In the Mouth of the Tiger (118 page)

Then Hollis opened the file again and flipped through the attachments until he came to document he wanted. It was an executive order to ‘all divisions and posts' from Menzies himself, directing that under no circumstances was Ultra material to be given to the Soviets. ‘This order,' Menzies had written in his preamble, ‘comes from the Prime Minister himself, and I have given my personal word that it will be scrupulously obeyed.' Nothing could be much clearer than that, Hollis thought – presumably one of the promises Churchill had extracted from the MI6 Director-General as payment for giving him complete control of Ultra distribution. Hollis lit his pipe and took his mind back to the early 1940s, when Ultra had burst on the scene. Churchill had naturally expected to see all Ultra material but Menzies had resisted. Ostensibly because he feared that Desmond Morton, the PM's Intelligence adviser, was a blabbermouth and might leak something important. The real reason of course was that knowledge is power, and Ultra would have handed the politicians more power than Menzies thought the politicians should have.

Hollis's train of thought was interrupted by the jangle of his telephone. ‘Sir Stewart sends his regrets, Mr Hollis, but cannot possibly see you immediately. But he suggests that if you are free after four o'clock you might like to meet him at his club.'

‘Please pass my regards to Sir Stewart and tell him I will meet him at White's at four o'clock.' Menzies liked to discuss anything ticklish at his club. It meant that C knew what Hollis wanted to discuss, and that it
was
ticklish. Hollis sighed again.

It was raining when Hollis punched the bell at White's, and George Groom, the head footman, let him in and took his coat. ‘Sir Stewart is in the billiard room,' he said deferentially. ‘He asked me to make sure you were not disturbed.'

Menzies rose from a seat by the fire in the huge, empty room and strode forward to shake Hollis by the hand, his highly polished shoes clicking on the marble floor. ‘No need for us to beat about the bush, Roger,' he said as he advanced. ‘You're here to talk about the Elesmere-Elliott business.'

Hollis nodded, and the two men sat down facing each other in front of the open fire. ‘I have no papers with me, Sir Stewart,' Hollis began.
‘Stupid business, but we are now required to sign for any papers we take out of Leconfield House. Part of the new security squeeze the bureaucrats are insisting on.'

Menzies nodded absently. ‘Lot of nonsense. If you want to steal something, you slip it into your pocket. Lot of nonsense.' He rubbed his hands together for warmth before the fire, then turned to Hollis. ‘Now, Elesmere-Elliott. To be blunt, Roger, the man was acting under my direct orders. Russia was being beaten and if they had collapsed the war would have been over. I wanted them to have the benefit of the Ultra material, so I gave it to them. It did the trick.'

‘Against the PM's strictest orders,' Hollis said quietly.

‘Against Churchill's strictest orders. And in breach of my agreement with the man. But needs must when the Devil drives, Roger. And the Devil was well and truly in the driver's seat at the end of 42.'

Groom brought in two old fashioned glasses on a silver salver, each a quarter full of single malt whisky. ‘Will you be staying to dinner, Sir Stewart?' he asked.

Menzies shook his head. ‘Not tonight, Groom. Tonight's a hanging night, and hangings take away my appetite.'

Alone again, he tapped Hollis on the knee. ‘You're an old hand,' he said. ‘You know the score. How will Denis fare if we don't interfere?'

‘It's a watertight bill, C. If you don't throw him a lifeline, he'll go down.'

‘What about his wife?'

‘Implicated. Silly girl helped service the dead-letter drops. According to the Russians she knew precisely what was going on. They even gave her a cover-name. Grand Duchess.'

Menzies sipped his whisky, frowning. ‘Are there any links to me?'

‘There's only one thing that ties you into the business. Elesmere-Elliott included his British Bureau number in the cables acknowledging receipt of the Ultra material concerning Russia. Anyone in the know will realise he did that to keep you in the loop.' He thought for a moment. ‘Nothing else. Unless of course Elesmere-Elliott himself says he was acting under orders.'

‘He won't,' Menzies said simply. Then: ‘Can you lose those receipts?'

Hollis grimaced. ‘I suppose so. I could say that they reveal operational methods and are not relevant to the case. Yes, I can lose the receipts.'

