In the Mouth of the Tiger (114 page)

Malcolm had flexed his Venona muscles that morning – with hugely satisfying results. He had visited Mrs Davis, custodian of all wartime Ultra messages, and demanded the London–Melbourne traffic for the period 1942 to 1946. The thin-lipped woman who met him at the counter had sniffed. ‘You will need to go through the proper channels, I'm afraid. I will want the proper signatures, and I will need at least a week's notice before I could even think of releasing . . .'

‘I don't have time to go through the proper channels, Mrs Davis,' Malcolm had said crisply. ‘I need those messages within the next half hour. If I don't get them within that time, I will have no alternative but to note that you have had time to tamper with the documents. I hope for your sake that I don't have to do that.'

Mrs Davis had opened her mouth in protest but Malcolm had held up a peremptory hand. ‘I need them for Venona, Mrs Davis. If you feel you need confirmation, please have a word with Mr Hollis. But it had better be a very quick word.'

He had the messages in his hands within twenty minutes, and brought them back to the cubbyhole office he shared with Ann as a hunter brings home a prize stag shot on the run.

‘What I want you to do,' Malcolm said thoughtfully, ‘is to have a good read of all this stuff and sort out any messages which in your opinion might have been of interest to the Soviets back in those days.' There were several hundred messages in the pile, each requiring to be decoded and all stamped ZIP or ZYMOTIC in the characteristic purple ink used by MI6. A quick glance at the cover-notes – single-sentence summaries of the contents of each cable – had shown that most of them dealt with Germany's turbulent relationship with Japan. Diplomatic traffic would have been of only lowgrade importance to a Russia fighting for its life, but amongst the dross there might just be gold.

Ann Last took a bundle of messages back to her desk without a word
and set to work immediately. A small, fine-boned woman in her forties, Ann had been a fixture at Leconfield House almost since MI5 had moved in. Initially a stenographer and record keeper, as soon as her quick intelligence and photographic memory had been recognised she was made a desk officer. Her job for years had been humdrum but vital: to trawl through all the material flooding into MI5 and to make the links that turned raw intelligence into useful information. It was rather like working day after day at an endless jigsaw puzzle, but it was a game Ann enjoyed – and had a genius for.

It was a job that over the years had given her immense power: not only did she have a finger in virtually every intelligence pie but she also knew precisely where all the skeletons were buried. As she began to read through the Ultra decrypts, the thought of that power came into her mind. She was determined that Malcolm was not going to be pushed around anymore. It wasn't anything banal like affection, this determination that Malcolm would have her whole-hearted support – Ann was a policeman at heart, and she had recognised in Malcolm a colleague cut from the same hard, uncompromising cloth. For twenty years she had seen perfectly good MI5 bills squandered. Traitors had been identified, evidence assembled, but then – nothing. The results of sometimes years of investigation thrown away by an agreement amongst gentlemen. A formal shaking of hands, a discreet resignation, perhaps a fabricated story for the press, and yet another traitor let off. No doubt to laugh up his sleeve at the lily-livered morons who ran Leconfield House.

At times she had almost suspected treachery at the very top of the service to which she had dedicated her life, and the anger she had felt at the very thought made her burn and tremble.

‘If we catch someone, we're not going to let him slip out of our grasp, are we?' she asked abruptly, and Malcolm had looked at her with cool, certain eyes.

‘No. On my life, we won't,' he said, and Ann Last believed him.

Chapter Forty

S
ummer crept up on Almer Manor quietly, without fuss or fanfare. At first Denis and I woke to a pink haze of apple blossom from the trees just outside our windows, then to the delicate green of spring. Imperceptibly, as the days passed, the leaves on the apple trees darkened to lustrous green, the skies behind them deepened to azure blue, and the sun lit the bedroom with bars of gold. Delma brought us our tea and the papers at seven, and we would lie abed, reading and dozing and listening to the larks, until childish voices in the walled garden warned us it was time to face a fresh new day.

June, July and August 1949 seem in memory to have been a blaze of endless sunlit days and long silver twilights. I remember so well the smell of fresh-cut lawns, the taste of the tart little apples we harvested, and the gentle murmur of pigeons on the afternoon air. If I could only exclude the pain of what was to happen, I know that I would remember those days as the happiest of my life.

