Old Flames (35 page)

‘I think I just talked to his wife. She hung up once I’d given her my rank.’

‘I don’t blame her. Now, are you going to tell me who he is?’

‘I think he’s the man who sent Commander Cockerell out to spy on the
Ordzhonikidze.
He’s certainly the man the FO sent to explain it all to Cockerell’s wife once
the Government decided to come clean.’

Jack looked blankly at him for a moment or two.

‘Clean? Not the word I would have chosen.’

‘Quite.’

Jack resumed the blank stare. Troy began to wonder if he had left half his lunch smeared across his chin.

‘You’re not going after Five and Six again are you?’

‘Again?’

‘You know bloody well what I mean.’

‘No. I’m not. I just want to know.’

‘Know what?’

‘What happened to Cockerell.’

‘You mean, who killed him?’

‘I just want to be sure it doesn’t fall within our brief.’

‘And if it doesn’t, we’ll leave well alone?’

Troy said nothing.

‘Freddie?’

‘Of course,’ said Troy.

‘You know, somehow I don’t believe you.’

Troy worked his way through the paperwork on his desk and cleared the afternoon. By three he was walking from Notting Hill Gate Underground station towards Kensington Gardens. He turned left
into Linden Gardens, a looping cul-de-sac, a mixture of mansion flats and double-fronted family homes. He stood on the pavement opposite number 202, wondering what opening tactic would stop him
getting an earful of the resentment that the Branch deserved. The door of the house opened, and a short woman emerged, wrapped in a belted mackintosh, headscarf and dark glasses. It was a warmish
late-summer day. The inappropriate clothes looked to Troy like a crude form of disguise. Audrey Hepburn or Diana Dors trying to shop unrecognised in Regent Street, but making quite sure everyone
would say, ‘There’s a film star in disguise.’ She walked off in the direction of the Bayswater Road and stopped by a parked Morris Minor.

‘Mrs Keeffe!’ Troy called out to her, and she stopped fiddling with her keys, turned and pulled her glasses down to the tip of her nose, peering, at him over the top.

‘It was you who called me?’

‘Yes. Mrs Keeffe—I’m not Special Branch.’

‘And I’m not Mrs Keeffe.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

‘I’m Deborah Keeffe. Daniel was my brother.’

‘Was?’

She took the glasses off entirely, folded them and put them in her coat pocket. Her eyes were red and the lids were swollen. She looked as though she had not slept for two or three days.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You can’t be Branch or you’d know. My brother took an overdose five days ago. He’s dead, Mr—I’m sorry I’ve forgotten your
name.’

‘Troy.’

‘I thought I’d seen you before. Or I’d’ve walked on when you called my name. I’ve seen you at the House. You’re Rod Troy’s brother, aren’t
you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m the Assistant House Librarian, Science and Engineering. I don’t suppose you’d’ve noticed me. The members don’t, so why should the visitors? I suppose you
went through the telephone directory looking for Keeffes, didn’t you? I don’t know what your interest is in Daniel, but he lived in Drayton Gardens. As I said, if you were Branch
you’d know that.’

‘I’m with the Murder Squad, Miss Keeffe.’

‘Who’s been murdered?’

Increasingly Troy had no answer to this simple question. He gave the answer he was accustomed to give, even though it ran against the grain of what he now believed.

‘Commander Cockerell.’

‘Well, well, well, the chickens come home to roost at last.’

She pulled her dark glasses out again and slipped them on.

‘The last few days I’ve been over to Drayton Gardens. Clearing up, clearing out, you know. I was on my way there just now, but I suppose that’s the last place we can talk. Why
don’t we forget the car and take the underground? I’ve always found it a rather private place outside the rush hour. I doubt anyone will hear what we have to say.’

They walked back the way he had come from Notting Hill Gate and boarded a Circle line, on the clockwise run, the long way round to Chelsea, north through Bayswater, east via Baker Street.

Miss Keeffe said nothing until they were seated. She pocketed the sunglasses once more, pulled off her headscarf. Black curly hair fell free, and she brushed it clear of her face. Troy put her
at about thirty. Short and Jewish, broad at the cheekbones, her eyes as dark as his, her skin pale, almost white by contrast, except where sleeplessness and grief had left it red and raw. It was a
familiar face. England had received many immigrants in the first forty years of the century. She was, he guessed, Latvian or Lithuanian, a descendant of refugees from countries that no longer
existed. Someone not unlike him. She knew this, too.

