A Train of Powder (40 page)

She was being soothed by her husband and her younger son, Ronald, who was revealed as one of the deep unmedicable causes of the misery felt by the man in the dock, which had been noticed by his colleagues in Moscow. For Ronald was very like his older brother, but with differences that made him good-looking in a comfortably ordinary way. A reporter had questioned Miss Jones, headmistress of the infants’ department in the Wandsworth school where the two boys had started their education, and she had no recollection of William at all but remembered Ronald; and had later sought out the choirmaster of the church choir in which both boys had sung, and to him William was “a quiet lad, not in the cricket team, as his young brother was.” Women like his mother are not so wrong in their sceptical attitude towards the law. The court would have regarded what Miss Jones and the choirmaster said as irrelevant.

The trial was tormenting to the Marshall family and difficult for the spectators to follow, because much of the evidence was given by Security officers in closed court, and then we had all to sit in the shadowy corridors. Some Indian women lawyers walked up and down in green and lilac and silver saris. There were Indians at Joyce’s trial, there have been Indians at all the treason trials. They have cast off British government, yet they retain their delight in the law which was the instrument of that government; they adore its intricacies, its protocol, the obsolete and dusky and airless caves where it practices its mystery. A Negro barrister’s luminous black skin and rangy stride made a new and picturesque costume of his white wig and flowing gown. He settled down on a bench with two of his compatriots, and their chatter propounded the riddle of Negro speech. The voices of African Negroes have a quality not found in European voices but are just as different from the voices of American Negroes. There is much more sensuousness and joyfulness in the American Negro’s voice; people are torn from their homes and packed in ships and sent thousands of miles to work under the whips of slavery, and their children speak for ever afterwards as if their lips were buttered with rich food and laughter were as often with them as speech. Strange is the course travelled through the centuries by alien peoples; but as we went in and out of the court the case confronted us with another more disconcerting type of strangeness. We saw a known routine reversed, and men who were adepts in a certain craft acting as if they were novices.

As soon as William Marshall had come into the dock it had seemed unlikely that any foreign power should have wished its agents to engage in activities which it desired to keep secret with this odd-looking boy, who was so pale and tall and thin, so easily identifiable by the most curious moulding of his cheeks and the steep angle of his sloping shoulders. Every moment he spent in court made it appear less likely that the police had lied when they described him as showing signs of nervousness when he was being watched. They need not have been close to him to have made such a report. As he sat and listened to the evidence he continually pursed his lips, then pouted them, then abruptly compressed them and puffed out his cheeks, and finally tried to wipe out the grimace by stroking his mouth and chin with his very long fingers. Considering that strain had this manifest physical effect on him, it was against all probability that the Soviet espionage authorities should have chosen one of the Embassy staff to handle him.

It does not seem likely that Embassy officials often deal with such matters in these days. Very sensibly, the standard Communist routine provides that all espionage should be carried out by three persons. The first is the “source,” usually a national of the country in which the espionage is carried on, and the second is “the contact,” who takes it from him, who also is usually a native. The third is “the agent,” who is often a Soviet national and employed in a Soviet organization and delivers it to the local Soviet espionage headquarters. This routine was varied in the case of the atomic spies, whose communications were regarded as so important that the contacts were cut out and they were handled directly by the agents, even though these were Soviet diplomats. This was not too rash a step, for it was during the war and the Russians knew that the Allies were treating them with complete confidence, and rightly divined that these diplomats were not shadowed. But it is now known that Nunn May handed over his information straight into the hands of Lieutenant Angelov, an assistant of the military attaché in Ottawa, and that Fuchs’s first contact was Simon Kremer, secretary to the military attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London. There is therefore little doubt that the British authorities shadow Soviet diplomats, and the temperamental bias of the Soviet authorities must lead them to exaggerate rather than minimize the amount of shadowing that is done. It is therefore not to be understood why they sent a second secretary to deal with a source whose appearance was God’s gift to any detective.

But even if it be granted that they had to take William Marshall as a source, because for some reason they needed a radio telegraphist at the British Embassy at this particular moment so badly that the certainty of early detection did not matter, and even if it be supposed that Marshall himself had somehow come to know Kuznetsov and insisted on dealing with him and nobody else, their choice of meeting place leaves the matter still enigmatic. Spies usually meet in private houses or in country lanes if they think they are a long way from having excited any suspicion; or, if there is any doubt, in crowded streets or bus stops or subway stations, or in large saloons. If there are any documents to be passed the encounters will be very brief. Much of the information Marshall was accused of handing over, such as the code letters for the various stations, could have been written down on paper. But Marshall and Kuznetsov met for leisurely meals at restaurants, at eight different restaurants, of which six were exactly the places one would have thought spies in general, and these men in particular, would avoid.

On January 2, shortly after Marshall had returned from Moscow, they lunched at the Berkeley, which is the London equivalent of the Colony, and three days later they dined at the Pigalle, a fairly grand restaurant which puts on a floor show, not far from Piccadilly Circus. They might easily have met Sir David and Lady Kelly at the Berkeley; and the Pigalle is the sort of place that a young diplomat might easily go after the theatre. At neither would one expect to see a young radio telegraphist. It might be thought that Kuznetsov was trying to soften Marshall by giving him luxurious tastes, but that was evidently not the plan. For nine days later they lunched at the more popular Criterion. After that there were longer intervals between their meetings, because Marshall had gone to work at Hanslope Park and got back to London only on his leaves. It was three weeks before they dined together again, this time at Chez Auguste, in Soho. After dinner they went to a hotel in the Bloomsbury area, frequented largely by prosperous businessmen from the provinces. Three weeks after that they lunched at the quiet and conventional Royal Court Hotel.