We had no pressing duties – our investments ensured that we would never have to work another day in our lives – but our days were nevertheless full and busy. Denis worked in his study for an hour or so each morning, talking to his brokers on the phone, adjusting his share portfolio to take advantage of an improving world economy. My task was to run the house, and with Mrs Frampton's help it was a pleasure. We'd meet over a morning cup of coffee in my sewing room, and I'd approve the menus for the day and perhaps become involved in some little drama from the village. Mrs Okeford might need an operation on her hip, and I'd make some small contribution, or Jack Gillingham might have been arrested for something or other he hadn't done, and I'd arrange for him to see our lawyers in Bournemouth. And then we would simply chat, happy in each other's company, the world an easy and dependable place around us.

The children had their lessons between ten and twelve, and I'd sometimes pop in to see how they were going. Morning lessons were ‘the humanities', which in Win Heppenstall's book meant painting and drawing, or discussing local history, or perhaps a lesson on natural history. I remember that one project was to find out whether the aggressive grey squirrels from America had taken over Bluebell Woods from their ancient English cousins, the red squirrels. The project gripped all our imaginations, and we'd walk up to the woods day after day, trying to spot the shy little creatures and to count the numbers of each species. The woods were very old – they had been mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 – and we were thrilled when our surveys showed that the squirrel population was still overwhelmingly English. Something precious had been conserved, and our hearts were gladdened.

Win also organised educational trips to Lyme Regis, where the beach was rich with fossils, and Denis and I would sip tea in one of the fashionable seaside tearooms as the scavenging party did its work on the pebbly strand. Another reason to visit the area was that the Duke of Monmouth had landed there just before the Battle of Sedgemore, and Win would declaim the story of the ill-fated Protestant rebellion as the children sat spellbound on the sea wall, gulls screaming about their heads.

Win did her ‘serious' tutoring – reading, writing, arithmetic and Latin – in the afternoons, with only the two boys involved. They had some way to go to meet the entry requirements for Taunton, but Win was confident they would make it. These sessions lasted from two till four, and about three thirty I would begin to see a boyish face appearing at the schoolroom window, peering down longingly as afternoon tea was assembled in the walled garden.

Afternoon tea under the apple trees became a precious tradition. Denis and I set out the long chairs about three o'clock, and read and dozed until Mrs Frampton brought out the tea tray, loaded with sandwiches and cakes. Then, like some predictable conjuring trick, the children would appear, first little Frances, sleepy-eyed from her rest, then the boys, ebullient with pent-up energy. After tea, it was cricket, with Denis bowling and each child taking turns to defend the gnarled trunk of an apple tree. It is strange how different one's children can be. Tony had all the natural sporting ability in the world, but was bored stiff by the game, flicking the ball negligently wherever he liked until boredom completely overcame him and he couldn't be bothered any longer. Bobby loved cricket with a passion, and crouched over the bat with a worried frown, playing his forward defensive stokes with copybook precision
but spectacular lack of success. Frances had Tony's athleticism, but also a fighting spirit that made her try doubly hard because she was the youngest and a girl and didn't even know how to hold the bat.

‘When I'm picked to play for England I'll teach you how it's really done,' Bobby would say loftily, and Frances would stick out her tongue and smash the next ball clean over his head for six.

Ann Last could hardly contain her excitement. She waited with affected indifference while Malcolm hung up his coat and hat, pedantically adjusted the piles of paperwork on his desk into precise bundles, and finally sat down to begin the day's work. ‘Found anything of interest?' he asked. ‘I must say my lot so far has contained nothing but rubbish.'

Ann came over, laying sixteen message forms on his desk, each once stapled to a typed decrypt. ‘These are Ultra cables sent to Australia. They contain copies of traffic from German High Command to commanders on the Eastern Front. Eagle classification. In terms of important intelligence they are pure gold, Malcolm.'

Malcolm picked up the first flimsy piece of paper, turned to the decrypt, and read it carefully. His hand was shaking before he had finished. It contained detailed orders concerning the movements of Field-Marshal Eric von Manstein's Army Group South during the decisive Battle of Kursk in mid-1943. It was information of the highest possible importance – the sort of information that can turn a battle from defeat into victory.