‘You’re Russians aren’t you, you and your brother? Sir Alex Troy’s boys.’

‘From Tula,’ he said, as he always did.

‘My mother was from Vilnius. Her parents brought her over in 1899. Russian speakers, Jews, outsiders twice over. Trying to beat the pogrom. They got on a ship bound for Ellis Island. It
put in at Tilbury. They disembarked, looked around for the Statue of Liberty, decided it was lost in the fog, registered, and lived here for the best part of a week under the illusion it was New
York. My father was from Cork. He had no illusions. He had no adherence to the faith either. An odd marriage, but it worked. Half-Catholic, half-Jewish, guaranteed for neurosis, wouldn’t you
say?’

Troy saw the gap.

‘Was your brother neurotic?’

‘Yes. And that’s why he killed himself. In the end. A more stable man might have ridden out the embarrassment, a more secure man might have seen it as less than life-threatening.
Only a fool would ever have dismissed it as trivial. He didn’t have to kill himself. It was always in him to do so, however.’

‘I take it your brother had run Cockerell during the war?’

‘Yes. He was in the Navy. Made commander. One notch higher than Cockerell. Ever since then there’s been the usual rubbish about the reserve list and a job in the Foreign Office, and
his rank became a sort of courtesy, concealing whatever rank he really held.’

‘And he was blamed for what Cockerell did?’

‘Blamed, interrogated, punished and humiliated. They posted him to Reykjavik at the end of June. Can you imagine the humiliation? Good war record. Bright young thing of the department,
leading light in Soviet watching, spoken the language since childhood, still under forty—and they post him to a non-place, to a non-job. All he’d do for the rest of his tour would be to
count fishing boats and spy on the amount of cod and halibut they landed. It was worse than sacking him. I always disliked Daniel’s commitment to his job. In wartime it seemed fine. In peace
it didn’t. Don’t ask me why. Maybe in war everything was bending to the common cause. The fabric of the old British prejudices stretching out of shape, holes appearing like fishnet
stockings, holes through which men like Daniel passed. Outsiders became insiders. He thought it was permanent. Bloody fool. He lied to himself and he lied to me. He wanted to be accepted.

‘The night before he left he came round to see me, already half cut. He finished off a bottle of gin in my sitting room and blubbered on about his job. I urged him to quit. He
couldn’t do that, he told me. Once they had you, you were theirs for ever. It would all blow over. He’d done nothing. Sooner or later they’d see that. Then he told me. Told me how
Cockerell came to see him after more than ten years. Daniel had been in charge of him, his “case officer” or whatever the spooks call it, during the war. He’d retired him, because
he was so obviously past it. Cockerell told him he wanted one last job before he finally hung up his flippers. Told Daniel he could tackle the
Ordzhonikidze,
described some crazy scheme
he’d thought up for examining the hull of the ship. Why would we want to do that? Daniel asked him. And Cockerell rambled on about Russian secrets, and how it was a golden opportunity. Daniel
said no. Told him he couldn’t possibly get authorisation for such a harebrained scheme. But he felt sorry for the old fool. He took him for a drink at his club. But even that was showing off.
Boasting that he had a club to take him to.

‘And then the bubble burst. The rumours about Cockerell started. The papers got hold of it. Entry records were checked. They all had to produce their diaries, and there it was, just as the
PM was trying to deny everything, Daniel’s diary showed an appointment with Cockerell. The log on the door showed Lieutenant Commander Cockerell admitted to see Commander Keeffe in March. Too
many spooks saw Daniel with Cockerell in his club, drinking like old comrades. And nobody believed a word of Daniel’s version. That he put Cockerell on a train back to darkest Derbyshire with
a couple of stiff drinks inside him and told him to forget about Khrushchev and enjoy his retirement.

‘He spent two days with someone he called the “Soft Man”—he looked five years older by the time he emerged. Then the Branch called. Smashed everything that mattered to
him. And the final humiliation. Three weeks before Daniel shipped out for Reykjavik the PM decided to own up and Daniel was sent up to Derbyshire to debrief the widow. And I think debrief is
Newspeak for “shut her up”. I don’t know what he said to her. He hardly spoke except when he was drunk. Mind you, that was every day by then. He sailed for Reykjavik drunk, he
phoned me up drunk. And he died drunk, swimming in gin and barbiturates.

