For two days they had left him alone and unvisited. And uninformed. Alone with his growing suspicions and his imaginings. Now, a series of detonations had damaged, perhaps destroyed, his foundations. He was like an old building that tottered from the concussions. Tapes, films, files — Teardrop. Above all, that clever, clever, clever codename — calm down…
All he had known before that morning had been gathered from the newspapers, and the television the previous evening — early news, Nine o'Clock News, News at Ten, Newsnight, the endless repetition of a growing nightmare.
Two species of treachery, separate yet interwoven. In December 1946, he had betrayed Robert Castleford, a distinguished civil servant working for the Allied Control Commission in post-war Berlin, and ever since then he had been a double agent, at first for the NKVD, then later the MVD, finally the KGB. For more than thirty-five years he had led a secret life. He was Philby, he was Blunt, he was Burgess — he was worse than any of them.
Mrs Grey's head appeared at the door, and hastily withdrew as he turned a baleful glance upon her.
And he had done none of it.
And he could never prove his innocence.
He could never tell the truth, not about December 1946, not about Castleford.
Impatiently, leadenly, he paced the room. The emperor had no new clothes. Silver, white napery, jade, velvet, wool, crystal, china, porcelain, oak, walnut. The emperor had no new clothes. KCVO. Sir Kenneth. Director-General. The emperor had no new clothes.
He could never tell the truth. There was a crime, but he could never reveal it. He would not be believed. He would never be believed innocent. He would only compound his guilt if he told the truth, because he had killed Robert Castleford.
In a grey tin box, in the safe keeping of one of the few people who had never lost his trust, his motives lay bound in leather, inside a buff envelope. He had written the account immediately in the wake of Castleford's murder. After the war, it had lain in a deposit box in his bank. His secret, his bane. His leather-bound guilt and conscience. Then, in 1949, when he had met Clara Elsenreith once again, in Vienna during his service there with the Allied Control Commission, he had surrendered the journal — confession? — into her safekeeping. She still possessed it. All the reasons were there, he had fully explained them; but now those reasons would never excuse the crime. The truth would finish him as effectively as the KGB's lies. He had killed Robert Castleford.
The emperor had no new clothes, he thought bitterly, anger vying in his chest and stomach with growing fear, so that he felt inflated; asphyxiated. His head had begun to pound with a sudden headache, and the chill grey light from the tall windows pained his eyes. The trap was perfect. Teardrop — Deputy Chairman Kapustin — had set him up to perfection, had led him by the nose for two unsuspecting years while his damnation was arranged. His heart pumped, his head beat with his impotent rage and accusations of failure and gullibility. He had been tricked — he had been tricked…
He banged his fists against his thighs as he paced back and forth across the length of the lounge. The icing on the cake was to make him appear to have been activated as a Soviet agent; it clinched the guilt they had suggested for him in 1946. The emperor had no new clothes.
The KGB had him. Teardrop was now his codename, the codename of a traitor, a traitor who was Director-General of SIS. The trap had closed. In his mind, he could distinctly hear the slamming of steel doors.
Crystal, jade, silver; presents for the nativity of his promotion. The emperor's clothes. Unreal, like the new flat overlooking Regent's Park, like the new housekeeper, like the new office at Century House, overlooking the river; like his knighthood, which he had been so long in taking. He had been moated with fulfilled ambitions, but now they had him, inescapably, finally. For he had killed Castleford, and they evidently knew that, and upon their knowledge the whole strategy turned. He had killed him and had hidden the crime for thirty-five… for so many years…
His heart pumped and his head throbbed. His body felt too frail to support his emotions and their physical manifestations. The doorbell rang, startling him. He heard his old, weary breathing in the silence that followed, and surrendered to hopelessness. Mrs Grey answered the door as he experienced dread at the possible return of Babbingtpn and Eldon with all the virulence of an aging woman unprepared by make-up and rest for the arrival of visitors.
Into Aubrey's mind a clear, high, pure treble voice floated, an almost unearthly sound; a boy's voice. The words of the hymn or anthem, whichever it was, were indistinguishable in the echoing innocence of the voice. Perhaps Abide with me, perhaps the Nunc Dimittis. He did not know which words he was singing in his vividly remembered childhood. A cathedral nave, but other churches and chapels crowded their architecture upon him, too. White surplices were no more than ghostly in an incensed gloom. His father, the disgruntled, vicious, bigoted cathedral verger, was there, smiling; his lips drawn back over his teeth in the demonstration of a snarl.
Aubrey was frightened of the memory; not because of its potency, but because it seemed to herald an incontinence of mind that endangered him. It was an involuntary retreat from the present when he needed all his energies, all his concentration, simply to survive.
He looked up, visibly shaken, as Paul Massinger appeared at the door, unannounced. Aubrey's eyes narrowed in calculation and surprise — Castleford's face as they struggled was vivid and unnerving in his mind. He saw Massinger's handsome face register shock and he recalled Massinger's wife; Castleford's daughter. Then Aubrey pushed himself firmly to his feet.
"Paul, my dear fellow! How good of you to come…"
"Kenneth — you're all right? You look—"
"Yes, yes," Aubrey replied testily. "A little tired. Sit down, sit down."
Massinger chose Eldon's place on the sofa, opposite Aubrey.
Aubrey noticed the walking stick and the moment of discomfort as Massinger lowered himself into the cushions. The man's breath escaped in a sigh.
"I—" Massinger began.
"A drink?" Aubrey suggested, almost involuntarily beginning to control the situation.
"Thank you. Scotch and soda." When Aubrey had poured the drinks and reseated himself, Massinger blurted: "I — came to offer my help. I don't know how — it seems almost crazy now — but I wanted you to know—"
Aubrey leaned forward and patted Massinger's knee. "I know, my dear fellow. And — thank you." Then the past two days welled up in him uncontrollably, and he said: "They've abandoned me, Paul. The Cabinet Office, JIC — abandoned me."
"The ingratitude of princes?" Massinger's Bostonian accent had almost been eroded by his twenty years' domicile in London.
"Perhaps. They want to get rid of me, of course — they'd like to see the reins in Babbington's hands."
"I — see…" Aubrey saw in Massinger's face a keen hunger. His expression wore a sheen of excitement. Good. Massinger, despite having resigned from the CIA more than twenty years ago, was being drawn back into the secret world. The alcoholic who, years after his cure, takes the first drink. Massinger was eager once more for the gossip of the secret world, its machinations, perhaps even for its power. He saw help, too, of course. Massinger intended to help him if he could. There was in him an erect and certain loyalty to friends, and an almost priggish sense of right and wrong. In his desperation, Aubrey would take and use Massinger's help if he could. He prepared himself for another interrogation. Massinger said, his face gloomy, wrought-up: "There's nothing to all this nonsense, I suppose?" As Aubrey began emphatically shaking his head, he added: "You know why I'm asking, of course?"