In the Mouth of the Tiger (80 page)

But while his physical health was returning, Denis was still a long way from being himself. He was unusually quiet, often almost taciturn, and never spoke of what he had been doing up north. In fact, if I asked anything about Thursday Island he would turn away abruptly, his lips compressed. ‘Don't harp on things, Norma,' he would snap, quite unfairly. I became convinced that something had happened which still distressed him, and that he would never be free of it until he had got it off his chest. I was sure that Dr Lawrence
would have been able to help, but of course Dr Lawrence was thousands of miles away and his type is desperately hard to find. The Repatriation Hospital in Heidelberg might have fixed up my husband's body but they obviously didn't have a clue how to fix his mind.

The weather broke on the first day of spring, and the storm that night kept us all awake. The children couldn't sleep as the wind howled around the bungalow and hail rattled on the roof. In the early hours the boys, and then even Shirley, joined us in our bedroom. Shirley's excuse was concern for Frances: ‘The little kid needs me,' she said earnestly, Frances asleep and quite oblivious in her arms. The boys slept with us while Shirley made up a bed of eiderdowns to share with Frances in the corner of the room.

The storm was suddenly over. Denis and I lay warm and snug in the middle of the bed, our family fast asleep all around us and the only sound the reassuring patter of raindrops on the roof above.

Suddenly Denis began to talk, at first lying on his back beside me, then propped up on his elbow to watch my face. ‘We have broken their naval code, you see,' he said, ‘so we are reading everything they say. The problem is that we can't let them know we're reading their signals or they would change the code. It causes us awful problems because sometimes we know something but can't act on the information or it would give the game away. Sometimes we find out who on our side is spilling the beans to the Japs, but if we did anything to the blighter the Japs would know we were on to them.'

‘Is that why you had to kill someone?' I asked intuitively.

Denis was silent for a long time. Finally he gave a great sigh. ‘He was a Dutch Eurasian, working for the Japs on an island north of the Coral Sea. When we put in coastwatchers he found out and made contact with the party. He helped them with provisions and so on, and we thought he was on our side. But just when we were about to launch an operation in the area, we found out from Jap naval signals that he had been tipping them off all along.'

Denis sat up quietly and reached for a cigarette, lighting one for me as well. The rain had increased to a steady downpour, drumming loudly on the tin roof while the first glimmers of a grey morning penetrated the chintz curtains.

‘We couldn't tell the coastwatchers what we knew, so the DNI sent me up to the island with orders to bump the fellow off as quietly as possible.'

Denis drew deeply on his cigarette, allowing the smoke to escape his lips in a long, thin spiral. ‘I liked the man, Norma. He was a small, wiry little
fellow, and deuced friendly. He called on the coastwatcher camp just after I arrived. When he was about to set off home I asked if I could walk with him for a while, to have a confidential chat. I think he smelt a rat and didn't want to be alone with me but I insisted. We walked a mile or so and then I asked to see what he was carrying in his pack. I hoped he had a gun in there. I prayed he had a gun.'

Denis was silent for so long this time that I worried that he might have dried up. ‘Did he have a gun?' I prompted finally.

‘I pulled my service revolver on him and ordered him off the path. I said I wanted to make sure he didn't have a gun. I think he guessed the game was up and argued like the blazes. As soon as we were away from the path I made him kneel down and open the pack. He was so frightened that the poor blighter couldn't get the buckle undone. He tried to duck just as I shot him, so the bullet knocked off the top of his head. It was dreadful, Norma. Dreadful.'

I didn't know what to say, so I just lay there.

‘Of course there was no gun,' Denis went on, his voice suddenly steadier. ‘But there were two or three tins of cigarettes, each one labelled with the name of a coastwatcher. He'd obviously brought them along as presents but forgotten to hand them out. My unexpected presence probably scared him from the start. I took the cigarettes back with me and told the fellows he'd asked me to deliver them for him. It added veracity to the story that we had parted as friends.'

‘What did the Japs do when he didn't get back to them?' I asked.

