‘Sorry about the leg, Freddie,’ Charlie said. ‘Does it hurt much?’
‘No. But it will. I still get gyp off the wound to the kidney and that’s more than ten years ago.’
Charlie had come through the war, and every subsequent skirmish not deemed worthy of the title, unscathed. He sat opposite Troy, tucked back the knee of his perfect trousers, crossed his perfect
legs, and touched together the tips of perfect fingers. He spoke calmly, an affection in his voice that was bound to provoke.
‘Freddie, we have to find a way out of this, you do see that? Don’t you?’
‘No. I see nothing. I hear nothing. I’ve listened to you all my life. All my life I’ve been the brave to your chief. Now, you’re going to shut up and listen to
me.’
‘Freddie—’
‘Shut up! We’re into endgame, Charlie. Can’t you see that? This is no time to be spinning me blarney. I’m going to tell you what’s what and you’re going to
listen.’
‘What, like the last page in an Agatha Christie? Poirot Sums Up.’
It seemed so sweetly pleasant, not the sneer which it surely was.
‘If you like.’
‘Fine. But if you’re going to go all the way back to Cambridge we’ll be here for a week.’
‘I don’t give a blue fuck about Cambridge. 17 April. That’s where it starts, when those two poor buggers from the Branch wrapped their car round a tree on the Portsmouth
Road.’
‘I’m all ears.’
His fingers stayed paused in their gothic position, the fingertip church, deceptively serene, while the pale blue eyes locked tightly onto Troy’s.
‘When the Branch roped me in, they did the last thing you had expected and certainly the last thing you wanted. If there was one copper in London you wanted nowhere near Portsmouth, it was
me. Not because of the proximity of me and Khrushchev—as my brother so rightly put it, guarding Khrushchev was a red herring—you wanted me nowhere near Arnold Cockerell. Bit of bad luck
really that I was ever roped in. But your luck got worse. You tried to talk me out of it, and we ran into Johnny Fermanagh. Johnny always costs me a good night’s sleep, blasts me into
sleeplessness. So I caught the late train to Portsmouth, and tough luck again, I found myself sharing a breakfast table with Cockerell, an hour or two before you sent him out to his death under the
naive illusion that he was spying on the Russian ship. Am I right so far, Charlie?’
‘Of course. So far, so good.’
‘Then a few days later the balloon went up and Detective Inspector Bonser dashed round to the King Henry and covered the trail. That puzzled me. Bonser is not an impulsive man. I
don’t think he’s got the imagination to work up initiative. Now, I haven’t had the time to pull Cobb’s service record, but what’s the betting that if I do I’ll
find that Cobb was in the Special Branch in Liverpool before he got the Yard posting? And that in Liverpool he worked with a sergeant named Bonser? When Bonser heard about the frogman spy, he
called his old friend Norman Cobb—if he did, there’ll be a record of the call in the duty log—and without you to turn to Cobb panicked and told Bonser to bury the evidence. So,
Bonser ripped out the page from the register at the King Henry, a page that also had my name on it. Then, Cobb caught up with you. You told him he’d been a fool, that above all else you
wanted the body identified as Cockerell. Because if it isn’t Cockerell, where’s the scandal?
‘Now, unless I’m mistaken you were out of the country in June and July—I know, Gus Fforde said you’d passed through Vienna on your way somewhere, and I tried ringing you
myself, just to tell you I’d married and to introduce you to Tosca—but Cobb wasn’t, was he? Cobb was at the Yard handling this fiasco on his own. So, the body finally washed up in
July, Bonser called Cobb again, and received new, contrary orders—forget covering up, it’s got to be Cockerell, Cobb said, at any price. God knows what Bonser told Cobb, but if
you’d been around I doubt you would have paid the price of his next move. When no one in Portsmouth could identify the body as Cockerell, Bonser consulted the torn page, talked to Quigley and
then he called me. Bonser’s a good copper, follows orders to the letter. He got me down to Portsmouth, asked me to look at the body, asked me to meet the grieving widow. And once again the
worst thing that could happen to you happened—I investigate the death of Arnold Cockerell. More than that, I investigate the life of Arnold Cockerell.
