The Harry Palmer Quartet

13

[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Pay special attention to insurance arrangements. Romance may be expected to delay social commitments.]

I talked to Murray about everything except the job. Murray was a tall and large-muscled man who, had he been a few years younger, would have made a John Osborne hero. His face was large, square and bony, and it would be equally easy to imagine him as an RSM or the leader of a wildcat strike.

He was efficient and responsive to orders in a way that more than faintly criticized his superiors by its very efficacy. It reminded me of those NCOs who drilled officer cadets. His hair was tightly arranged across his lumpy skull. His eyes, thin slits, as though he constantly peered into brightness, would wrinkle and smile without provocation. Unlike Chico, Murray’s smile wasn’t motivated by a desire to join other men – it separated him quite deliberately from them. We talked about Bertold Brecht and the 1937 Firearms Act, and it amused Murray that I was probing around amongst his acquisition of knowledge. He’d not liked the peacetime army and it was understandable, there was no place in it for a man with a paperback edition of Kierkegaard in his pocket. The sergeants tried to talk like officers and the officers like gentlemen, he said. The mess was full of men who’d sit in a cinema all the weekend and come back with stories about house-parties on the river.

‘Georgian houses,’ Murray said, and he had a great love for beautiful buildings. ‘The only Georgian houses they’d ever been to were George the Fifth ones along the by-pass.’

By the time we had got back to 42 the fingerprint men and photographers had done their stuff and Chico and Ross had arrived. Ross resented my sudden rise to power and had got his department into the act probably via Keightley. Chico was wearing his short tweed overcoat with the gigantic pattern and looking like a bookies’ clerk. I noticed his chin had got those pimples again that I called ‘caviare rash’. He and Ross were poking about in the greenhouse when we arrived. I heard Ross say, ‘Mine aren’t coming on at all, I think it was the early frost.’ Chico countered this with a quote from his gardener, then we all started on 42.

You couldn’t find a house more normal than that one, as far as the rooms on the ground floor and first floor were concerned. Old wounded furniture, balding carpets and sullen wallpaper. The ultra-modern kitchen was well stocked with food, both fresh and tinned, and a machine that minced up waste and sluiced it away. The bathroom upstairs was unusually well-fitted for England – shower, scales, pink mirror and extensive indirect lighting. One room on the ground floor was equipped as an office and had in one corner a wooden phone-booth with glass panels and a little gadget that fitted into the phone dial which, when locked, prevented it being used.

A few books remained on the shelves, a Roget, a business directory, a thick blue-bound volume, the French edition of Plans of the Great Cities of the World showing Principal Roads and Exits, the AA Road Book, ABC Railway Guide, and a Chambers’s Dictionary.

The filing cases were so new that the paint squeaked. A couple of hundred blank file cards lay inside. I walked into the rose-wallpapered hall and upstairs. The staircase between the first and second floor had been removed. A cheap, unpainted wooden ladder poked its top into a dimly lit rectangle in the ceiling. Murray and Chico deferred to me in the matter of ascending. Ross was downstairs still checking the phone books for underlinings, finger-marks and page removals. I climbed the splintery ladder. As my head rose past the second-floor level I saw what the police cameraman had been talking about. The light from several unshaded 25-watt bulbs fell across the uneven wooden floor. Here and there plaster walls had been badly damaged and revealed brickwork inadequately distempered over. I hoisted my fourteen stone through the hatchway and augmented the dull glow with my torch. I looked into each of the little wooden rooms. Some of them had windows facing down into the cobbled centre courtyard – the central feature of the house built as a hollow square. The outward-facing windows were completely bricked up. Chico came up to me, bright-eyed; he’d found a pair of plimsolls, blue and white, size ten, in one room, and had a theory about the whole thing.

‘A small private zoo, sir. My cousin’s aunt, the Duchess of Winchester, let him build one, sir. Frightfully interesting. This would be for food, sir, this room. Those scrubbed buckets, sir, everything terribly clean. I helped him many weekends, sir. Then one time we had a stunning house-party there. I wish you had been there, I’m sure you would have been interested, sir.’ Chico’s adam’s apple had become more and more prominent as his voice pitch rose.

