Every Spy a Traitor, page 26
He left the alley through the other end to the one he’d entered from and walked to Kentish Town underground station. By ten to seven he was leaving Charing Cross station and heading towards the Phoenix Theatre.
* * *
It took him five minutes to spot the trap. In Moscow, he’d been trained to look out for people who may be following or watching him: people hanging around with no apparent purpose, constantly looking in different directions, good quality footwear, possibly with or very close to another person but having little direct contact with them… and the couple on the corner with Flitcroft Street looked like typical followers, standing close to each other but apart, looking around much in the manner that a dog does when trying to catch a scent, standing close to the edge of the pavement so as to get the optimum view.
Archie moved to the other side of the road and into the shadow of a doorway of an umbrella shop, with a clear view of the Phoenix Theatre.
But it seemed the woman may have spotted him because he saw her beckon the man over and as she spoke with him, she gestured in his direction.
He hurried up Charing Cross Road, north towards Tottenham Court Road, left into Oxford Street and then down a side street and into the rear entrance of a pub, which was thankfully quiet, and in a cubicle of the filthy toilet he removed the wig and the false beard and put them along with the raincoat in a shopping bag he kept in the pocket and hoped he looked different enough from the man who’d hurried away.
He remained in the pub for an hour and a half, sitting in an unlit corner of the bar with a good view of the entrance. When he was satisfied all was clear he picked up a bus on Tottenham Court Road.
He left the lock-up in Kentish Town just after nine and decided to walk home to Hampstead: it was safer that way and, in any case, it was an opportunity to clear his head.
But that didn’t work, all he could think was how foolish he’d been to fall into Phillips’ trap – or if not actually fall into it, get perilously close to its edge. It was the same as in the Kremlin the previous May with that damned Branstone chap: he’d rushed into things, hadn’t bothered to stop and think because if he had, he’d have realised that Phillips announcing this to all and sundry was utterly implausible.
* * *
And it was a few days later when he was able to consider the saving graces: his wife not being at home, of course; the fact that he’d not told Osip, because that would have been a disaster in more ways than one; the incompetence of the couple, making it obvious they were watching him; and then his coming to his senses so quickly and getting out of the predicament.
But they were small consolations.
The fact of the matter was that if Phillips had set a trap – in however heavy-handed a manner – then that was because he suspected someone in MI6 of being the traitor.
Until then they could quite reasonably assume Archie worked at one of any number of organisations – MI6 or MI5, the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the War Office and even Downing Street or one of the armed forces, meaning he could be one of many thousands of people.
Now they may well have narrowed it down to one or two hundred at the very most.
The odds were dangerously short.
There was no room for any more mistakes.
Part 3
Chapter 23
London
November 1938–January 1939
Charles Cooper started work at the headquarters of the British Communist Party on a damp Monday morning, the last day of October.
It had rained all weekend and on the Sunday night he’d been kept awake by the rain driving against the window in the house in Willesden where he was now living. It showed no sign of abating on the Monday morning and he was drenched when he arrived at 16 King Street, waiting forlornly and shifting uncomfortably as a puddle of water formed under him in the surprisingly small reception area as someone went to find Comrade Wright, all the while being watched suspiciously.
It had been quite a miserable first week: he was treated very much as the newcomer and there were a lot of questions and he was given precious little to do other than carry packages from one floor to another and he began to worry that maybe he was suspected of being an infiltrator, but Burton told him not to worry. Everyone, he said, is suspected of being an infiltrator.
‘That building thrives on suspicion, the whole Communist Party does: it’s how it works – different factions, different centres of power, almost imperceptible differences in ideology. Frankly, I’d worry if they appeared to trust you from the outset.’
And at the start of his second week there’d been what turned out to be a positive development. A woman had turned up at the house in Willesden one morning while he was out and had met the old man and the woman who was there during the day and she’d said she was from a local church and left a list of services. And two evenings later, after Cooper had arrived home, the doorbell rang and it was a man offering his services as a gardener and was this his house and Cooper patiently explained that it belonged to an elderly gentleman and he looked after him and, no, there was already a gardener, thank you.
Evidently, he’d been checked out and had passed the test and after that, Cooper began to be entrusted with more work: taking messages across London and around the building, helping in the library and a range of other clerical tasks, all of which were rather mundane, but he did notice that as each week went by, he was given more interesting work.
He was particularly keen to volunteer for what they called – half-jokingly – the porters office. It was not the most popular place in the building as it was mostly manual work and there was a general aversion to that, with little appreciation of the irony.
But it did give him something of a carte blanche to wander around the building at will: the set of overalls he wore seemed to afford him a degree of invisibility and he found that if he carried a small ladder with him and a tool kit and made a point of checking light bulbs and fixing door handles then he could go wherever he wanted.
Which was how, towards the end of November, he came to meet Cliff Milne.
