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No, he would not have expected it of such a respected professional.

Yes, he agreed; such incompetence was staggering, and must be punished.

Throughout all this, de Vere Green looked straight at Herbert without turning a hair.

It was Herbert’s word against his, and de Vere Green was higher up the greasy pole; he had been in the
service for thirty years, having joined straight from Oxford; he was One of Them.

Five was no place for a fair hearing. Arguing one’s case was seen to imply lack of judgment. “Because I say so” and “It’s always been done this way” were stonewall discussion-finishers. External overviews were out of the question, for “security reasons.”

Even as the Empire crumbled, everyone in Five was clinging with sticky fingers to their own little spheres of influence.

But equally, there was a reluctance to dismiss Herbert for fear he would make a nuisance of himself with the press or some such. Besides, Five were never decisive enough to sack anyone; one left only to tend one’s garden in retirement or be interred six feet beneath it.

So Herbert was offered a post in Vetting, a new department created on Attlee’s express order to prevent further treason. The words “horse,” “stable door,” and “bolted” sprang pretty much unbidden to mind. At least he was spared the formalities of a leaving party; in Five these tedious affairs were known, with manifest irony, as OBJs—short for O! Be Joyful.

Vetting fell within C Branch, Security. The remit was to examine the backgrounds of all civil servants with “regular and constant access to the most highly classified defense information” and “the more highly classified categories of atomic energy information;” but since most Whitehall departments believed that they and only they should meddle in their colleagues’ affairs, Vetting’s role was relegated more or less to that of applying the rubber stamp.

The process went as follows.

The internal security departments at each ministry would forward completed copies of the standard questionnaires, along with a full curriculum vitae, a declaration of links to extremist organizations both left and right, and two referees.

Vetting would check the Registry files to see what, if anything, Five held on each candidate, and then send a standard letter to the referees—some of whom, it transpired, had not seen their particular applicant for a decade or more.

Then Vetting would conduct a pointlessly anodyne “interview” with each nominee, pen a laconic
nothing recorded against
on his application, and recommend him for clearance, which he had enjoyed anyway while they had worked through the endless backlog of cases.

Even when Vetting did turn up a bad apple, very little was done about it, particularly if the contender in question had gone to the right school. If a chap was one of us, reasoned de Vere Green and his ilk, why bother to put him through this beastly snooping? They had their special ties and their inscribed cuff links, and they could do no wrong.

If the intelligence services had been as adept at spotting spies and traitors as they were at discerning who was one of them—and, just as importantly, who was
not
one of them—then this country would have been impenetrable, then and evermore.

But they found it impossible to believe that anyone from the upper classes could be anything other than loyal to the institutions into which they had been born and raised. Besides, no one wanted McCarthyism on this side of the Atlantic.

The sheer futility of it was enough to make a man weep. Not least because all this was taking place after Burgess and Maclean—
because of
Burgess and Maclean, in fact—and if ever two people could prove that breeding meant nothing, it was them. They would both have sailed through the very procedures that their treachery had sparked into existence.

The pair of them seemed destined to cast a long pall, not only over Herbert’s life but over that of the country as a whole. Gone was the unquestioning innocence of the prewar world, where the upper classes had been preordained to lead, unquestioned in their fitness to do so.

Now there prevailed a strange mixture of democratic optimism, Cold War chilliness, and tutting prejudice, especially against homosexuals, whose cause Burgess had almost single-handedly set back thirty years. Within months of his defection, prosecutions for sodomy and indecency were running at five times what they had been before the war.

Then, a few months later, the cards of yet another internal reshuffle landed with de Vere Green taking over as head of C Branch. It was hardly ideal, but then again even Herbert could see that Five would have been a one-man band had it allowed itself to take account of every feud under its roof.

If anything, de Vere Green seemed to have got worse in their brief time apart. His talents for politicking and ingratiation had now wholly eclipsed whatever soupçon of administrative efficacy he had once boasted, and he impressed the staff of wherever he worked mainly by his terror when called upon to take a decision.

