Yesterday’s Spy

We walked north, through the old town, and through the back alleys that smelled of wood-smoke and shashlik, and past the dark bars where Arab workers drink beer and watch the slot-machine movies of blonde strippers.

But it was no cramped bar, with menu in Arabic, to which Champion took me. It was a fine mansion on the fringe of the ‘musicians’ quarter’. It stood well back from the street, screened by full-grown palm trees, and guarded by stone cherubs on the porch. A uniformed doorman saluted us, and a pretty girl took our coats. Steve put his hand on my shoulder and guided me through the hall and the bar, to a lounge that was furnished with black leather sofas and abstract paintings in stainless-steel frames. ‘The usual,’ he told the waiter.

On the low table in front of us there was an array of financial magazines. Champion toyed with them. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said. ‘You let me make a fool of myself.’

It was Steve who’d taught me the value of such direct openings. To continue to deny that I worked for the department was almost an admission that I’d been assigned to seek him out. ‘True-life confessions? For those chance meetings once or twice a year? That wasn’t in the Steve Champion crash-course when I took it.’

He smiled and winced and, with only the tip of his finger, touched his bruised cheek. ‘You did it well, old son. Asking me if I was recruiting you. That was a subtle touch, Charlie.’ He was telling me that he now knew it had been no chance meeting that day in Piccadilly. And Steve was telling me that from now on there’d be no half-price admissions for boys under sixteen.

‘Tell me one thing,’ Steve said, as if he was going to ask nothing else, ‘did you volunteer to come out here after me?’

‘It’s better that it’s me,’ I said. A waiter brought a tray with silver coffee-pot, Limoges china and a sealed bottle of private-label cognac. It was that sort of club.

‘One day you might find out what it’s like,’ said Steve.

‘There was the girl, Steve.’

‘What about the girl?’

‘It’s a Kill File, Steve,’ I told him. ‘Melodie Page is dead.’

‘Death of an operative?’ He looked at me for a long time. He knew how the department felt about Kill File investigations. He spooned a lot of sugar into his coffee, and took his time in stirring it. ‘So they are playing rough,’ he said. ‘Have they applied for extradition?’

‘If the investigating officer decides …’

‘Jesus Christ!’ said Steve angrily. ‘Don’t give me that Moriarty Police Law crap. Are you telling me that there is a murder investigation being conducted by C.1 at the Yard?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘There were complications.’

Champion screwed up his face and sucked his coffee spoon. ‘So Melodie was working for the department?’

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

Champion nodded. ‘Of course. What a clown I am. And she’s dead? You saw the body?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Level with me, Charlie,’ said Champion.

I said, ‘No, I didn’t see the body.’ Champion poured coffee, then he snapped the seal on the cognac and poured two large tots.

‘Neat. Effective. And not at all gaudy,’ said Champion eventually, with some measure of admiration. He waggled the coffee spoon at me.

It seemed a bit disloyal to the department to understand his meaning too quickly. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘You understand, old boy,’ said Champion. ‘You understand. But not as well as I bloody understand.’ He paused while a waiter brought the cigarettes he’d ordered. When the waiter departed, Steve said softly, ‘There’s no dead girl – or if there is, your people have killed her – this is just a stunt, a frame-up, to get me back to London.’ Champion moved his cigarettes and his gold Dunhill lighter about on the magazines in front of him, pushing them like a little train from The Financial Times and on to Forbes and Figaro.

‘They are pressing me,’ I said. ‘It’s a Minister-wants-to-know inquiry.’

‘Ministers never want to know,’ said Champion bitterly. ‘All Ministers want is answers to give.’ He sighed. ‘And someone decided that I was the right answer for this one.’

‘I wish you’d come back to London with me,’ I said.

‘Spend a month or more kicking my heels in Whitehall? And what could I get out of it? An apology, if I’m lucky, or fifteen years, if that suits them better. No, you’ll not get me going back with you.’

‘But suppose they extradite you – it’ll be worse then.’

‘So you say.’ He inhaled deeply on his cigarette. ‘But the more I think about it, the less frightened I am. The fact they’ve sent you down here is a tacit admission that they won’t pull an extradition order on me.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

‘Well, that’s because you’re too damned naïve. The department don’t want me back in London, explaining to them all the details of the frame-up they themselves organized. This is all part of an elaborate game … a softening-up for something big.’

‘Something that London wants you to do for them?’ I asked. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘Let’s stop beating around the bush, shall we? The department has given me jobs from time to time. They do that with pensioned-off operatives because it keeps them signing the Act, and also because their pensions make them the most needy – and so the cheapest – people around.’

‘Come back to London, Steve.’

‘Can’t you understand plain bloody King’s English, Charlie? Either the girl is not dead, and the department have put her on ice in order to finger me …’

‘Or?’

‘Or she’s dead and the department arranged it.’

‘No.’

‘How can you say no. Do they let you read the Daily Yellows?’

‘It’s no good, Steve,’ I said. ‘The department would never do it this way and both of us know it.’

‘The confidence you show in those bastards …’ said Champion. ‘We know only a fraction of what goes on up there. They’ve told you that Melodie was a departmental employee – have you ever heard of her or seen any documents?’

‘The documents of an operative in the field? Of course I haven’t.’

‘Exactly. Well, suppose I tell you that she was never an employee and the department have wanted her killed for the last three months. Suppose I told you that they ordered me to kill her, and that I refused. And that that was when the row blew up.’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘The department made that contact for me. They said she was from the Palestinian terrorists. They told me that she was a nutty American student, the London contact for five hundred stolen Armalites and two tons of gelignite.’ Champion was excited now and smiling nervously, as I remembered him from the old days.

He sipped his drink. ‘They sent an American chap to see me. Is his name Schindler? Drinks that Underberg stuff, I remember. I wouldn’t believe he was from the department at first. Then they sent a Mutual down to confirm him as OK. Is it Schroder?’

‘Something like that,’ I said.

‘He mentioned the killing end. I didn’t take him seriously at first. I mean, they must still have special people for that game, surely. But he was in earnest. Ten thousand pounds, he said. He had it all set up, too. He’d organized a flat in Barons Court stacked up with beer and whisky and cans of beans and soup. I’m telling you, it was equipped like a fall-out shelter. And he showed me this hypodermic syringe, killing wire and rubber gloves. Talk about horror movies, I needed a couple of big whiskies when I got out of there.’ He drank some coffee. ‘And then I realized how I’d put my prints on everything he’d shown me.’ He sighed. ‘No fool like an old fool.’

‘Did they pay the bill for the tweed jacket we found there?’