* * *
He finished his novel at the end of October.
He gave it a title – The Jewels of Europe – which he wasn’t sure about but assumed publishers were bound to come up with a better one. And he was pleased with how the story developed: plenty of intrigue and action as Louise stole diamonds across Europe, all the time pursued by an enigmatic private detective of uncertain nationality.
He hoped the ending worked – it could be considered perhaps too violent – but this was something else the publishers would no doubt have a view on.
Thanks to judicious use of carbon copies, he had five copies of the book. He sent four of them out to publishers in the first week of November and felt full of optimism.
One of them, surely, was bound to be interested.
* * *
It was rare for him to be called to the top floor at King Street, where Harry Pollitt, the general secretary, had his offices along with members of the Politburo and other important people, though there were no names on the doors, which were always locked.
But at the end of November the main handyman – a cantankerous type who had little time for Cooper – was off work for a couple of weeks and another handyman had broken his wrist. Although Cooper was a porter rather than a handyman he quickly volunteered when there was a call to fix a lock in an office on the fourth floor.
Office belonging to a Mr Milne, he was told: Cliff Milne.
The man who let him in introduced himself as Sidney Dunn and said to call him Sidney, if he wished, and explained that the lock to the inner office where Comrade Milne himself sat was quite stiff and if he could sort it, he’d be very grateful.
Sidney Dunn was a slightly dishevelled type, probably in his fifties and wearing a thick, knitted scarlet pullover, a check shirt with frayed collar and cuffs and a tightly knotted red tie. He was chatty, fussing around Cooper as he checked the lock to Milne’s inner office. He was a clerk, he explained, looking after Comrade Milne’s office.
‘You’re a volunteer, are you, Frank?’
Cooper said he was.
‘And a Party member?’
‘Of course.’
Sidney moved closer, bending down, his hands on his knees and his mouth close to Cooper’s ear.
‘Thought so: not many people are aware of Comrade Milne, but what he does…’ He paused and looked round. ‘It’s some of the most important work in this building. Even I only know half of it, if that. But he trusts me, I keep my mouth shut.’
He leant back, his arms folded across his chest and a knowing grin revealing a set of stained teeth. He clearly wasn’t very good at keeping his mouth shut.
Cooper unscrewed the lock and applied plenty of lubricant and thankfully it didn’t need changing because he wasn’t sure he was up to that and as he was tidying up, the door to the outer office swung open and Cliff Milne hurried in, his arms full of papers and a briefcase tucked under his arm, which Cooper noticed was attached to his wrist with a chain.
Sidney deferentially explained that Comrade Cooper was from the porter’s office and had come to sort out the lock and Cooper said it was all fixed and was there anything else that needed sorted while he was up here with all his tools?
He expected to be sent away, but Cliff Milne was standing behind his desk, his briefcase on the chair and still attached to his wrist and looking up and down at his bookcase. He looked older than in the photograph he’d seen of him at The Annexe; more like mid-forties, and his fair hair was now greying and thinning.
‘Is there anything you can do about this?’ He was pointing at a bookcase that took up the whole of one wall. Half of the shelves were stuffed with box files, their contents overflowing, and the other shelves were filled with books and piles of magazines and newspapers.
‘Every morning when I come in, I’m surprised it’s still standing, but it’s only a matter of time. All those files… It would be a disaster if the whole thing collapsed. It would take Sidney and I months to get it all back into some kind of order.’
Cooper walked up to the bookcase and moved one or two items to the side. It was obvious that the brackets that attached the shelves to the wall were coming loose. It was the kind of job which would normally be handled by one of the more senior handymen, but this was too good an opportunity to miss.
As he moved along the bookcase, he noticed that behind Milne’s chair was a low cupboard, which was now open, exposing a heavy iron safe. Milne was bending down, putting some items from the briefcase into the safe, trying to shield what he was doing with his body.
‘I’m sure I can fix this: it will take a few days though.’
* * *
The week leading up to Christmas was a distinctly miserable one for Charles Cooper. On one of his infrequent visits to his mother and step-father he’d allowed himself to be talked into spending Christmas Day with them – a prospect that filled him with dread, but that was the least of his problems.
In the middle of the month, he received his first rejection for The Jewels of Europe. It was from Holborn Books, one of the larger publishers, and he’d been surprised to hear back from them so quickly. He’d hoped that in the event of a publisher turning down the book at least they’d provide helpful feedback he could use for an improved version. But this was barely a letter – the date filled in by hand above what was clearly a pro-forma rejection slip: the book was not one they’d consider publishing but they were very grateful for the submission.
No name, no helpful comments.