They lasted a week together. De Vere Green went out of his way to appear pleasant to Herbert, who in turn went even further out of his way to annoy him, all the while trying to pretend that the work they were doing was in any way meaningful.

Finally Herbert did what the faceless powers had no doubt been angling for all along, and resigned. De Vere Green must have seen it as a capitulation, and a shockingly easy one at that; when Herbert broke the news, he actually started, and in doing so inadvertently jabbed the letter opener into the soft webbing between his left thumb and forefinger.

Herbert watched as a perfect globe of blood appeared on his skin as if fully formed; it was a moment before he realized that the unholy scream of pained terror he could hear was coming from de Vere Green himself.

“Do something,” he gasped between howls. “Get a cloth, for God’s sake.”

Herbert looked again at his hand. The cut seemed a nasty one, though not especially serious; certainly not one which merited his yelling the house down. This was de Vere Green, Herbert reminded himself; one of those Englishmen who probably cared more for his dog than his wife, if indeed he had one.

Several people had already appeared at the door of his office, excitedly aghast. It occurred to Herbert that they might prove good witnesses if de Vere Green tried to claim he had been the one to stab him.

And then Herbert turned on his heel, sidestepped the gathering throng, and walked quickly from the building. He should probably have been ashamed, but he was not. Not in the slightest.

New Scotland Yard could hardly offer him a post quick enough; they were desperate for recruits, and much of his work at Five had been sufficiently akin to their own disciplines—one of the reasons Six looked down so much on Five was that they saw them less as spies than as plodding policemen, country cousins to their urban sophisticates—to allow Herbert to come in at a much higher rank than usual; though, as he had discovered, what the top brass decreed and what those on the shop floor thought of it were two very different things.

At last Herbert was free of Five, free of being a menial man doing a boring job in a humdrum organization, an outfit of such crashing incompetence that it denied its own existence even while fueling the fantasies of young men nationwide. He was free of de Vere Green, with his hail-fellow-well-met veneer and his endless capacity for intrigue, for de Vere Green intrigued at all times, everywhere, in all places, and with everybody.

He was free of it all. And now he was right back in it.

He went via his flat, to make a couple of phone calls in privacy.

The first was to Rosalind Franklin at King’s.

He described de Vere Green to her—a whipped cream of whitening hair, a face a shade or two of purple darker than seemed entirely healthy—and she identified him immediately as a man she had seen talking to Stensness during one of the breaks.

Herbert asked her three times, and each time she was adamant. There could not have been that many people who looked like de Vere Green, she said.

And even fewer who would want to, Herbert thought.

The second call was to Tyce.

Herbert didn’t want to mention de Vere Green. Tyce knew their history, and Herbert feared that the case would be taken away from him, staff shortage or not. Or, perhaps even worse, he would be retained on the case, but kept in limbo as it became bogged down in endless layers of bureaucracy while the Pooh-Bahs at Leconfield House and New Scotland Yard thrashed things out between themselves.

Tyce was many things, but he was no fool, and he sensed more or less instantly that Herbert was keeping something back. So Herbert told him.

“Stick it to those bastards,” Tyce said. “Don’t let them walk all over you, you hear? You’re one of us now, Herbert, so behave like one. Think where your loyalties lie. Good man.”

Well, Herbert thought. Whatever he had been expecting, it hadn’t been
that.

In Tyce’s own, roundabout way, it had sounded suspiciously like a vote of confidence.

One lived and learnt.

De Vere Green’s reaction to Herbert walking through the door of his office in Leconfield House was entirely predictable: a blizzard of bonhomie.

“Dear boy!” He was rising from his desk before Herbert was more than a pace inside the room. “What a pleasant surprise! I was just thinking that I needed something to cheer me up in this beastly fog, and blow me if you don’t appear like an angel sent from heaven! Not that I imagine too many people refer to the gothic monstrosity where you work as in any way celestial. Sit down, sit down. What brings you to my humble inferno?”

De Vere Green sometimes spoke as though he had swallowed a thesaurus, refusing to use one word where ten would do. Herbert had once heard him say “individuals with access to conspicuous wealth in their own right” to describe rich people.