Not one of these restaurants was a mere nosebag. All of them were in the metropolitan nexus. Later Marshall and Kuznetsov were to eat in Kingston and in Wimbledon, and in such places a restaurant draws on a small, enclosed, local world, which will often find no clue to a stranger. But at these first six appointments the two exposed themselves to the scrutiny of a sprawling and well-informed system. At any one of them it was possible that people at the next table might be diplomats, or Embassy employees, and even probable that they might from time to time have attended a diplomatic reception. At any one of them the waiters belong to the upper circle of their profession, which has its own unwritten “Who’s Who,” far meatier than the printed version. At any one of them a table has to be booked. If Kuznetsov did the booking, it would be rash of him to give his own name, still more rash to give a false one; and if it were Marshall, the question might be asked at any moment, “Who is this young man who is going about with the second secretary of the Soviet Embassy?”

It was so little surprising that Marshall had landed in the dock that it was very surprising. It was comprehensible enough that when Inspector Hughes of the Special Branch told how he had arrested Marshall and found the copied document in his wallet and searched his room in his parents’ home, there was no joy of the chase in his tone. Marshall’s counsel put it to him that the young man had a blameless record and had been given an excellent character when he left the Forces, and the Inspector drearily agreed. But he added with sudden and grim emphasis, “Better than normal.” It was not clear what he meant. It might have been that he had been nauseated at having had to watch for months this pitiable young man shutting himself up in a mousetrap. It might also have been that that character was framed in such strong terms of recommendation that, now Marshall had got into trouble, it appeared possible that at some point there had been fiddling with his papers. Perhaps without his knowledge, persons who wanted to plant him in the diplomatic wireless service had seen to it that he could produce a character which would make him seem an exceptionally desirable candidate. It was, after all, out in Egypt that it had first occurred to him to seek employment in that service.

But that was dissolved in the general doubt. This oddly reckless pair had behaved in a way bound to arouse in any reasonably cautious person the suspicion that Marshall was a criminal; but it seemed not at all certain that he was going to be convicted of any crime. There were two counts of the indictment which related to the copy of the document which was found in his wallet. One charged him with unlawfully obtaining the information in the document, for the benefit of a foreign power; but the judge announced early in the trial that he was going to direct the jury to acquit Marshall on this charge, since it was information which had been given him in the course of his duties and he had made no effort whatsoever to obtain it. It was in fact the copy of a notice which was put up in each of the bays in which the radio telegraphists worked. Another count charged him with recording that information for the benefit of a foreign power, and there seemed little doubt that he could be found guilty of this offence, since an expert graphologist had testified that the copy was in his handwriting. But even this was not certain. Since it had been found in Marshall’s wallet, and there was no evidence that he had ever taken it out since he originally put it in, it seemed possible that he would be acquitted of that charge with its imputation of a desire to help a potential enemy, and that he would be charged again with the very much lesser offence of wrongly retaining the information. But the gravity of the case, the element in it which made his parents’ distress reasonable enough, lay in the three other counts, which charged him with having on three dates communicated information to Kuznetsov which could be useful to a foreign power. And there was not a particle of direct evidence that there had been any such communication at all.

On the first date, April 25, Marshall had been seen to go to the Thameside town of Kingston. There he met Kuznetsov, lunched with him at the Normandie Restaurant, and went with him to a public garden by the river, where they sat on a bench for an hour and twenty minutes. Marshall was seen to take some papers out of his pocket, and he appeared to be explaining them to his companion; and he sometimes made a drawing on some paper laid on his lap, as if he were illustrating his explanations. If anybody halted in the neighbourhood of the bench he put away the papers; and when he left his friend and went home he looked nervous and worried. That was all the detectives could say. Nobody had overheard what he said or seen him give any papers to Kuznetsov.

On the second date, May 19, Marshall met Kuznetsov in Wimbledon High Street, close enough to his home in Wandsworth, and spent two hours with him in a restaurant. But neither then nor on their last meeting, in King George’s Park on June 13, was a word of what they had said taken down by the detectives, nor did any papers pass between them.

It seemed quite likely that he would be acquitted on these major charges until he went into the witness box to give evidence on his own behalf. There he damned himself. He was in all things a contrast to his parents. His swaying, fidgeting height shot up out of the witness box like the rootless saplings that grow out of the crevices of bombed buildings; it did not seem possible that he should have been the child of this amply made woman, this compact and vigorous father. The boy shifted from foot to foot as he testified in a high, weak voice, which the judge and the counsel found hard to hear. This reluctant trickle was different from the slow, full river of sighs and persuasive murmurs and passionate exclamations with which his mother had tried to suggest his innocence, or the cascade of words with which his father had tried to sweep away his guilt; and it was flowing in the opposite direction.

He told an incredible story of how he had come to know Kuznetsov. He said that when he had come back from Moscow he had found that he had failed to return a pass issued by the Soviet government which all British Embassy personnel had to carry in case they were stopped in the city. Though it had been issued to him by the Embassy officials, he did not hand it back to the Foreign Office, and accounted for this absurdly, by saying that he “did not want to involve the Foreign Office” if he should have handed it back before he left Moscow. He returned it to the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens, and not by post. He took it himself, and when he explained the purpose of his visit to the doorman, he was taken in to see Kuznetsov. He implied that this was the first time he had ever met him; but it is to be noted that Kuznetsov had been sent from London to Moscow the previous autumn and had been there during the last three months of Marshall’s service in the British Embassy there. With him he had a conversation which immediately engendered a feeling of friendship. “We found,” he said in his statement, “we had a good deal in common and we looked at life in the same way. I told him I was still working at the Foreign Office and we agreed to meet again.” He gave the duration of this conversation as a quarter of an hour.