The Company of Strangers (50 page)

‘In 1977 I was retired, but I asked to continue working in the Stasi archives. I had already stolen lots of documents, which I kept buried in the garden of a villa Elena and I had the use of on the outskirts of Berlin. From 1977 to 1982 I worked exclusively on stealing documents which would give me irrefutable proof that there was a traitor permanently in the top five executives of the British SIS. In 1986, when Elena fell ill, I took her back to Moscow and there I managed to fit in the last piece of the puzzle. The final and verbal confirmation of all my documentary proof. I spoke to Kim Philby on three occasions before he died in 1988.

‘It was difficult to work on the book in Moscow and later, as Elena got sicker, I became ill myself. I have cancer, which at my age is a slow-moving affair, but I’ve been told
that it can suddenly get worse. So I’ve believed myself to be on this important mission, to tell the world everything I know, but without knowing how long I had to do it.

‘I felt compelled to do this work because the man, this traitor, has been honoured by his country for his services and I didn’t think it right that such a person should be so highly regarded for sending his own countrymen to their deaths.’

‘And now?’

‘And now, in the last forty-eight hours I’ve come to realize something. That what I thought was the most important thing, the work that would have left my stamp on this world, is as valuable as all the intelligence ever gathered and presented to those leaders who demanded it in order to make their brilliant decisions. It is worthless. It is dust. And now that I know that, or rather had you to help me remember it, and with all that you’ve shown me, with all that you’ve given me…I am, at last, happy.’

Andrea sipped her
aguardente,
kissed him on the mouth so that he felt the sting of the alcohol on his lips.

‘But who is it?’ she asked. ‘You’ve still got to tell who he is.’

They laughed.

‘It is so worthless, such dust,’ he said, ‘that I don’t think there’s any point in telling.’

‘You’ll be sleeping on your own if you don’t.’

‘I wanted to tell you when we were on that walk yesterday. Our walk through the Bairro Alto. The one where we were seen by the
bufo
who reported it to General Wolters. That, for me, was the most amazing thing that Philby revealed. It was during my last meeting with him. I hadn’t told him I’d been in Lisbon during the war. To begin with I thought that would be too risky, but Philby was completely finished by then. A very sad case. I think even the Russians were wary of him by the end. So I told him who I was. I
even remembered my codename, because it was such an odd one. I told him I was “Childe Harold”. He started laughing, laughing so hard I was worried about him. He grabbed my hand and breathed into my face, “And now we’re on the same side.” So I started laughing with him, willing him to tell me but not wanting to ask, because asking someone like that is different to them telling. He told me he had given the order that my name should be handed over to Wolters as a double agent and traitor…but that it must be done with subtlety. Nothing traceable.’

‘Why did Philby want to get rid of you?’

‘Because I was stuffing his British agents full of information which could possibly have given us, the Germans, a chance at a separate peace with the Americans and the British. He didn’t want there to be any possibility that the Russians would be excluded. So, he ordered one of
his
men to give me up. It was this man who told the
bufo
to report it to Wolters and led to my arrest.’

‘I knew it,’ said Andrea. ‘I knew it would be him.’

‘Who?’

‘Richard Rose.’

‘This is very sad, Andrea, because I know how much this man means to you but…’

‘Richard Rose means nothing to me…even less than nothing now. I invited him to my dinners because he’s one of the gang. He’s entertaining. But I’ve spent most of my life not liking him at all.’

‘It wasn’t Richard Rose. I always thought it would be, because he was so hard in the negotiations I had with him and Sutherland in the Monserrate Gardens.’

‘No?’

‘I couldn’t believe it either…that he was already in position at such an early stage.’

‘Philby was a liar, too.’

‘I’ve got the documentary proof of his later work,
Andrea. All those files I dug out of the Stasi archives. They’re all at home.’

‘If it’s him, I want to hear it from his lips.’ ’I’m not sure how wise that is, Andrea,’ said Voss. ‘Philby and Blake were both ruthless men. They sent hundreds of agents to their deaths, but I can assure you that Meredith Cardew was worse than the two of them put together.’

