Inside Enemy (8 page)

‘What about MI5?’ asked Charles. Security investigations were their responsibility, jealously guarded.

‘They have been informed that we are examining the possibility of a suspected leak from within SIS. As soon as we are able to confirm that there really has been such a leak, they will be
brought in.’ Matthew held up his hand, his smile just detectable. ‘Yes, I know. Don’t say it. We’ve got away with it so far because of their usual reluctance to investigate
espionage they haven’t themselves uncovered. Any investigation threatens trouble for them, either because it’s inconclusive and a waste of resources but might still come back to bite
them later. Or because a spy is discovered and they get blamed for not having caught him earlier. So they’ve agreed we can continue to examine all four of those we think might be in the frame
and let them know our thoughts soon. We are sending them the paperwork today. It’ll be a week at least before they look at it if they work at their usual pace. They don’t know
we’re going to interview anyone. And we – I – will be in serious trouble if it doesn’t work.’

‘Who is it?’

When Matthew named Peter Tew, Charles was conscious that they were studying him carefully. He had an immediate image of Peter’s pale, intelligent features, his grey eyes often on the brink
of laughter, his quick smile and ready perception. Trying to match the new image of Peter as traitor with the old of Peter as friend was like having a tracing that didn’t fit the map. Yet,
somehow, he was not surprised. There was much that was unknown about Peter, an uncharted interior. That was true of many people, of course, but with most there were myriad casual indications that
the interior existed, suggesting what kind of country it was. In Peter’s case, he realised as Matthew talked, there were none. The beach was all you saw, sunlit, entertaining, attractive,
intended perhaps to forestall curiosity about the interior. Content with the superficiality of daily intercourse, Charles had never sought to explore.

‘The interview is arranged. He believes it will be a routine personnel interview to discuss his next posting,’ Matthew was saying. ‘Meanwhile, we have discovered he is
homosexual.’

Quite unexpectedly, that was a tracing that did fit the map. The Office was known for its attractive and talented women and Peter was popular with the girls, charming them, but he had no
girlfriends. Unless you counted the one he used to mention – what was her name – Jane? Jenny? – who died of leukaemia. That was a long-standing relationship which had broken his
heart, he implied, leaving you to conclude that it was difficult or impossible for him to consider another, yet. But no-one had ever met Jane, or Jenny. No-one had ever seen Peter’s
Marylebone flat. Now, as Matthew described how the FBI in New York, where Peter was serving, had come across him visiting clubs in drag and that since his return on leave in the last few days
surveillance had seen him picking up young men in a notorious pub in Vauxhall, the tracing drew itself.

Charles recalled various minor incidents, remarks, tones, inflexions he never realised he had noticed. Peter’s almost maternal solicitude when Charles went down with flu, the follow-up
telephone calls, Peter’s silences when people mentioned girls or sex, his abrupt and uncharacteristically brutal condemnation of someone who had been dismissed, allegedly on health grounds,
as ‘a flaming poofter’. And that lunch in another Vauxhall pub which they drifted into simply because neither knew it and which turned out to feature a striptease in the bar. A young
black girl cavorted to loud music on a raised dais, thrusting herself into the faces of the men nearest her. The performance was more vigorous than seductive and Charles watched, he told himself,
more through cultural curiosity than interest, let alone arousal, but Peter was disgusted. He backed away, muttering, ‘Revolting. How can they?’

Afterwards the girl resumed her white bra and knickers and red shoes and walked amongst the crowd in the bar holding out a man’s tweed cap for contributions. Every man put in something,
including Charles, but Peter withdrew as if from contagion.

As they walked back to the office Charles remarked on the contrast between the girl as symbol and presumed object of desire while on the dais, and the same girl, minutes later and still
provocatively clad, walking unmolested amongst the drinkers who threw their change into her cap and treated her with indifference or familial affection.

Peter wasn’t interested. ‘I can’t – the proximity. It makes me almost physically sick,’ he said, his eyes on the pavement. ‘So vulgar, very vulgar.’ He
repeated the phrase softly to himself.

