The Greatest Traitor (42 page)

On the back seat, Blake had draped a mackintosh round his shoulders and put a hat on his head. He could sense how tense Bourke was feeling and noticed that the glasses the Irishman was wearing by way of a disguise had steamed up.

Despite slow-moving traffic, Bourke’s reduced vision and nerves led to him bumping the Humber Hawk into the car in front at a level crossing. The crash was hardly severe, but the driver nonetheless turned into the kerb to examine the damage, expecting Bourke to do the same. Instead, he slammed his foot on the accelerator and screamed away to the end of the road. He went through a light that was just barely turning green, raced along Wood Lane for a few hundred yards, then turned right into North Pole Road.

Another couple of turns and he was in Highlever Road. Fraught though it was, it had taken no more than six or seven minutes to reach the quiet residential street in North Kensington.

Bourke’s nerves, almost shredded by the collision at the level crossing, were now slowly settling. His plan was to drop Blake off at 28 Highlever Road while he went and disposed of the car. He switched off the ignition and turned round to look at Blake: his face was a mess, with blood streaming down from a badly cut forehead. As Blake tried to reach into the pocket of his mackintosh for the keys, he winced in pain, his wrist bent at a sharp angle just above the joint and clearly beginning to swell. Bourke at once abandoned the plan to dump the car and, instead, escorted Blake into the safety of the flat. The ex-prisoner took off his hat and coat and stood in the middle of the room in his grey prison trousers and striped shirt.

‘George,’ said Bourke, ‘I can hardly believe that you’re standing in this room. It is going to take me a long time to get used to the idea. It is rather like seeing a double-decker bus on top of Nelson’s Column.’

‘I cannot believe it myself,’ Blake laughed.

Bourke left the flat to buy bottles of brandy and whisky to celebrate. It was 7.20. Inside Wormwood Scrubs, every prisoner would be ‘banged-up’ and the final roll call of the day was nearing completion.

Blake was discovered missing at around the time Bourke had turned the car into North Pole Road. Upon finding Cell No. 8 empty, Prison Officer William Fletcher immediately called his colleague patrolling the boundary wall and D Wing was scoured for any sign of the escaped prisoner. While that fruitless search took place, the rope ladder was spotted, still dangling over the wall. By 7.35, Noel Whittaker had joined the search party and, when he went outside the prison wall onto Artillery Road, he soon came across a pot of pink chrysanthemums in their green wrapping paper, dumped there by Bourke. Back inside the jail, officers discovered the broken window at the south end of the wing, together with a missing metal bar. In just twenty minutes, it was all too clear how the bird had flown.

At 7.43 p.m., a call was made to Shepherd’s Bush Police Station reporting the escape of Britain’s most closely guarded criminal. ‘This is the Deputy Governor of Wormwood Scrubs. I have just been informed by my Chief that we have lost one of our chaps over the wall. We think it’s Blake,’ Noel Whittaker explained in agitated tones.

‘Blake?’ replied Police Constable Stanley Frankling.

‘Yes, the one doing forty-two years,’ replied Whittaker.

‘Can you give a description?’ asked the police officer.

‘Not at the moment. He’s probably in prison grey. He went over the East wall. Look, I’m a bit tucked up at the moment; I’m in the middle of releasing a man. I’ll ring you back when I get more information.’

For PC Frankling, it was a surreal moment that interrupted an otherwise commonplace Saturday evening, with its usual reports of
minor burglaries and the odd incident of domestic violence. Putting his initial astonishment to one side, the police officer was instinctively cautious about Whittaker’s call because he knew that a coded message – ‘Patterson Calling’ – was in place for reporting escapes from the Scrubs, and Whittaker had not used it. At 7.50, PC Child received confirmation that the report was, indeed, authentic. Frankling then alerted the Central Information Room at New Scotland Yard.

The manhunt was underway.

While police and dogs flooded into the area around the Scrubs in pursuit, a detective constable from Shepherd’s Bush was in the Gate Office at the prison with Whittaker searching for an up-to-date photograph of Blake. There was just one, frustratingly out of date, taken on 2 January 1965. Nonetheless, the picture and its negatives went off to New Scotland Yard to be duplicated and distributed across the country. Along with it would come this description of the fugitive: ‘44 years old, 5
'
8
"
, proportionate build, oval face, swarthy complexion, hazel eyes, dress either a prison grey suit or blue overall’.

