Yesterday’s Spy

There was little hope of discovering anything startling here. The continuing triple-A clearance, right up to the time that Champion stopped reporting to the department, was in itself a sign that men more jaundiced than I could ever be had given Champion a clean bill of health. Since then the department had shown little interest in him.

I looked at his Biographical entries. Champion’s father, a Welsh Catholic, had been a senior lecturer at the Abbasiyah Military Academy, Cairo. Young Champion came back to England to attend public school. From there he won a place at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. For a boy who grew up to table-talk of tactics, battles and ballistics, Sandhurst was a doddle. Champion became an under-officer, and a well-remembered one. And his scholarship matched his military expertise: modern history, four languages and a mathematics prize.

It was Champion’s French-language skills that earned for him a secondment to the French Army. He went the usual round of military colleges, the Paris Embassy, Maginot Line fortresses and Grand General HQ, with occasional glimpses of the legendary General Gamelin.

Champion had only been back with his regiment for a matter of weeks when a War Office directive automatically shortlisted him for a Secret Intelligence Service interview. He was selected, trained and back in France by 1939. He was just in time to watch General Gamelin’s defence system surrender to the Nazis. Champion fled south and became ‘net-officer’ for what was no more than a collection of odds and sods in the unoccupied zone. His orders were to stay clear of the enthusiastic amateurs that London called their Special Operations Executive, but inevitably the two networks became entangled.

It was Champion who greeted me in person that night when I landed from the submarine at Villefranche. I was assigned to SOE but Champion kidnapped me and got it made official afterwards. If I’d gone up to Nîmes as ordered, my war service would have ended two or three months later in Buchenwald.

But Champion used me to sort out his own network and I stayed with him right up to the time the network crumbled and Champion was taken prisoner. Eventually he escaped and was flown back to London. He got a DSO and a new job. Even before D-Day, Champion was assigned to peacetime network planning. He demanded choice of personnel, and got it. His first request was to have me as his senior assistant. It wasn’t easy for me now to look at Champion’s file with an objective eye.

When you read old files, you realize how the paperwork itself decides the progress of an inquiry. Schlegel gave Bonn’s report a twelve-week life cycle, so the coordinator decided not to give it a file number. He attached it as an appendix to Champion’s abstract. Then I had to do a written report, to glue it all together. With everyone satisfied, the file would have gone over to Current Storage and then gone sliding down the priorities until it ended in a tin archive box in Hendon.

But it didn’t.

It was activated by an alert slip that came from the officer who was ‘running’ Melodie Page. She failed to report for two cycles. This would normally have meant the opening of an orange Caution File with its own file number. But with Champion’s abstract signed out to me, it caused the girl’s alert slip to be pinned on to my desk diary.

Suddenly the Champion file was wearing red stickers in its hair, and everyone concerned was trying to think of a ‘Latest action’ to pin to it, in case the Minister wanted to read it himself.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Schlegel.

‘Perhaps she’s fallen for Champion,’ I said.

He looked at me to see whether I meant it. ‘That’s all I need,’ said Schlegel. ‘You coming in here inventing new things for me to worry about.’

‘And you want me to go to this flat that Champion is supposed to have kept as some kind of bolt-hole?’

‘It’s a ten-minute job. Special Branch will send Blantyre and one of the Special Branch break-in specialists. Just take a look round, and file a short report tomorrow. No sweat – it’s only to show we’re on our toes.’

‘Are you sure I’m experienced enough to handle something like this?’

‘Don’t go touchy on me, bubblebrain. I want a piece of paper: something recent, with a senior operative’s signature, to put in the file before it leaves here.’

‘You’re right,’ I said.

‘Goddamn! Of course I’m right,’ he said in exasperation. ‘And Mr Dawlish will be looking in there on his way back from his meeting in Chiswick.’

The top brass! They really expected questions in the House, if Dawlish was going to do an I-was-there piece for them.

Steve Champion’s hideaway, in Barons Court. Well, I don’t have to tell you what kind of house it was: Gothic horror comes to town! Depressing place, with no sign of any tenants, and a dented metal grille that asks you who you are, and buzzes when it opens the lock.