Why had it been sent to Australia?

‘What did the cover-note say?' Malcolm asked.

Ann picked up the message. ‘Military traffic, European Theatre. For background information only,' she read.

Malcolm picked up the next message, and then the next. They were all the same – first quality military intelligence of no possible relevance to Australia in 1943.

Dynamite.

‘We need to know who handled this traffic in Melbourne,' said Malcolm. He drummed his fingers on the desk, thinking. By a stroke of luck, Roger Hollis was actually in Melbourne at the time, working with the Australians as they set up their own version of MI5. It meant he could get direct, untainted intelligence of what had happened there during the war.

‘Get a cable off to Hollis, Ann,' he said. ‘Don't tell him what we have,
but stress that we need to know the who had access to the Ultra traffic going into Navy Office in Melbourne between the start of 1943 and the end of the war.'

Ann remained beside his desk, the light of battle in her eyes. ‘Do you think someone betrayed this material to the Soviets?' she asked. ‘If they did, he handed them victory against the Germans on the Eastern Front.'

Malcolm tapped the pile of messages with his forefinger. ‘If we can find out who was receiving this stuff in Melbourne, and then find it in our Venona material, we will have collared the biggest traitor you or I are ever likely to come across.'

Alan and Mary Hillgarth stayed with us for a weekend in the first week of August. They arrived just after lunch on the Friday, and because Alan had just spent some time at Broadway he brought news of the terrific flap which was gripping MI6. ‘You're well out of it, Denis,' he said slinging a suitcase out of the boot. ‘Suspicion everywhere. A fellow dare not turn his back on a colleague.'

‘What's causing the trouble?' Denis asked. ‘Not this fellow Gouzenko, surely?' Igor Gouzenko had been a cipher clerk in the Russian Embassy in Ottawa before defecting to the Canadians in 1945. Since then he had been dribbling out information about Russian double agents in the West. He had caused a lot of worry for a lot of people but nothing concrete had ever come from his information because he only had the cover-names for the Soviet agents, not their real names.

Alan chuckled. ‘Gouzenko is old news, Denis. What's stirring the pot now is this new code-breaking exercise, Venona. Venona has implicated some pretty big fish. The latest to be landed is a British scientist who used to work on the Manhattan project. That gave the Americans some gyp, I can tell you. And we suspect there will be more.'

‘Nobody in MI6, I trust?'

Alan straightened. ‘That's the trouble,' he said quietly. ‘The Venona material suggests that the Soviets had – or still have – assets in MI5 and MI6.'

By tacit consent nobody talked about Venona after that. Alan needed space from the tensions pervading Broadway and Leconfield House, and I didn't want Denis reminded of a world he was fast putting behind him.

The next day we went to the races. Bobby Weld, a neighbour to the south
of Almer, had a horse running at Salisbury that was supposed to be a dead-set certainty. That was all the excuse we needed to dress up and make a real day of it, buying badges for the County stand and enjoying a champagne lunch before the Welds' horse was dreadfully trounced in his six-furlong sprint. But it was a tremendous day all the same: Salisbury is a beautiful course, we saw some superb racing, and on the way home we visited Salisbury Cathedral, said to be the second most beautiful cathedral in all England.

‘Do you miss Malaya at all?' Mary asked as we stood in the shadowy nave, looking at the fine tracery of stonework above us.

I didn't even have to think before I answered. ‘Not at all. I loved Malaya, Mary. I loved our home at Whitelawns. But that's all in the past. The Manor is our home now. It's part of us, and we are part of it. Our children will be married in St Mary's, and Denis and I will no doubt eventually moulder in its graveyard. It is comforting to be part of something that is so permanent.'

I don't think Mary quite understood me. She had been part of something huge and permanent all her life. Mary Sidney Katherine Alima Hope-Morley, as she had been born, was the grand-daughter of the Earl of Carnarvon, with royal connections and grand houses in both England and Ireland. To her, belonging was taken for granted. But she smiled, and pretended to understand, and took my arm. ‘I'm glad you feel part of Almer Manor,' she said. ‘It is a really lovely home. So warm and friendly. I was telling Alan last night that I was sure you must have some happy ghosts about the place.'