Detective Inspector Lynch of Special Branch was the ‘hands-on’ investigating officer at New Scotland Yard. He began to spread the search far and wide. By 8.40 p.m., officers covering airports in the London area had been informed about Blake’s escape, along with those at the cross-channel ferry train at Victoria station. All seaports manned by Special Branch and Customs Water Guard officers were informed by 10.25. Lynch was working on the theory that the Russians had sprung Blake, so police cars were despatched to three embassy residences in Kensington Palace Gardens and one in West Hill, Highgate, to question those officials they suspected of being KGB operatives. To the same end, H.M Customs Water Guard was told to supply details as quickly as possible on all the Eastern Bloc ships currently berthed in London docks. Special attention was also paid to airfields, and anywhere else where light aircraft might conceivably take off.

Harold Wilson, spending the weekend at the Prime Minister’s country residence at Chequers, was informed of the breakout within
an hour. By 9 p.m., he had received preliminary reports from Dick White of SIS and Martin Furnival Jones of MI5, on the implications of the escape for national security.

At 10.25, copies of Blake’s photograph were belatedly handed to the duty officer in the Press Bureau at New Scotland Yard, for immediate distribution to all press and TV outlets. Unfortunately, all the Sunday papers had been ‘put to bed’, bar one – the
News of the World
. The paper’s deadline was 10.15 but its editor agreed that no copies should roll from the presses until a special messenger arrived with Blake’s photograph.

Even at this very early stage of the inquiry, Special Branch officers worried that time was against them. ‘We ran around a bit like headless chickens, trying to work out where we should go,’ recalled Wilf Knight. ‘We assumed Blake had been sprung by an Eastern Bloc country, because of the organisation and mechanics of doing such a thing, and therefore they must be ready to take him out straightaway.’

Somehow, from somewhere, Special Branch had received an unlikely tip-off that Blake was being spirited away in a harp case carried by a member of an Eastern European orchestra which had just played at the South Bank. Such was the fevered atmosphere that the story was taken seriously. At 2 a.m., as the Czechoslovakian State Orchestra checked in with their own airline to fly out of Britain, they were stopped. ‘[We] turned them over – men and women, harps, bassoons, cellos, everything. We caused quite a furore diplomatically,’ said Knight.

Back at the Scrubs, there were scenes of jubilation as news spread by word of mouth or prisoners listened to radios in their cells. For Gerald Lamarque, the response was unprecedented: ‘The excitement in the voices I hear is unbelievable. There must have been nearer a hundred than fifty escapes in the years I have spent here, but I have never known a reaction like this . . . Blake . . . Blake . . . over the wall . . . George . . . had it away. Good old George. Cowboy yells of “Yippee”, only once or twice sheer savagery, directed against authority more than in support of Blake’s escape. “He’s fucked ’em” . . . And then, far
away and faintly from the south end of the prison, singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”.’

Sharing in the celebrations, with the feeling of a job well done, was Phil Morris: ‘It was a great strain, personally, but the atmosphere in the wing itself was electric . . . People were dancing and singing on the landings. The actual prison just ground to a halt for two days. But it was ecstatic, you know, and it couldn’t have been a bigger morale booster for people who were under the cosh at the time.’

For Michael Randle, it had been an anxious day, and an increasingly worrying evening. He had expected Bourke to call by 7 p.m. and when, half an hour later, there was still no news, he feared the worst. He had plans to take his wife and her parents out for a meal at the nearby German restaurant,
Schmidt’s,
in Tottenham Court Road, and was preparing to set off when the phone finally rang.

‘I’m just calling to say that I have been to the party and thrown the bait to our friend, who has taken it hook, line and sinker,’ said Bourke, in the coded language he had adopted for these occasions. ‘I have him now standing beside me.’ Randle was too overcome to reply. He sank back into his chair and curled up in a ball, quivering with emotion and sheer relief. When he recovered sufficiently to congratulate Bourke, he was told that there was one minor problem: Blake’s wrist was almost certainly broken, and would need attention from a doctor.

