The documents were uninteresting, mostly share certificates, and the boxes contained Krugerrands; about £10,000 worth at today’s prices. I was disappointed and put everything back as I had found it.
I made a brief but reasonably thorough search of the rest of the house and turned up nothing of any interest. I could find no other hidden safe nor hidey-hole and, short of a search that would leave his house in a similar state to that in which I had found my own, there was little further I could do. I let myself out and walked back down the drive; just before I got to the gates I heard a car slowing down and within seconds of my disappearing into a particularly accommodating rhododendron bush, Mrs Scatliffe came sailing into the driveway.
I felt a lot happier when I was back in the Jaguar, cosseted by the smell of old leather and warm engine oil, with the throaty roar of the exhaust as I drove out past the far side of Guildford, past Basil Spence’s towering red-brick monstrosity of a cathedral, heading towards the M3 back to London.
I rarely enjoyed poking around other people’s houses and I enjoyed poking around Scatliffe’s least of any; there would have been a lot to answer for if I’d been caught. As I drove, I began to unwind, my heartbeat slowing down from cerebral haemorrhage level to its more normal coronary arrest level.
I was disappointed my trip down here hadn’t been fruitful, but I knew I would have been very lucky if Scatliffe had been careless enough to leave anything lying around. I thought about Charlie Harrison, now better known to me as Boris Karavenoff, and hoped he was doing his stuff. I hoped that Arthur Jephcott was as trustworthy as Fifeshire had assured me he was. I hoped I wasn’t making a terrible mistake; I was going to look more than a little foolish if I was wrong. I checked the mirror constantly for signs of a tail but the road behind me was clear.
Until Wetherby had surfaced, I had no idea who was after me; I’d figured it must be the Russians. But the appearance of Wetherby had changed all that, or so it seemed to me; it was my own side that were after me. I didn’t yet have any proof, but the facts tallied. Maybe Wetherby was a double agent. Maybe. Maybe he was working under instructions from the Pink Envelope. Maybe he was the Pink Envelope; but Karavenoff had said the Pink Envelope was in a very senior position in Whitehall — Wetherby had been transferred to Washington. My gut-feeling was that it was Scatliffe; but I had no evidence. None at all. But if not Scatliffe, then who?
I churned over all those I had met since joining MI5. I hadn’t met many people — it had been policy, ever since Philby, to discourage socialising and friendships within the Department. But Karavenoff said the Pink Envelope was powerful; I had certainly met all of those who were powerfuclass="underline" Fifeshire; William Carreras, head of MI6; Scatliffe; Euan Wagstaff, deputy head of MI6; Sir Maurice Unwin, head of MI6 Washington; Granville Hicks, his deputy; Sir John Hobart, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Major Sir Nyall Kerr, head of Combined Central Information, the organisation at Hyde Park, with Arthur Jephcott and the quiet boffin Norman Prest directly under him; Guy Cove-Eastden, head of the Armoury, with Leslie Piper, in charge of the dirty tricks department, and Charles Babinger. the ballistics expert, under him; John Terry, head of Public Relations, and his second-in-command, Duncan Moss; Recruiting was headed by Gordon Savory, with Harold Townly and Wetherby under him; Anthony Lines, the Home Secretary, to whom the whole of MI5 was ultimately responsible; and others too, any of whom could quite well qualify.
I had met many of them at a cricket match in which I had been invited to play. Invited, that is, in a manner not inconsistent with the manner in which I had been recruited into MI5. The British Secret Service is not a place where niceties, such as the option to refuse something, are a customary part of life; nor, in my limited experience, are they even an exception to the rule: they simply fail to exist.
It was in this sense of the word that the Home Secretary invited me to play in his team, in a curious match he was instigating that he hoped would become an annual event on the calendar: MI5 versus MI6. Two old enemies.
The invite greatly annoyed Scatliffe and not without reason, since I was far junior to everyone else who was going to be playing and I was an agent, and agents are meant, by policy, to be kept in the dark and not exposed to the gods that control them, except when it is vital, and in Scatliffe’s view the shortage on the Home Secretary’s team did not constitute something vital. But there was little he could do about it; it was a Friday afternoon during my year’s hard labour for him, and Scatliffe was discussing with me a report I had made, when Lines strode into his office.
There was little doubt in anyone’s mind in the whole country that Anthony Lines would be the next leader of the Conservative Party and that he would serve more than one term as Prime Minister. The media already took almost more notice of what he said and did than the Prime Minister, and he certainly shone through the media with a magnetic charisma. Serious but genial, incisive, tough, fair, ever on the ball, a brilliant fielder of awkward questions and a lethal bowler of challenges, a batsman who had had a long and striking innings, yet who gave the impression that his innings had only just begun; it wasn’t surprising he wanted to organise this match.
He held out his hand towards me. It was warm, small, exquisitely manicured, a delicate white as if it had been sprinkled with talc, and had a softness about it which suggested that if ever during its 50-odd years of life it had held a spade, it had been wearing a kid glove at the time. This hand for sure had never held any rougher instrument of manual labour than the microphone of a dictating machine.
Like so many people in public life, he was smaller than I had imagined, no more than 5 foot 8, and his face was less assured, more nervous than that which I had seen on television and in the papers. It was a good-looking but basically weak face, with a boyish cut of fair hair, and blue eyes that squinted slightly, with heavy bags underneath. ‘How do you do, Max!’ he had said on being introduced by Scatliffe, using the American technique of jumping straight to the first name, and smiling a benign smile that had the warmth of an outdoor lavatory in January.
‘Well, thank you, sir!’ I buttered him up with the ‘sir’ bit and it earned me several more seconds of benign smile.
‘Do you play cricket, Max?’
I hadn’t played cricket for ten years and wasn’t particularly good when I did. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
‘We’re having a little game this Sunday and I’m a man short in my team — perhaps you’d care to play?’
Scatliffe’s face turned apopleptic: his most-hated minion being invited to join the brass hats at play! ‘I don’t think it will be possible, Minister, for Flynn to play — I believe he’s on an assignment over the weekend, aren’t you, Flynn?’ He gave me a hard stare.
‘No, sir, I have a free weekend.’
‘Good.’ The Home Secretary handed me a photocopy of a map showing how to get to the cricket pitch near the village of Fulking in the Downs behind Brighton. ‘Lucky for me you’re here, Flynn — no chance of getting anyone else at this hour on a Friday.’
Scatliffe contained himself admirably, I thought.
So I turned up on a grey Sunday morning at the cricket pitch, to join 21 men who between them had the job of hunting out the subversives among Her Britannic Majesty’s 1060-odd million Commonwealth subjects, and monitoring the rest of the world’s attitudes and plans towards what remained of the British Empire.