‘It took me till yesterday to work out that it was Cobb following me around. Stupid of me, damn near got me killed. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to keep track of my movements
at the Yard, he’d only have to put his ear to the ground to know I was going down to Derbyshire to see Cockerell’s wife. I found Jessel, and before I could get anything out of him Cobb
killed him. I don’t think he meant to, but he overdid the bully boy routine and scared the poor bugger to death. I’ve got fingerprints from Jessel’s desk. One of the prints will
surely match Cobb’s.
‘Then … then I fucked up. Cobb had no idea Madeleine Kerr existed. No idea that Cockerell had a mistress. I led him straight to her, and he killed her. No accident this time. He
snapped her neck, pulled the cord, jumped from the train, and if he’d been a better shot he’d have killed me too.
‘I found myself on enforced sick leave and in the detective’s doghouse. But that meant I wasn’t at the Yard, and with Onions’ wrath hanging over me it meant that I was a
damn sight more secretive about what I was doing. Cobb lost me. He didn’t pick up the next lead, he didn’t follow me to Paris because he didn’t know I’d gone. In fact you
none of you knew a damn thing about it till yesterday, when my wife blundered into the Café Royal and blew both our covers.
‘But we were all on borrowed time. If you’d been around when I first brought her home with me, it would all have come apart in our hands weeks ago.
‘So, I found Arnold Cockerell’s insurance policy—the document Cobb suspected he’d left behind, and for which he killed Madeleine Kerr. And now I not only know what
happened—I know why.’
Charlie’s reactions had been minimal. A slight twitch in the muscles of the cheek—a little like the King’s nervous tick during the abdication speech—a tilt of the head
forward so his lips touched the tips of his extended fingers.
‘I’m still listening,’ he said, scarcely more than a whisper across his fingertips.
‘Now we will go back a while, not as far as the thirties, and not to Cambridge, but to, let’s say, 1951, to London. You and Cobb are setting up a new network for the Russians. I
presume you knew both Cobb and Cockerell from the war?’
Charlie straightened up, smiled, almost happy to be able to make a contribution.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘They were SOE. Very much our operational arm in those days. I knew Cobb fairly well. He’d no politics to speak of, but he always needed money, and
I knew he’d do almost anything to get it. They don’t make the best agents, but then you’ve always some degree of power over them, because they’re so damn greedy. A greedy
man is a weak man. I met Cockerell a couple of times at best, but I didn’t know him. Norman was the one who knew Cockerell.’
‘And when the Russians told you they needed a money-laundering service and a courier, Cobb suggested Cockerell?’
‘Of course, I’d forgotten all about the chap. He hardly stuck in the memory, did he? Cobb knew he was in business, and it seemed like just the cover we needed.’
‘1951,’ Troy went on. ‘Cockerell told his wife he was going to visit the Festival of Britain. At the same time Cobb arranged a meeting for the three of you. And I’ve
wondered, what lie did you tell him, Charlie, what yarn did you spin him?’
‘None at all. Told him the truth. It was a Russian operation. Not my fault if he couldn’t grasp the reality. And he did go to the Festival. We met him in the Dome of Discovery, as a
matter of fact.’
‘You recruited Cockerell to bring in and distribute money to your network. You created a plausible cover, you told him to set up a foreign business, to inflate it to heaven, and he brought
in Jessel to keep everything looking kosher. Jessel worked out the trick of paying tax on the money, effectively legitimised it—but nobody told Jessel the truth. Jessel just thought it was a
fiddle. And if there’s one thing the age of austerity did for us, it made us a nation of fiddlers. Sid James is our national archetype. Jessel saw very little wrong with this. God knows,
until I showed up he probably thought of himself as honest. It was just one more piece of spivvery—the economic
modus operandi
of the ration book society.
‘Strangest of all—you told Cockerell to turn respectable. He improved his cover, left the Labour Party, joined the Tories and the Rotary Club—he became a pillar of the local
Establishment, the middle man of Middle England, and all the time you were pushing thousands of pounds through his Contemporary tat business to a network of Soviet agents working to overthrow
everything Cockerell now appeared to stand for. A nice sense of irony, I’ll give you that.
‘For the best part of five years it ran like clockwork. Then something got into Cockerell. I’ve had a high old time trying to figure out what, but at some point he came to you and
said he wanted a real mission, he wanted one more crack in the field, didn’t he, Charlie?’
