In the Mouth of the Tiger (117 page)

I suddenly wanted that little horse, and I knew Denis did too. I put my knife and fork down and took his hands in mine. ‘We could afford him, couldn't we?' I asked. ‘We could race him down at Salisbury, and then, when he retired, I could have him as my hack. He has a certain something, don't you think?'

Denis laughed. ‘With that breeding, we could build a stud farm around him. All he'd have to do is to win a Classic or two, and then the biggest breeders in the country would be beating a pathway to our door. Wouldn't it be extraordinary if he
were
a throwback?'

I clutched at the suggestion. ‘You've always wanted to start a stud farm. What a chance this would be! And the Fates showed him to us, didn't they? We'd have walked straight past if they hadn't mixed up the signs.'

‘He does seem to have Hyperion's temperament,' Denis mused. ‘Hyperion was a placid horse except when racing, and then he had a heart of fire. He'd shove bigger horses aside if they crowded him. The harder they bumped, the truer he ran.'

We bought our colt almost for a song. His lack of size, and the prejudice in racing circles against four white stockings, worked for us and when the hammer fell I had the sweetest sense of victory.

We didn't drive back to Dorset that night but stayed at the Rutland Arms in Newmarket, planning the colt's future. The first decision we had to make was to choose a name, and I proposed Richelieu. ‘Sun of a Star,' Denis said firmly. ‘Hyperion is a star as well as a Greek god, so the name is jolly appropriate. Or what about Al Kochbar, which means the same thing?'

‘Richelieu,' I said equally firmly. ‘Don't forget, if he wins the Derby we'll
be building a thoroughbred stud farm around him. Richelieu Park sounds an awful lot better than Son of a Star Park.'

We tossed a coin for it over dinner, which seemed the appropriate thing to do. Denis won, but as soon as he did he raised his champagne glass to me with a chivalrous smiled: ‘Richelieu he is, my dear. Just in case he does come a cropper and ends up as your hack.'

During the night, the idea of a stud farm in Dorset bloomed in Denis's mind. I think it was three in the morning when he joggled me awake. ‘There's good chalk country not ten miles from the Manor,' he said. ‘Perfect country for a stud. We'll build everything from scratch, and have the most modern stables in England.'

‘When are we going to start this stud?' I asked.

‘The sooner the better. We'll buy some good brood mares, and pay for a sire or two until Richelieu finishes his racing.' There was a moment's silence, and then Denis nudged me again. ‘The Fates again. Being right on the edge of the Dorset chalk.'

I sighed. ‘Why the preoccupation with chalk?' I asked a little irritably.

‘Oh, don't underestimate chalk. The best horses in Malaya were always from New Zealand. We put it down to the fact that New Zealand foals are raised on chalk. Chalk puts something in the grass, and it's always firm but never hard. Lets a young horse really stretch his legs.'

I rolled over and pulled the eiderdown over my ears. ‘It's nearly four o'clock,' I grumbled. ‘Please forget your blessed stud farm for a while, Denis.'

But then I couldn't sleep. I saw the stud farm in my mind's eye, its white post-and-rail fences straddling lush green fields while a stallion with a golden mane flashed across the chalky turf, his four white feet flying.

‘Elli,' Meredith Gardner said. ‘Your spy's cover-name is Elli. It's always difficult breaking out individual letters, but we're quite certain it's Elli. And he must have been important to the Soviets because they treated him with kid gloves. I say him because a wife is mentioned. His wife sometimes helped make the dead-letter drops.'

‘Do the cables tell us anything more about him?' Malcolm asked. ‘If I'm to put up a watertight bill – and nothing less will be good enough – I need to know more than that.'

Meredith spread his hands and was about to say something but Ann Last, sitting quietly in the background, cut in ahead of him. ‘I know all about Elli,'
she said. ‘Igor Gouzenko talked about him after his defection. In Gouzenko's book, Elli was the most important Soviet agent of them all.'

Malcolm pushed his chair back to allow Ann into the circle. ‘Can you remember anything about Elli?' he asked. ‘Was he in Australia, for instance?'