The two men sipped their whisky in silence. Around them, the shadows
of a late autumn afternoon were already thick in the ornate room with its chandeliers and shrouded billiard tables. The fire had died down to a mass of embers, blood red in the gloom.

‘I have to take this course,' Menzies said. ‘No alternative, I'm afraid. Too much hangs on my staying in my job for a few more years. Too many irons in the fire, too many balls in the air.'

‘I understand,' Hollis said.

Everything that needed to be said had been said. But even spymasters are human. The two men needed some time to pass, to take away the sting of what had just been decided. To give the moment a little grace.

‘You'll be wondering if I am a secret Communist,' Menzies said.

Hollis shook his head but Menzies went on all the same. ‘You know that my generation was decimated in the first war? I was President of Pop at Eton, and of my eight committee members, four were killed in the first year of the war. Four bright young men who should have been here now, running this country. Four of my closest friends.'

Hollis moved uncomfortably in his chair. He was an ‘old hand', which meant he would die for C. But he did not want to sit here, listening to this. Did not want to be the older man's conscience.

Menzies read the awkwardness and smiled. ‘I'm not about to ask for absolution,' he said. ‘But I am going to tell you how the Great War changed me. I decided that if it was ever in my power, I would make sure that no Englishman ever again died unnecessarily.' He held his glass up against the light from the fire. ‘This is Haig whisky, Roger. Haig & Haig made a lot of money for a man called General Haig. It was that money that eventually put him into a position where he could order a million Englishmen to rise out of their trenches and run forward to their deaths. And he did precisely that. Hundreds of thousands of Englishmen died on that man's orders. But Haig also saved my life. He took me out of the trenches after eighteen months of hell and made me a brevet major on his Intelligence staff. A more honourable man than I would have stayed with his soldiers and died with them.'

Hollis lifted his own glass in a kind of salute. ‘You did more than your share,' he said. ‘Some of us didn't get the chance to do anything.'

But Menzies was not to be diverted. ‘I made a pledge when I first joined Intelligence,' he said. ‘I promised myself to play the game by my own rules, and play it for stakes that I thought were worth fighting for. And I have done that for over thirty years now. Some of the things I've done, Roger, would
make your hair stand on end. Some of the things I'm still doing would make your hair stand on end. But the ends have always been the same. To save the lives of Englishmen.'

Hollis didn't want to hear any more, and he put his glass down with a muted bang. ‘So Elesmere-Elliott is to dangle in the breeze?'

Menzies didn't answer for a moment. Then he shook his head. ‘You still don't understand, Roger, do you?' he said softly. ‘It's all a game, don't you see? And the game's not over until the pieces are put away.'

After Hollis had gone, Menzies paced the billiard room for a good half hour, then took a cab back through the rain to Broadway. The duty officer saluted him in the lobby. ‘Late night, sir?' he asked politely, but Menzies just stared at him without answering, his blue eyes opaque, inscrutable.

‘Cold fish,' the man said as Menzies took his private lift to his office on the fourth floor. He didn't stay long: there was a concealed passage from his office to his residence at 21 Queen Anne's Gate, and he traversed it almost immediately. Pamela and his daughter were away in the country, and Menzies supped alone, the latest cables from the Duty Officer arrayed for his perusal beside his plate.

After dinner he smoked a cigar, perhaps two, sitting hunched and thoughtful in his favourite armchair, an unread copy of the
Times
on his lap and the gas fire glowing at his feet. And then, after the housekeeper had wished him a cheerful goodnight and departed, he roused himself and put on his coat and hat. Stepping out into the chill of Queen Anne's Gate, he walked rapidly for perhaps half a mile before slipping into the doorway of a small maisonette flat. Inside, he closed the door and drew down the blind over the frosted window before snapping on the lights. The place was spotless as a new pin but strangely desolate. Clearly nobody lived here. It was a
pied à terre
, a bolt-hole, owned by a company his family controlled but available only to him. He went straight to the telephone on the cramped hall table and dialled a number.

