Set in stone, p.28
Set in Stone, page 28
part #10 of Robert Goddard Series
“What is your official capacity?”
“I can’t say.”
“Why not? If the problem’s solved—”
“Let it stay solved.”
“Was Cedric a traitor?”
“Of course.”
“But is that your official opinion, or the truth?”
“It’s both. If you define truth as that which is and ever will be universally believed.”
“And what about the absolute truth?”
“You’d not want to burden yourself with that.”
“It’s not just Cedric’s death we’re talking about, it’s my wife’s.”
“Aye. I know.” He sipped some whisky and rolled it around his mouth before swallowing. Then he sat back in his chair and frowned at me. “It’s a hard business.”
“I have a right to—”
“Understand if not to know?” His mouth curled slightly, in the beginnings of a smile. “Well, well, perhaps that’s accurate enough. The first thing you need to understand is that I have more to lose than you.”
“How do you figure that out?”
“You surely don’t suppose being able to keep this appointment was some kind of lucky break on your part. By your own account, your pursuers had you at their mercy twice: at the pub in Marylebone and when they picked you up leaving the hospital. Why do you think they let you go?”
“Why do you think?”
“It’s obvious, man. To smoke me out. They knew Cedric would contact Heraclitus if he was in a tight enough corner. And they knew Heraclitus would respond. But they didn’t know who Heraclitus was. They couldn’t afford to give Cedric an inch. But they could give you a mile of rope, and follow it straight to me, before looping it round my neck.”
“Nobody followed me.”
“They’d have done a poor job of it if you thought otherwise. Take my word for it, though. They followed.”
“No. I’m telling you—”
“I’m afraid Major Strathallan is correct,” came a voice from behind me.
I jumped up from my chair and swung round. The door was wide open. Through it strode Rainbird, transformed by a lightweight suit and polo-neck shirt into a bewilderingly metropolitan version of himself. Behind him was the grim-faced man who’d driven the car I was bundled into in Paddington. He stopped in the doorway, as if to guard it. But Rainbird ambled into the room and propped himself against the Aga. He folded his arms across his chest and treated us both to a rubbery smile.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “You must have been so engrossed in your conversation that you didn’t hear the bell. Hope you don’t mind us letting ourselves in.”
I felt anger surge through me before I had a chance to analyse it. “You bastard,” I shouted, launching myself towards him. But I didn’t cover more than a yard before the man in the doorway moved to intercept. And a second later I was back in my chair, arms pinned behind me.
“Thank you, Walker,” said Rainbird. “Tony’s just a little overexcited. Further restraint’s unnecessary, I feel sure.” Walker’s grip slackened, but still I was held, effectively enough. “Isn’t that right, Tony?”
“I expect so,” I reluctantly agreed.
“Good.” Walker released me and moved back to the door. “Now, Major,” Rainbird continued, “I don’t want to seem high-handed, but certain colleagues of mine are eager to meet you and talk over old times, if you know what I mean. So, would it be possible to get straight off? We’ve a car waiting for you.”
“Why not?” Strathallan hesitated for a second. I wondered if he meant to make a grab for the gun. His gaze seemed to flicker down towards the drawer. But no, in the end, he merely drained his glass and rose slowly from the chair. “I wouldn’t want to keep them waiting.”
“Not when they’ve already waited so long. Quite.” Rainbird glanced across at me. “Tony and I will stay here and have a little chat of our own about matters of mutual interest.” Then he looked back at Strathallan. “It’s been an education, Major, it really has. Not a surprise, though, I must admit. I had my eye on you from the first. Others may have been deceived by your show of bitterness towards Cedric Milner, but I always suspected you were just too bitter to be true.”
“How very perspicacious of you,” said Strathallan, as he buttoned his blazer and shot his cuffs. “It must be satisfying to be able to tell the decoy ducks from the dead ones with such accuracy.”
“It is, I have to confess. But we must press on. At any rate, you must. Walker will escort you.”
“Where are you taking him?” I put in.