They slept heavily that night because of the drink. They woke late in the morning and made love for the first time, with the maids singing in the corridors outside.

By afternoon Voss was not feeling well and was in pain. They took a cab all the way to the airport and flew back to London. By eleven in the evening he was in the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. By a quarter past he’d been transferred, in agony, to the Pain Relief Unit in the specialist cancer hospital, the Churchill, where they brought his condition under control. By morning he was stable.

The consultant told Andrea that it could be a matter of days, at the most a fortnight. Voss insisted on staying with her at home. Andrea paid for a private nurse who would come in twice a day. Voss was installed in her bed with a morphine drip, whose doses he could control by a handheld self-administering device that computed the amount taken so that he couldn’t overdose himself.

Andrea didn’t go up into the attic. She didn’t turn on Voss’s computer. She never knew that all his data had been corrupted by a virus and that someone had taken a sample of the documents from the trunk. She stayed in the bedroom with Voss and read to him, because it was comforting to both of them.

At night she made a light supper and before she went up to bed at eleven o’clock, she let Ashley out into the garden. She stood at the back door under the light, the dog lost in the darkness. It was a balmy night but she wore
a cardigan and held it tight around her chest though she realized the cold was coming from the inside out. She had tried not to think it, but she knew she was going to have to do it again. She was going to have to go through that whole painful process once more – coming to terms with the word ‘never’. Not in a million years. From here to eternity. An infinity of absence.

She remembered coming out of the Basílica da Estrela back in 1944 having cried herself empty and the feeling of that breeze blowing straight through her. Had that been bad? Not entirely. There’d been a freeing up, a loosening of the moorings, her ship still linked to the landmass of her grief but the instinct already there to move on. That was her generation. Don’t make a fuss. Get on with it. And now? After a life led with love hanging by a thread. And old age, and the only possible end of old age.

In the afternoon she’d walked through the graveyard of the church looking at the headstones of married couples, wondering if this was a grim thing to be doing. She noticed that if the woman died first, the man always followed within a year. If the man died, the woman did not go gently into her husband’s night. The women hung on in their decrepit bodies, hearts thumping through the years.

She was going to finish life how she’d started it. Alone. Except that this time there were connections and an image came to her of roped climbers up a sheer wall and the looks of encouragement between them.

She shouted for Ashley.

No response.

‘Bloody dog,’ she said, and set off down the path.

She found him by stumbling over his supine body. The dog was warm but completely inert and she could tell by the light coming up the garden from the back door that if there was any life in his visible eye it was the tiniest crack. She picked him up. Quite a weight for a dachshund. She
went back to the light, inspected him briefly under it and took him inside and laid him on the refectory table at one end. She looked at him intently for some sign of what it was that had struck him down. The warm night air blew against her back. She prised open his jaws and saw vestiges of red meat in his teeth and, in the instant that it came to her that he’d been poisoned, a white silk scarf floated down in front of her eyes and snapped tight round her neck.

She grabbed at the reins of the scarf behind her neck and found that a pair of strong, male, gossamered hands held the loop of silk. She tried to move but the taut body behind her jammed her against the table. She kicked back at the shins, saw a pair of mahogany Doc Martens. He pushed her forward again with his hips, bending her down over the table so that she felt her last chance was to get her legs up on to the table, try to scrabble across it. The powerful hands reined her back, bore down on her. She rolled back towards him, clawing at his shoulders, trying to weaken him in any way she could but the fight was going out of her. Her face was swelling, her vision darkening at the rims. Blood blackened in her head and through the narrowing tunnel she saw his face. She mouthed his name with her thick, purple lips. Her last word, a soundless question:

‘Morgan?’

Voss woke up. The only light in the room from the red digits of the clock which read 00.28. The pain had woken him. He clicked on the morphine dispenser but this time he didn’t feel the trickle of Lethe, as they’d begun to call it. He looked at the pillow next to him. Empty. He moved his arm, which swung freely, and saw in the weak red light that the morphine-drip tube had been cut. The pain in his side was crushing, as if there was a steel hand in there relentlessly closing on an organ. He threw back the bedcovers, turned on the reading lamp, saw that the
overhead drip-feed bag was empty when he knew it should have been at the halfway mark.

