The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Part 14

Two years later, and the end of George's tour of duty in sight, he had pa.s.sed his O level and A level Russian and was pa.s.sing fluent pa.s.sing only in that he had just Ollerenshaw to converse with in Russian and might, should he meet a real Russki for a bit of a chat, be found to be unequivocally fluent.

Most afternoons the two of them would sit in George's office in sanctioned idleness talking Russian, addressing each other as "comrade" and drinking strong black tea to get into the spirit of things Russian.

"Tell me, tovarich," Ollerenshaw said. "Why have you just stuck with Russian? While you've been teaching yourself Russian I've pa.s.sed Italian, Art History, Swedish and Technical Drawing."

George had a ready answer for this.

"Libya suits you. You're happy doing nothing at the b.u.mhole of nowhere. n.o.body to pester you but me a weekly wage and all found petrol you can flog to the wogs you're in lazy b.u.g.g.e.rs' heaven. You've got skiving down to a fine art. And I wish you well of it. But I want more. I don't want to be a lieutenant all my life and I certainly don't want to be pushing around dockets for pith helmets, army boots and jerry cans for much longer. Russian is what will get me out of it."

"How d'you reckon that?"

"I've applied for a transfer to Military Intelligence."

"f.u.c.k me! You mean MI5 and all them spooks an' that?"

"They need Russian speakers. Russian is my ticket."

MI5 did not want George. His next home posting, still a lowly First Lieutenant at the age of twenty-nine, was to Command Ordnance Depot Upton Ba.s.sett on the coast of Lincolnshire flat, sandy, cold and miserable. The only possible connection with things Russian was that the wind which blew bitterly off the North Sea all year round probably started off somewhere in the Urals.

He hated it.

The saving grace was that a decent-but-dull old bloke Major Denis c.o.c.kburn, a veteran of the Second World War, with a good track record in bomb disposal took him up.

"We can always use a fourth at bridge."

George came from a family that thought three card brag was the height of sophistication but readily turned his hand to the pseudo-intellectual pastime of the upper cla.s.ses.

He partnered the Major's wife, Sylvia the Major usually partnered Sylvia's unmarried sister, Grace.

George, far from being the most perceptive of men, at least deduced that a slow process of match-making had been begun. He didn't want this. Grace was at least ten years older than him and far and away the less attractive of the two sisters. The Major had got the pick of the bunch, but that wasn't saying much.

George pretended to be blind to hints and deaf to suggestions. Evenings with the c.o.c.kburns were just about the only d.a.m.n thing that stopped him from leaving all his clothes on a beach and disappearing into the North Sea for ever. He'd hang on to them. He'd ignore anything that changed the status quo.

Alas, he could not ignore death.

When the Major died of a sudden and unexpected heart attack in September 1959, seemingly devoid of any family but Sylvia and Grace, it fell to George to have the grieving widow on his arm at the funeral.

"You were his best friend," Sylvia told him.

No, thought George, I was his only friend and that's not the same thing at all.

A string of unwilling subalterns were dragooned into replacing Denis at the bridge table. George continued to do his bit. After all it was scarcely any hardship, he was fond of Sylvia in his way, and it could not be long before red tape broke up bridge nights for ever when the Army asked for the house back and shuffled her off somewhere with a pension.

But the break-up came in the most unantic.i.p.ated way. He'd seen off Grace with a practised display of indifference, but it had not occurred to him that he might need to see off Sylvia too.

On 29 February 1960, she sat him down on the flowery sofa in the boxy sitting room of her standard army house, told him how grateful she had been for his care and company since the death of her husband, and George, not seeing where this was leading, said that he had grown fond of her and was happy to do anything for her.

It was then that she proposed to him.

She was, he thought, about forty-five or -six, although she looked older, and whilst a bit broad in the beam was not unattractive.

This had little to do with his acceptance. It was not her body that tipped the balance, it was her character. Sylvia could be a bit of a dragon when she wanted, and George was simply too scared to say no. He could have said something about haste or mourning or with real wit have quoted Hamlet, saying that the "funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table". But he didn't.

"I'm not a young thing any more," she said. "It need not be a marriage of pa.s.sion. There's much to be said for companionship."