“A comfortably appointed Chilterns retreat,” said Rainbird. “He’ll be well looked after and he’ll come to no harm, I assure you.”
“Aye,” said Strathallan. “I’m sure the service will be very attentive.” He squared his shoulders, nodded a perfunctory farewell to me, then strode from the room, Walker falling in beside him.
“What the hell’s going on?” I glared at Rainbird. “What gives you the right to do any of this?”
“Parliament, I rather think,” he blithely replied. “I should be able to quote the relevant statutory instrument word for word, but I seldom need to, so I fear I’m a little rusty.”
“Why didn’t you just arrest Cedric?”
“Because he was no ordinary traitor. In fact”—he raised one hand, as if to say that the subtleties of the situation weren’t his fault—“the reality is, Tony, that you’ve seen and heard enough to be convinced Cedric Milner wasn’t at all the devious Marxist spy depicted by friend Fisher in his book. As to what he really was, I ought to leave you in the dark. But I suspect that would only encourage you to delve further, which might oblige us to…well, cut you off in your prime, so to speak. Believe it or not, I would personally regret such an outcome.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“No. Of course not. The truth is often hard to accept, the truth about Cedric Milner being a case in point.”
“And what is the truth?”
“Are you quite sure you want to know?”
“Just tell me.”
“Very well.” Rainbird pushed himself away from the Aga and moved across to the dresser beneath the window. He stretched his arms until his elbows clicked, then leaned on the dresser, gazing up at the window as he spoke. “Cedric Milner passed technical information on the design and construction of nuclear weaponry to the Soviet Union…on behalf of the British government.”
“What did you say?” For a moment I genuinely believed I must have misheard.
“On behalf of the British government,” Rainbird repeated.
“That can’t be.”
“I did warn you that the truth isn’t always easy to accommodate within one’s preconceptions. What I’m telling you is totally accurate, and totally unverifiable. Cedric is dead. His contact, the person who instructed him on what to pass on and acted as a conduit for supplying much of that information to him, code name Heraclitus, is being taken in for questioning. The issue of proof does not arise. Cedric’s code name, incidentally, was Columbus—Latin for pigeon: the messenger bird. But a pigeon may also be a dupe, a half-willing victim of deceit. This pigeon was never intended to fly home to its loft.”
“Are you saying Cedric was some kind of double agent?”
“Not exactly. The material he supplied was genuine. And valuable. It appreciably advanced the Soviet H-bomb programme. It’s hard to say by how much. The Soviets were making great strides for themselves. And a real traitor—Fuchs—was giving them a helping hand, unbeknown to Cedric’s sponsors. But he certainly made a difference. As he was intended to.”
“Intended by whom?”
“I told you. HM government. The political powers that be. Our elected masters. The decision came from the top. And by the top…I mean precisely that.”
“The Cabinet?”
“Good God, no. A sensitive matter like this wouldn’t have been discussed with anything like that many people. But naming names is essentially a speculative exercise until the good major unburdens his conscience and, more to the point, his memory. A political decision was taken. That is all we know for certain. SIS—the intelligence service—was not involved. And small wonder. This was, after all, officially sanctioned treason. But it remained unofficial, of course. Secret. Unrecorded. Deniable. That was the vital point. Such a project could never be allowed to become known within the intelligence community, let alone the community at large. It was a reversal of every tenet of publicly declared policy. It was heresy as well as treason. It was aiding and abetting the enemy. And yet, of course,” he smiled, “it had its rationale.”
“Which was?”