‘He was the only one of the Soviets' top agents who was not in England the week Gouzenko defected,' Ann said. ‘We know that because the warning cable to London from Moscow Centre specifically asked for a message to be sent to him. But we don't know if he was in Australia. Gouzenko himself didn't know too much about him. Only what he had gleaned from cables passing through his hands.'

‘What
did
he know?' Malcolm asked.

Ann frowned thoughtfully. ‘That Elli was quite high in British Intelligence – probably second in charge to an Allied intelligence chief. That he had something Russian in his background. And that his material was so important to the Russian war effort that his material was taken straight to Stalin himself.'

Malcolm whistled softly. ‘All of that matches with what we know about our target. Elesmere-Elliott was chief of staff to the Australian DNI. His wife is Russian, for heaven's sake. And the Ultra material is precisely the stuff Stalin would want to see immediately.'

Meredith Gardner stretched and got up from his chair. ‘This is the side of Venona I absolutely hate,' he said. ‘I like to think of the work we are doing as an intellectual challenge, but of course it's a lot more than that. People are going to get caught because of what we find out, and some of them will doubtlessly be shot, or hanged, or whatever it is you do to traitors in peacetime. I know catching traitors is part of my job, but I don't have to like it.'

After Meredith had left, Ann dialled the combination of her safe and extracted a slim folder which she laid on Malcolm's desk. ‘This contains the statements Gouzenko made in 1946 about penetration of MI5 and MI6,' she said. ‘His allegations were pooh-poohed at the time, I think mainly because nobody wanted the pain and bother of unearthing British traitors. But I hung onto the stuff because I hated the thought Gouzenko might be right.'

They sorted the bundle of statements between them and settled down to read, Ann prim and upright at her desk, Malcolm lounging back at his with a cigarette in his fingers. Almost immediately, something leapt off the page for Malcolm and he held up a peremptory hand. ‘Listen to this: ‘‘GRU-Naval had a double agent in Singapore just before the war. This man was our contact
with Comintern agents throughout Malaya, and very highly regarded. I'm not sure, but I think that man was Elli''.'

Ann came over and stared at the passage over his shoulder. ‘I think we have enough for a bill already, Malcolm,' she said almost reverentially. ‘That matches up with what you say Elesmere-Elliott was doing in Malaya after the war. The stuff you unearthed but which the powers that be saw fit to bury.' She paused, thinking. ‘And there is another thing. In 1946 there was a serious breakdown in security in Singapore that has never been explained. A Russian naval lieutenant called Skripkin tried to defect to SIFE, but someone in MI5 or MI6 betrayed him. Elesmere-Elliott was in Singapore at the time, wasn't he?'

Malcolm banged his open palm hard on the surface of his desk. ‘Of course he was.' He took a deep breath. ‘I think that clinches it, Ann. All we've got to do now is to get our bill together as quickly as we can. Surely, they'll have to act on what we've got now!'

It was hours later, while Malcolm was dining in his favourite Indian restaurant in Carnaby Street that the final clincher came to mind. ‘Elli' indeed! Elli was the first four letters of the man's name. ‘Always did like cocking a snoot,' Malcolm breathed. ‘But we've got you this time, Denis. The original documents don't lie and, as an added insurance, I've secretly photographed the lot. There can be no battleship big enough to help you now, old lad.'

Life had never, ever been so sweet. I woke up one morning to see the first heavy frost of winter, and pulled on my dressing gown to stare through our window at a crystal wonderland. Mr Frampton had left a sprinkler on in the walled garden, and icicles hung like a million jewelled daggers from the apple trees. The lawns were white with frost, the sky a pale eggshell blue, and in the distance a couple of riders were cantering towards Bluebell Woods.

One of the Drax girls with her beau, I thought, out riding before breakfast as Denis and I had ridden in KL. The bright carousel of life: a pattern ever changing, always the same.

‘Can it get any better than this?' I asked Denis, and he chuckled.

‘I see no reason why not. Next spring we'll have Richelieu in training for the Classics, the stud will be full steam ahead, and we'll have a yacht to race off Poole Harbour. The only fly in the ointment will be that we can't be in half a dozen places at the same time.'

‘I know where you're likely to be,' I said severely. ‘Up at Monk's Farm.
You'd be up there twenty-four hours a day even now if you didn't have to come home for meals.'

