He took my elbow to guide me around a puddle. A puddle, for heaven’s sake! As if a girl who was about to spy on a Russian Intelligence agent turned businessman needed assistance to walk. He said, ‘I’m not going to send you into Petrov’s den. It’s too dangerous. It’s not right.’

  I stared at him, wondering if I’d succeeded too well in charming Mr Vaughn. ‘You’re not satisfied with my progress?’

  He looked down at his feet and then away, beyond the water to the weeping willow on the opposite bank of the lake. ‘It’s not that at all.’

  Clearly, he was struggling with his conscience. He surprised me by saying, ‘I like you, Miss Granger,’ he said. ‘I like you very much.’

  I smiled at him. This wasn’t good. My tone became brisk and jolly, like the vicar’s wife organising prizes for the tombola. ‘Well, I like you too, Mr Vaughn. I think we work well together.’

  He hesitated once more, struggling with himself, and I thanked heaven for the typical Englishman’s emotional constipation.

  ‘Are you going to eat that?’ I asked him, indicating the half of our sandwich he still carried gingerly in his cupped hand, like a precious artefact. ‘Only I am so awfully hungry.’

  ‘Oh. Ah. Yes,’ said Vaughn, handing it to me. He looked deflated, as I’d intended him to be. In Vaughn’s world, true ladies did not express appetites of any kind.

  ‘Did you make this yourself, Mr Vaughn?’ I licked a smear of pickle off my thumb. ‘It’s very good.’

  ‘Oh. Ah. No,’ he said, still disorientated by my prosaic need for sustenance while he strained to pour out his heart. ‘Listen, I —’

  ‘Yes, Mr Vaughn?’

  He paused, distracted by my décolletage. ‘You, ah . . . You have something on your, ah . . .’

  ‘Do I?’ I took out my compact and handkerchief and made a production of wiping the crumbs from my bosom.

  ‘Right,’ I said, having accomplished that task. ‘When are you going to teach me how to kill a man with my bare hands?’

  Aware that I was being given a test run with something of low i­mportance, I was determined to prove myself at Petrov’s offices.I was to keep an eye on comings and goings, who saw Petrov and with whom he corresponded. The man was selling information to the British government but he might also be working for the Kremlin. It was my job to help MI5 decide where, if anywhere, his true a­llegiance lay.

  The Russian had several secretaries working for him in the large typing pool outside his office. Ostensibly, my job involved dealing with the correspondence deemed suitable for Petrov’s personal attention. Anything that seemed unusual or suspicious was to be reported to Vaughn. He gave me a tiny camera; I was to take photographs of documents with it and hand over the film at the designated place.

  On my way to work each day, I would buy a newspaper and read it on a particular bench in Regent’s Park. On Thursdays I would fold copies of correspondence and my report, written carefully in the code Vaughn had taught me, inside the newspaper, leave it on the bench and walk away. I never saw who collected my leavings.

  I didn’t feel too guilty about spying on Petrov from any point of view – not least from a personal standpoint. He was a loud, barrel-chested pig of a man, who resented my appointment as his personal secretary but seemed constrained to accept me. Perhaps, like me, he was trying to prove himself to MI5.

  Our efforts with hair dye and shapeless, drab clothes worked, both as a disguise and as a deterrent to what Vaughn primly called Petrov’s ‘roving eye’. Sure enough, Petrov referred to me as ‘Thet ugly beetch’ in his thick Russian accent. It is profoundly amazing to me that men who look like toads believe they are entitled to comment on the appearance of everyone around them – particularly women.

  There wasn’t much to report. Either Petrov was doing as he said or he was very good at hiding his tracks. I’d learned from Vaughn that Petrov was once an agent for the NKVD.

  I was not supposed to be there on the night Petrov was murdered.

  Vaughn had told me not to take any undue risks, but I was bored with the routine surveillance and the lack of anything much to report. I was marking time in this place. I needed to pull off some sort of coup to convince Peter Durant I was ready for the next step in his plans for me. Ignoring Vaughn’s warning, I decided to search Petrov’s offices one Saturday night when no one else was there.

