About the Author
Alan Judd began writing while in the Foreign Office. His biography of Ford Madox Ford won the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Award. He recently published a biography of Mansfield Cumming, founder of Great Britain’s modern Secret Service. Judd writes regularly for the Daily Telegraph in London.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
LONDON, MID-1970s
It was a warm summer when Charles Thoroughgood left the army and joined the Secret Service but politically the world was deep in the Cold War. He moved to London and rented a basement flat in Kensington with a view of sodden detritus in the well of the building and the housekeeper's kitchen. He suspected that, from behind her dirty net curtains, she spent days and nights in unprofitable surveillance of his own uncurtained window. "Slack Alice," Roger Donnington, his colleague and flatmate, had dubbed her. "Face that would stop a coal barge."
One autumn Monday, he got up after a restless night to a humid, muggy London. The flat's tiny bathroom had no window and the electricity was off. Shaving by candlelight was a slow operation because he had to keep moving the candle as he traversed each cheek, and it was difficult to get any light at all beneath the chin without risk of singeing. He had long owned an electric razor, a present from his mother, but it had never left its box. The idea of using it had always felt like a concession to something, perhaps a luxurious and corrupting modernity. It was irrelevant now, anyway, because he had used the battery for his radio. Calling an electrician to restore mains power had, so far, proved too great a concession for either him or Roger.
The milk and butter in the powerless fridge smelt rancid. Someone would have to throw them away, sometime. He made toast in the gas stove, covered it with Marmite and drank black tea. He tidied the bedclothes on his double mattress on the floor, put on his light suit and flicked a tie free of the clothes crammed on the hook on his bedroom door. Before leaving he knocked on Roger's door. Roger had his own mattress in the sitting room, with the television at its foot. Charles had got in late the night before, so had no idea whether Roger was alone or accompanied. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder. "Okay?" he called.
Roger's groan became a cough. "Okay."
It was not to be a normal day at the office, though few were at that time. He was glad of that: secret service seemed so far to provide the advantages of bureaucratic employment--security, purpose, companionship and, though he might not yet have admitted it to himself, the pleasing consciousness of service--without the monotony he assumed to go with office life. He wouldn't need his bike that day, so left it propped up against the bedroom wall.
The best features of the flat were the front door of the building and the curving staircase, both of a size and grandeur to give an impression of spaciousness and opulence within. It had been cheaply converted into flats during the 1950s and 1960s and already the additions seemed older and more worn than the house. The plaster was cracked, paintwork faded, doors warped and skirting boards had parted company with their walls. The door of Charles's flat was tucked beneath the bottom turn of the staircase, so that stepping from it into the entrance hall was literally to enter a bigger and brighter world.
Out on Queensgate, he turned left towards Hyde Park after a deliberate glance across the wide street to check that his car was undamaged. The rush-hour traffic was heavier than usual, perhaps in anticipation of further wildcat strikes on the Underground, and the delay in crossing the Cromwell Road gave him the pretext to look about as if seeking a quicker way. He did the same at Kensington Gore, then walked behind the Albert Memorial and into the park. He walked unhurriedly, trying to establish a regular but not purposeless pace.
He looked back around again before he crossed the Serpentine Road and took one of the footpaths to Marble Arch and Speakers Corner. Anyone following would have to keep well back, or ahead or to the side, but then close quickly before Charles entered the Marble Arch subway. Presumably they would have car as well as foot surveillance, and radio. A car team might become a foot team when they needed to close, but to do that the cars would have to loiter in the busy Park Lane or Bayswater Road, which was never easy.
Once in the subway and reasonably sure he was out of sight, he broke the rules by looking behind without an obvious reason. None of the figures in the park was hurrying. No puffy, sweaty man or woman suddenly appeared at the top of the steps. Perhaps they were waiting in Queensgate for Roger, if they were there at all. They might have a long wait.
In Oxford Street he made for C&A, where he bought two pairs of black socks. It was cooler in the store and he loitered a while among the suits, before taking a back street to Marylebone Station, walking slowly with his jacket over his arm. At the station he bought a day return to Beaconsfield. The newsagent had sold out of The Times because the printers had gone on strike during the night, leaving only the early editions available. There would be time to find one later. He settled for the previous week's Economist.