“A seductive one, viewed in a certain light. Within a year of dropping two atom bombs on Japan, the United States made it clear, by passing the McMahon Bill and deadlocking the Combined Policy Committee, the Anglo-American advisory body on the question, that it had no intention of sharing the secrets of its nuclear weaponry research, present or future, with anyone, whether they’d been wartime allies or not. The Nunn May case had given them the excuse they needed. The British weren’t to be trusted. Attlee’s response was to order the development of an independent British nuclear deterrent. The strategy was obvious and inevitable. But it risked antagonizing the Soviet Union, who weren’t thought to have the technical know-how to build their own bomb, and who already resented the Americans’ tendency to throw their weight around on account of the bomb to end all bombs nestling permanently in their hip pockets. You have to understand that Britain’s hard-up-uncle relationship with the US was still in the evolutionary stage then. As was the carve-up of the globe between the American and Soviet blocs. Everyone was feeling their way. The future was in flux. Stabilizing it meant creating a balance of power. And balance required parity. A British bomb was only likely to make the Soviets feel more inferior and more resentful, running the risk that they’d be so keen to show the Americans they couldn’t be intimidated that a confrontation between the two would get out of hand, with Britain caught in the middle. Hence the other highly secret element in the new strategy. Britain would enable the Soviets to catch up and gain parity by feeding the necessary technical information to them. But the Soviets weren’t to know where it was really coming from. No-one was. A traitor was required; a loyal traitor.”
“A Judas,” I murmured.
“Judas?” Rainbird nodded. “Yes, I suppose so, in a sense. And look what happened to him.”
“So that’s what Cedric was.”
“Yes. Why he was chosen we don’t know. How he was talked into doing it is unclear. What he was promised—if anything—we can only guess. Major Strathallan may be able to shed some light on those issues, as well as on a good many others. Milner’s Russian mother may be the key to it. One theory, at the time, was that a cousin of hers, who fetched up at the Russian Embassy in London after the war as a cultural attaché, was Milner’s contact. There’s no real evidence for that, but it fits the facts—those few that are known, at any rate. The Fuchs case threw a spanner in the works, you see. It brought the bloodhounds to Harwell and more or less guaranteed Milner’s exposure in the long run. Strathallan couldn’t cover his tracks indefinitely, nor could the truth be revealed if he were caught. He had to go. Well, Arzamas-16 was preferable to Wormwood Scrubs, no question about that. So, he went. As to whether he was encouraged to believe he could ever return…” Rainbird shrugged. “The truth was revealed, of course. To SIS if not to the public. The change of government in October ‘fifty-one led to the discovery of the project’s existence. But it had been wrapped in so many precautions that Heraclitus remained anonymous. His controller had died a few months previously and no-one else knew who he was. It didn’t really matter. Milner could safely be demonized and forgotten about. He didn’t turn out to be the only traitor, after all. He was one of several. The irony is that they’d probably have done Milner’s job for him, had he but known. His sacrifice wasn’t strictly necessary, but it was real enough—and potential dynamite to Anglo-American relations. Can you imagine the effect its disclosure would have, even today? I don’t like to, let me tell you. It just doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“No need to think about it now, is there? You’ve made sure Cedric can never tell his story.”
“It had to be done. An old man with nothing to lose and God knows how many ways of actually proving his claims. As soon as it became known he’d left Russia, the alarm bells began ringing. He had to be found. And he had to be stopped. Hereabouts was the obvious place to lie in wait for him: as close to a home as he had. Maybe that’s why Strathallan bought this house. We approached Miss Temple and found her sympathetic. Of course, we did nothing to disabuse her of the notion that he was a cold-hearted traitor. She agreed to co-operate with us in the event of his contacting her. I think her suspicion that he’d never told her all he knew about her sister’s murder may have stiffened her resolve. I was on hand to deal with the situation as, when and if it developed. Spywatching rather than birdwatching, insofar as there’s a difference. Both require a hide, some camouflage and plenty of patience.”
“Well, you got what you were waiting for. Cedric contacted Daisy, as you’d guessed he would. Why didn’t you pick him up then?”
Rainbird sighed. “My superiors became overambitious. A besetting fault of theirs. They wanted Heraclitus as well as Columbus: the fancier as well as the pigeon. We tried to string him along. The theory was that Daisy’s ultimatum would drive him to Heraclitus as his only remaining ally. But it was too long a shot in my view. And it was beginning to involve too many people. The approach his solicitor made to the Home Office was a particularly worrying development. We didn’t even know he had a solicitor.”