  There was no difficulty gaining entry. I had my own key to the building and I’d palmed the key to Petrov’s office and had a copy made the previous day. Wary of attracting attention by turning on the overhead lights, I flicked on Petrov’s desk lamp and began my search. I was so intent on what I was doing that I didn’t hear Petrov’s footsteps, muffled as they were by the thick Aubusson carpet.

  For a large man he moved fast. In a flash he was across the room, gripping my throat, his face inches from mine, screaming at me in Russian.

  Flecks of spittle rained down on my face as he harangued me. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t answer his barrage of questions for the pressure around my windpipe. Was it all over? Was I going to die? The low-level testing ground had suddenly disappeared from beneath my feet.

  Suddenly, I saw Peter Durant in the doorway and my struggles grew more frantic. He held a bottle of vodka and two shot glasses. What was this? He’d never mentioned he knew Petrov personally.

  My voice strangled in my throat as I tried to call out to him for help. Petrov dragged me towards his desk and yanked open the top drawer.

  The pistol barrel gleamed, catching the desk lamp’s glow. The sight chilled me, slowing my brain until everything seemed to be filt­ered through the beat of blood in my ears.

  Petrov shoved the gun muzzle against my temple with bruising force. The metal barrel was cold and hard and seemed to drill into my brain.

  I was going to die. Durant wasn’t doing anything to stop Petrov. He hadn’t moved from the doorway.

  Several excruciating seconds passed before Peter said evenly, ‘Come, Dimitri. Let her go.’

  Why the Russian should do as Peter said, I didn’t know. Reluctantly, slowly, the big man’s hand loosened and he pushed me away so hard that I staggered and fell to the floor, gasping and coughing and clutching my bruised throat. Petrov rolled out a string of Russian vulgarities, still threatening me with the pistol.

  ‘Put the gun down,’ Peter said.

  As if suddenly comprehending the situation, Dimitri’s expression turned thunderstruck. Nevertheless, he obeyed, slamming the pistol down on the leather inset of his desk. ‘What is this? You are protecting her? She is a spy!’

  I was as much at sea on that point as Petrov. Perhaps more so. Hadn’t Peter deliberately distanced himself from Vaughn’s operation? What was he doing here, in that case?

  I was in a lot of pain, unable to speak for the fire in my throat, but my mind was beginning to regain focus. From the floor, I kept my eye on Dimitri’s gun. But there were many factors preventing my lunging for it.

  For one thing, Peter seemed to have the situation in hand. For another, learning to shoot at the Marylebone Ladies’ Club was one thing; putting my training into practice in a high-pressure situation like this was another. I’d probably end by getting myself and Peter killed.

  Then the most incredible thing happened. Two men in heavy black overcoats and fedoras stormed the office, pistols in their gloved hands. One was a baby-faced hulk, the other tall and thin, a cadaver on legs, with heavy pitting over his cheeks and bullet-hard eyes.

  Petrov went for his gun. Baby Face caught him before he reached it, thrust him into his swivel chair and spun it to face the two men.

  The thin man said something in Russian that was so rapid, I couldn’t understand it. Petrov shook his head until his jowls wobbled, dark eyes wide with terror.

  Peter had turned ashen. It was one of the few times I ever saw him taken at a disadvantage. He spoke sharply to the men in English but they didn’t seem to understand him, or perhaps they were ignoring him.

  While his colleague subdued Petrov, the man who looked like a cadaver turned his pistol on Peter.

  The situation was careering out of control. I struggled to speak.I could have translated for Peter if my voice would work, but it was no more than a wheeze in my throat.

  Finally, Peter mentioned the name ‘Odysseus’. That caught the Cadaver’s attention. Colour returned to Peter’s face as he saw the word had an effect.

  What did it mean? Was it a password or a code name? It sounded like the latter.

  Once assured of their attention, Peter’s calm, quick speech turned to a staccato order. ‘Now get out.’

  The two men seemed torn between obeying orders and adapting to the unexpected. In fact, as I learned later, they were trained pr­ofessionals who had made a grave mistake. There should be no witnesses to an assassination, particularly when the common practice of the time was to force the traitor at gunpoint to sign a suicide note before ‘assisting’ him to blow his own brains out. All neat and tidy with the loose ends tied. The right message would be sent to the people who needed to know but the suicide would not be investigated further by ordinary police.