George was not well acquainted with pa.s.sion. There'd been the odd dusky prost.i.tute out in Libya, a one-night fling with a NAAFI woman in Aldershot ... but little else. He had not given up on pa.s.sion because he did not consider that he had yet begun with it.

They were married as soon as the banns had been read, and he walked out of church under a tunnel of swords in his blue dress uniform, the Madame Bovary of Upton Ba.s.sett, down a path that led to twin beds, Ovaltine and hairnets worn overnight. He had not given up on pa.s.sion, but it was beginning to look as though pa.s.sion had given up on him.

Six weeks later, desperation led him to act irrationally. Against all better judgement he asked once more to be transferred to Intelligence and was gobsmacked to find himself summoned to an interview at the War Office in London. London ... Whitehall ... the hub of the universe.

Simply stepping out of a cab so close to the Cenotaph England's memorial to her dead, at least her own, white dead, of countless Imperial ventures gave him a thrill. It was all he could do not to salute.

Down all the corridors and in the right door to face a Lt Colonel, then he saluted. But, he could not fail to notice, he was saluting not some secret agent in civilian dress, not Bulldog Drummond or James Bond, but another Ordnance officer just like himself.

"You've been hiding your light under a bushel, haven't you?" Lt Colonel Breen said when they'd zipped through the introductions.

"I have?"

Breen flourished a sheet of smudgy-carbonned typed paper.

"Your old CO in Tripoli tells me you did a first-cla.s.s job running the mess. And I think you're just the chap we need here."

Silence being the better part of discretion and discretion being the better part of an old cliche, George said nothing and let Breen amble to his point.

"A good man is hard to find."

Well he knew that, he just wasn't wholly certain he'd ever qualified as a "good man". It went with "first-cla.s.s mind" (said of eggheads) or "very able" (said of politicians) and was the vocabulary of a world he moved in without ever touching.

"And we need a good man right here."

Oh Christ they weren't making him mess officer? Not again!

"Er ... actually sir, I was under the impression that I was being interviewed for a post in Intelligence."

"Eh? What?"

"I have fluent Russian sir, and I ..."

"Well, you won't be needing it here ... ha ... ha ... ha!"

"Mess Officer?"

Breen seemed momentarily baffled.

"Mess Officer? Mess Officer? Oh, I get it. Yes, I suppose you will be in a way, it's just that the mess you'll be supplying will be the entire British Army 'East of Suez'. And you'll get your third pip. Congratulations, Captain."

Intelligence was not mentioned again except as an abstract quality that went along with "good man" and "first-cla.s.s mind".

Sylvia would not hear of living in Hendon or Finchley. The army had houses in north London, but she would not even look. So they moved to West Byfleet in Surrey, on to an hermetically sealed army estate of identical houses, and as far as George could see, identical wives, attending identical coffee mornings.

"Even the b.l.o.o.d.y furniture's identical!"

"It's what one knows," she said. "And it's a fair and decent world without envy. After all the thing about the forces is that everyone knows what everyone else earns. Goes with the rank, you can look it up in an almanac if you want. It takes the bitterness out of life."

George thought of all those endless pink gins he and Ollerenshaw had knocked back out in Libya, and how what had made them palatable was the bitters.

George hung up his uniform, went into plain clothes, War Office Staff Captain (Ord) General Stores, let his hair grow a little longer and became a commuter the 7.57 a.m. to Waterloo, and the 5.27 p.m. back again. It was far from Russia.

Many of his colleagues played poker on the train, many more did crosswords and a few read. George read; he got through most of Dostoevsky in the original, the books disguised with the dust jacket from a Harold Robbins or an Irwin Shaw, and when he wasn't reading stared out of the window at the suburbs of South London Streatham, Tooting, Wimbledon and posh "villages" of Surrey Surbiton, Esher, Weybridge and imagined them all blown to b.u.g.g.e.ry.

The only break in the routine was getting rat-a.r.s.ed at the office party a few days before Christmas 1962, falling asleep on the train and being woken by a cleaner to find himself in a railway siding in Guildford at dawn the next morning.

It didn't feel foolish it felt raffish, almost daring, a touch of Errol Flynn debauchery, but as 1963 dawned England was becoming a much more raffish and daring place and Errol Flynn would soon come to seem like the role model for an entire nation.