On the other side of London, a man called Yuri Modin picked up his telephone. He was in the middle of a party, a thoroughly bourgeois party despite his impeccable Communist credentials, and he had to cover his right ear in order to hear what his caller was saying.

‘I need a favour, Yuri,' a voice said. Modin had heard that voice no more than half a dozen times in his life but he recognised it immediately and clenched his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Shut up, everybody,' he shouted at
the top of his voice. ‘Not a sound! Please, this is very important!' And he sat down in the sudden silence to listen.

His heart pounding like a trip-hammer.

I woke up on the day the blow fell to the desolate cawing of a flock of crows. The sound penetrated a happy dream and dragged me reluctantly to wakefulness, and I lay in our warm room puzzled and disconcerted by the unfamiliar sound. I couldn't recall hearing crows before at Almer Manor, and their sudden presence seemed an evil omen.

And then they were gone. Almost simultaneously, sunlight touched the wide bay windows and everything was back to normal.

It was a very normal day. We had kippered herrings for breakfast, washed down by lashings of tea. Win Heppenstall planned a natural science excursion to Lulworth Cove for later in the morning, and as it promised to be something of an adventure the children were excited and chattering twenty to the dozen. The plan was to test a local legend by the application of common sense and a little mathematics. The legend was that smugglers had used Lulworth Cove to land contraband because they could tell precisely where they were on the darkest night by feeling the size of the pebbles on the beach. This was because the pebbles were graded uniformly from east to west. Testing the legend would be simple: find out if the pebbles
did
range uniformly from east to west.

‘How are you going to do that?' I asked as I spread marmalade on my toast.

‘We're going to collect buckets of pebbles from points along the beach, and then find out their average size by dividing the weight of the bucket by the number of stones in each,' Win explained. ‘If we find a regular gradation in size from one headland to the other, we'll assume the legend proved.'

‘I think that's very clever,' Denis said from behind his newspaper. ‘A bit of maths, a bit of history. And jolly interesting. I'd come along but the broker is ringing at eleven.'

‘Do you mind if I tag along, Win?' I asked. I wasn't just being polite. The idea of a few hours by the sea was appealing, and the project would give me another chance to touch the history that was all around us. I was reading Daphne du Maurier's
Jamaica Inn
at the time, and my thoughts were very much on smugglers and secret landings in blacked-out bays.

We had tremendously good fun. The sea was up and a fine, chill spray
hung over the pebbled beach but we were all so busy that we hardly noticed the cold. Gulls wheeled against the pale sun and the wind tossed the children's hair and brought roses to their cheeks. Afterwards, we crouched in the shade of a sea wall while the children did the counting and the calculating.

The pebbles
did
range uniformly in size from one headland to another, and when the result became obvious we all gave a cheer.

We had a normal afternoon, so normal that I hardly remember anything of it. I suppose we had lunch, with the fire crackling in the grate and Mrs Frampton lingering after each course to pass on the village gossip. No doubt the children would have been at their lessons after lunch while Denis and I read and dozed in our room. I have the odd memory or two from the afternoon: Tony waiting for the red post office van to come up the drive because this was the day
Yachting World
was delivered. Denis showing me apples he'd laid down in the attic to dry as pippins.

I do remember afternoon tea, because Robert and Susie Weld dropped in and we talked horses. We had studbooks open, and I remember passing around a photograph of Richelieu.

‘Looks like a pony!' Bobby said with mock derision. ‘Are you absolutely
sure
he's a thoroughbred?'

‘He's entered for the season's first maiden at Goodwood,' Denis said. ‘Six furlongs. That will prove he's no show pony. You know his sire holds the record for six furlongs?'

‘Rubbish!' Bobby protested. ‘Five furlongs! Five pounds says that Hyperion holds the record for five furlongs.' There was a scramble through the studbooks while Susie and I shook our heads at each other. But the dispute was never resolved: the children had been outside playing soccer and there was a minor tragedy, a cut knee or something of the sort, and so I have never discovered what record Hyperion held. All that became unimportant of course, overwhelmed by what was about to happen, but I still sometimes wonder. Not that I would ever ask anyone, because all of that belongs to another world, another age, and it would not be right to intrude upon it.