‘Delirious?’ McCoy asked, suddenly interested.
‘He was, well, babbling rather. Yes.’
‘Goodness me!’ McCoy was thoroughly aroused. ‘How did you manage that?’
‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. The point was he mentioned a letter drop in New York, a private mailbox at Grand Central station, when he was cloudy, so to speak. Afterwards we … we, er, taxed him on that, when he was clearer in the head. And he denied having ever mentioned such a thing. But we had a recording. And eventually the whole thing came out: what he said was this — and I think he must have been inventing it all, as a blind — but he said he was a member of a dissident liberal group within the KGB. Gave us details — which we couldn’t possibly check. Then he came onto our side about it all. It’s in my report. He pleaded with me to let him go, to carry on with this work, saying that the West should help support this group, that it was a vital lever for change in the Soviet Union. Well, you’ll have to pass on the stuff to your political experts. It’s my view that it was sheer bluff. I can’t see the KGB riddled with dissidents. Least of all with this man Flitlianov heading them.’
‘He said that, did he? Flitlianov’s head of their Second Directorate, in charge of all internal security. Unlikely, to say the least. And this letter drop in New York — this was to communicate with the other dissidents in the group?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have the number of it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, we can put tabs on it through the FBI. See who goes there, who took the box out. That won’t be difficult. And I’ll pass that part of your report on to the politicals. But I agree, it seems a complete blind. That box was surely there for him to report on his activities against the official KGB networks in America. And that’s the horse we should ride — if we ride anything.’
Croxley nodded. ‘I should have thought so.’
‘Come on then — let’s take a look at him.’
Graham was in one of the special cells with a one-way observation glass let into the top half of the door. McCoy was surprised at his demeanour. He was sitting at a small table, pen in hand over some scribbled paper. But he was writing nothing now. The pen jumped every so often, involuntarily. His eyelids flickered continuously, twitching in awful duet with his eyebrows. A lot of his hair had come away from the top of his head, so that, from having been a Brylcreem Boy on a hoarding three days before, he now had the air of some badly eccentric academic, ten years older, a scalp ravaged like a bird’s nest after a hawk, the hairline shrunk all about his head. He still wore his tweed jacket. But there were purple stains down its back which McCoy couldn’t understand. It was as if something entirely unnatural, some terrible physical mutation, had overcome the man, enabling him to twist his head round by 180 degrees, to be violently sick in reverse. There was the remains of some uneaten, or picked at, or vomited food by a plastic bowl on the floor. One couldn’t tell what process it had undergone. A dog, it seemed, was occupying the room.
Three days ago he had been a quiet man-about-town. But those few days had done ten years’ damage to him. He was like someone who had been abroad for a long time, in a hard country; someone whom one had remembered leaving with hope and vigour and had returned unexpectedly damaged beyond repair.
‘What’s he writing?’
‘He insisted on it. His “confession”. But there’s nothing there. Nothing to confess. He gave it all before. He can’t write. Can’t really even think now. Do you want to see him? I’m afraid —’
‘No. No, there’s nothing I can do. Nothing.’ McCoy spoke quickly, like a doctor surprised in a morgue. He had thought for so long that when you caught a traitor, he would remain more or less the same man; there would still be the evidence of his treachery in him. He believed that deceit had an ineradicable lineage, and was now vastly surprised by his mistake. This man was so changed he might have been born anew. The footsteps where he had come through life had been completely erased.
Yet McCoy had thought that Graham, when caught, would release the mysteries, explain the hidden trails, give him a fair picture at last of those border lands — all the exact colours of his temptation and betrayal. Instead, he saw just a shape now, not a man, something quite mutilated which could now never be repaired, only replaced.
‘It’s not pleasant.’ Croxley looked through the one-way glass.
‘It’s what happens. I’ve no doubt it would be a lot more unpleasant elsewhere,’ McCoy said unctuously.
‘New for us, though. They developed it in Aden. And Belfast. Black bags and wind machines. We can still beat the world in some developments. Some development this …’
‘It must make your work a lot easier.’
‘Takes all the skill out of it. Like taking sweets off a seven-year old.’
‘What do you expect? Development. You said it yourself. He’s alive, after all.’
‘Of course.’
‘He’s breathing. Plenty of places where he wouldn’t be.’
‘No, he’s not dead.’
‘No. No, indeed. So?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t call it progress. Sounds more like redundancy to me.’
‘I’ll read your report.’
McCoy took a last look at the man. A collection of broken pieces. What had he ever looked like originally? McCoy could barely remember now. Yet he wanted to remember, for he wanted someone very soon to look like him — wanted a replica of that happy man who had strolled around the galleries and restaurants with a sweet tobacco drifting in his trail.
McCoy left Croxley and walked up Whitehall. The principal outlines were clear: someone around forty, well-built, with fluent Arabic; someone who had known Beirut and Cairo well, who had lived there; someone with experience, yet who had worked out of any limelight; not someone currently in the field, even if there was time, for Moscow could well have tabs on such a person. Someone at home, then, with Arabic and therefore from his own section — skilled, but at the same time relatively dispensable, for the chances of success were less than fifty-fifty. It was more than a difficult combination; such a man was a contradiction in terms.
He talked the whole matter over with his deputy, John Harper, showing him Croxley’s report, when he got back to Holborn, in the front office of the new building with the Hepworth abstract in the forecourt. And they seemed to have got nowhere by the time Rosalie brought them a second coffee at midday.
Harper had stood up and gone to the window, looking down on the stream of secretaries fluttering out into the sun, leaving for an early lunch from the front entrance. Navy Recruitment, appropriately, it was said, came and went by the back door.
Harper seemed to be picking up each of the figures with his eyes, examining them closely, turning them over in his mind, before replacing them gently on the pavement all unawares. Among other things Harper was responsible for internal security within the building. Then he turned and with unnecessary, heavy elaboration picked up his coffee cup and drew it slowly towards his lips. McCoy hated these silent dramatics that Harper went in for, hated his meddlesome, pugnacious, Australian face. Harper had the querulous, unsatisfied expression of a vet who has been struck off the register for unnatural practice.
‘Marlow,’ Harper said at last. ‘Peter Marlow that was. He has all those qualifications. Every one, except experience in the field. But then Graham doesn’t seem to have had much of that either.’
McCoy narrowed his eyes, as if about to start a difficult position in yoga.
‘Marlow. You remember. The Scapegoat. Three years ago, or was it longer? The man Williams insisted on sending down for that Cairo business. The Cairo-Albert circle. The fellow Moscow framed, using his ex-wife — got a bag over her head, put her in a plane out of Cairo and let Der Spiegel photograph her outside GUM next day. Marlow got twenty-eight years for it as I remember. A costly affair …’