It was all down to one person really a nineteen-year-old named Christine Keeler. Miss Keeler had had an affair with George's boss, the top man, the Minister of War, the Rt Hon. John (Umpteenth Baron) Profumo (of Italy) MP (Stratford-on-Avon, Con.), OBE. Miss Keeler had simultaneously had an affair with Yevgeni Ivanov, an "attache of the Soviet Emba.s.sy" (newspeak for spy) and the ensuing scandal had rocked Britain, come close to toppling the government, led to a trumped-up prosecution (for pimping) of a society doctor, his subsequent suicide and the resignation of the aforementioned John Profumo.

At the War Office, there were two notable reactions. Alarm that the cla.s.s divide had been dropped long enough to allow a toff like Profumo to take up with a girl of neither breeding nor education, whose parents lived in a converted wooden railway carriage, that a great party (Conservative) could be brought down by a woman of easy virtue (Keeler) and paranoia that the Russians could get that close.

For a while Christine Keeler was regarded as the most dangerous woman in England. George adored her. If he thought he'd get away with it he'd have pinned her picture to his office wall.

It was possible that his l.u.s.t for a pin-up girl he had never met was what led him into folly.

The dust had scarcely settled on the Profumo Affair. Lord Denning had published his report ent.i.tled unambiguously "Lord Denning's Report" and found himself an unwitting bestseller when it sold 4,000 copies in the first hour and the queues outside Her Majesty's Stationery Office in Kingsway stretched around the block and into Drury Lane, and the country had a new Prime Minister in the cadaverous shape of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who had resigned an earldom for the chance to live at No. 10.

George coveted a copy of the Denning Report but it was understood to be very bad form for a serving officer, let alone one at the Ministry that had been if not at the heart of the scandal then most certainly close to the liver and kidneys, to be seen in the queue.

His friend Ted Captain Edward Ffyffe-Robertson RAOC got him a copy and George refrained from asking how. It was better than any novel a marvellous tale of pot-smoking West Indians, masked men, naked orgies, beautiful, available women and high society. He read it and reread it and, since he and Sylvia had now taken not only separate beds but also separate rooms, slept with it under his pillow.

About six months later Ted was propping up the wall in George's office, having nothing better to do than jingle the coins in his pocket or play pocket billiards whilst making the smallest of small talk.

Elsie the tea lady parked her trolley by the open door.

"You're early," Ted said.

"Ain't even started on teas yet. They got me 'anding out the post while old Albert's orf sick. What a diabolical bleedin' liberty. Ain't they never 'eard of demarcation? Lucky I don't have the union on 'em."

Then she slung a single large brown envelope on to George's desk.

"I see you got yer promotion then, Mr 'Orsefiddle. All right for some."

She pushed her trolley on. George looked at the envelope.

"Lt Colonel H. G. Horsfield."

"It's got to be a mistake, surely?"

Ted peered over.

"It is, old man. Hugh Horsfield. Half-colonel in Artillery. He's on the fourth floor. Daft old Elsie's given you his post."

"There's another Horsfield?"

"Yep. Been here about six weeks. Surprised you haven't met him. He's certainly made his presence felt."

With hindsight George ought to have asked what Ted's last remark meant.

Instead, later the same day, he went in search of Lt Col. Horsfield, out of nothing more than curiosity and a sense of fellow-feeling.

He tapped on the open door. A big bloke with salt-and-pepper hair and a spiky little moustache looked up from his desk.

George beamed at him.

"Lt Col. H. G. Horsfield? I'm Captain H. G. Horsfield."

His alter ego got up and walked across to the door and with a single utterance of "Fascinating" swung it to in George's face.

Later, Ted said. "I did try to warn you, old man. He's got a fierce reputation."

"As what?"

"He's the sort of bloke who gets described as not suffering fools gladly."

"Are you saying I'm a fool?"

"Oh, the things only your best friend will tell. Like using the right brand of bath soap. No, I'm not saying that."

"Then what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that to a high flyer like Hugh Horsfield, blokes like us who keep our boys in pots and pans and socks and blankets are merely the also-rans of the British Army. He deals with the big stuff. He's artillery after all."

"Big stuff? What big stuff?"

"Well, we're none of us supposed to say, are we. But here's a hint. Think back to August 1945 and those mushroom-shaped clouds over j.a.pan."

"Oh. I see. b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l!"

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l indeed."