‘It was almost insane,’ Charlie said. ‘He came to me and said he had to swim again. It was something he had to do for himself. He said, “I must have a
mission”—you’re quite right, his exact words—he suggested some crack at Bulganin and Khrushchev, not me. I said “Arnold, we’re on their side.” And he
didn’t seem to grasp it. It was as though a button had been pressed in his brain and he was back in the war. Swimming into Brest, a recce out to the beaches of Normandy, or whatever. I
couldn’t get through to him what we were doing. He seemed to have grasped so little of it. He seemed to think that in some way it was all circular, that in doing this for me he was party to
some double- or triple-agent scheme whereby it would all turn out to be for Britain in the end. And you’re wrong about his cover—I never told him to go Establishment. He did all that
off his own bat. Worse still, I think he genuinely believed it all. He was the man he pretended to be. Pretty much the fate of all of us when you come to think about it. You invent yourself.
‘As you will imagine, by March he was a liability. I told the Russians about his crackpot scheme and asked what to do with him, and they said, “Fine, send him out to the
Ordzhonikidze.
” Could’ve knocked me down with a feather. I was staggered. But I did it. I didn’t know they were going to kill the poor sod.’
‘But they didn’t tell you why they wanted him sent out, did they?’
‘Not till I’d done it, no.’
‘It was a black joke. One of Khrushchev’s finest. Cockerell was sent out to spy, by the Russians on the Russians, and they in turn used him to create a scandal that rocked the
British Government. It really spits in your eye, doesn’t it? You thought you’d finally got Cockerell off your hands and they toss him back at you like a sprat. Can’t you see the
contempt they had for you in pulling a stunt like that?
‘But, it didn’t go smoothly. On the Monday night I heard Khrushchev say, “Do it.” I’d no idea what he meant. I didn’t know who he was talking to, but sure
enough the next morning the Captain of the
Ordzhonikidze
complained to the Foreign Office about a frogman spy. That Monday night, while Khrushchev and I were out pub-crawling, they dumped
the late Commander Cockerell overboard. That was “Do it”—“dump the body now!” But in the morning there’s no body. It had vanished, when it should have been
floating belly up in Portsmouth Harbour like a dead mackerel. God, Krushchev must have been furious. He’d been saving Cockerell to create a diplomatic crisis when he felt like having one, and
he felt really bloody after the row with the Labour Party, so he told the Russian captain to “do it”—but nobody allowed for the currents and Cockerell’s body got washed
along the coast for five miles and as many months, and it became a scandal without proof. Only my brother raising hell in the Commons and Eden’s stupidity ever allowed Khrushchev so much as a
whiff of victory. He got his scandal, but all too late and too little for his purposes. What he wanted was all hell to break loose while he was still here. Two birds with one stone—the public
embarrassment of the Government and the disposal of a useless former agent. Khrushchev probably thought Cockerell was more useful dead than he’d ever been alive.
‘When the body finally washed up, it’d been chewed beyond recognition by fish and propellers and God knows what. It was still important that it should be Cockerell, but by the time I
gave you the positive identification you wanted, the proof of the pudding as it were, none of it really mattered much. Yesterday’s rice pudding. Eden had opted for damage limitation, owned up
to something he didn’t do, and it was all old hat. And besides, the perfect scapegoat had been found. Both sides needed a victim, both sides needed someone else to blame, and once he’d
been nailed the matter could be safely buried by everyone concerned. Scandal, retribution, sacrifice and finally justice. Tell me, how did you manage to pin it on Daniel Keeffe?’
‘Oh, that was easy. I told Cockerell to report to his wartime controller. Keeffe. I knew Keeffe would dismiss his plan as rubbish, but by then it would be too late. His visit would be a
matter of record. It didn’t matter what Keeffe said, no one in Five and Six would believe him.’
‘So Keeffe died for your sins. The perfect scapegoat.’
‘If you like.’
‘And now your chickens come home to roost.’
‘I don’t quite follow you.’
‘When you pulled Cockerell off the money run, the Russians had no further use for their courier—Tosca. They pulled her from their end of the operation, knocked her about, and she
fled for her life—to find me, and eventually, inevitably, she would find you. Doesn’t it strike you as a mite ironic, that you set in train the sequence of events that would undo you
when you sent Cockerell to his death?’
‘Irony’s wasted on me, Freddie. I’m not open to it. Underline it, put it in red. Do what you will. It won’t affect me. I’m a believer.’