I was trying to do the most difficult job I’d ever heard about. To help me I had a rose-cultivator downstairs, and a refugee from the Royal Enclosure. A fine team to pit against half the world in arms.

‘It’s just like my friend’s zoo, sir.’

There was certainly a lot to support Chico’s observation. The gaunt cell-like room in which we were standing had a little coke-burning stove with the stove pipe leading out through the wall. Piled in a corner were some old army-style cooking pans. The floorboards were scrubbed white. I looked through the little unwashed window into the shiny little courtyard, at the rough plastered walls, pitted and broken and at the metal guarded wall-light.

‘It’s exactly like my friend’s, sir.’ Anybody with Chico for a friend didn’t need an enemy. I nodded.

The rain dabbed spasmodically at the glass pane, and another plane ground its way across a damp skyful of cloud. I tried to see it but the window-frame confined my view to a downward slant. I walked along the corridor, through the heavy wooden door and into the strangest room of all.

It was one of the largest rooms – about 20ft by 25ft. In the centre of the floor stood a heavy metal water tank 8ft by 8ft and 5ft high. There was four feet of water in it. Waterproof cloth had been roughly tacked to the floor. ‘There’s something in there,’ Chico shouted. He was poking around in the water tank with a stick he had found in the garden. It took the police nearly an hour to get all the pieces of the tape recorder, and a harness from the floor of the tank.

The movie camera men from Charlotte Street and two CID men from the forensic lab were in the hallway downstairs, and I decided to leave the place to them for a few hours.

The birds had awakened and a thin streak of wet dawn could be seen as I poured myself a cup of Blue Mountain coffee with cream, and went to bed with a backlog of memoranda from Alice, and still found time to send a fiver to Adem for his fauna preservation. The way I looked at it, I was fauna too.

I was still tired when I showered the next morning. I picked a suitable dark grey striped wool and nylon, with a white shirt, and handkerchief, plain brown tie, and brown shoes to add a touch of rebellion. I must get those brown trousers mended.

I read my copy of The Stage in the cab. We put in a regular classified advert to let Dalby know what was going on. It said:

‘Touring SOLO talent. Girl dancers (military number) very tall man for panto parts for certain Midland towns. Send photo details. Central London novelty act now complete. Scripts badly needed. Phone Miss Varley. Dalby casting.’

Alice was handling contact with Dalby in the field, but even without the master code-book it seemed pretty clear that she was having a go at me. My cab turned into Scotland Yard. The Commissioner has a very large corner room. His leather chairs were old and shiny but the finish was bright and tasteful. An expensively framed Stubbs print of a man and horse dominated one wall; below it the open fire crackled and flared with damp coal. Through the multi-paned window I could see the traffic creeping over Westminster Bridge. A stubby black tug dragged a train of dirt-filled barges against the oily water flow, and below me on the embankment a short man in a torn wet raincoat was trying to get a bent bicycle into the back of a taxicab. The Commissioner was going on about the house business. He had that Commanding Officer manner from which it was hard to tell exactly which element caused him distress, or indeed, if any aspect did. He started for the third time going through the injustice – the word sounded ironic coming from him – of Charlotte Street being given unlimited funds. I’d told him twice that my office could fit under his kneehole desk, and my view commanded a flyblown delicatessen. This time I let him run through the whole thing without interruption for the duration of two cigarettes. He was slowing down now he had got to the use we made of the Criminal Records Office and the Forensic Science Laboratory without cost, and the right of search, and how little I knew about it. If the old man knew half the things Dalby got up to he would flip his lid. I made a firm and immediate decision to curtail Chico’s participation as far as our illegal activities were concerned; he was easily the most loquacious and not the most tactful. The Commissioner broke through my reverie.

‘That fellow with you, dark chap, good talker.’

I went cold.

‘Murray?’ I said, hoping. ‘Sergeant Murray – statistics expert. He was at the house last night.’