De Vere Green’s chin had cloned itself during a slight migration south, and his smile fell a fraction short of his eyes.

“Max Stensness was drowned last night,” Herbert said simply, watching him hard.

“Who?”

The man was a pro, Herbert had to give him that. De Vere Green had not flinched; if he had, Herbert had not seen it, and Herbert was trained to see such things.

“Max Stensness. Young man, blond. Worked at King’s College.”

“Dear boy, I’ve never heard of him.”

“That’s strange.”

“How so?”

“Because you were seen talking to him yesterday afternoon.” Herbert pulled the pamphlet out of his pocket and dropped it on de Vere Green’s desk. “The London Biochemical Conference, Royal Festival Hall.”

“My dear fellow, how can I have been seen talking to him when I don’t know who he is?” His tone was one of perfectly reasonable, mild bewilderment. Despite himself, Herbert began to wonder whether he might be mistaken.

“Son of Sir James Stensness. One of the scions of Whitehall.” De Vere Green shrugged; Herbert pressed on. “I’ve just been to see two of his colleagues. They gave me this.” He tapped the pamphlet. “Your name was
on it, on the delegate list. I described you to them. One of them said she’d seen you talking to him.”

“You know scientists, Smith,” de Vere Green said. “If it’s not at the other end of a microscope, they don’t know which end is up.”

“I never said they were scientists.”

“Who else are they going to be, at a biochemical conference?”

If it had been a slip, de Vere Green had covered himself expertly. Herbert conceded the point, and switched tack. “What were
you
doing there anyway?”

De Vere Green tapped his nose. “You know the drill, Smith.”

“And the affiliation with Cambridge University?”

“Again, ask me no questions, Smith, and I’ll tell you no lies.”

“But that’s the thing, Richard.” Herbert felt a strange sense of liberation; finally out of the Five hierarchy, with all its connotations of Gentlemen and Players, he could use de Vere Green’s Christian name with impunity. “Max Stensness is dead, so I
have
to ask questions. And if you lie to me, I’ll just keep asking them.”

“You can ask all you like, but I’m bound by Acts of Parliament, Smith.” The emphasis was unmistakably on Herbert’s surname; the class divide was still alive and kicking, at least as far as de Vere Green was concerned, and the bonhomie had been dialed back a notch. “As are you, if you recall.”

“You’re not immune from the law of the land.”

“Dear boy, that sounds like some kind of threat.”

“Ask Sillitoe. He’ll back me up.”

De Vere Green winced slightly, as most of Five’s officers did when someone mentioned Sillitoe—Sir
Percy of that ilk, a policeman to his bootstraps, now halfway through his sixties and with the genial, bluff face of a kindly grandfather. With his erect bearing, Sillitoe had always reminded Herbert of Wavell, the soldier who had been the penultimate viceroy of India; an altogether too simple, too straight, too decent soul to prosper in the muddy waters where the intriguers hunted.

As Five’s director-general, Sir Percy was, in contrast to the majority of his peers, busy trying to reduce the organization’s powers rather than augment them, for fear that Britain would become a police state. Five’s officers could not make arrests, nor did they have the expertise to gather evidence that would stand up in court.

The Metropolitan Police could, and did, respectively.

“How can we act legally when our work so often involves transgressions against propriety or the law itself?” de Vere Green asked.

“Propriety and the law being mutually exclusive?” De Vere Green made a gesture:
Don’t be naïve, Smith, we’re men of the world.
Herbert continued. “Richard, we can go round and round, but the fact remains: I have a dead man, and you were seen talking to him a couple of hours before he died.”

“Your witness must have been mistaken.”

“You’re quite distinctive, you know.”

“And I tell you, she was mistaken. Whose word do you trust?”

“Do you really want to know the answer to that?”

De Vere Green flashed Herbert a look of shamed malevolence; he could witter all he liked about the greater good of the service and the public interest, but
he was nowhere near stupid enough not to see Herbert’s grievance and the reasons for it.