  Petrov, meanwhile, had been sliding glances at his own gun from his seated position beside the desk. He could not possibly reach it before one of the Russians put a bullet through him. Surely he wouldn’t be stupid enough to try.

  Having dragged myself to a sitting position, I was closer to the pistol, only a couple of yards away. However the odds were not in my favour, and besides, Peter seemed to be talking his way out of the situation. He was so very good at persuasion. Later I realised he did not want to be involved in what is known disparagingly in the spy trade as ‘wet work’. The timing of this assassination could not have been worse for either of us.

  Napoleon once said that he’d prefer a lucky general over a good one. Luck, good and bad, plays a large part in secret intelligence-gathering. It was fast dawning on me that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing in regard to Petrov. This chance c­ollision of objectives had thrown everyone’s plans into disarray.

  However, a spy is nothing if not light on his feet, adaptable to the unexpected. If I waited and did nothing, would Peter extract us both from the situation?

  Somehow, I didn’t trust him to let me walk free. Surely now that I’d seen him interacting with both Petrov and the hired assassins, he couldn’t afford to let me go.

  But would he kill me? Would he stand by while they did?

  I thought of Sylvia. What would she do? I looked at the gun.I had no chance against two hired thugs.

  Suddenly, Petrov lunged towards his gun, taking advantage of his captors’ distraction while they dealt with Durant.

  One crack. Two. Petrov threw his hands up and fell forward with an almighty thump. The baby-faced Russian had fired, shot him in the back.

  Now I was a witness to murder and they could not let me live.

  I admit it. I did not take Dimitri Petrov’s death with any kind of stoicism. I’d never seen someone die like that before, though my imagination’s reconstruction of Sylvia’s murder haunted my dreams. I stayed where I was, trembling and sick, as the air filled with a stench I didn’t want to think about. If only I’d taken Vaughn’s warnings to heart.

  The Russians were shouting at each other. This was not what they’d planned, the Cadaver spat out. Now the police were going to get involved, for how could a man shoot himself in the back?

  While the baby-faced assassin grew increasingly agitated and the Cadaver sneered and snarled, Peter seemed to descend into preternatural calm.

  ‘Gentlemen, you may leave this in my hands. Put the pistol on the desk and leave.’

  The thin man, who did speak English and probably understood a lot more than he’d previously let on, jerked his head at me. ‘Best we kill her too.’

  There was a long pause. I think it was the longest of my life.

  ‘You don’t want to do that,’ said Durant at last. ‘You’d best get out of here. I’ll handle the girl.’

  After another, fraught pause, the thin man accepted the recom­mendation with a nod. A sharp, guttural sentence to Baby Face brought him to heel. Stepping over the fallen Petrov, they left the offices.

  These events happened in far less time than it takes to describe them. I was panicked and confused, unsure of Peter’s loyalty, s­urprised that he had shown any kind of compassion towards me – if that’s what his refusal to let me be shot had been.

  The truth behind what was happening did not dawn on me until I was sitting in the cupboard-like holding cell at Holloway Prison.

  When the assassins had left, Durant helped me tenderly to my feet, running a gentle finger down my bruised throat. I was shaking and tearful, the relief swamping me as if my ordeal were already over, reaction setting in. He put his arm around me and led me to a chair and sat me down in it.

  He fetched the vodka he’d brought, calmly picking his way around the Russian’s inert body to get to it. I heard the splash and tumble of the liquid into the glass. Peter returned and handed me the vodka. Still gasping in shock and pain, I downed the breath-catching spirit in one agonising gulp.

  An instant, deep lassitude crept over me. ‘My word,’ I whispered, ‘that’s jolly powerful —’

  When I woke, I was alone with the dead Petrov in his office, my blouse ripped and skirt torn. And there was Petrov himself, dead on the floor in a pool of dark blood, head to the side, eyes staring blankly at the carpet.

  Fear was a cold, greasy trickle down my spine but I was strangely unable to do anything about my situation. Fuzzily, I stared at Petrov’s body and tried to piece together what had happened. My mind refused to work.