‘No! No! No! Young feller-me-lad, er, now, er …’

I said, in a dull voice, ‘Chillcott-Oakes, Phillip Chillcott-Oakes.’

‘Yes, a charming chap, absolute charmer – that’s him.’ He smiled for the first time and leaned across to me in a conspiratorial gesture. ‘At school with my youngest!’ he said.

The pub across the road had just opened. I downed a couple of Dubonnet and bitter lemons. What chance did I stand between the Communists on the one side and the Establishment on the other – they were both out-thinking me at every move.

14

[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Let your head rule your heart. Steer well clear of controversy both at home and at work.]

Tuesday was a big echoing summer’s day. I could hear the neighbour’s black Airedale dog, and they could hear my FM. I sorted the letters from the mat; Times magazine subscription dept said I was missing the chance of a lifetime. My mother’s eldest sister wished I was in Geneva; so did I, except that my aunt was there. A War Office letter confirmed my discharge from the Army and told me that I was not subject to reserve training commitments, but was subject to the Official Secrets Act in respect of information and documents. The dairy said to order cream early for the holiday and had I tried Chokko, the new chocolate drink that everyone was raving about.

At the office I started going through the documents in my locked ‘In tray’. Some stuff about chemical warfare documents on microfilm. The US Defense Dept seemed pretty sure that a BOAC engineer was handling them. I marked it for Special Branch LAP. The Public Information Officer at Scotland Yard was being very nice about the house business but said the press was getting a line on it. Alice said he’d been on the phone twice, what should she say. ‘Tell him to tell the newspapers that a high court judge, a Cabinet Minister and two press barons were watching a blue film, but that if they play their cards right we won’t give the story to ITN.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Alice.

The FSO sent a report on the house. I read quickly through: ‘Road dust, stains on floorboard; could be blood, very old; possibly from wartime bombing.’

Finger-prints – there were a lot, mostly mine, and unidentified; they were going through the single print collection and ‘scenes of crime’ (where other unidentified prints were filed under the place in which they were found).

I had to see Ross at three. Now that I had taken over from Dalby it was one of my weekly ordeals. I sent out for sandwiches – cream cheese with pineapple, and ham with mango chutney. The delicatessen sent them with rye bread. I spent ten minutes throwing caraway seeds into the ashtray until Chico appeared, then I downed the last round, seeds and all. He put a reel of 16mm film on the desk and hung around to make conversation. I gave him the rich-man-with-ulcers-type grunt and nod, and he finally went away.

I sat for a long time staring into my Nescafé, but no particular line of action occurred. The opposition may have fumbled the pass but I hadn’t detected a gap in the defence, unless any of the documents in front of me now meant anything. It didn’t seem much to me. There was nothing to make me sure it was a matter for us to deal with even, let alone to connect it with Jay. It’s only writers who expect every lead the hero meddles in to turn out to be threads of the same case. Here in the office were about 600 file numbers; if all the villains were brought to justice simultaneously it would make Auschwitz look like the last scene of Hamlet.

Should I continue to fool with the leads in the house business? What leads? I decided to sound out Ross. I’d see whether his department were going on with it. I took a cab down to a sleazy drinking club off Jermyn Street. It was a couple of rooms on the first floor. Red plush everywhere, and not a chink of daylight. Beyond the highly polished baby grand piano, and a vast basket of too perfect flowers, sat a balding man with spectacles and a regimental tie. It was Ross. He was at least half an hour early. I sat down next to him. Our weekly meetings usually took about ten minutes and consisted of agreeing to the Army Intelligence Memoranda sheet for the Cabinet, and an inter-change of certain financing arrangements for which our two departments overlapped. The waiter brought me a Tio Pepe and Ross ordered another pink gin. He looked like he’d had a few already. His big domed frontal area was wrinkled and pale. Why did he like this place?

