he dressed when you found him in the bathroom?’

She thought for a long time. She said nothing. Her little sitting room had some framed religious texts on the walls. She had been crying, but now she seemed bemused. I looked at some photographs on the sideboard. In one of them Martina was blonde with thick mascara: she had gone from Helen Shapiro to Dusty Springfield.

Eventually she said: ‘Isn’t that incredible? I can’t remember … He was either wearing clothes or pyjamas. He wasn’t naked. But the locked door bothered me … Unless he sensed that something was going to happen and he didn’t want me to find him … Did he take just one more drink knowing that it was going to kill him?’