Two days later two rejections arrived on the same day, which felt particularly cruel. Corton and Wild – who had quite an extensive crime list – did provide a couple of sentences, which in the right light could be construed as feedback of sorts: a slightly uncertain and, if I may say, meandering plot… is the character Louise meant to be a villain or a heroine? And from New End Publishing another pro-forma letter informing him this was not the type of story they were looking to publish.
The last post before Christmas dashed his hopes that he may enjoy some kind of stay of execution over what passed for the festive season, but Passport Books – who had both crime and travel lists – said they wondered whether he ought to consider tackling a different genre altogether.
He took a week off over Christmas and apart from the day with his mother and step-father, he spent it back at Dorset Square. He had a list of publishers, which he’d copied out from a book in the Reference Library, and he went through them carefully to decide who to send the book to next.
Which was how, on the day following Boxing Day, he was scanning the list when he came across Francis Randall Books, the company which Misha at the State Publishing House of Fiction in Moscow had mentioned nearly a year and a half ago: he’d described them as their English partners and said Cooper’s novel was the kind this company liked.
Early on, Cooper had decided not to risk an approach to this company: the very last thing he was going to do was to take the chance of alerting them to the fact that he was alive and well. But since he’d been back in London – well over a year – Charles Cooper had to all intents and purposes disappeared and now he was happily living as Christopher Shaw and that was the name he used as the author of the book.
The risk, he now decided, was therefore minimal.
* * *
He returned to work at King Street on 2 January, the first Monday of the new year, feeling decidedly more upbeat than before Christmas. He’d prepared what he thought was a well-written synopsis of The Jewels of Europe and had decided to deliver it in person along with a hand-written covering letter to Francis Randall Books during his lunch break. A small touch like that could make all the difference, putting a face to a name and all that.
And the second reason was that in the course of his long walks in Regent’s Park over Christmas he’d devised what he regarded as a very clever plan, one he hoped Burton would approve of.
He’d spent much of December in Cliff Milne’s office in King Street as he laboriously repaired the bookshelves. He was, he told them, a perfectionist, which hopefully accounted for the job taking so long. At first Cliff Milne appeared too busy and distracted to talk with him, but in time he did begin to engage in occasional conversation and was evidently impressed with the handyman who was clearly a dedicated Party member and a committed Marxist Leninist, who was educated and well-read and obviously had some experience of life, despite his relatively young age.
They began to have conversations. Cooper was careful to avoid coming across as scheming or ambitious. He found himself in the position of almost being Milne’s confidante.
‘Sidney’s a decent type,’ he explained one day when the other man left the office. ‘A good comrade, of course, and very trustworthy, but he… he lacks energy and initiative. He’s not interested in ideology: maybe that’s not such a bad thing.’
Other times, Milne alluded to the pressures of the job and the responsibilities that fell on his shoulders, which were perhaps greater than those for anyone else in the building, including the general secretary.
He was careful not to spell out what he meant and Cooper never pushed it, but Milne was constantly weary: he often remarked he operated on no more than four or five hours’ sleep a night and often had people to meet late at night or early in the morning and there was the constant strain of always having to be careful and Cooper had asked him what he meant by that because not to do so could have appeared too innocent. Milne shrugged and leant back in his chair and said that was a good question, but avoided answering it, which was typical of Milne – enigmatic, appearing to be open and even frank, but as closed as the books now neatly arranged on the nearly repaired bookcase.
‘The point about being a Marxist revolutionary is that you need to be more committed and work twice as hard as anyone else. You never have a day off. Everything else – and I mean everything – takes second place.’
Cooper said he sympathised and if there was anything he could do to help and Milne was on his knees at this point retrieving something from his safe but he did mumble something about being grateful and you never know.
When he stood up, he looked in pain.
‘Doc says I need an operation on my knee, but the idea of that… being in hospital and the recuperation… it’s out of the question.’
During his period in Milne’s office, he carefully observed his use of the safe. The cupboard it was in was locked, but Cooper spotted him fumbling under the desk to retrieve the key. Milne then reached behind the safe and produced another key, for the safe. But clearly two keys were required to open it – and the second one was kept on a chain round his neck.
Milne hadn’t realised that Cooper was watching him, but that didn’t seem to matter: with access to just one key the safe would remain locked.
* * *
It was a pleasant fifteen-minute walk through Seven Dials and Bloomsbury to Store Street, the home of Francis Randall Books.
It was a four-storey building close to Gower Street, the ground floor occupied by a firm of solicitors, the entrance to Francis Randall Books through a door to the side and up a flight of narrow steps to the third floor. The reception was on a landing at the top of the stairs, a formally dressed woman sitting behind a desk, with piles of books stacked up on every available inch of floor space.
She took a while to glance up at him and then only responded with the briefest of smiles when he wished her a good afternoon and said he was sorry to bother her but he’d… well, written a novel, actually, and he’d brought it along because he’d like to submit it to Francis Randall Books to be considered for publication and it’s, here…
