It was as he came out of the phone-box that Shaw heard the police siren and saw the squad car rocketing across hell-for-rubber out of Charing Cross Road. Of course that could mean anything from a break-in upwards but Shaw had a curious hunch it was more than that, so he followed quickly as the car pulled into a turning off to the left, some way beyond the Fig Leaf. And what he found, less than a couple of minutes later, was a street accident. A hit-and-run…
The crowds had gathered already.
A heavy truck had driven right over a man, they said. Two men had jumped out and run for it and no one seemed in the least able to describe them; it had all happened very fast. The man? Dead as mutton, and looked as if he’d been sawn in half.
Shaw pressed through to the police cordon.
A man was lying, clear of the wheels now, with his chest crushed like a cardboard carton, the two halves of his body appearing quite separated. He was very thin and was wearing a dark suit and there was a mole below his left eye. In death, he still looked as anxious, as scared, as in life. Shaw felt overwhelming pity. From a coat pocket drooped a crushed, soiled, and blood-stained Evening Standard.
Shaw tapped a police-sergeant on the shoulder and held up, shielded in the palm of his hand, the special pass with the red and green bisected panel. The sergeant looked, and gave a rigid salute. Shaw asked, “The truck?”
“Sure to have been stolen, sir, you can depend on that. We’ll get no leads.” He hesitated. “This going to be a Ministry job, sir?”
“Not so far as you know,” Shaw said. The scene made him feel sick. Bullets were clean, wholesome things — antisepsis, compared with this. The thin man had suggested he might be expendable; he’d been right! Already this job had blood-stains on it.
Two
After doing some telephoning, Latymer had put Shaw on to Treece. He said, “You won’t know him, and you won’t like him either. He’s a thorough bastard, but he knows his stuff. He was a wartime subaltern in the Sappers — turned Regular in 1946, and was later seconded to ‘I’ Corps. Did a good job, I understand — retired as a brigadier. After that he got lured into the security section of the FO. He’ll see you first thing tomorrow.”
When tomorrow came, Shaw found that Treece, who would certainly not have admitted being employed by the Foreign Office anyway, was no charming, elegant Edenesque diplomat of the old school. He didn’t even use the “Brigadier” these days. He was plain Mr Treece, and that might or might not have been his real name — Latymer hadn’t gone into that. Treece worked from a sleazy room over a dressmaking establishment in a side alley off Whitechapel High Street, not far along from Aldgate East Station; and the door of the outer office bore the legend HAKE AND STALLY-BRASS, EXPORT AND IMPORT AGENTS.
When Shaw was admitted, Treece was sitting in his shirt sleeves, directing a stream of aerosol insecticide at a demoralized fly; he was sitting behind a painted deal desk littered with invoices and flanked by steel filing-cabinets of a dull and dirty green. He looked uninspiring; elastic sleeve-suspenders held his cuffs back from the thick, hairy wrists; irreverently, Shaw felt he should have had a green eye-shield as well. At the same time there was an indefinable “orderly-room” atmosphere about the place, as though Treece was still a pugnacious CO confronting a defaulter. He looked much more like a brigadier than an undercover-man, much more fitted to the Sappers than to Intelligence, but that, of course, was entirely as it should be. He was square and blunt, with a full-blooded, heavy face. He wore a black moustache and had dark, shadowed jowls even this early in the morning. His eyes bulged slightly, but they were cold, searching and supercilious, almost hostile, and the fingernails of his hairy-backed hands were dirty, as though he spent his spare time in his garden and wasn’t too particular about cleaning up after.
As befitted his appearance, Treece was no time-waster. Gesturing Shaw to a hard upright chair, he said abruptly, “Your chief has passed me all the facts, Commander, so you needn’t go into the story again, except to tell me this.” He looked hard at Shaw. “In your opinion, was this thin man of yours telling the truth?”
“I’ve convinced my chief he was.”
Treece slitted his mouth and sucked in air angrily. “I know that! I want your first-hand view.”
“In my opinion, yes, he was.” Shaw crossed his long legs; there was something about Treece that grated and made Shaw want to irritate him in return. “I can’t see any particular point in his faking it, anyhow.”
Treece smiled coldly and began to fill a pipe, ramming the tobacco down hard with short, stubby fingers. “Every coin,” he said smugly, “has two faces. We shall see. Meanwhile we can’t take any risks and I’m instructed to proceed as though the story’s true until such time as we prove it isn’t.” He paused and struck a match with a jerky motion of his hand. The light flared on the mass of tiny, broken blood vessels clustered round a coarse nose. “You know, Commander, I doubt if our good friend the Englishman in the street had ever heard of Kosyenko. I believe the feller’s never been out of Russia since the war, except to visit Pekin. But if Kosyenko is rubbed out, by a Westener especially, then the Armageddonites could be proved right… or so the PM thinks.”
“I’m inclined to agree with him. By the way, has my contact been traced?”
Treece gave a harsh laugh. “All the way to the mortuary, my lad!”
“I mean,” Shaw said patiently, “Do you know who he is?”
“Yep. I’ve been up all night on it, as a matter of fact.” Treece rasped the blue jowl, which was now explained. “When your chief reported your theories about the girl who made the first approach — he said you thought she could have been on a newspaper — I fancied it gave me something of a lead. We’ve had rather too much lately of this business of the Press sticking their fingers into Government pies, and this, I thought could be another example. It was.” He grimaced. “I checked all the London papers … to cut a long story short, your thin man worked as a crime-reporter on a certain big-circulation daily. Nothing is known of how he came by his story, or of any known contacts likely to have given him a lead, but there are a few people I want to talk to, and with any luck will be talking to shortly. In the meantime I’ve had the body removed to a safe place and the police and the newspaper most concerned have been told to keep quiet about the whole show in the interest of national security. As a matter of fact the entire Press has already had a D notice chucked at ’em — hard! So no one’s going to be sure the man’s talked. Which brings me to this feller Conroy himself.” Treece moved his thick hands and opened a drawer in his desk. He brought out a sheet of typewritten matter and scanned it briefly. He said, “Ivan Conroy was known to security before the war. I’ll summarize what we’ve dug out of the files, and you can study the full report later.” He looked down again. “Ivan O’Shea Conroy, bom Dublin 1908; father, British by nationality, Irish by birth and domicile, mother Russian—”
“Russian?”
Treece looked annoyed. “That’s what I said, isn’t it? I’ll go on, if I may.” He rustled the sheet of paper. “The mother was the daughter of a Count Alexis Ozolin, a minor official of the Tsarist Court. The father was an unknown quantity, an Irish adventurer it seems — a sort of soldier-of-fortune whom Conroy’s mother met on a visit to London. Conroy himself, the son, was known to security as a fanatical and extreme Communist, and a pre-war member of the British party. He left the UK for the States in March 1939 and, so far as we’re concerned anyway, hasn’t been heard of since. It’s possible he’s changed his name, of course, and may even have taken out American citizenship papers — that we don’t know yet, and I’d say it’s doubtful, considering his record as a Party member… unless of course he entered the States originally on a forged passport and with a new identity and personality.”