He launched himself out of bed, sent the drip clattering to the floor. He called out, ‘Andrea!’

It was a weak cry. The steel hand was crushing the breath out of him as well. He reached the door frame, the cut tube, still with the intravenous needle taped to his arm, whipping around his face. He staggered down the stairs and turned into the kitchen and saw the bodies on the table. The dog at her feet.

What is she doing?

A spear of pain shot through his chest, so sharp and fast that neon flashed in his brain. He staggered to the edge of the table, gripped it with his fleshless hands and looked down into the face that was hers but not.

He coughed against a pain that was far greater than anything the steel hand could produce. He coughed against a whole agony in his chest, the departure of possibility, the flight of future. Drops darkened on the wool of her fuchsia cardigan as he put his face down to hers, touched her cheek with his good cheek, felt the residual warmth. He lay next to her on the table, clasped her hand in his and for one bright moment felt happy, saw her falling through the bubbles of water as he rushed down to meet her, to bring her up, to bring her back to the light. And then the pain in his chest tightened but this time didn’t let go and, although he didn’t want to resist it, his body arched against it, the last pain. And through it he saw her across the river from him, on the opposite bank, waving.

Morgan Trent, who’d been sitting at the dark edge of the room waiting for his bit of sadistic amusement, came forward. He inspected the bodies, drumming his chin with his fingers. He saw the hands clasped. How sweet, he thought, how very sweet. He looked over the faces, found
himself mildly curious at the quizzical smile on the good side of Voss’s face. As if he’d seen something. Received a welcome.

He checked for a neck pulse. None. He went up to the attic and brought down the trunk, which he passed over the wall into the garden of his rented cottage. He returned for the two suitcases of documents. He went back a third time, planted his foot firmly in the flower bed outside the dining-room window and broke a pane of glass. He climbed in through the window and walked out of the front door, closing it behind him.

He put the suitcases and the trunk in the back of his car. He removed the Doc Martens and put on a pair of crêpe-soled shoes. He trotted down to the Brocks’ house and put the Doc Martens where he’d found them, in the garage. He drove to Swindon and made a call from a public phone box. They exchanged passwords and he said: ‘It’s done, I’m dumping the paper now.’

The nurse found the bodies in the morning. She had her own key. She called the police and an hour later three officers were standing around the bodies on the refectory table.

‘You know what this looks like to me?’ said the DC.

‘Apart from murder, you mean?’ said the DI.

‘The way the bodies are positioned, with the dog at their feet, and the fact that he’s holding her hand…’

‘Odd that.’

‘…it looks like a tomb,’ he said. ‘One of those old tombs, carved in stone. You know, the knight in armour and his lady wife.’

‘You’re right,’ said the DI, ‘and they’ve always got those little dogs at their feet.’

‘There’s a poem written about that,’ said the third officer, who was young, new in the job.

‘A poem,’ said the DI. ‘I didn’t know they read poetry at Police College these days.’

‘They don’t, sir. I got a BA in General Arts from Keele University. We read a few poems.’

‘All right,’ said the DC, thinking – acceptable.

‘I only remember the last line.’

‘That’s all right, we don’t need the whole damn thing.’

‘“
What will survive of us is love
…”, sir. That was the line.’

‘Well, that’s a load of crap, isn’t it?’

Oxford Times 3rd December 1991

At 11.30 a.m. in the Oxford Crown Court Gary Brock was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Karl Voss and Andrea Aspinall.

Oxford Times 3rd February 1992

Morgan Trent and Kathleen Thomas would like to announce their forthcoming marriage to take place at Langfield Church, Oxfordshire on 28th June 1992.

The Times 30th June 1993

On 28th June 1993 Sir Meredith Cardew died peacefully at home. He was 84 years old. There will be a memorial service at St Mary’s in the Strand on 15th September 1993.