“Why haven’t you rung up the Director of the Government Communications Headquarters? I’m sure your Permanent Secretary will have his direct line number, Home Secretary.”
Roy Jenkins tried hard not to get flustered and lose his temper.
“Nobody in my private office seems to have the necessary security clearances to look into any aspect of the management and administration of GCHQ,” he explained patiently.
“Rubbish! You are a bloody Cabinet Minister!”
“Yes, but…”
The Home Secretary was grateful for the urgent rapping at his door. His Private Secretary stepped into the room.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you, gentlemen,” he apologised smoothly, because private secretaries to senior government ministers did not as a rule allow themselves to seem overly alarmed. “The Foreign Secretary is coming over…”
Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson very nearly fell into the room such was his hurry, brushing past the Home Secretary’s gate keeper as if he was so much Scotch mist. The newcomer blinked at Enoch Powell, who made as if to struggle to his feet to depart.
“Ah, I see. Sorry if I’ve arrived in the middle of a tete-a-tete, Roy,” he grimaced. Then he turned to the MP for Wolverhampton South West. “Please stay, Mr Powell. Your, er, particular perspective on things may be helpful to us.”
Without further ceremony he pressed two sheets of Foreign Office notepaper into the Home Secretary’s hands.
Enoch Powell had re-settled in his chair after the agony of attempting to rise to his feet the moment before.
“Oddly enough, I was about to advise the Home Secretary to seek your counsel on a matter related to GCHQ and our esteemed Security Service, Sir Thomas,” he observed like a cruelly badly mauled but infuriatingly smug Cheshire cat.
“Oh, yes,” Roy Jenkins murmured, scanning the documents he had just been given without resuming his seat. Presently, he looked up. “Oh dear,” he concluded. “May I?” He inquired, glancing to Enoch Powell.
“By all means,” Tom Harding-Grayson said tersely.
Things could hardly get any worse; there had been some kind of disaster at Malta in the Central Mediterranean, British colonies and dependencies in the South Atlantic, specifically East Falkland and South Georgia had been seized by the Argentine, and now the IRA were planning a new campaign on the mainland of the United Kingdom and the blighters appeared to have acquired the wherewithal to shoot down V-Bombers and jetliners!
The note pressed into Enoch Powell’s infirm, shaking hands dealt exclusively with this last calamity. It was the Foreign Secretary’s private office’s précis of the British Ambassador in Dublin’s much longer report of a meeting with the Irish Prime Minister, the Irish Minister for External Affairs and the Chief of Staff of the Irish Defence Forces earlier that day. The Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West seemed to only glance at it before handing it back.
“You cannot trust those people in Dublin,” he concluded, now painfully levering himself to his feet. “For all we know the IRA men they have sent to these shores to kill and maim are Sean Lemass’s own men. The Irish sheltered the people who planned last year’s attack on Balmoral. Ever since the war they’ve been pump-priming the conflict in Ulster. A Government which does nothing to stamp out vipers in its midst is as culpable as the criminals themselves when others suffer the fatal bite.”
The two Cabinet Ministers stared at him.
“The Home Secretary,” he added, turning towards the door, “was, I think, about to quiz me about matters pertaining to ‘Hut Six’,” he finished, his right ‘good eye’ momentarily glinting with rueful amusement.
Roy Jenkins blinked worriedly at Tom Harding-Grayson.
“What was all that about?” The latter inquired when they were alone.
“Oh, nothing,” the Home Secretary scowled. “The IRA thing is much more important…”
The Foreign secretary had spent most of his adult life in the higher echelons of the Civil Service and was not the man to allow a politician to get away with changing the subject that easily.
“The IRA ‘thing’ is only important because this is the first we’ve heard of it, Roy. What the Devil was Enoch talking about?”
Both men remained standing as the Home Secretary briefly recounted the affair of the four senior GCHQ Directors remanded in Her Majesty’s Prison Gloucester, and the intercepted and thus undelivered letter to the Prime Minister which had landed them in hot water with MI5.
“Margaret hasn’t seen this letter they sent?”
“No. The Security Service intercepted it and the case file was only copied to my private office two days ago.”
Tom Harding-Grayson pulled up the chair vacated by Enoch Powell and gestured for his younger colleague to sit with him before the guttering embers in the grate. The room was not cold but neither was it warm, for a Cabinet Minister in Margaret Thatcher’s Administration was entitled to exactly the same coal ration as a man in the street.
“I have to get back to Corpus Christi in a minute,” he groaned. “Things are looking bad in the Mediterranean and Margaret, and well, the Prime Minister is not herself. Leaving that aside,” he shrugged, “once things have quietened down again, if they ever do, somebody’s head is going to have to roll at GCHQ!”
Chapter 16
The British had not known what to do with her. The harassed and understandably shaken young officer who had listened to her account of what had happened when she had confronted Arkady Pavlovich Rykov and his KGB friend pointing guns at Admiral Sir Julian Christopher, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, had decided that she was insane and she had entirely sympathised with him. Julian Christopher had died of his wounds by then, Arkady Rykov’s wrecked corpse was spread across half the room and the KGB man on the floor had still not recovered consciousness. Actually, she had been a little surprised when the man on the floor had actually moaned and attempted to raise himself off the bloody flag stones; she thought she had hit him hard enough to kill him. She had killed a lot of people that day but could not remember exactly how many. Things had happened so fast and she had been so angry!
The two big Redcaps who had been with her ever since her arrest had finally stopped fingering their Sten guns; but periodically they threw her uncertain, vaguely shocked looks. Because they were British they had looked away both times she had had to use the toilet bucket. They were an odd people — the British — pragmatic, phlegmatic, not often deliberately cruel, sometimes callous without knowing it, and personally, frequently but not invariably, decent. Her grime-streaked, tired, twitchy minders had been as decent towards her as humanely possible once they had got over their initial disbelief. They had even adjusted the old, rusty handcuffs that still manacled her wrists in front of her so they no longer pinched off the circulation to her left hand. Now she sat on the stone floor in the corner of the bare-walled cell with her back resting on unyielding cool limestone. In olden times this room beneath the Archbishop’s Palace might have been a storeroom or a dungeon, or perhaps the sleeping place of some unfortunate noviciate patiently waiting his turn to slowly progress higher in the Bishop’s retinue.
Wherever one went on Malta centuries of history spoke to one through the stones beneath one’s feet and the ancient landscape through which one passed. Here in the Citadel of Mdina, the Dark Age and Medieval capital of the main island, perched several hundred feet above sea level with — from the ramparts — an unfettered three hundred and sixty degree view of the entire Archipelago, it was easy to live a life in touch with, and touched by the presence of countless past generations. She had hoped to find peace in Mdina; to hide away in the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, to forget her own history, to disengage with the madness of her life. That had been a schoolgirl daydream shattered in a split second by the Margo Seiffert’s murder; and here she was sitting in a cell beneath the ramparts of Mdina in a stinking blood-smeared pale blue nursing smock, watched over by two Royal Military Policemen who had every reason to be terrified of her.