Like many of his generation, Charles had grown up unaware he knew any homosexuals. He never looked for it in anyone nor had any idea what to look for beyond theatrical camp. A couple of
girlfriends had told him about affairs they had had with women but that, though erotically interesting, somehow didn’t seem to count. Until quite late in his career homosexuality had been a
bar to joining the Office because it disqualified anyone from being PV’d – positively vetted. The reason given was that it was a criminal offence in many countries and disapproved of in
many more, rendering practitioners vulnerable to blackmail. There was also, no doubt, an unexamined assumption that homosexuals led more promiscuous lives and were less trustworthy; Burgess and
Blunt cast long shadows. You could be a promiscuous and adulterous heterosexual so long as you didn’t lie about it in vetting interviews and kept clear of women from communist countries; NATO
and other Western states were preferred. That was not too difficult – there were after all well over twenty NATO countries – though Charles mildly regretted having never been the target
of a KGB honey-trap. He might have enjoyed being the object of seduction, watching the game being played before him.

‘It means he lied in his vetting,’ Matthew continued, ‘which means his PV certificate can be withdrawn, possession of which is a condition of working here. So we can dismiss
him immediately if we want, whether or not we can prove he is our man. But if he is a spy – and we believe he is – we want him in prison, not free to be debriefed by the Russians
whenever they choose.’

‘How strong is the evidence?’

‘Nothing that would stand up in court. We need a confession.’

The interview was planned for the following week. It was essential that no-one suspected there was anything unusual going on, so Charles was to continue his current job but spend as much time
out of hours as he wanted reading the papers in Matthew’s or Frank Heathfield’s office. It was then that he began to know Peter Tew in a way he never had before.

T
ea with Viktor, without either tea or Viktor, took over three hours. Charles had to wait at the house and tell his story several times.

He paused now, before doing so again. He had already described his arrival twice, once to the young policeman who was first on the scene, then to the inspector, the woman in plain clothes who
was interviewing him now. But that was in the garden where he had waited because it felt inappropriate to wait in the house. A house not his and where Viktor – assuming it was him – lay
dead on the polished hall floor with no face and bits of his brain and skull splattered over the first few steps of the stairs. His hair had gone grey, it appeared from some of the larger bits.

Charles paused because he wanted to get it right, if this was to be a more formal statement. He was trying to be helpful although the inspector’s manner made him feel more like a suspect
than the witness who had found the body. The inspector was in her thirties, pale, thin-faced, with a beaky nose and an officious manner. Her short bleached-blonde hair was darkening at the roots.
She looked tired. It was hard to feel she had much going for her; perhaps she liked her job, perhaps she was good at it. Her plain-clothes assistant was a younger man with dandruff and a plump
pasty face that looked as if it needed washing. Long hours, late nights and shift work did no favours for either, Charles thought.

They were sitting at Viktor’s dining table with notebooks open and no visible recording equipment.

‘So,’ continued the inspector, ‘you say you were calling on Dr Viktor Klein, the owner, who was an old friend of yours but he didn’t know you were coming. When did you
last see him?’

‘I’m not sure – over ten years ago.’

‘Not a close friend, then?’

‘Not in recent years.’

‘And you say you were calling on him to tell him you are moving into the area?’

‘Renting a cottage in Brightling, yes.’

‘Can anyone vouch for that?’

‘The landlord.’

‘Who is?’

‘The MP, Jeremy Wheeler. I’m not sure whether this is part of his constituency but he lives in Battle.’

They noted that, their expressions giving nothing away. ‘What did Dr Klein do, exactly? He was foreign, wasn’t he?’

‘By origin, yes, but he was naturalised British many years ago. He was a scientist, not a medical doctor.’ He knew only the outline of Viktor’s post-defection identity and his
new name, Klein. The police would have to be told the full story but it might leak less, or at least more slowly, if it came to them down their own chain of command, from their chief constable.

‘Where did he work?’ asked the man.

‘I’m not sure he did. I think he was retired.’

A white van drew up on the pebble drive, joining the police cars. Two men got out and put on white overalls. A uniformed policeman, the alert young one who had been the first to arrive and who
had turned pale at what Charles had shown him, walked towards the end of the drive with a reel of white-and-blue tape.