The family meal that followed took on an atmosphere of celebration, even though Randle’s in-laws were oblivious to what had happened. While driving back home, they listened to a radio news bulletin that led with the news of Blake’s escape. It was a salutary moment. ‘The announcement hit me like a blow in the stomach,’ was Randle’s memory. ‘It was like wakening from an exciting but frightening dream to find it was actually happening.’

Back at the house, Randle received two disconcerting phone calls from journalists. Both reporters had made the connection that Randle had been in prison with Blake and asked if he knew anything about the escape. Feeling very uneasy, he denied it, but worried that if journalists
could so quickly find a link between them, then so could the police.

At 28 Highlever Road, the mood was one of unconfined elation. Bourke and Blake raised their glasses to drink a toast to each other, the Irishman uttering appropriate words from Antony in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
: ‘Mischief thou are now afoot – take what course thou wilt.’ They then settled back to watch the BBC evening news at 9.45.

The measured tones of newsreader Peter Woods announced the main story: ‘High drama in West London tonight. George Blake, the double agent who was serving forty-two years’ imprisonment, escaped from Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London this evening.’ After details of his crimes and sentence, Woods read out a statement from the Home Office: ‘Blake was missed from his cell at seven o’clock, when all the prisoners were locked away for the night. A search was made of the prison grounds but no trace of Blake could be found. He is, therefore, presumed to have escaped.’ Woods finished by telling viewers that a careful watch was being maintained at all airports and harbours, and East European embassies were also being kept under observation. He concluded: ‘News is still coming in of this dramatic escape, and we will keep you informed.’ The delicious incongruity of Woods talking about this extraordinary nationwide manhunt, when here was the subject of it, less than a mile from where the presenter was speaking in Television Centre, was not lost on the two friends.

Euphoria at their success, laced with copious amounts of brandy, had given the evening an unreal, fantastical mood that neither man was eager to break. When they did turn in, Blake found it difficult to sleep, his wrist becoming increasingly painful as the alcohol wore off. Bourke just kept muttering ‘Christ, we’ve done it’ as he turned and turned on his mattress on the floor.

Escaping from the Scrubs had, in a sense, been the easy part, though. Fleeing the country would be a far more challenging and complicated affair.

19

Hiding

T
he criminal underworld had mockingly, though with a degree of grudging respect, nicknamed him ‘Whispering Grass’. Shaw Taylor, with his mellifluous voice and amiable manner, had been helping reel in the wrongdoers ever since his programme,
Police Five
, was first broadcast in 1962. When the former actor introduced it as usual at 3 p.m. on Sunday, 23 October, there was little doubt about which crime he most wanted the public’s help in solving. ‘A few moments ago we received a report from Scotland Yard of a couple of clues about the escape on which they hope
Police Five
viewers might be able to help,’ Taylor told his audience.

One of the leads detectives were following up concerned the homemade rope ladder. The knitting needles reinforcing the rungs of the device had been identified as Milward brand, size thirteen, twenty in all. ‘Now I wonder if there is a shop somewhere that sold at least ten pairs of size thirteen knitting needles, all in a go?’ Taylor asked his viewers. In fact, police would visit a total of 412 establishments in the next few weeks in their search for shopkeeper who might identify Blake’s accomplices.

As for the pot of pink chrysanthemums, it had been established that the flowers were fresh, bought on Saturday from a branch of F. Meyers
Ltd. ‘Maybe they were used as a marker, maybe they were used as an excuse for hanging about by the wall at that particular time?’ mused Taylor.

An offer of help soon came from an unusual quarter. Upon hearing about the spy’s escape, Mr J.L. Taylor, Secretary of the
Institute of Psychical Studies
near Bath, had immediately contacted Leslie Newcombe, Governor of Wormwood Scrubs, saying: ‘It would be of interest to our research into a process of locating individuals by a method of map divination (akin to water divining by map) if we might include George Blake in our current programme of readings.’ Taylor claimed that the Institute’s research into ‘this use of the earth’s electro-magnetic field’ had resulted in a 70 per cent success rate. ‘Should you feel disposed to give the method a trial,’ he wrote, ‘and could forward to us the necessary sample (a few hairs from the man’s hairbrush, or a well-worn shoe or cap), we would include the sample in our programme of readings and report the result in 48 hours – the time required for testing readings for consistency.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, Scotland Yard declined the offer, and no item of Blake’s head or footwear was put in the post.