“I don’t think I can do that.”

  “Go on.” He winked and, with a swiftness that was surprising in so bulky a man, stepped past me into the passage. “Just a glimpse.”

  “Mr Rainbird,” I said sharply, wondering how to avoid physically throwing him out.

  “Norman, please.” He plonked the book down on the telephone table. “That all right there?”

  “What? Yes, but look—”

  “The Priors keen on watercolours, are they?” he asked, glancing at the paintings to the right and left as he strode towards the hall. “Bit insipid for my taste. What about you, Tony?”

  “Hold on.” I caught up with him at the foot of the stairs, gazing up appreciatively at the circular galleried landing. “Norman.”

  “Yes?”

  “This isn’t my house,” I said levelly. “I can’t let you wander round without the owners’ knowledge or consent.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Ah.” He stuck out his lower lip and looked crestfallen. “Pity.”

  “Maybe. But I’m sure you can appreciate my position.”

  “Of course. Tricky. I do see that.”

  “So—” The doorbell rang behind us, down the passage. I looked round. “Who the hell…”

  “Like Clapham Junction here this afternoon, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll see you out while I answer that.”

  “Righto.”

  The doorbell rang again. Rainbird tagged along reluctantly as I went down the passage. I opened the door to a moonfaced bloke in a baseball cap and rumpled clothes. A taxi was parked in the drive behind him, its engine rumbling. “Yes?”

  “You ordered a taxi.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “This is Otherways?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then you ordered a taxi. To Peterborough train station.”

  “Not me.”

  “Four thirty.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m bang on time.”

  “There’s been a mistake.”

  “How d’you reckon that?”

  “No idea.” Suddenly aware that I sensed no presence at my shoulder, I looked round. Rainbird was nowhere to be seen.

  “Somebody phoned in, squire, with all the particulars. I didn’t make it up.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t. Look, I’m sorry, but I didn’t ask for a taxi and I don’t want one.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  I slammed the door in his face and ran back into the hall. “Norman!” There was no answer. “Norman!” Still no answer. And no sign of him in the ground-floor rooms. I checked each of them in turn, as well as the kitchen, before heading up to the bedrooms.

  And there he was, strolling casually round the landing to meet me as I reached the top of the stairs. “Ah, Tony.”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Nothing. You seemed busy. I just, well, went for it. He who dares wins, don’t you know?” He gazed up at the conical ceiling and the plaster orb set in the centre at the very top. “Poetry in stone.”

  “Would you very much mind getting the hell out?”

  “Sorry, I’m sure,” he said, looking hurt. “I shan’t stay where I’m not wanted.”

  “I explained the situation to you clearly enough.”

  “So you did.” He gave me a pseudo-apologetic smile. “No harm done.”

  “There’d better not be.”

  “I don’t quite know what you’re suggesting.”

  “I’ve just got rid of a taxi-driver who was convinced somebody here wanted to be taken to Peterborough.”

  “A mistake?”

  “Yes. But whose?”

  “I wouldn’t know. There’s a house in Hambleton called Hathaways. Easy to mishear one for the other, I should think.” He ambled past me down the stairs, eyeing Matt’s collection of Spy prints as he descended. “They’ve fitted the place out nicely, I must say. These are a big improvement on Strathallan’s stags’ heads.”

  “I thought you’d never seen inside before.”

  “There were some photos in Country Life when the house was up for sale.” He paused at the foot of the stairs and nodded to himself. “Didn’t do it justice, though.” Then he looked round at me. “Well, must be off.”

  “Don’t let me keep you.”

  “Tell me what you think of the book,” he said, tapping its cover as he passed. He reached the front door and opened it, then turned and said, “I’d be interested to know.”

