My assignments were no different from anyone else’s; they were equally foul. But Fifeshire did at least thank me at the end of each one and dole out generous portions of whisky or sherry, or anything that took the fancy, in his cavernous, oak-panelled, sound-deadened office in Carlton House Terrace, overlooking the Mall and the stone pillbox-shaped and ivy-camouflaged building that had covered the Admiralty communications headquarters, deep in the vaults below, during the Second World War.
But in spite of the cheery reception he gave, Fifeshire always kept a distance. Most agents he called only by their numbers and referred to them only by their numbers, not that he referred to them much. He believed in isolation; that agents should never meet one another; that they should train in isolation, work in isolation and, when necessary, die in isolation.
Fifeshire had a country estate in Gloucestershire and a flat in Wimpole Street. He had never married, to anyone’s knowledge, and worked continuously, never stopping, whether he was in the office, or pacing the floors of his flat, or leading a bucolic weekend as the country squire. He had a missionary zeal for his work, to try and maintain the credibility of British Intelligence, to try and hold it together and build it stronger and stronger.
At his core he was tough as steel, quicker-thinking than any calculator, and ruthlessly hard. At the start of the Second World War he had joined the army and shot through the ranks to Major-General. Before his luck ran out and a German shell removed the head that contained his outstanding mind, the talent was spotted; he was airlifted out of the front into Whitehall and had remained there ever since.
Bombs had ceased to rain from the sky; the war passed and truces were made, but for Fifeshire the war went on, and would go on for ever. Cold war, warm war, bloody war, silent war — it made no difference, it all boiled down to the same thing: survival. He intended to survive, and for that to happen his world had to survive; and for the world to survive on terms he could accept, his country had to survive and be able to stand up and be counted. And so he fought — day in, day out.
In the post-war period, a number of events, highlighted by such major fiascos as Philby, and Eden’s stunning lack of foresight in the Suez crisis, had a devastating effect in the United States on the credibility of British Intelligence; Fifeshire therefore had an unenviable task.
And yet he was succeeding. Since he took command in 1957 all the major Western powers had come to look to him as one of their most reliable sources of information. Whatever they might have thought of the governments and the politicians that comprised them, Fifeshire, and the outfit he had honed and ground and sculpted and built, they listened to.
Facts were what Fifeshire sought to acquire during all his waking hours. He believed implicity in facts. Like Dickens’s Gradgrind, he instilled the message in his pupils; ‘What I want is Facts… Facts alone are wanted in life.’ Fifeshire lusted after facts. They were the life-blood of British Intelligence. His agents were merely tools for obtaining them. He wanted to know everything about everyone; no one was to be left to chance, no one to be trusted, not even those who worked for him — especially those who worked for him. ‘What good is the whole of British Intelligence,’ he would say, ‘if there’s one damn spy in it?’
I was deployed to spy on the staff of MI5. For the last six years I had followed various members of staff to shops, to cinemas, to the lavatory, to hookers and massage parlours and mistresses, to holidays in Bognor and Tenerife and Nassau and Moscow; I had seen husbands hanging from chandeliers while their wives beat them with willow canes, and a 60-year-old spinster secretary roller-skate naked around her living room; I had recorded a thousand meetings on sound-tape, video-tape, celluloid, hung around a thousand windswept street corners, eaten a thousand miserable ham sandwiches in ten seconds flat, and I hadn’t yet found a single damn traitor.
But there was one. I was sure of it. Fifeshire was sure of it. And he knew that if he kept on looking, and I kept on looking, and the others he deployed kept on looking, sooner or later, whoever it was would make a mistake.
It was in the fourth year of my work that I ran foul of Scatliffe. He had a hawk-nosed, skinny, wrinkly tartar of a secretary, who looked like a giant eagle that had escaped from its cage. She was one of those very meticulous people who keep everything carefully in its place and a careful record of the place it’s kept in. She was also, I discovered, an incredible hoarder.
She had a large flat in a decaying Georgian terraced house in Westbourne Terrace, off the Bayswater Road. It was packed to the gills with the most incredible rubbish: cartons upon cartons of tights reduced in a Debenham’s sale; hundreds of empty plastic powder puffs; piles of men’s nylon socks, reduced in another sale; rows and rows of different-sized shoes; magazines and newspapers dating back decades; empty food tins washed out and stored away. She had evidently seen the boom in old bric-à-brac and was determined not to miss out next time around.
Under every single object she had carefully placed a hair. By checking the positions of the hairs she could tell if anything had been moved. It had taken me days to search through it all and I hadn’t noticed the hairs. She arrived home early one day, having left work with a migraine, and spotted me leaving the building. She checked the position of the hairs and put two and two together. She reported to Scatliffe that I had been spying on her.
Commander Clive Scatliffe was second in command to Fifeshire. He was a waspish man in his late forties, short, thin and wiry, with greying hair swept back in a rakish manner that didn’t suit him, and made him look like a cross between a concert pianist and a second-hand car dealer. He had small, penetrating, ice-cold eyes, that forever darted around, never looking anyone straight for long; a small thin mouth that pursed tight, spat out words, then pursed tight again. His skin was pasty white, looking like it never saw sunshine, and his hands were small and bony, and rarely stopped clenching each other. He exuded a constant atmosphere of high pressure.
Scatliffe had come up through the ranks from out of left field. Three years ago no one had heard of him. But he worked like a demon, was extremely intelligent, kissed every ass that was attached to anyone of importance, then followed them round as they turned to say thank you and stabbed them in the back. He had been a close friend of the previous Home Secretary and now had Anthony Lines eating out of his pocket. Few people liked him, including Fifeshire, who never openly declared his hostility towards Scatliffe, but I could tell. The one undeniable fact was that Scatliffe was heading for the hot seat. Even Fifeshire declared that he was his most likely successor. He was professional enough to admire the man’s capabilities, though he made no secret of the fact that his personal choice was Victor Hattan, the well-liked director of Security for SIS.
Scatliffe was mad as hell that I had been spying on his secretary. He hauled me into his office and screamed at me for a full ten minutes. He didn’t care if God himself had instructed me, his personal staff were beyond scrutiny; for them to have to undergo surveillance was a slight on his judgement. He kicked up such a stink in the department that in the interests of peace and harmony the normally unshakeable Fifeshire was forced to soft-pedal and leave Scatliffe and his staff to their own devices for a while.
Some months after the dust had settled Fifeshire told me he felt I should try and make peace with Scatliffe. Ever since the incident Scatliffe had had the boot in for me, unfairly, as Fifeshire agreed, blaming me rather than Fifeshire for the incident. Fifeshire said that he would one day be stepping down — not for a while, but within a few years — and that when he did, Scatliffe would replace him; unless his vitriolic attitude towards me could be softened before then, I would be in for a rough ride.