“His solicitor was my wife, Norman. You seem to forget that.”
“I’m well aware of what she was to you. To us, she was a problem. And we already had quite enough of those.”
“Of course.” The dismissive tone in his voice finally crystallized the anger that hadn’t left me throughout his supercilious analysis of Cedric Milner’s tragedy. But it was anger I had control of now. I rose casually from my chair and strolled round to the other side of the table, trailing my hand across the top, between Strathallan’s emptied glass and the bottle of Lagavulin. “How very inconvenient for you.”
“I make no complaint.” Rainbird was still staring up at the window, apparently unaware of my progress towards the drawer—and certainly unaware of what the drawer contained. “Problems are what I’m paid to solve.”
“You seem to be good at that.” I slid the drawer open as I spoke, masking the sound with my words. “Really very good.”
“Kind of you to say so.”
“And in this case the solution”—I grasped the gun and lifted it out—“was murder.”
“Murder?” He turned round with a look of puzzlement on his face, which intensified into open-mouthed astonishment when he saw what I was holding.
“Yes.” I pointed the gun at him, steadying my wrist with my other hand, my forefinger curling round the trigger. “That’s exactly right.”
“I murdered no-one.”
“It doesn’t matter to me whether you actually did it, Norman, or one of your goons did. Walker, perhaps. Or one of those headcases he goes around with. You’ll answer for it anyway. I reckon that’s fair.”
“You’re making a big mistake, Tony.”
“Am I?”
“We had nothing to do with your wife’s death.”
“Pull the other one.”
“I assure you, we weren’t involved.” He spoke softly and calmly. He wasn’t frightened. Or, if he was, he was too well-trained to show it. “It would have made no sense for us to move against her at that time. Consider the effect her death actually had. It alerted Milner to the vulnerability of his position and drove him underground. One minute we knew where he was, the next he was gone. Do you think we wanted that? Of course not. It put us back to square one, if not off the board altogether. It obliged me to devote a considerable amount of time and effort to luring him back into the light, courtesy of your good self. From our point of view, your wife’s death was a disaster.”
If only he hadn’t made so much sense I’d have pulled the trigger there and then. I still wanted to. I wanted a target for the grief and rage memories of your death still evoked. And there he was, in front of me, a prime target if ever there was one. But was he the right target? I had only a single chance one shot at the truth. But the truth was like a pattern in a kaleidoscope, swirling and changing before me. Somewhere, beyond and behind the shifting scene of different people’s versions of the same events, lay the answer. But killing Rain bird wasn’t the way to find it.
“Put the gun down, Tony,” he said, moving slowly and cautiously towards me as he spoke. “I didn’t throw your wife off that cliff, and I didn’t order anyone to. It was nothing to do with me or mine. You know that. You’d like me to be responsible, but you don’t really believe I am. And I’m sure you don’t believe the satisfaction of putting a bullet through my brain is worth twenty years in prison. It would be at least that, by the way. The judiciary come down hard on those who murder public servants. Too close to home, I suppose.” He stopped when he was within an inch or so of the barrel and held out one hand in gentle invitation. “Do put it down, there’s a good fellow. Better still,” he cradled his hand beneath mine, “let me put it down for you. These old weapons can be treacherous things.”
There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t amount to an admission of defeat and no doubt he could read that in my eyes anyway. I was breathing hard and my hands were shaking. God, what a stupid, pointless, bloody mess it all seemed. When Rainbird prised my fingers from the handle, I was grateful—and sickened by knowing that I was grateful.
“Thank you,” he said, “for not making a fool of both of us.” He uncocked the gun and peered curiously at it. “Major Strathallan’s, I assume. A virtual antique, yet preserved in full working order. One would expect nothing less.” Then he opened the chambers and gave an appreciative whistle. I looked down and saw that they were empty. “Well, well. Would you believe it? I shouldn’t care to play poker with the major, I must say.”