  After he’d driven away, I did a quick check of the house, wondering if I’d find any signs of drawers being opened or things moved. I didn’t have Rainbird down as the light- fingered type, but nor could I accept that a glimpse of a Posnan interior was all he’d wanted. On the other hand, I couldn’t bring myself to believe he’d ordered the taxi to distract me while he slaked his architectural curiosity. And I couldn’t prove he had even if I did. It was all very odd. I felt wrong-footed and suspicious. But there was damn all to nail my suspicions to. Nothing looked out of place. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. In the end I gave up and took a beer out into the garden, along with Seven Faces of Treason.

  It was a faintly musty plain-covered hardback dating from 1975. And the author, as I should perhaps have guessed, was Martin Fisher. “A freelance journalist specializing in intelligence matters,” according to the uninformative blurb. “He is currently working on a full-scale history of MI5.”

  Several of the seven faces of treason Fisher had chosen to study were predictable. Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby virtually picked themselves. Anthony Blunt, of course, was yet to be unmasked back in 1975. George Blake made up an obvious quartet, followed by John Vassal and Alan Nunn May, two I’d certainly heard of but knew little about. And then there was Cedric Milner.

  In the preface, Fisher explained that he was interested in the psychology of treason. By treason he meant the betrayal of one’s country, and by one’s country he meant the country where one was born and brought up. Hence his exclusion from the book of Klaus Fuchs, the German-born physicist who supplied the Soviet Union with information while working on the atom-bomb project at Los Alamos during the Second World War and who continued to do so when he was transferred to Harwell after the war. As a naturalized British citizen, Fuchs was technically guilty of treason. But, for Fisher’s purposes, it didn’t really count. He turned to Cedric Milner for the real thing.

  His chapter on Milner began with the biographical information I’d already gleaned from his Sunday Times Magazine article, supplemented by photographs of a blond-haired square-jawed young man in cricket kit and hiking clothes. Cedric Milner at school and university was noted for academic brilliance, sporting exuberance and a liking for a good time. If he was a closet communist, it was a very deep closet. Fisher’s view of him seemed to have changed since the Sunday Times piece. Although Cedric studied under Bernai, a noted Marxist, at Cambridge, he apparently wasn’t active in the communist circles that eddied round Bernai, although he certainly socialized with those who were. It was a subtle distinction, and I wasn’t sure where Fisher thought it led, other than to portray Cedric in an enigmatic light.

  The Otherways murder certainly enhanced that effect. Fisher gave the facts of the case, such as they were, the same slant he had before, implying, without ever quite bringing himself to say he believed it, that Cedric was implicated in the murder of Ann Milner, if not actually responsible for it. He couldn’t prove it and a motive was hard to come by, but perversely that rather suited Fisher. As the chapter entered post-Otherways territory, terra incognita as far as I was concerned, the outline of his Milner thesis began to emerge.

  The autumn of 1939 was the making of Cedric Milner, where it could so easily have been the breaking of a less self-sufficient individual. Flis sister-in-law, with whom he had lived off and on for several years, was dead. Her sister, his fiancée, had broken off their engagement and effectively ended their relationship. His brother had been hanged for murder. His family home, which he had inherited, stood empty, tainted by the recent memory of violent death. And the Second World War had begun. Milner was halfway through the first term of his final year as an undergraduate at Cambridge when his brother went to the gallows. Outwardly, he seemed unaffected by the event, so much so that many of his contemporaries in the hermetically sealed world of university life were quite simply unaware of it. He threw himself into his studies and socialized less. This was scarcely unusual for a final year student, but in Milner’s case it may have been an excuse for engaging less with other people and so avoiding those unwelcome questions that some might have put to him about his role in the death of his sister-in-law.

  Though withdrawn, Milner was not depressed. Fellow students at St John’s College describe him as being as cheerful as ever, simply less conspicuous. “He gave up sport,” says Clive Unwin. “And one didn’t see so much of him. But he was always in good humour. He never mentioned his brother to me. He never spoke about his family at all. But he never had done as I recall. Looking back, I can’t think of anyone at Cambridge I spent so much time with yet knew so little about.”