  Gradually, it dawned on me. I must call for help.

  Peter . . . His name echoed in my head. Had they taken him? No. They’d left. He’d told them to go.

  I tasted bile in my mouth. It had a strange metallic tang, as if I’d chewed on a pill. My throat felt scourged, as if an animal had been trapped inside it, clawing to get free. My hand throbbed. Had I sprained my wrist when I fell?

  For an instant, my mind cleared, as when the clouds part to allow a glimpse of the sun. Someone had made it look like I was responsible for Petrov’s death. The ripped clothing . . . Had Peter drugged me and left me here like this to make it look like I’d shot Dimitri in self-defence?

  My brain throbbed in the silence, a pressure building in my ears. Another glimpse of clarity. No time to call anyone. I had to get out of here.

  I stood, then swayed on my feet, so dizzy I fell heavily against the desk, crying out in pain as my injured hand took the brunt of my weight. My arms seemed too weak to support me.

  ‘Think!’ I ordered myself. I needed to make a plan.

  Clean myself up, put on my coat, button it to cover my torn clothes. Gloves. I stared at my hands. Where were my gloves? Didn’t I have them on when I went through Dimitri’s office? My hands were bare now.

  The truth smacked into me. Of course. They’d wanted my fingerprints on the gun.

  Find the gun. Where was it? I needed to find the gun and get rid of it. I needed . . .

  Thoughts chugged slowly through my mind without seeming to prompt any action. My body was like an engine that ticked over and refused to start.

  A trample of feet. I needed to get out but my legs wouldn’t work and then it was too late. Shouting and guns, the room filling with men. A uniformed bobby bent over Dimitri. A plain-clothes man, his hand on my shoulder, his words warping through the force field that surrounded my mind. A gunshot. Someone had called the police.

  Murder. Under arrest. You do not have to say anything . . .

  I went with them as quietly as a lamb.

  I put up no defence at my trial and I was convicted of Petrov’s murder. You might wonder why I made no effort to expose the truth or even to invent a plausible lie.

  Russians with guns and a lover with a drug. No one would believe such a fanciful story. But why hadn’t I made up a plausible one? That was a more difficult question to answer.

  What I realised once the drug and the shock had worn off was that I had been Dimitri Petrov’s murderer, even if I had not pulled the trigger myself.

  Petrov had been providing information on various Soviet dealings to the British secret services. The documents I’d gathered on Petrov’s operations only served to confirm he’d been acting for MI5, feeding the Russians false intelligence while reporting on them to the British.

  When I so diligently copied files, stole papers and made reports, I had been working not for British Intelligence, as I’d been told, but for the Russians. Someone had been intercepting my com­munications with Vaughn. They’d discovered that Petrov was indeed a double agent, that he was working primarily for MI5, feeding false intelligence to the NKVD on MI5’s behalf.

  Having received confirmation of Petrov’s activities from the d­ocuments I’d copied and the reports I’d made, the NKVD had dealt with Petrov in their own inimitable way. What Peter had told me was routine surveillance on a British double agent to test his commitment had in fact been a directive from Moscow to flush out a traitor. Peter had used both Vaughn and me as pawns.

  British Intelligence wanted to treat the operation as an embarrassment best swept under the carpet. I wasn’t talking, so they could breathe a sigh of relief.

  It was the secret service who briefed my solicitor to make doubly sure nothing damaging came out at trial. They were all in on it – all except Eve – but they needn’t have worried. Only Peter and I knew the full unvarnished truth of what had happened that evening.

  Would Eve discover the clue I’d left her? I hoped such a determined woman might champion my cause. I had failed in my mission, and if I ever saw the light of day outside the grim walls of Holloway Prison, it would be too late.

  I wondered what would happen to Vaughn. Would this end his career? Would he ever suspect Durant’s hand in the affair?

  Most maddening of all, Peter remained aloof from the whole business, his hands clean, since Vaughn couldn’t recall how he’d come to make my acquaintance, nor who had introduced us. My dead drops had all been intercepted by Peter and passed on to his Soviet handler. He had replaced my envelopes with documents carefully doctored with misinformation among a lot of useless detail.

 

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