‘I was at work when they told me. I have an office just off the reading room. Chap called Woodbridge, Tim Woodbridge, called in. Parliamentary Secretary at the Foreign Office, MP for
Upshire or Downshire. No one I knew. Most of my work is with the Opposition. Government doesn’t much need the briefs we can prepare, they have the civil service at their beck and call. So,
Woodbridge introduced himself, told me he had some bad news for me, started his how-sorry-we-all-are waffle. I cut him short and told him if Daniel was dead he should just spit it out. Had to be
Daniel. My parents are long gone, and we were neither of us married. There was just me and him. And besides, it was in his nature to do the silly thing. Anyway, Woodbridge let me have a little cry,
and when it looked as though I’d put on the stiff upper lip he came to the real purpose of his visit. Anything among Daniel’s possessions relating to the job must be returned to the
spooks, and I’m still bound by the Official Secrets Act. I must tell no one anything, and if I cooperate my prospects at the House are assured. Meaning if I don’t, they’ll finish
me. All said in the nicest possible way, you understand and not a word of reference to what he really meant—just “recent events in which your brother may have been involved”.
Didn’t mention spies or frogmen or Khrushchev. And all the time the bastard called me “my dear”. I can take all the time I want off work, all they ask is for assurances of my
discretion. I felt like he was pretending all the time. Pretending I was one of them, pretending I wasn’t a woman, pretending I mattered in some way, pretending I was part of “the
club”, pretending I played by the same rules, for God’s sake pretending I wasn’t Jewish!’

‘Then why are you telling me this?’

‘Because I’m not part of the club. Because faith, age and gender exclude me from it. Because I won’t play by their rules. I like my job. I’ve worked hard to get there.
Scholarship to Girton when I was seventeen, a Master’s from the LSE by the time I was twenty-one. Commons Librarian at twenty-six. But they can’t bribe me with it. They can’t use
it to hit me over the head. I don’t know what I’d’ve done. I’ve almost cleaned out Daniel’s flat and I haven’t found a damn thing that would point a finger at
anyone. But I know what I know. And if you hadn’t come along I’d’ve found someone. Some bloody Ivanhoe would come along and rescue Rebecca. I hope to God he would.
I’d’ve told somebody. God knows, I might even have told your brother, I’ve written the odd brief for him. At least he knows my name.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Eh?’

‘Don’t tell him anything.’

She shrugged. ‘If you like. I’m not sure what appealing within Westminster will achieve anyway.’

She paused. Troy could almost hear the action of memory.

‘Tell me, do you remember that piece in
The Economist
last year, at the time the House debated Burgess and Maclean?’

‘What piece?’

‘I think the chap’s name was Fairlie. He said something like the “Establishment closing ranks” to protect them? Does that ring a bell?’

It didn’t. Troy had dim memories of poor old Harold Philby denying all the innuendo in the press conference at his flat, facing the likes of Alan Whicker, and doing his best to defend
himself against the power of rumour.

‘Vaguely.’

‘It stirred up a debate in itself. One of those cultural rows that happen from time to time as a country and a culture redefines itself. That’s what we’re doing now. Redefining
ourself. Doing it rather badly, as a matter of fact. And just because we don’t have a Fourth of July, or salute the flag, and we have no notion of un-British in the sense of un-American, and
no one stands up in the cinema for the national anthem any more, it doesn’t mean we don’t have a sense of identity, a sense of ourself. Fairlie put his finger on it. The idea of an
Establishment—an inner layer of Britain that always looks after its own. Not a class or a hierarchy, and much harder to define than that. Layer’s about the best I can do. It’s
about belonging. I don’t belong. My brother did not belong, and he died of wanting to belong. He could not live with the accusation of betrayal. But he never grasped that without belonging
there can be no betrayal. Do you see what I mean?’

Troy saw very clearly what she meant. For a moment it was like debating with his father. It was his kind of argument. It was his kind of structure. But she had got the important point the wrong
way round.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But the point of Burgess and Maclean is that belonging makes betrayal impossible. If you belong you cannot betray. Establishment, however you define it,
is not country, is not
patria.
Betray and the country will disown you or prosecute you. This Establishment, this layer as you call it, never will. It is in that scheme of things perfectly
possible to betray, to belong and not to accept that you have betrayed. It’s perfectly possible that Burgess has kept up his subscription to whatever gentleman’s club he was in on the
offchance of his ever needing it again.’