Blunt left the table, upset and embarrassed. He walked over to the drinks cabinet on the other side of the room. He had drunk almost a complete bottle of gin, but still needed more. I walked over to him.
"Well...?" I asked.
Blunt stood, his shoulders sagging with strain.
"I suppose you're right," he said, his eyes gleaming with emotion. "I suppose he must be one of us, but I never recruited him, and Guy never told me he had."
There was no gin left, so Blunt poured himself a tumbler full of sherry and added soda water. He gulped it down.
"Sometimes," he said, "I think it would have been easier to go to prison."
Victor and Tess Rothschild were a constant help during the D3 inquiries into the 1930s. Both knew so much about the personalities and the hidden relationships of the period, and were often able to prevail upon otherwise reluctant inhabitants of the Ring of Five's menagerie to meet me. Victor was also able to make a number of vital introductions for me. For instance, one of the questions which fascinated me after the Watson case was the degree to which other scientists besides Watson had been targets for recruitment. Burgess, Blunt, Philby, and Maclean were all classically educated, but I wondered whether rings had been recruited at, for instance, the world-famous Cambridge University Cavendish Laboratory.
My suspicions fell on the renowned Soviet scientist Peter Kapitza, father of the Russian atomic bomb. Kapitza came to Cambridge in the 1920s, financed by the British Royal Society, where he built the Mond Law temperature laboratory attached to the Cavendish. Kapitza remained close to the Soviet Government, and on several occasions was observed receiving Russian intelligence officers in his rooms. In the 1930s the Soviet Government, alarmed by growing international tension, insisted Kapitza return to work in Russia, and he was allowed to take all his machinery back with him. But both before and after the war he remained in touch with British scientists, often receiving those who visited Russia in his well-appointed dacha outside Moscow. For years it was rumored inside MI5 that Kapitza had talent-spotted potential recruits inside the Cavendish. But no one had ever really traced through the story. No one knew who, or how many, or whether Kapitza was ever successful. It was just another loose end, left in the files, seeping doubt and suspicion.
The one man who was in a position to know more about Kapitza, who he was friendly with, who his contacts were during his time at Cambridge, was Lord Adrian, who knew Kapitza when he was in Britain, and in the 1960s was Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and President of the Royal Society. Victor promptly arranged a dinner party at which I was able to meet Adrian, and from there guide him gently onto the subject of the Russian scientist.
Adrian was entirely cooperative, and could well understand the suspicions we had about Kapitza, even though he admired his achievements tremendously. He began to reel off names of those who had been especially close to Kapitza. More names for my black books. More names to be checked in the Registry. More names to be traced, interviewed, assessed, cleared, and in one or two cases, removed from access. All to be sure, finally, that no one had slipped through the net.
The most important help Victor gave was persuading Flora Solomon to meet MI5 again. I knew from her session with Arthur that she knew far more than she was saying. She had obviously been in the thick of things in the mid-1930s, part inspiration, part fellow accomplice, and part courier for the fledgling Ring of Five along with her friends Litzi Philby and Edith Tudor Hart. After her meeting with Arthur she refused to meet MI5 again. She had a typically Russian paranoia about conspiracy and treachery. She was convinced we would double-cross her, and put her in prison, or that she would be assassinated by the Russians, as she believed had happened to Tomas Harris. I asked Victor if he could intercede on my behalf, and eventually, in mid-1965, she agreed to see me.
"Does the name Dennis Proctor mean anything to you?" she growled.
It did indeed. Dennis Proctor was then the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Fuel and Power, having joined the Civil Service in the 1930s, when he had served as Stanley Baldwin's private secretary. In my travels around Cambridge and Oxford nearly a dozen people had picked out Proctor as a notable left-winger, although not a Communist, during his undergraduate days. He had the classic Cambridge Comintern recruit's profile - he was a close friend of Burgess, Blunt, Philby, and Watson and a member of the Apostles.
There was one other odd thing about Proctor which had puzzled me. Shortly before the 1951 defections he suddenly left the Civil Service for no apparent reason to take a job with a shipping company in Copenhagen. In 1953, just as suddenly, he reappeared in London and resumed his Civil Service career.
I asked Flora why she mentioned Proctor.
"Kim used to bring people to see me," she said. "He valued my opinion. I would never join, but I used to tell him what I thought of his recruits."
"And what did you tell him about Proctor...?"
"Kim brought him around for dinner one night. I didn't like him. I told Kim he was no good. He had no backbone. 'How will he stand up to stress?' I asked him."
Proctor was another name which Blunt had clearly deliberately avoided giving to me. I went to Hollis and requested permission to interview Proctor, but he refused. It would cause too much fuss in Whitehall, he said, and there were enough problems there as it was. I would have to wait until he retired. After all, said Hollis, it's only a few months.
Proctor retired to a delightful rustic French farmhouse in the rolling countryside outside Avignon with his second wife and children, and in February 1966 I traveled to France to visit him.
Proctor was a distinguished-looking man, with a hook nose, receding hairline, and just a touch of the cleric about him. He greeted me with the easy charm and familiarity which upper-class Englishmen use to set their visitors at a distance. I explained that MI5 were looking back into the 1930s.
"We're just tying up loose ends, you know, that sort of thing..."
Proctor talked about the period in crisp civil servant's shorthand. He rarely mentioned himself at first. Like the model civil servant, he was the modest observer of other people's lives and decisions. But beneath his reserve, I could detect an enthusiasm, as if he were recalling a better world.
"And how did you feel about things then yourself?" I asked.
"You mean what were my politics?" he countered, smiling at my euphemism. "Well, you presumably know I have been left-wing all my life."
"Really?"
"Oh yes," he went on, "but never Communist. I wanted to go into Government service too much to join the Party, and besides I didn't have the courage of people like Guy Burgess, who did it openly."
I asked him if Guy had ever approached him to work for peace, or for the Comintern, or anything like that.
He shook his head.
"No, I don't think so... No, I don't remember anything like that at all."
"But Guy knew what your political views were?"
"Why, yes. We were very close. Guy, myself, Anthony. The Apostles, you know..."
"Don't you think it's odd he never tried to recruit you?"
He paused for thought.
"I suppose it is, now you come to mention it. In fact, I'm really rather insulted he didn't..."