‘Cost of last,’ said Dalby again. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘Last,’ I said. ‘Last — what the cobbler threw at his wife, you know.’
Dalby continued reading from my expense account for the month. ‘Then this item: “To entertainment, drinks and dinner: Mirabelle Restaurant twenty-three pounds.” What is this, you, Chico, Carswell and Murray at the —’ he paused, and mouthed the words incredulously and slowly, ‘— Mirabelle Restaurant!! You’re supposed to spend £103 per month. This lot comes to £191 18s 6d. How’s that?’
It seemed he expected an answer. ‘I’m keeping a few items over till next month,’ I said.
That went down like a lead balloon. Dalby had stopped joking now, he began looking really annoyed, he scratched the side of his face nervously and kept waving my expense sheet so that it made crackling noises in the air.
‘Ross said you were an impertinent —. You’ll impertinent your way right out of here before long. You’ll see.’ His rage had gone suddenly, but it seemed a shame to leave it like that.
‘In all those expensive clothes,’ I asked plaintively, ‘do you expect us to eat in a Wimpy Bar?’ Dalby rolled with the punch, he didn’t even know what a Wimpy Bar was; he just couldn’t bear the thought of a sergeant brushing waiters with him at the Mirabelle. That’s why I continually did it, and why I itemized it in the most unequivocal way I knew. Dalby at this stage executed a famous military manoeuvre known as the ‘War Office twostep’, generally used for withdrawing intact when out-ranked. He started explaining that there was no need for Carswell and Murray to buy things off my expense sheet. Carswell can have his own. I didn’t particularly want Murray to have an expense sheet but I was interested to see whether I could angle Dalby into having to give him one.
‘Accounts will never in a million years let you give a sergeant with less than two years’ provisional service a sheet of money.’
I followed up, ‘You know that’s the sort of thing they are dead fussy about;—no, you might get away with giving him free use of Carswell’s petty cash, but what they says goes when it comes to money sheets.’
Dalby sat there with a sardonic look clamped across his head like a pair of earphones. ‘When you have quite finished, for reasons known only to yourself, getting Sergeant Murray an expense sheet, let me say that I have considered the matter carefully and both of them can have one.’ Dalby leaned back and put his suède ankle boots on the back of the only comfortable chair in the office. He picked up the two books that lay on the top of the old brief-case that I intended to lose and replace from expenses at the earliest possible moment. He read the spines aloud, ‘Experimental Induction of Psychoneuroses in Personality and Behaviour Disorders, Vol 1, by Liddell, and Shorvon’s Abreactions. I saw them on your desk this morning but I don’t think it will get us closer to Jay.
‘Now I know you are a little miffed at working with what you consider inadequate information, but we’ll settle all that.’ He paused for a long time, as though thinking carefully before committing himself by what he was about to say, as indeed I’m sure he was doing. ‘I’m letting you take over this whole department,’ he said at last. ‘Now don’t get all excited, it’s only going to be for about three months, in fact less if I’m lucky. You are a bit stupid, and you haven’t had the advantage of a classical education.’
Dalby was having a little genteel fun with me. ‘But I am sure you will be able to overcome your disadvantages.’
‘Why think so? You never overcame your advantages.’
It followed the usual pattern of our preliminaries. We got down to business. The handing-over ceremony consisted of Dalby and Alice showing me how to work the IBM. I had a feeling that a certain amount of the documentation had been removed, but perhaps that’s just me being paranoiac. He was moving out the next day and he wasn’t telling me what he was doing. I asked him in particular about Jay. Dalby said, ‘It’s all in the documents. Read it up.’
‘I’d rather hear it from you, get the hang of the way you’re thinking.’ Of course, I really wanted to avoid reading all that damn bumf.
Anyway, Dalby gave me an outline. ‘When Jay settled in London in ’50 he was working on smalltime espionage for the Americans. We didn’t want him, in fact, doing just economic and industrial work, it wasn’t really our decision. He had an office in Praed Street and seemed to be doing OK apart from his homework for the Yanks. The first time we got interested in him was the Burgess and Maclean business. We had a memo in saying we mustn’t pull him for it. We didn’t have any idea of doing so, but it started us off thinking.’
I interrupted, ‘Who sent the memo?’
‘It wasn’t written or recorded. I wasn’t in charge then. If you ever find out let me know. It’s one of my big unsolved mysteries. But he has friends upstairs.’
There was only one level that Dalby called upstairs.
‘The Government?’ I said.
‘The Cabinet,’ said Dalby. ‘Mind you, don’t quote me, we have no evidence at all, not one thing that connects him with any illegal dealings since ’50. We checked Jay’s movements during the Burgess and Maclean business. They definitely correlate. When Maclean was Head of Chancery at the British Embassy Cairo, Jay was in Cairo twice. Although we have no trace of him visiting or phoning Tatsfield where Maclean lived, they did cross paths.
‘On the 25th May ’51, Maclean drove with Burgess in a hired car to Southampton. At twelve the Falaise cross-Channel packet left on a round trip to St Malo and the Channel Islands with Burgess and Maclean and Jay aboard. Of the three people, only Jay returned to England.
‘When, a lot later, two bank drafts arrived each for £1,000 and both for Mrs —[8] (Maclean’s motherinlaw) and drawn on Swiss Bank Corporation and Union Bank of Switzerland respectively, another bank draft followed, this time for £25,000. It was drawn on the Swiss Bank Corporation and paid into the London and S. Hellenic Bank to the account of Mr Aristo. I need hardly tell you that Mr Aristo is Jay, or there’s nothing illegal in receiving twentyfive thousand quid. I think Jay is in the import and export business as his cards say, but he finally found that the second most valuable commodity today is information.’
‘And?’
‘The most valuable?’
‘People with information,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, that’s what I think, but you’ll not get me to say so at this stage in the game.’
‘Was that fellow Raven we grabbed at Baalbek part of this scene?’
‘He was the chemical warfare biochemist from the Research place at Porton. But the number of people they take are very small. Naturally the Press Department (Security) keep any names out of the papers. We’re not having another Burgess and Maclean shindy, questions in the House and all that.’
‘You think the work Carswell is doing has Jay involved?’
‘No, I think that although the money Jay gets for a B & M operation is vast, he is smart enough to realize that to continue that is to live on borrowed time. I think he grabs an S.1 now and again when he needs some mad money but certainly not on the sort of scale that Carswell is talking of. He’d have to run coaches and advertise in the Observer. I’d leave Carswell right out of your calculations until he starts getting something a little more concrete. You’ll look an absolute clown talking to the Permanent Under-secretary about…’ He turned to the list I’d pinned up ‘…righthanded “concens” with fever.’ He eased his weight off my desk and bent his knees, quickly sweeping his hand under my desk top. He switched off the miniature tape recorder I had had going. He walked to the door, then came back. ‘Just one more small thing, you secret service man, you, try and have a haircut while I’m away and I’ll use my influence about your back pay!’