The next day Knox was back at headquarters, and the following week Sarah Holland arranged a small, private memorial for Williams.
‘He’ll be with you for the rest of your life,’ she’d told Knox when he’d said he wasn’t ready to say goodbye to his best friend. ‘You need to carry more than his death.’
Knox went back to work, but without Williams it felt like there was an invisible wall around him, an impenetrable distance between him and everyone else that only Holland, sometimes, could cross.
Since then Knox had stepped away from running all but the most important active operations – like Calder Hall – and dedicated more and more time to sifting through MI5’s past. It had given him a focus, a purpose, but it had also widened the gulf between him and everyone except the few people he was closest to.
Now, Knox felt almost as adrift as he had after Williams’s death. But this time Holland wasn’t here to help him through it.
He had no idea what he should do next. The problem was a lack of concrete, tangible evidence to guide him. He hadn’t found anything to suggest Bianchi and Moretti were more than the couple of chancers he’d originally dismissed them as. There was nothing that connected them to the Russians. And nothing to link them back to Manning, either. So, why was Manning so interested in them? Or Knox, for that matter? Why go to the trouble of kicking him out only to bring him back in? Why not leave him out in the cold where he couldn’t cause him any more trouble?
Was it just as Manning had said himself, to use Knox to prove his innocence, all the while enjoying watching him squirm and chase false leads? With Manning now sitting in Holland’s seat, the only higher powers Knox could turn to for support were political ones, and they wouldn’t dare touch the acting head of MI5 without a cast-iron case against him.
Knox had nothing, and he needed something. He needed to do something. He decided he needed, in the words of Holland, to pull himself together and get on with his job. So, he climbed out of the Eames lounger, and took himself out of his flat and down the two streets that led from Kemp House to Bar Italia.
CHAPTER 20
Even at his most maudlin, the streets of Soho at night had the power to make Knox feel better.
After his parents’ deaths, Knox had gone to live with his grandmother, who had tried to keep him safe by limiting his world to the few streets of the East End where she’d spent her whole life. It hadn’t worked. As soon as he was old enough to understand there was a vast city out there beyond Bethnal Green waiting to be discovered, Knox became a person of two distinct halves – the well-behaved grandson by day, and the night owl who would pound the capital’s pavements and alleys for hours.
The city’s lights and spirit dimmed during the war, but Soho had still shone, once you knew where to look. The old men in ragged suits still pushed their carts of meagre wares along the gutters. Open doorways leading to staircases lit with tealights reminded passers-by that London’s oldest and hardest workers were still open for business. And basement bars and clubs still catered for the brave souls who didn’t want to spend their nights cowed in their beds, waiting for German bombs to fall.
Knox was too young to do much more than watch all this go on. But watch he did, a nocturnal flâneur soaking it all in. He’d choose a street corner or bench and let the city’s nightlife pass him by, or he’d pick someone out from the throng and follow them to whichever theatre, club, or inconspicuous doorway they were heading for. He didn’t know it at the time, but it was all good training for his future career.
It was Soho that Knox missed when he was fighting in France. So, when it was all over and he returned to London, it was in Soho that he settled. He’d lost count of the places he’d lived before Kemp House. He’d had a room above a restaurant on the corner of Haymarket and Panton Street, lived in what could kindly be described as a garret in Golden Square, and even spent a year in the basement of a grand old townhouse in Bloomsbury Street, next to the British Museum.
A lot had changed since the war. The glow of the city had returned. The first generation that had grown up untouched by the war was coming of age, testing their boundaries and pushing the world to see how far they could make it move. Collars were getting longer, skirts shorter. But some of the old Soho was still there. The men hauling carts now wore demob suits, newcomers and veterans alike were beckoned into dark doorways, and, at any time of day or night, there was coffee to be had.
Bar Italia was never quiet, but Knox hit a lull between the pub-goers needing a shot of caffeine to carry them home and the late crowd after a fix to get them through the night.
He ordered a double espresso at the counter and watched the young waiters with their rolled-up white shirt-sleeves and greased hair cleaning up small cups and plates. The older staff spent their time actually making the coffee, checking their immaculate beards in the counter’s mirrored panels, and harassing the junior staff in rapid Italian. Above them the high wa-wa-was and clavioline notes of Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’ played from an invisible radio.
Knox finished his espresso, pushed his empty cup across the bar, and, realising that there wasn’t anyone waiting to steal his spot from him, ordered another with a brief raising of his finger and the slightest nod – the unspoken language of the regular.
Knox and Williams had spent endless late Friday nights propping up Bar Italia’s counter and it had taken Knox considerable effort to keep the cafe as a home for only good memories.
The two men used to play a game over their late-night espressos – guessing which of the cafe’s customers was most likely to be an agent of some foreign power, and inventing ever more sinister backstories for them.
‘Eldest daughter of a Cypriot shipping magnate, became a gunrunner for the Turks when Daddy wrote her out of the will,’ Knox would say about a woman in a jet-black trench coat and sunglasses at ten o’clock at night.
‘Soviet sleeper who gave it all up for love and is now on the run,’ Williams would say about a pensive man lingering over his third milky coffee.
Now Knox played the game by himself over his second espresso. This evening he had his pick of a man in a dishevelled suit who looked like he was in a worse state than Knox, two couples talking very quickly over each other, someone Knox could only half-see past the couples sitting in the window, wearing a light jacket with a trilby perched on the back of their head, and another suited man lingering in the door, alternating between sipping his coffee and sucking on a cigarette.
He settled on the man in the doorway, who kept eyeing people as they walked past the cafe. He decided he was the frontman for a Balkan smuggling operation, waiting to make contact with someone who wanted something only he could supply. Not his best creative work, but it would do.
Knox finished his espresso and, considerably more alert, gave up his space at the counter and headed back out into Soho. It was one of those hot London nights that brought people out onto the streets. Lovers strolled arm in arm from bar to bar. Groups of teenagers flirted with each other across traffic junctions. Theatregoers lingered outside tube stations, putting off the end of their evenings as long as possible.
At the corner of Old Compton Street and Greek Street, Knox realised he’d been wrong to finger the man in Bar Italia. As he crossed the road he noticed a figure twenty yards behind him turn quickly away – a figure in a light jacket and hat. Someone had taken an interest in him.
Peterson hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said he’d be keeping a close eye on Knox. Unfortunately for this Watcher, no matter how well they might know London there was no way they could compete with Knox’s years of night-time wandering. He turned into Moor Street, heading towards Cambridge Circus, then quickly doubled back down Romilly Street, along the side of the Palace Theatre. He crossed over Shaftesbury Avenue and Gerrard Place before approaching Cambridge Circus again, this time from the south. He could see the trilby trying to push through the crowd that was still outside the Palace, discussing the performance they’d just seen of the new musical, The Sound of Music.