‘I didn’t steal your money,’ Valentine stressed, sounding offended at the suggestion. ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that.’
‘Where is it then?’
‘No need to worry on that score,’ Valentine assured him. ‘We’ve paid it into your mother’s account. C’s idea. He thought if worse comes to worst she’ll not have the bother of wills and all that rot.’
Paul groaned. So it really was gone. He could envisage his mother’s surprise at being in funds again. She’d never be able to resist the temptation to fritter it away at the Waldorf, or scatter it like confetti over Russian ne’er-do-wells…
‘The point is, it seems Yurkas was sent to stop you getting on the ship.’
‘So there isn’t an agent on board, after all, like Kell thought.’
‘I don’t think we ought to jump to conclusions,’ Valentine advised.
Just at that moment a crewman walked by and saw them wedged between the lifeboats. He paused, frowning, then carried on past.
‘Look, we don’t want to be spotted talking like this. Why don’t we meet later and compare notes on the other passengers. After dinner, say. What about your cabin?’
Paul shook his head. ‘I’m in with Pinker. What about yours?’
‘I’m having to share with the Holy Joe… Pater. He’s forever on his knees. A chap can’t move without tripping over him.’ He stuck his head round the lifeboat to see if the coast was clear. ‘We’ll sort it out later.’
Valentine started to leave. Paul held his arm.
‘I was thinking,’ he said. ‘How did they know I was going to be on this ship? This Lithuanian, Yurkas, and his friends.’
Valentine shrugged. ‘They must have got wind that the Admiralty had released the steamer and it was going to Helsingfors. After all, it’s taken a week or more to arrange.’
‘No,’ Paul said, ‘not the ship. Me. How did they know about me? I didn’t know anything about it myself till lunch on Saturday. Yet this Yurkas fellow was already on my tail.’
Valentine slid back between the boats.
‘Good point,’ he said.
‘Who else knew about me? Apart from you, C and Browning?’
Valentine stroked his chin thoughtfully.
‘Well there’d be Burkett, of course, since he’s the one who suggested you in the first place. Then there are the girls in the office dealing with the paperwork. They had to get the tickets and your identification sorted out. Kell, of course, since we needed what he had on you and your mother… and his office staff. Then there’s Lockhart in Moscow and anyone—’
‘Good God!’ Paul exclaimed. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a secret operation? Was there anyone who didn’t know? Apart from me, of course.’
‘Steady on, old man. One can’t do this sort of thing in isolation.’
‘That’s all very well but someone spilled the beans and damn near got me killed. I can’t see Burkett being a closet revolutionary, but what about someone on C’s staff, or Kell’s?’
‘It would have to be someone who didn’t want you to reach Russia.’
‘Obviously. Bolsheviks?’
‘Or the French,’ Valentine suggested.
‘The French? They’re out allies, for goodness sake. Why would the French want me killed?’
‘Well they’re pretty jealous of their influence on the Legion, you know. Browning’s always had a down on them. Perhaps they’re a bit of an outside chance, I admit. More likely to be the Bolsheviks. Any counter-revolutionary front put up by the Legion and Kolchak in the east could squeeze them between the allies in the north and Germany in the west. They’d be out to stop anyone who might make that threat a viable one.’
Paul couldn’t quite see himself in those terms although he had to concede that the Bolsheviks wouldn’t know that.
‘Of course Kell didn’t know what we were planning,’ Valentine said.
‘C’s office then?’
‘Well, he’s pretty rigorous about who he employs. You know, only our sort of chaps. And the girls all come from good families.’
Paul wasn’t sure that knowing whoever betrayed him had come from a good family would have been much of a comfort if he’d been the one bleeding to death in the alley.
‘Can’t say the same about the class of fellow we’ve recruited in Russia, of course,’ Valentine went on. ‘Lockhart and Ransome are first class but—’
‘Who’s Ransome?’
‘Arthur Ransome. He’s over there for the Daily News.’
‘You mean S76.’
‘I say, you have got the hang of this haven’t you? Yes, S76. S and St are codenames for Stockholm, our regional station. The numbers all get a bit confusing though so we call him Ransome. He’ll know, of course, as well as Lockhart. Lockhart certainly wouldn’t have told anyone else. I know at home they think he’s a bit too close to the Bolsheviks and now he’s got himself mixed up with another woman, but he’s sound. And there’s Sidney Reilly, of course. He might know. But he’s got no love for the Bolsheviks at all.’
Valentine had brought something said in Cumming’s office to mind but Paul couldn’t quite remember what it was.
‘You were right to bring it up though,’ Valentine went on. ‘If they got wind of you there’s a chance that they’ve fielded a long stop in case Yurkas missed you.’ He squeezed Paul’s bicep. ‘We need to be on guard and play a straight bat. What d’you say, old man, play up, play up?’
But Valentine wasn’t waiting for an answer. He slipped away leaving his cricketing metaphors ringing in Paul’s ears. Telling Paul to ‘play up’ was all very well but he was beginning to feel like a rabbit at the wicket, a tail-ender put in before he was ready, and with the other side closing in all around him.
15
Paul remained at the rail for some time after Valentine had gone. The steamer had now taken to pitching and yawing in the face of the bow-on swell, rather like a child’s rocking horse champing at the bit to get going but forever restrained by its static rockers. He fumbled for a cigarette and spent three matches trying to light it in the wind. He recalled the old trench warning about snipers and lighting three cigarettes from the same match and wondered if three matches on the same cigarette counted.
After a while he walked around the deck, circulating first one way then the other. He didn’t want to go below. It was stuffy down there and Pinker would be in the cabin full of his mundane chatter. The Russians, Korbelov and Solokov were in the saloon, so that was out too. To believe they might be Kell’s assassins seemed eccentric in the extreme given that they weren’t trying to hide what they were, but he supposed one shouldn’t eliminate the double-bluff. After all Valentine, as Darling, was passing himself off as some sort of civil servant which — in a way — was just what he was. At least Valentine seemed to have drawn the short straw this time: Pinker was far preferable to Pater. Paul might have to put up with Pinker’s luggage cluttering up their cabin but at least he wasn’t underfoot like Pater, forever communing with his God. Paul wondered who’s soul the man was praying for, his fellow beings’ or his own? If he was anything like the chaplains Paul had come across in the army, Pater was probably more concerned for his own skin — or the spiritual equivalent — than the men’s. They had only ever seemed comfortable with the enlisted men when they were dead; or at some irretrievable point close to it.
Looking at the overcast sky Paul realised it had been some years since he had given much thought to his own soul. With death all around he had usually been more concerned with staying alive than with thoughts of what there might lie beyond. Granted, under a bombardment he had chanted ‘God, oh God’, as often as the next man. But that had been not so much a request for help as a simple incantation which, had it any possibility of working, was as good a thing to mutter to oneself as anything else. After the enforced religiosity of his childhood — mostly in the care of priest-ridden servants — he had found that, with age, secular considerations had obtruded. To the extent where he could now speculate that if he still had a soul by this time it had probably shrivelled through inattention to the size of a walnut. Or some equally compacted object, impervious anyway to half-forgotten religious ritual.