CHAPTER THREE: NOSTALGIA
a) Soho, London, 19th December 1963
Espionage in the ’60s reeked of boiled cabbage and old rot. It was a grim, tawdry affair that makes even the present day world of paperwork, politics and accountancy seem attractive.
At that time I was still a few months away from a department of my own. My specialist area of espionage had thrived during the Second World War but petered out as the Service focused elsewhere. That said, there was still enough money and enthusiasm to bring me onboard as a sounding post for other sections. You couldn’t move for funding and the obsession with the Russians was at its peak. If someone in the war office suspected our Soviet friends of being able to fly, they would have had a Cambridge graduate on the roof flapping his arms within forty-eight hours.
I operated out of a creaking office building in Soho. I would walk to work through a maze of blue neon and questionable promises. Posters offered glamour that the threadbare carpets and well-worn stages could never live up to. It was a place of honey traps, luring the lustful into dark, sordid interiors where their money would be drained away as surely as their dreams. It couldn’t have suited us better.
The front door of the office peeled like an Englishman on a package holiday. The electric bells to the left offered a life insurance company, a tailor, a travel agency and a film production house. They were all as fake as the pneumatic dancers that jiggled on the advertising poster of the club next door.
Stepping inside, you might have thought you had been transported to a solicitor’s office from Dickens. The entrance hall was a mixture of black and white floor tiles and the sort of dark, dreary wood that feeds on natural light.
The Service was an uneasy combination of confused scholars and old soldiers; each quite incapable of understanding the other. The concierge, George, was from the military school – an aged infantryman who had lost his left arm during the war. He compensated for this loss of mass with a paunch that stretched the buttons of his suit jacket until they threatened to pop. It was the sort of belly you can only gain through liquid refreshment, a sack of digested beer that he hauled around like a camel’s hump.
‘Morning, Mr Shining,’ he would say, looking up from his copy of the Daily Mirror, before offering a comment on the weather. Those meteorological statements had the stiff formality of codewords, shifting alongside the seasons. ‘Fresh as you like,’ he would say during the cold of winter; ‘Damp enough for Noah,’ when it was raining; ‘Bright as a button,’ when the sun shone. If he ever varied from his script I certainly never heard it. He was reliable, old George, as much a part of the fixtures and fittings as the creeping mould or the carpet that did its best to hold the stairs together.
I’d work my way up to the second floor, where I had my office alongside the fake travel agency, its small windows filled with wilting posters of beaches and old monuments.
I had done my best to make the office comfortable, but it was like placing a cotton valance on a bed of nails. The building fought all attempts at pleasant habitation. The windows were draughty and their sills collected dead flies. The wallpaper was damp to the touch and the furniture creaked when you applied weight to it.
On the morning the Krishnin affair began, I had planned to continue observation on a young man who claimed he could trap ghosts. I had little doubt he was nothing more than a delusional unfortunate surrounded by empty tea chests and with an overactive imagination, but dealing with him beat sitting in that damn office.
It was not to be.
‘You busy?’ A moustache poked its way around my door frame. It was luxuriant, that moustache; you could have painted a wall with it in no time. It was attached to Colonel Reginald King, our War Office presence and most upright of the army lot. He wore his previous life like a security blanket: picture of the Queen on his wall and medals in a case – the sort of things you find shoved away in a dull pub corner these days. If he listened to anything other than marching band music he kept the secret well. He had infected the entire top floor with pipe smoke and tubas.
‘Let me put that another way,’ he continued, before I had time to answer, ‘can you put whatever you’re up to aside for a bit? I need you to help me with a thing.’
‘A thing’. This casual attitude towards operations was part of the military affectation. They were quick to insist others stuck to operation classifications and code names but spent their entire careers involved in ‘shindigs’, ‘ruckuses’ and ‘bits of business’. Perhaps it made them sleep better at night, downgrading their acts of murder or terrorism to nothing more than ‘little barneys overseas’.
‘What do you need?’ I asked, but he had already begun to walk off down the corridor, obliging me to follow.
I shoved my paperwork back in a desk drawer, locked it and gave chase as he made his way downstairs.
‘Got a little picture show for you,’ he was saying, his rich voice being sucked up by the stairwell like nourishment. ‘Chap I want you to take a look at.’
The screening room was part of our production house facade, a small cinema filled with tip-up seats grown shiny through use and the ghosts of dead cigarettes. We all smoked in those days – tobacco was as ubiquitous as water and we thrived on it. It kept the smell of the building at bay.
‘Maggie,’ said the Colonel, shouting at a small woman whose head sported a cheap perm and bright pink spectacle frames. ‘Get Shining a coffee, would you?’ He didn’t bother to consult my wishes on the matter; I would accept this token of civility whether I wanted it or not.
She sighed and rose to her feet under the great weight of all that curled hair. ‘Milk or sugar?’ she asked, with the enthusiasm of a woman about to clean up after her dog.
‘Both please,’ I said, knowing that the coffee would need all the help it could get in order to achieve flavour. Those were the days of powdery, instant, light brown flour that managed to look vaguely like coffee when water was added to it but had long given up on tasting like it.
We entered the screening room, the Colonel waving me to a seat as he moved towards the projector.
‘Never know how to work the wretched thing,’ he admitted. ‘Where’s Thompson, damn him? He’s the only one that understands its arcane bloody ways.’
He stepped out for a moment, hunting for Thompson, a pleasant young man whom I hoped would one day come to his senses and find a better career.
I sat and smoked.
I was used to hanging around the place at the casual beck and call of others. I was like a cherished stapler, passed between offices and frequently lost under a pile of expenses claims.
‘Sorry to keep you,’ said Thompson as he entered at the back, which just goes to show how polite he was. After all, it hadn’t been him that was detaining me. ‘Nobody else seems able to work the projector.’
‘I’d have been willing to have a go,’ I declared, ‘but I didn’t want to confuse our superior by showing excessive signs of intelligence.’
‘Certainly doesn’t pay in our line of work.’ Thompson smiled.
‘Ah!’ said the Colonel, once more gracing us with his presence. ‘All set then? Good man, Thompson. Reel on top.’
The film opened with a blurry shot of the Oceanic Terminal at Heathrow. A Vickers V10 was disgorging its passengers onto the tarmac. The camera man was no threat to Hollywood. The lens jerked around until he managed to focus it on one passenger in particular, a middle-aged, dark-haired man who was so bland in appearance he could only be a spy.