He asked me for a cigarette. This wasn’t like Ross, but I flicked him a couple of inches of Gauloise. I ignited it. The match lit the interior like a magnesium flare. Sammy Davis sang, ‘Love in Bloom’ and a gentle firm Parker-like sax vibrato made the plastic flowers quiver. The barman – a tall ex-pug with a tan out of a bottle, and a tie-knot the size of a large garden pea, was rubbing an old duster around spotless unused ashtrays and taking sly sips at a half-pint of Guinness. Ross began to talk.

‘To be frank, the memorandum isn’t quite ready yet; my girl is typing it this afternoon.’

I was determined not to say ‘That’s OK.’ The odd couple of times I had been late with my data Ross had ‘hurumped’ for half an hour. Ross looked at me for a minute and tugged his battered black pipe out of his pocket. He still had my Gauloise only half-finished. Ross was in a nervous state today. I wanted to know if he intended to have his people continue to work on the ‘haunted house’ as someone had christened it. I also knew that with Ross the direct approach was fatal.

‘You’ve never been down to my little place, have you?’ It was pretty rhetorical. The idea of Ross and I having an overlapping social life was hilarious. ‘It’s quite pretty now; at the bottom of the garden there are three lovely old chestnut trees. Laid out between them Anna Olivier, Caroline Testout and Mrs John Laing. When the yellow catkins are on the trees in June, with Gustave Nabonnand and Dorothy Perkins, why you could be in the heart of the countryside. Except for the house next door of course. Those chestnuts when I bought the place in 1935, no, tell a lie, end of ’34, the builders would have cleared the site bald. It was country then, not a house for miles – behind us, I mean; next door was there. Didn’t have a bus service, nothing. Mind you, didn’t affect me much. I was in Aden by the summer of ’35. My wife, you’re not married, but my wife, a wonderful woman, at that time the garden – well, it was nothing. Hard work, that’s all. I was only a lieutenant then.’

‘Ross,’ I said, ‘Mrs Laing and Dorothy Perkins are roses, aren’t they?’

‘Of course they are,’ said Ross. ‘What did you think they are?’

I tilted my forehead at the inquiring look of the barman, and a Tio Pepe and pink gin arrived very promptly. He paused long enough to give our ashtray a rebore. Ross had paused in his house agent but he soon went into it again.

‘I was at the SCRUBS in ’39,* gave me a chance to get the garden going. That’s when I put the acacias in. It’s a picture now. A three-bedroom one only seven doors away, not a patch on ours, not a patch, went for six-and-a-half thousand. I said to the wife at the time, “Then ours must be worth eight.” And we’d get it too. It’s fantastic the prices detached ones go for.’ Ross swallowed a gulp of pink gin and said, ‘But the truth is –’

I wondered what the truth was and how long it would take to get round to it.

‘The truth is with the boy at school, and at a critical time – couldn’t possibly cut back on the boy now, he’ll be at university in eighteen months; well, truth is it’s been a frightful expense. You’ve always been a bit of a, well I might almost say a protégé of mine. Last year when you first started hinting about a transfer, well, I can’t tell you the hoo-ha there was in the C5 subcommittee. You remember O’Brien, why, he even said it to you. But I just thought you were the sort worth sticking by. And well, I was right, and you’ve turned up trumps.’

This cant from Ross was more than I could stand – all this ‘sticking by you’. What did he want – money, a transfer, Dalby’s job? It was way out of character except in that it was badly done. Everything Ross handled had that in common. Did he want a fiver? Five hundred? Did he have the imagination to ask for much more? I wasn’t enjoying seeing Ross crawl but he’d given me so many toffee-nosed dressing downs that I didn’t feel inclined to soften the way for his application. But now he was changing his line.

‘With Dalby away and you running the show, well, it’s been mentioned, the Minister’s private secretary was most pleased with the Swiss Bank stuff. You have someone inside?’ He paused. It was a question, but not one I felt like answering. ‘Will he go on with giving us names and code-numbers?’ He paused again, and I remembered all the difficulties he’d made for me when I did the deal with the bank. ‘Oh, I see I really shouldn’t ask. But the important thing is you are getting known. To be frank, it means that you won’t be stuck in a cul-de-sac the way I have since Joe One.’1

I muttered something about it being an important cul-de-sac.