He knew the forty-minute journey. Whether or not they were following by car, they would have to put at least one watcher on the train with him. If there were any "they." He read until the approaching Chilterns countryside gave reason for glancing about the carriage. It was tempting to get off at one of the small stations before Beaconsfield to see who got off with him, but that was cinema stuff. The trick in evading surveillance, they were told, was not only to get away but to give the impression you weren't looking for surveillance because you were innocent of anything that would merit it. At Seer Green, the last halt before Beaconsfield, he glimpsed a Ford Escort in the car park with Russian diplomatic number plates. He saw it too late to get the number but was sure enough of its origin. They were supposed to report all such sightings.
At Beaconsfield a grizzled, grey-haired man wearing jeans and incongruously polished brown shoes got off with him. Charles walked unhurriedly up the station approach, pausing to look in a shop window at the top. The man crossed the road and became engrossed in an estate agent's window. Charles continued his walk, turning left towards Old Beaconsfield, with its stockbroker Tudor avenues, neo-Georgian mini-mansions and moguls' houses of the twenties and thirties, with large unseen gardens and new Jaguars and Rovers in swept gravel drives. The low cloud had thinned enough to permit weak sunshine.
He strode purposefully into Hughes's, the Mercedes dealership. The forecourt was lined with polished secondhand saloons described as "nearly new," with their distinctive vertical headlights and squared-off, no-nonsense styling. Beige seemed the most popular colour, followed by red. To one side was a trio of elegant sports models with their dished roofs and thick, rounded leather seats. Immediately outside the showroom was a luxurious new S class, gleaming silver and easily the biggest car there. Charles paused by it before entering the show-room and wandering with what he hoped was critical detachment among the new cars within.
A salesman sat smoking at a desk with a telephone, a notepad, a Mercedes brochure and a copy of Glass's Guide, the trade price list. He had rubbery features and crinkly dark hair. Charles watched through the window as Brown Shoes crossed the forecourt to the older saloons. His back was to the showroom but he could probably see it in the car windscreens. The salesman took two long pulls on his cigarette before stubbing it out and slipping Glass's Guide into his desk drawer. He rose and came over to Charles, his features now composed into a rubbery smile. "Can I help, sir?"
"I'm thinking of buying a car."
"Just what we like to hear, sir. Mercedes, I take it?"
"Could be."
"Anything you'll be wanting to trade in?"
"No, I'll pay cash."
He made himself the ideal customer, accepting a cigarette while they discussed models and prices over coffee. The salesman was happy to talk residual values but became vague when asked pointed questions about trade prices. Brown Shoes studied the sports cars on the forecourt. They walked round the new cars in the showroom, then outside to the one and two year olds nearby. Brown Shoes crossed the forecourt to the older saloons, still with his back to them. Charles gave the impression that cost was less important to him than style and comfort, that he might be inclined to wait for the new mid-range model, that he would probably look in on Jaguar, BMW and Rover dealerships, with a possible nod in the direction of Volvo. There was the family to think of, and Volvo seemed to make a great thing about safety, which no one else did. Unless, of course, he allowed himself to be wooed by the new S class. That would presumably be even more solid and long-lasting than a Volvo and he particularly liked it in silver.
"You look every inch a Mercedes man, if I may say so, sir," the salesman said as they shook hands and Charles pocketed his card. "Love to see you in one."
Clutching his brochures, Charles carried on towards Old Beaconsfield. He had provided anyone watching with a reason for his visit and himself evidence, in the event of questioning, as to what he had been doing. He had ensured that the man in the dealership would remember him. He had also created time and space to spot surveillance.
It was not far but few walked the busy road. They might have a team of cars on him but, Brown Shoes having remained on the forecourt, he was sure he was the only walker. In an Old Beaconsfield tea shop he lingered over more coffee and ate shortbread, reading his magazine and listening to the conversation of two mothers with children at the same school. They were discussing a third whose marriage had broken up, whose mother was dying and whose child was ill.
