The following Thursday evening, Rachel had butterflies in her stomach when the cab left her at 6 Chesterfield Gardens in Mayfair. She was there to attend a social function hosted by Tommy and Hildy Harris, and potentially to betray her country.
In contrast to the nondescript middle-class flats of most spies, the Harrises lived in a magnificent, sprawling house Tommy Harris’s father, a prominent art dealer, had bought with his fortune. The brisk night air carried down notes of cello music from the well-lit salon on the second floor, mixed with a faint hubbub of conversation and clinking glasses. It sounded like the Group—as the spies who informally gathered at the Harrises were called—was present in full force.
Tommy and his wife Hildy were endlessly gracious hosts. At one point, they had even worked as de facto caretakers and cooks for the Service’s operations school at Brickendomby Hall. They had an apparently bottomless wine cellar and a Latin passion for cooking and entertainment. They instinctively understood that the people of the secret world needed a safe place where tongues could be let loose and guards lowered with no regard for rank or secrecy, and were utterly dedicated to making their home a safe haven for spies.
Yet, for the first time, Rachel felt apprehensive when she rang the doorbell beneath the marble arch of the main entrance. The wine-red evening dress, high-heeled shoes and thick layer of make-up felt uncomfortable, and there was a touch of cold sweat at the small of her back.
Hildy herself opened the door. She was a small woman, pretty like a doll, with rounded cheeks, a tiny nub of a nose and a ready smile—a stark contrast to the dark and enigmatic Tommy. She stood up on her tiptoes to kiss Rachel’s cheeks, then gripped her forearms firmly.
‘I heard,’ Hildy said in a low voice. There were few women in the secret world, but they had never been close. Rachel had always appreciated that Hildy treated her as one of the boys, keeping her distance and playing the host. But now her tone was warm. ‘It is lovely to see you, regardless.’
‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world!’ The last word was a squeal. Rachel giggled. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I may have started with a couple of large glasses of Merlot at home. Please don’t tell anyone. I’ll behave myself, I promise.’
Hildy frowned. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Please do come in. Everybody is here!’
Rachel took a deep breath and followed her inside, desperately hoping that everybody included Peter Bloom.
* * *
She had been against Max’s scheme from the start.
‘This is ridiculous,’ she had protested two days earlier, after their planning session. ‘I have no training in this.’
In response, the large blue-breasted Amazon parrot sitting on a perch screamed an obscenity in Portuguese. They were in the dead spymaster’s jungle-like conservatory in his flat on Sloane Square. Rachel sat on a rickety wooden chair in the shade of a palm tree, balancing a saucer and a teacup on her knee.
‘Ssh,’ Max said in a rattling, gramophone-like voice. ‘Goo is finally sleeping.’
His spirit presently inhabited a life-sized Edison doll, with nyctoscope camera eyes and an amplified ectophone in its belly. It wore an expensive smoking jacket covered in bird droppings. Rachel missed Henry the medium. While the doll was a good likeness, with its saturnine, hawk-nosed face and bushy eyebrows, its black pinpoint eyes and complete stillness were unsettling. Some of the newer models had small electric motors the spirit could control to make basic movements, but to Rachel that was even worse. Still, it did not appear to bother Goo, the baby cuckoo resting peacefully between the Max-doll’s folded wooden arms.
‘My apologies to Goo,’ Rachel said. ‘But I really do not think this is a good idea.’
‘Can you come closer? I can’t hear you very well.’
That was hardly surprising given the cacophony of animal noises that filled the place. Every room in the small flat apart from the bedroom of Susi the maid was a veritable zoo. At the door, Rachel had been received by a white Bull Terrier and a large, lumbering black dog—which turned out to be a bear cub called Jasper, considerably more affectionate than his namesake at the Winter Court. When she used the bathroom, she barely suppressed a scream when she spotted a tangle of live bullfinch snakes in the bathtub.
Sighing, Rachel pulled her chair over next to the Max doll and angled its head to improve the pickup of its microphone ears.
‘That’s better,’ Max said. ‘Now, as to training, none of my agents ever had any. That was what made them so effective. They were ordinary women, secretaries, clerks. Utterly without guile, yet possessing extraordinary courage—’
‘I must say that when it comes to Mata Hari tactics, I am with Harker.’
‘Ah! The sex drive does not come into it, not at all! And in this case, I doubt it would work on Bloom in the first place, even if he was still alive, all due respect to your charms, Mrs White. No, I am guessing that with him it will be about ideology.’
‘So how do I approach him?’
‘You don’t. You make him come to you. We will turn you into a desirable candidate for recruitment. That will require surprisingly little effort, wouldn’t you agree?’
Rachel opened her mouth to protest. Then she imagined reading her own file, as she might have done in the old Registry’s reading room. An outstanding officer, one of the first women in the Service, but demoted for insubordination. Considered resigning. Financially dependent on her husband. Marital troubles?
‘All right. On paper, I am a promising target. But is it going to be enough?’
‘Not quite. We need something else, an … incident. The Harris soirée should do fine.’ The doll’s fixed smile appeared to widen. ‘Remember that I can quite literally see into your soul, Mrs White. Just have a few drinks and it will all happen quite naturally.’
Goo the cuckoo moved in the doll’s lap and stretched its wings.
‘Now the poor thing is awake,’ Max said. ‘And we haven’t even started on the breeding and care of finches.’
* * *
With a spring in her step, Hildy led Rachel up a long, narrow staircase, past a priceless red-and-gold tapestry and precious Spanish furniture of dark wood, and into a large salon on the second floor where the Group was holding court.
Guy Liddell was playing the cello, more for his own pleasure than as formal entertainment. Tommy Harris was seated next to him, tapping his foot. He was darkly handsome, with black hair and intense Mediterranean eyes.
There were perhaps two dozen guests, enough to make the L-shaped room a little crowded. Rachel recognised several faces: Anthony Blunt, Tim Milne, Victor Rothschild, Richard Brooman-White—all younger Winter Court officers, all drinking red wine or something stronger, engaged in lively conversation.
A smaller contingent from the Summer Court hovered near the grand piano by the window, all in charter-bodies—no Edison dolls for Group meetings. The New Dead often chose mediums who resembled their past selves, but Rachel had only ever met Bloom briefly when he was alive and wasn’t sure if she would recognise him by the medium he had chosen. In any case, these particular charter-bodies all looked identical, like exotic birds in their evening wear and white or black Venetian masks and metal-crested spirit crowns.
When Rachel and Hildy entered, there was the briefest hush in the conversation. Rachel tensed. The furtive glances cast towards her felt like splashes of cold water.
Hildy took her arm. ‘Kim is playing barman as usual,’ she said. ‘I have to abandon you to these beasts and check up on a few things in the kitchen.’
A large, ancient oak table beneath a gold-framed landscape painting served as the bar, displaying a small cityscape of alcohol. Tommy had once said that no good table could be spoiled by wine-stains. Kim Philby stood behind it, busy pouring drinks, improvising cocktails and refilling glasses.