‘Yes, you think so, but not everyone does, you see. Frankly I’m walled in, financially. Now take the case of the Al Gumhuria file.’

I knew the Al Gumhuria work; it was one of Ross’s favourites. Al Gumhuria was Nasser’s house organ, the official news outlet. Ross had got through to someone working on it. Later on, when Al Akhbar (The News), Cairo’s best-known newspaper, and Al Ahram (The Pyramids) were nationalized, his contact had even more sway.

From his agent there Ross had built up a complete picture of the Russian military aid throughout the Near East.

Ross’s people still had a few strings to pull even in Nasser’s government, and his boy there never looked back. But as his standard of living rose, so, he thought, should the payments for his extra-curricular activity. I could see Ross felt badly about losing one of the best contacts he’d ever made, just for the sake of a few thousand quid, and I’d heard from devious sources that his agent was beginning to dry up. Probably doing a deal with the Americans for ten times what Ross was paying. If his contact moved on, you could bet the Onassis yacht to a warm snowball that Ross would finally lose the whole network.

‘You could do great things there, great things, but I just haven’t got the money, or department to do it. I can see the sort of report you’d do. It would go to minister level without a doubt. Minister level.’

He sat and thought about minister level like he’d been asked to write the eleventh commandment.

I nudged his reverie. ‘But I don’t even have a file number on it. You’ve got it.’

‘Precisely, old boy. Now we’re getting down to tin tacks. Now if I were a stranger, you’d have the funds to buy a dossier, wouldn’t you?’ He rushed on without pausing. ‘You have more leeway in these things than I have, or we have, I should say. Well, for a fair sum it’s all yours.’ He sat back but he didn’t relax.

At first I thought I had trouble understanding him, so I played it back at half speed.

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that my department should buy this file from your department?’

He tapped his pipe against the table leg.

‘It sounds strange, I know, but this is a pretty irregular business, old man. It’s not like a nine to five job. Not that I’d offer it to anyone else, like the …’

‘Russians?’ I said.

His face had become more and more static over the last few minutes, but now it froze stiff like a Notre-Dame gargoyle, his mouth set to gush rainwater. ‘I was going to say “Navy”, but since you’ve chosen to be so bloody impertinent … Your friend Dalby wouldn’t have been so “boy-scoutish” about an offer like this; perhaps I’ll have a word with him.’

He’d chosen his words well; he made me feel like a cad for mentioning the Russians; brought Dalby into the conversation, gently reminding me that I was only acting in his stead anyway, and finally calling me ‘boy-scoutish’ which he knew would hit me where it hurt. Me, the slick modern intelligence agent. Six months with the CIA and two button-down shirts to prove it.

‘Look Ross,’ I said. ‘Let’s clear it up. You need some money urgently for some reason I can only guess at. You’re prepared to sell information. But you won’t sell it to anyone who really wants it, like the Russians or the Chinese, ’cos that would be unsporting, like pinching knives and forks from the mess. So you look around for someone on your side but without your genteel education, without your feeling for social niceties about who it’s nice to sell information to. You look for someone like me, an outsider whom you’ve never liked anyway, and give my heart-strings a tug and then my purse-strings. You don’t care what I do with the dossier. For all you care I could get a knighthood on the strength of it, or chuck it over the back wall of the Russian Embassy. You’ve got the nerve to sell something that doesn’t belong to you to someone you don’t like. Well, you’re right. That is the sort of business we’re in, and it’s the sort of business that a lot of people that got those reports for you wish they were still in. But they’re not, they’re good and dead in some dirty back alley somewhere, and they aren’t going to be around for your share-out. We’ve got 600 open files in my office, that’s no secret, and my only interest at the moment is making it five hundred and ninety-nine even if I don’t get the Minister’s certificate of Good Housekeeping doing it.’ I gulped down my Tio Pepe and almost choked on it – it would have spoiled the effect. I chucked a pound note into the spilt drink and left without looking back. Lee Konitz moved into ‘Autumn in New York’, and as I went downstairs I heard Ross blowing into his briar pipe.