"I didn't like to ask too much," said one. "She looked so awful, as if she might burst into tears at any moment. White as a sheet."
The other nodded. "Dreadful for her. Of course, those highlights she has don't help."
No one else came in. Surveillance would have been briefed to identify anyone with whom he had even an apparently accidental encounter. They would have had to put someone, most likely a couple, in the shop with him. He ruled out the mothers, who had been there for some time. Had it not been for Brown Shoes, he'd have been pretty sure he'd left them--if they were on him at all--in London.
Charles was approaching thirty, a supposedly vigorous age; the year in which a man might feel he entered full estate, experienced but forward-looking, fecund and purposeful. Instead, he spent more time musing upon the past than anticipating or shaping his future. This was partly why he had chosen Beaconsfield for what they called his dry-cleaning run. He had been brought up not many miles away and had spent a short time there on an army methods-of-instruction course in a former prisoner-of-war camp. His memories of that period were vivid. He was fitter then, going for hard daily runs through the beechwoods after hours in the classroom. It was a cold autumn with woodland carpets of crisp red, yellow and golden leaves and lung-fulls of frosty air. He was keen, always running in army boots, pack and webbing, drawing a rifle from the armoury to make it harder. He wasn't sure now why he'd done it so intensively. The approved military purpose--fitness--was part of it, but there was always something else--a craving for solitude amidst the very public life of the army, an escape from daily occupations, or from thought. Whatever he was running for or from, he felt better for putting himself through it. He didn't run so much now, nor so hard.
Old Beaconsfield was much as he remembered, little more than a single main street with some quaint shop fronts, oppressed by traffic but still, beneath lowered eyelids, possessed of a reserved charm. It had been in that very tea shop that he and Janet, his then girlfriend, had agreed to part. Theirs had been an affair in which tea shops featured prominently. It had started in one in Oxford before he joined the army and had begun to come apart in another in Belfast, where she had visited him during his single afternoon off in four months. He wouldn't have been surprised to hear that she now owned one. It was what she often said she most wanted to do, as she became a solicitor.
As lunchtime approached more customers came in and Charles ordered soup and bread. There was still no hurry and he was reluctant to break his semi-trance. As Roger said, Secret Service beat working for a living, so far. Roger, he imagined, would by now have made himself at home in some London drinking club, pouring drinks down a sequined cleavage and thinking to hell with surveillance. Unless the cleavage was the surveillance.
The journey back to London showed no further sign of surveillance. He took the now-functioning tube to Trafalgar Square and walked along the Strand to the short road that led down to the Savoy. He was fifteen minutes early. "If you're on time, you're late," he remembered their trainer, Gerry, saying as he glanced up at the Upstairs restaurant overlooking the main entrance where the cars turned. Someone had said it was good after a play or film, and not too expensive. He would recce it later.
An hour later he lowered his bone china tea-cup to its bone china saucer, using his left hand and without taking his eyes from the early edition Times he had picked up in Beaconsfield. If he had not found it he would have had to root through dustbins for an old one, since the instructions were that he had to be reading The Times. He lowered the cup as precisely as possible, appearing to read but concentrating entirely on the movement. One of his father's eccentricities had been to practise using his left hand in anticipation of the stroke he claimed was his destiny, and which was statistically most likely to paralyse his right side. In fact, death, when it came so prematurely, took both sides at once, in a heart attack, while he slept.
Cup reached saucer dead centre with a faint chink. The tearoom, quiet when he arrived, was beginning to bustle. He was now the only solitary, the others having been joined by their guests. He had considered ordering for two but his instructions--to await a contact who had his description and would give the password--did not indicate whether there was to be a meeting, with a discussion, or just a message quickly passed. He studied the faded opulence of the room, with its golds, blues and reds, the sumptuous but tired sofas and armchairs, the table legs that had been knocked a few times too many. In the middle was a grand piano and a harp. A man wearing a white jacket and an auburn-haired woman in a long black dress had arranged music sheets and sat at both as if about to play, then disappeared without a note. The tea-takers, mostly female, had paid no attention.
From the Hardcover edition.