Denis drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. ‘When he disappeared the Japs thought he had defected to us. They rounded up his family and shipped them off to a labour camp in Japan. We got the whole story, of course, from their signals.'

The confession seemed to do Denis an immense amount of good. Over the next few days he returned almost to normal. I say ‘almost' because there was still something different about him. His casual, open nature had been put on hold, replaced by a kind of careful wariness that I had not seen before. He seemed to be waiting for something or someone, and when the phone rang or there was a knock on the door he would give a quite uncharacteristic start. He went into Melbourne for whole days at a time, and though I asked if I could accompany him he refused. ‘I need to get my sea legs back,' he would say. ‘I need to learn to look after myself again.'

One afternoon – it was a day or so before he was due to return to duty
– we were shopping in our little village of Croydon when he gave a little start and gripped my arm. A man had come into the shop, a big man in a raincoat, with a soft hat pulled low over his face.

He looked like every unconvincing spy in every B grade movie ever made.

Denis steered me outside to the pavement. ‘Look, I've got to have a quiet word with that chap,' he said hurriedly. ‘I'm sorry to have to ask this of you, dear, but please shove off home. I'll be with you in an hour or so.'

He was home in less than an hour, and when I saw him coming in through our front gate I strode out to meet him. ‘I have never been so insulted in my life,' I snapped. ‘Aren't I fit company to meet your friend, or are you ashamed to introduce him to me? Whatever the reason, please never put me in that position again.' Behind my bluster was a sharp edge of concern. My instinct told me that the man in the shop had something to do with the tension Denis had been under, and I didn't want his newfound peace of mind put to the test too soon.

Denis chuckled, and for the first time in ages I saw a real twinkle of amusement in his eyes. ‘That was a chap called Makarov, a countryman of yours. Makarov is the head of Soviet Intelligence in Australia. I couldn't introduce him to you because you're supposed to know all about him. In fact, you are supposed to have urged me to meet him.' He grabbed my arm and swung me back towards the gate. ‘We need to talk, my dear. Let us take a little stroll.'

I felt the tendrils of Denis's secret service life touch me, and an involuntary shudder swept through me. I'd almost forgotten that side of our lives. The secrets, the deceptions, the need to appear something you are not. And, I suppose, the thrill. The tingle in the fingertips that comes from having adrenaline in the blood.

We took our usual walk, following White Horse Lane out into the green winter countryside. As soon as we were alone Denis stopped and faced me, his hands on my shoulders. ‘We've been given a rather special chance to help win the war,' he said. ‘I say “we” because you've rather been the key to everything.'

‘What on earth are you talking about?' I asked.

‘We need to pass some information on to the Russians,' he said. ‘Crucial information that will help them to beat the Germans on the Eastern Front. But we can't give it to them openly because they don't trust us and they would
think it was a trick. On top of which our own people won't allow us to give secrets to the Communists. So I'm going to have to “betray” the stuff to them. Take on the role of a well-placed intelligence officer who has turned against his own country. That way they'll believe it, and the blimps on our side won't be any the wiser.'

‘What do you mean about being a well-placed intelligence officer?' I asked.

‘I'm about to start work as the DNI's personal assistant,' Denis said. ‘The chap who handles all his secret signals, a fact the Russians will know all too well.'

I felt the need to sit down, and pulled Denis towards the grassy bank on the side of the road. At that moment some schoolboys came in sight, cheeky little urchins who rolled their eyes at us and made loud kissing sounds, assuming we were a courting couple looking for privacy. I looked at them coldeyed until they had gone and then turned to Denis. ‘And how do I come into it?' I asked. ‘You said I was the key to everything. I don't know any secrets, and the Soviets don't know me from a bar of soap.'

‘They certainly do know you from a bar of soap,' Denis said. ‘In fact they have a great deal of respect for you. They know you rebuffed Prince Gagarin, who they think of as a traitorous Quisling. It was only when I told them that it was you who had talked me into offering them secret material that they took me seriously. Until then they thought I was a plant, a double agent trying to penetrate their organisation.'