We'd found a perfect site for our stud. Monk's Farm was just outside Handley, with a pretty little Elizabethan farmhouse and sixty acres of flat, rich land perfect for agistment. There were stands of chestnut trees for shade, plenty of water, and even a natural amphitheatre ideal for an exercise track. The lawyers on both sides were at it hammer and tongs, arguing about title and so on, but I knew that everything would turn out right in the end. The Fates were on our side, after all.

Denis got out of bed and joined me at the window. ‘Happy?' he asked, and I threw my arms around him.

‘Sublimely,' I said. ‘What on earth have we done to deserve all this?'

Roger Hollis sat in his gloomy office and stared out at an equally gloomy view of London rooftops. He was not a happy man, and the reason for his unhappiness lay in front of him on his blotter.

The Elesmere-Elliott bill.

Malcolm Bryant and Ann Last had done well, he acknowledged to himself. Very well indeed. They had produced a near-watertight case, complete with certified copies of all the supporting evidence and with only one reasonable conclusion: that Denis Elesmere-Elliott had been a Soviet double agent for nearly twenty years.

Hollis heaved a huge sigh. It was always depressing to be confronted with evidence of man's fallibility, and particularly so when the man concerned was a colleague, and a trusted and admired colleague to boot. Elesmere-Elliott was one of a kind, a disappearing breed that had never been more than half tamed. Not one of the new machine men of the service, but a buccaneer who served the cause not for professional reward and advancement but simply because he wanted to.

Or at least, that had been his reputation. Hollis had been in China before the war, and had known of Elesmere-Elliott through story and legend. A magnificent sportsman, a crack shot, a pilot who had written off a Tiger Moth over the jungles of Pahang and survived. And a legendary agent, reputed to have had both the Kuomintang and the Malayan Communist Party eating out of his hand.

It would be immeasurably sad if it turned out that it had all been a sham. Worse still if money had been the root cause for treachery.

Hollis sighed again. The next steps in the protocol were as inevitable as the tides. A fiat from the DG, Sir Percy Sillitoe, and then the traditional MI5 ‘interview', when a board of peers would cross-examine Elesmere-Elliott on the allegations in the bill. If the bill stood up, and Hollis had little doubt it would, the material would be turned over to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Hollis shuddered. A trial in these paranoid times would be brutish and short, and it would quite likely end in a hanging.

Hollis sighed for the third time. This time it was not a sad sigh reflecting on the frailty of human nature, but a sigh of exasperation at his own uncertainty. Because there was something wrong with the bill. Something profoundly wrong. It was something Malcolm could never have uncovered, and that would remain hidden throughout the most hard-fought trial.

Each of the Ultra cables received in Melbourne had been receipted by Elesmere-Elliott. That made perfect sense, because Signals in London would want confirmation that they had been received. But Elesmere-Elliott had gone further than a simple receipt. He had included his British Bureau number – BB7 – on every one of the acknowledging cables.

And that made no sense at all, because every communication with a BB number received at Broadway during the war had been automatically referred to the MI6 Director-General, Sir Stewart Menzies. If Elesmere-Elliott was betraying Ultra material to the Russians, why would he have brought C into the loop?

Perhaps he hadn't brought C into the loop. Perhaps C had always been involved. Either because the whole business was part of a still-secret MI6 operation, or because C himself was implicated in a real betrayal.

Hollis knew that many MI6 operations were kept secret from MI5, sometimes for years, sometimes forever. That was why the protocol required MI6 to be consulted early in every MI5 investigation involving MI6 personnel. MI6
had
been consulted in Elesmere-Elliott's case and no ‘hands off' signal had been forthcoming. The implication was that the investigation had not crossed any official MI6 operation and could go ahead.

But then, the people at MI6 who would have handled the matter wouldn't have known the significance of the BB numbers. They wouldn't have known because the British Bureau concept had always been highly secret, and it had also been dismantled years before. It was only old hands like Hollis who would know.

But he
did
know, and that was the trouble. So he squared the student's
slope of his shoulders and picked up his telephone. ‘Make an appointment with Sir Stewart Menzies, Miss Guernsey,' he said. ‘For today if possible. Please tell his secretary it's a Hunt Club matter. And don't put it in my diary.'