‘And you say the door was ajar when you got here?’ continued the woman.

He was fed up with having what he’d said played back to him as if implying disbelief, but didn’t want to upset them. He wanted them to succeed, more than they could know. ‘Yes,
I noticed straight away but I knocked a couple of times first, then I called out. When there was no answer I pushed the door open. Then I saw the body.’

‘But you couldn’t know for certain it was Dr Klein if you hadn’t seen him for over ten years, could you?’ said the younger one.

‘I still don’t, without a face to go by. It’s an assumption we’ve all made.’

There were footsteps and voices in the hall and the sounds of equipment being set up. The mantel clock above the fireplace struck five. Accurate, according to Charles’s watch. Typical of
Viktor. It had struck the half-hour while he waited for the police. The longcase clock in the hall had stopped.

‘And then you entered the house, you say?’ continued the policeman. ‘Despite the fact that you’d seen there was a body there. Why did you do that?’

‘I entered because I’d seen the body, not despite it. Firstly, to see whether there was anything I could do—’

‘But then you went all over the house. Why?’

‘– and secondly to see if the killer was still here.’

‘What would you have done if he had been?’

‘Disarmed and arrested him.’

‘We’re not being funny, sir,’ said the woman.

‘Neither am I.’

He was but he stared back, as unsmiling as they were. For a moment he had thought it might be suicide. Seeing no weapon, he had tiptoed throughout the house, looking into each room. It was a
good house, generous proportions, high ceilings, well but sparingly furnished, a bachelor’s home, solid and comfortable, no frills.

‘That was very dangerous,’ said the inspector. ‘You should have waited for us. It’s our job to do that sort of thing.’

Yes, he thought, after a few hours, with a convoy of armed response vehicles, helicopters, dogs and a stand-off ending with the shooting of a gardener who turned up carrying a fork. Charles had
seen enough of police overkill. Anyway, he’d been pretty sure the killer would not have hung around waiting to be caught. It looked too much like a contract killing for that.

‘You might also have contaminated or destroyed forensic evidence,’ continued the inspector. ‘We’ll have to ask you to show us exactly where you went and we’ll need
to take your fingerprints, DNA and samples of clothing. In order to eliminate you from our inquiries.’

Or include me if you possibly can and it looks like an easy conviction, he thought.

‘Did you see anything suspicious?’ asked the younger one. ‘Anything strike you?’

This was more like it. ‘Nothing at all except that the door was open. There were tyre tracks on the drive but I guess there always are on beach pebbles. I didn’t see anyone driving
away. There were vehicles in Bodiam, a bit of movement around the castle car park and the pub, but I don’t remember passing any on this lane.’ Especially not motorbikes, he nearly
added. The contract killings he’d known of had been two-wheel jobs. But they’d all used pistols rather than sawn-off shotguns which, judging by the upper-body devastation, was the case
here. ‘No doubt you’ll work out time of death from the body, but the grandfather clock in the hall might give you a rough idea. It’s stopped at twenty past one.’

‘You mean it was caught in the blast?’

‘I don’t think so, I didn’t notice any damage. It’s probably a thirty-hour clock and he would probably have wound it yesterday morning, but not today. Assuming he wound
it in the mornings, that is. So as it’s stopped at twenty past one that might suggest that he was killed between winding it first thing yesterday morning and failing to wind it first thing
this morning. But your forensics will be more precise than that.’

‘Unless it wasn’t going at all.’

‘Possibly, but he used to be meticulous about that sort of thing. His clocks would have worked. He liked mechanical things.’ And gadgets of all sorts, he thought, recalling
Viktor’s mingled delight and frustration with the ingenious but far from faultless concealed cameras and recording devices Charles occasionally issued him with. The electronic revolution had
been a particular pleasure and he used to enjoy taunting Charles for his ignorance.

‘D’you know anything about Dr Klein’s lifestyle?’ asked the inspector. ‘What he did with his time, what sort of reputation he had with neighbours or in the
village?’