  Already, then, Milner had developed a habit of secrecy, whether because he had something to hide or because it was a feature of his personality. That secrecy has proved durable, making it as difficult to track his movements outside Cambridge as it is to guess the slant of his mind. Otherways was requisitioned for use as offices by the RAF early in 1940. From that moment on Milner was effectively rootless. He graduated with a first-class degree and was immediately recommended to the Ministry of Aircraft Production for their newest project: an investigation of the weapons potential of nuclear fission. Cambridge was one of the centres chosen for theoretical research into the subject. Most established physicists having been assigned to work on radar, Milner had found himself in the right place at the right time.

  He remained in Cambridge, working on what was later code-named the Tube Alloys Project, for the next three years. During this period, his self-sufficiency and self containment heightened. He lived alone in a flat near the railway station. Apart from occasional evenings out with fellow physicists, he apparently had no social life at all no girlfriends, no regular companions. He often went to London at weekends, however, where he may or may not have pursued an exotic double life. There is simply no way to tell. Studying Milner’s life is like eating a slice of Emmental cheese: bland, with lots of holes.

  Nor is there the slightest flavour of communism. Milner’s old Cambridge mentor, J.D. Bernai, frequented Guy Burgess’s London flat, along with Blunt, Philby and Maclean. No doubt he would have been happy to introduce Milner to their pernicious circle, but there is no evidence he ever did. Milner steered adroitly clear of bad company. Or maybe he just covered his tracks more assiduously than most. Whatever he really thought or intended, he seems to have kept to himself.

  There is nevertheless evidence that, on the quiet, he was a bit of a ladies’ man. Cambridge was hardly the place for him to demonstrate that, but in November 1943, most of the Tube Alloys staff, Milner among them, were transported to the United States to help build the atom bomb. Milner was a member of the team assigned to a uranium-separation plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Several of the female office staff there fell for his blond good looks and were taken up and put down with some frequency, according to colleagues. “He enjoyed the company of women,” says Colin Selsey, who worked with him at Oak Ridge. “But he ran a mile from anything serious. Sex, I assume, but never love. Personally, I found him easy to get on with but impossible to know. After a while, you began to notice how much better he was at asking questions about other people than answering them about himself.” It is uncannily similar to what Unwin said about him at Cambridge. Milner charmed, but never confided. He seems to have trusted no-one but himself.

  One of Milner’s colleagues at Oak Ridge was Klaus Fuchs, an even more self-effacing character than Milner himself. Fuchs had been feeding information to the Soviet Union since the start of his involvement in the atom bomb project, and the two were to meet again at Harwell after the war. Meanwhile, in the summer of 1944, they went their separate ways: Fuchs to Los Alamos, Milner to Montreal, where he was to work on an Anglo-Canadian fission project kept separate from the Anglo-American effort. Progress at Los Alamos soon assumed historic proportions. The Montreal laboratory was, in that sense, a backwater. Milner had not been regarded as an essential member of the British team chosen for Los Alamos. Whether this was because of deficiencies in his work or conflict with superiors is unclear. “He was sometimes too logical for his own good,” recalls Selsey. “He was no sycophant, that’s for sure, and he could easily rub people up the wrong way. He didn’t care who they were. That wouldn’t have mattered if his work had been vital, but there seemed to be a feeling that he wasn’t quite pulling his weight.”

  So, Milner went to Montreal under something of a cloud. He spent the rest of the war there and found himself working with a former colleague from the Cambridge Tube Alloys Project: Alan Nunn May. Nunn May, as we have seen, was already passing information to Soviet Intelligence. He and Milner became drinking companions in Montreal, according to other laboratory staff. They certainly saw more of each other than they ever had at Cambridge. There is nothing necessarily sinister in that. Though five years apart in age, they had shared interests and similar backgrounds, and they were both a long way from home. But this still constitutes a significant change in Milner’s behaviour. Nunn May got suspiciously close to being a friend, the first real one Milner had had in years. And he happened to be a Russian spy. Whether Milner knew or guessed what he was really up to is, of course, impossible to establish. But the news of what had been achieved at Los Alamos must have been one of their recurrent topics of conversation. Nunn May later gave as his reason for passing samples of enriched uranium to his Soviet Controllers in August 1945 the conviction that nuclear weaponry should not be exclusive to the United States. That was his solution to the moral dilemma confronting the first generation of nuclear physicists. What was Milner’s?