That bugger Blantyre was already there, chatting away merrily with his ‘break-in specialist’ who’d already splintered the paintwork on the outer door and left a wet footprint in the hall, and who, on closer inspection, turned out to be Blantyre’s old buddy Detective-Inspector Seymour.

There they were, striding all over the clues and pouring each other double portions of Champion’s booze.

‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ said Blantyre.

‘So I see.’

Blantyre held up his glass and looked at it, like one of those white-coated actors in TV commercials about indigestion. He said, ‘We were wondering whether to send samples to the lab.’

‘Send a whole bottle,’ I said. ‘Order a case from Harrods, and give them his Diner’s Card number.’

Blantyre’s face reddened, but whether in shame or anger I could not be sure. I said, ‘Good. Well, if I’m not disturbing you two, I’ll take a look round while there’s still some evidence left.’

Blantyre gave me both barrels of a sawn-off twelve-bore, sighed and left the room wearing a sardonic smile. His drinking companion followed him.

I’d hardly started having a look round when Dawlish arrived. If Schlegel was hoping to keep our break-in inconspicuous, I’d say that Dawlish screwed up any last chance, what with his official car and uniformed driver, and the bowler hat and Melton overcoat. To say nothing of the tightly rolled umbrella that Dawlish was waving. Plastic raincoats are de rigueur for the rainy season in Barons Court.

‘Not exactly a playboy pad,’ said Dawlish, demonstrating his mastery of the vernacular.

Even by Dawlish’s standards that was an understatement. It was a large gloomy apartment. The wallpaper and paintwork were in good condition and so was the cheap carpeting, but there were no pictures, no books, no ornaments, no personal touches. ‘A machine for living in,’ said Dawlish.

‘Le Corbusier at his purest,’ I said, anxious to show that I could recognize a cultural quote when I heard one.

It was like the barrack-room I’d had as a sergeant, waiting for Intelligence training. Iron bed, a tiny locker, plain black curtains at the window. On the windowsill there were some withered crumbs. I suppose no pigeon fancied them when just a short flight away the tourists would be throwing them croissants, and they could sit down and eat with a view of St James’s Park.

There was a school yard visible from the window. The rain had stopped and the sun was shining. Swarms of children made random patterns as they sang, swung, jumped in puddles and punched each other with the same motiveless exuberance that, organized, becomes war. I closed the window and the shouting died. There were dark clouds; it would rain again.

‘Worth a search?’ said Dawlish.

I nodded. ‘There will be a gun. Sealed under wet plaster perhaps. He’s not the kind of man to use the cistern or the chimney: either tear it to pieces or forget it.’

‘It’s difficult, isn’t it,’ said Dawlish. ‘Don’t want to tear it to pieces just to find a gun. I’m interested in documents – stuff that he needs constant access to.’

‘There will be nothing like that here,’ I said.

Dawlish walked into the second bedroom. ‘No linen on the bed, you notice. No pillows, even.’

I opened the chest of drawers. There was plenty of linen there; all brand new, and still in its wrappings.

‘Good quality stuff,’ said Dawlish.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

Dawlish opened the kitchen cupboards and recited their contents. ‘Dozen tins of meat, dozen tins of peas, dozen bottles of beer, dozen tins of rice pudding. A package of candles, unused, a dozen boxes of matches.’ He closed the cupboard door and opened a kitchen drawer. We stared at the cutlery for a moment. It was all new and unused. He closed it again without comment.

‘No caretaker,’ I said. ‘No landlady, no doorman.’

‘Precisely,’ said Dawlish. ‘And I’ll wager that the rent is paid every quarter day, without fail, by some solicitor who has never come face to face with his client. No papers, eh?’

‘Cheap writing-pad and envelopes, a book of stamps, postcards with several different views of London – might be a code device – no, no papers in that sense.’

‘I look forward to meeting your friend Champion,’ said Dawlish. ‘A dozen tins of meat but three dozen bars of soap – that’s something for Freud, eh?’

I let the ‘your friend’ go unremarked. ‘Indeed it is, sir,’ I said.

‘None of it surprises you, of course,’ Dawlish said, with more than a trace of sarcasm.