I felt my head spinning. ‘How on earth do they know about Prince Gagarin?' I asked. ‘And as far as I remember, I didn't refuse to help the Prince. It's just that I didn't get a chance to help him.'

Denis cleared his throat. ‘I told Gagarin that you were opposed to what he was trying to do,' he admitted, ‘and that you had forbidden him to approach you ever again. Your opposition became a bit of an issue amongst the émigré community in Malaya, which is no doubt how the Soviets came to hear about it. They had penetrated Gagarin's group from the beginning, of course.' He looked at me a little apologetically. ‘I hope you'll forgive me for sticking my oar in, but for all his charm and grace Gagarin
was
working against us. The Russian Royalists want the Communists to lose this war. That means they want the Nazis to win.'

I sat there on the earthen bank, thinking hard. I suppose I should have been annoyed that Denis had taken the Gagarin business into his own hands,
but the truth was that my instinct had always been to refuse to help the Prince. Denis had merely translated my feelings into action.

‘I think this all sounds dreadfully dangerous,' I said seriously. ‘What if our people
do
discover what is going on, and decide you are a traitor? Won't they want to shoot you?'

Denis gave one of his old carefree grins. ‘It's a game, Norma. Just a game. But a game with a very serious point to it. We simply must help the Russians now we have the chance, because if we don't they may lose, and if
they
lose, so will we. As for getting caught, the DNI knows what I'm doing and he'll back me to the hilt if the worst comes to the worst.'

I took a long, deep breath. ‘Is Stewart Menzies involved in this?' It seemed to me that if the information was going to be of any use to the Russians it had to be coming from London. Denis climbed to his feet and drew me up with him. ‘I'm afraid I can't answer that,' he said, and then after a moment: ‘I really am asking you to take things on trust, aren't I? Do you mind being involved?'

I took another long, deep breath. ‘Of course I don't mind being involved,' I said firmly. ‘I love you, and I trust you, don't I? So if you are involved, I am involved. It's as simple as that. Now, what do we do next?'

Denis took my arm and turned us homewards. ‘Makarov wants to meet you, no doubt to assure himself that you really are on their side. I've arranged for us both to meet him at four o'clock tomorrow afternoon, at the coffee shop in the Botanical Gardens.' Then he squeezed my arm. ‘You really are being magnificent about all this, darling. It must be a frightful shock to the system having so much dumped on you without warning. I wouldn't have dreamed of letting you get involved except there is so much at stake.' He turned and looked into my eyes. ‘You will tell me if you have second thoughts, won't you?'

I did have second thoughts. Late that night I woke up, horrified at the course we had embarked upon so lightly. We were about to betray British secrets to the Soviet Union, a country I had been brought up to think of as the epitome of evil. The thought of helping the Soviets was bad enough, but the thought of what might happen to us if we were caught absolutely terrified me. Spies were shot out of hand, I knew that. Denis had said that the DNI would back us up if things went wrong, but I took that with a grain of salt. Surely, if a spy is caught the first rule of espionage is that you deny any connection with him.

I shook Denis awake and we wrapped ourselves in dressing gowns and shared a pot of tea in the kitchen while I explained my fears. ‘I know you think this business is important,' I said. ‘But I would never forgive myself if things went wrong and I hadn't at least tried to change your mind. Don't you see how much there is at stake? What would happen to the children if we were both arrested as spies?'

Denis put his cup down carefully. ‘I know precisely how much is at stake, darling. For us and the children, but also for the Allies. The intelligence we are now getting out of Germany is pure gold. Operational signals about how and when each attack will take place. Information about German dispositions, strengths and weaknesses. We're giving it to our commanders in North Africa and it's turning the tide for them. If we can get it to the Russian commanders on the Eastern Front it will do the same for them.'

I didn't say anything and there was silence in the kitchen for a while. I could hear the wall clock ticking above the sink, and the distant sound of a milk train pulling out of Croydon Station.

Then Denis reached across the table and took my hand. ‘But you are quite right about the children, darling. I do think that perhaps you should stay completely out of this. For their sakes.'