  At first it appeared to be to opt out. He returned to England in September 1945, took a teaching post at Bristol University and ceased to have any active involvement in nuclear research. Nunn May went to King’s College, London. They saw little of each other during the few months of liberty left to Nunn May. Perhaps theirs really had been nothing more than a friendship of fellow exiles. In February 1946 Nunn May was arrested. Before his trial, Milner was questioned about their time together in Montreal. His lack of communist associations told in his favour and he was at no point officially under suspicion. He told the police that he was ‘appalled’ by what Nunn May had done. Perhaps he was also appalled by the sentence meted out to him—ten years’ penal servitude.

  A few months later, Milner was offered a job, rather surprisingly in view of his albeit apparently innocent links with Nunn May, working under Klaus Fuchs in the theoretical physics division of the newly created Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in Berkshire. He accepted and was at once restored to the forefront of nuclear research. This could have peaceful applications, of course. Maybe Milner told himself he would be helping to develop a new, clean energy source for the future. The smog-ridden cities certainly needed one. And that was partly what Harwell was about.

  But it was also about the Bomb. In July 1946, Congress passed the McMahon Bill, banning any traffic with other countries, Britain included, in information concerning atomic energy. That meant Britain had little choice but to go it alone. Early in 1947, Attlee took the decision to build an independent British nuclear deterrent. Fuchs’ department at Harwell was set to work on it, in conditions of some secrecy. It was not until May 1948 that the Government made its decision publicly known. When Fuchs took a small team—Milner among them—to the Ministry of Defence Weapons Establishment at Fort Halstead, in Kent, to brief the ministry’s head of weaponry research, William Penney, on progress at Harwell, they told no-one where they were going. Unless, of course, in Fuchs’ case, it was his Soviet controllers.

  Milner lived initially on site at Harwell, in one of the prefabricated bungalows erected for staff. It was an isolated location, given that most of them were married and too strapped for cash to buy a car. Milner did own a car, however, having inherited enough from his brother to afford a few luxuries. He soon moved to a rented cottage in Wantage and commuted from there. His comfortable financial situation, as a bachelor on a principal scientific officer’s salary, is further illustrated by the fact that he made no move to sell Otherways when the RAF vacated it in 1947.

  Milner’s bachelor status also meant he was much in demand on Harwell’s party circuit, and his way with women, first noted at Oak Ridge, resurfaces in the recollection of Emily Tucker, widow of Horace Tucker, personnel officer at Harwell. “He gave you the glad eye in a cool take-it-or-leave-it way that some of the wives liked. He was good-looking and, yes, charming. Women liked him more than men, I think. I know Horace had to deal with several complaints about him from husbands who suspected he’d had his way with their wives. I dare say he had. But nothing was ever proved. Nothing formal came of any of it.”

  Marital spats and sly adulteries apart, life proceeded placidly at Harwell until 23 September 1949, when the White House announced that it had “evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.” The Russians had the Bomb, and they had it so much earlier than anyone had expected that it seemed clear to many that they had been helped. The hunt for their helpers was on.

  Just over four months later, on 2 February 1950, Klaus Fuchs was arrested on espionage charges. He had signed a full confession a few days previously. The Harwell community had to confront the fact that they had been harbouring a traitor in their midst. It was, for some, a traumatic realization. The deputy director, Herbert Skinner, was close to tears when he broke the news to a hastily convened staff meeting. Many felt betrayed, as well as shocked. Nobody seems to remember Milner’s reaction.

 

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