Croxley drank the top off his beer and put the glass down carefully, thinking. A caricature of a man remembering: steady blue suit and quietly formal overcoat — going back to a time in the ranks in a distant war; gas masks in the cupboard under the stairs in Battersea and a conversation in the blackout with Burgess.
‘Witty? Even in drink?’
‘Oh yes. He had that ability — then. I don’t know about afterwards. I was on other work.’
‘He rather fell to pieces, I can tell you.’
‘Yes, but we never got him. He got away.’
‘He was just lucky.’
‘He had the confidence, though,’ Croxley insisted, ‘that brings the luck.’
‘A certain juvenile insouciance — that’s all.’
‘What?’ Croxley sipped again, perplexed. He was a straightforward man. The room was loud with chat and clatter but McCoy knew he’d heard him.
‘It wasn’t based on anything,’ McCoy went on. ‘He had nothing else. Just that confident good fellowship. So he had to push it like a lifeboat.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Croxley thought again, as though pondering an exam question. Then he turned, with hope: ‘Yes, he offered to get me a proper bottle of Scotch, I remember — not knowing my job of course. Cost price. Couldn’t be done with it. Said the black market was all wrong.’
‘I bet he did. Always had the right connections.’ McCoy paused, openly bitter. ‘A playboy. God knows even Moscow did their best to push him under the carpet when he got there.’
‘But he’d done his stuff by them. Covering for the others — Maclean, Philby. That was a certain skill. He knew we’d look right through a good-humoured classy drunk like him, never see a thing. Knew we’d notice his boozing, though, which would take the pressure off his friends. His indiscretions saved them all.’
McCoy turned away, curious at this sympathy. He felt a sudden unease standing next to this man who had once stood next to Burgess, in the very same spot. And though Croxley hadn’t let Burgess go, had played no part in that disaster, McCoy felt that he was somehow guilty by association, as if he had picked up some infection in that innocent drink he’d had with Burgess twenty-five years before, a disability which would tell in the coming hours with another traitor fifty yards down the street. McCoy looked round at the unchanged, ancient bar with its dark woods and barrels, its crusted panelling and ports and crystal, and thought there might be something buried here, in the wood or forever in its air — some gremlin or omen which favoured only the bad fairies, some hidden order which might reach out again at any moment, to protect the chancey, the dishonest, the laughter-makers, against all the ploys of honest people.
In fact, it was Croxley’s sympathy that had brought him to the top. He held a gentle fascination for the men he set out to trap. In another world they would have been among his closest friends at the Club. He appreciated their lying skills and secret humours, and failure to take them at the end had never soured his appetite, as it had McCoy’s.
It was so obvious, Croxley had always thought — a man, traitor to one side, was all the more necessarily hero to the other. And you had to recognise the other side of the coin whether you liked it or not. Other people had a right to their heroes, even if, as he knew, such men everywhere died miserably for little good.
They sipped their drinks again. McCoy thought he had spotted some sediment rising in his glass. But it was a trick of the light, golden motes above the counter caught in a sunbeam. The shower was dying outside.
Once they were sure the man was with the KGB, having tapped his phone, they had watched him for nearly two months, hoping to trace his contacts — from the Embassy, some other deep-cover ‘illegal’, or someone in the British forces or Intelligence. But he met no one. And no one had come near him. At first they assumed the man was sleeping or that he reported in some other extremely intermittent manner. Then, when they discovered he was making preparations to go abroad, they realised he was on transfer, marking time before his next posting, keeping his tail clean. At least, everyone except McCoy believed this. McCoy was still certain that he would make some contact before he left. And so Croxley and the others waited for orders to take him. McCoy was running the show.
‘Another week,’ McCoy had said. A fourth, then a fifth. This was the eighth week, close surveillance, round the clock, and Croxley had come to know their quarry, in his sympathetic way, like a friend one remembered in every detail but hadn’t spoken to for a long time — but a friend for all that, where the friendship would last no matter how long the parting. But he thought McCoy an optimistic fool who should have known better.
The man lived off Marylebone High Street, halfway up towards Regent’s Park, in a small flat above a firm of medical suppliers, and until a week before had gone every day to his present work as a Senior Reports Officer at the Central Office of Information in Westminster.
A week before, he’d finished his packing and there’d been a small party at his flat, saying goodbye to a few colleagues and friends. But he hadn’t left. They’d learnt that his booking on the New York boat wasn’t until a week later, and they’d watched him all the harder then — for surely, McCoy thought, this would be the week for some last contact, for some final check. But nothing happened. Even Croxley was initially surprised at this hiatus, while McCoy was incensed by it.
The man spent the week like a tourist, walking endlessly about the city, but with aims of sheer pleasure: he went to art galleries and museums in the morning, cinemas in the afternoons, theatres and restaurants at night. He had even fitted in the Tower of London and the Bridge as well. Croxley’s men had pursued him diligently, egged on by sighs of horror from McCoy. They skinned their eyes for a contact or a message drop. They had gone into public lavatories after him, rooting up tiles and destroying expensive flush systems. They had quizzed waiters, museum curators and vehement little ladies in the box-offices. They had stuck to him like clams, done everything but sleep with him, and had come up with absolutely nothing. He had spoken to no one, written nothing, dropped nothing nor picked anything up. He had fallen out of all his old life like a stone and come into pleasure like a tremendous inheritance.
McCoy had been involved in the chase from the start. The man had at one time worked indirectly for his section while he was with the British Council in Beirut. Almost certainly, McCoy thought, the KGB had recruited him there at the same time. Probably Henry Edwards had done the work. For Edwards, they’d discovered — just before his death in Cairo in 1967 — had been a senior KGB officer in British Intelligence for nearly twenty years.
And now, impossibly, like a bad joke long condemned, here was another man in that disastrous chain, one more character popping up in the big book of deceit, negligence and snobbery that had for so long characterised British Intelligence. It had started with Burgess and Maclean, then Philby, Blake and the others. And just when they’d thought it finished four years previously with Edwards, here was another ghost that had quietly laid ruin all about them, and who, when caught, would cause them more trouble still. For to catch a man like this was to publicly compound the vast defeat. Better to leave him free, some thought, with tabs on, than to win Pyrrhic victories at the Old Bailey.