Philby smiled. ‘Who was the interrogator?’
Andropov smiled with him. ‘That’s why I asked you here this afternoon — his name was Croxley, from the British Special Branch.’
‘Detective Inspector — probably Superintendent by now — Croxley. I knew him by reputation. MI5 wanted him put on to me but there was so much interdepartmental jealousy around Whitehall ten years ago it wasn’t difficult for my section to head him off. Besides he was junior then to the man I got — Skardon. Skardon was the man everyone feared and of course he was good. But Croxley was thought to be just as good — and he was younger. And stamina plays a big part in these question-answer games.’
‘Of course, the point struck me, Philby — if Croxley got this man Graham to break, why not the head of this conspiracy? What do you think of that?’
‘Yes, possibly. How would you get this Chief to England?’
‘He travels abroad from time to time. And if not, I’m sure we could find ways of getting him there and then breaking him to the authorities. He’d be taken to Croxley, wouldn’t he?’
‘Almost certainly. He must be the number one by now. The trouble is if Croxley failed to get anything out of him you’d lose your trail to the rest of the group. They’d just bang your key figure in jail for twenty years.’
‘Yes. Now what could you do to prevent that? Or rather, what precautionary steps would you take, as another string to the plan? so that you still had a chance of following the rest of the group up?’
Philby answered almost immediately. ‘What about this man George Graham? Could you replace him? Have Harper put somone else in his shoes and wait and see what messages, if any, were passed to him from above or beneath. Send him off to do whatever assignment Graham had been given — and see where it led him to? Use him as a stalking-horse.’
‘That’s a daring idea.’ Andropov considered it as if for the first time. Then he added sagely: ‘But I think you’re right. That’s exactly what the British are going to do — Harper has suggested it already — since, of course, they’re just as anxious as we are to try and follow this trail down the line, to pick up the rest of Graham’s KGB contacts. Our interests here coincide precisely: we want to find out who these men are just as much as they do. British Intelligence may in fact be able to do most of this job for us. There’s just one more point, Philby: a possible problem. The man they’ve chosen to replace George Graham: he’s an ex-British SIS officer, used to work in their Middle East section, Peter Marlow. Did you know him?’
‘Marlow?’ Philby was surprised. ‘Hardly an officer. More a clerk. He was in Information and Library. And he’s in jail now, isn’t he? A long sentence. We used him to get Williams clear three or four years back.’
‘Yes — but they’re going to spring him quickly. Point is he doesn’t seem the best choice for this sort of job.’
‘A complete amateur — from the little I know of him.’
‘That’s the problem. A weak link. You have a phrase for it, don’t you’ — and he went on in English — ‘“Fools jump in when angels go to bed.”’
Philby looked at Andropov with some embarrassment. ‘Yes, well, er — perhaps. On the other hand, look on the bright side: he’s served us far better than he has the British in the past — as regards Williams for example. He’s natural fall-guy material — I suppose that’s why they thought of him. After all, replacing a KGB officer in this way, if the contacts he’s after discover the deception — that’s not a healthy future.’
The two men nodded in agreement. The afternoon had died outside the window. The dark had run in over the city like an accident.
Book Three
1
The heavy prison buildings had ceased to interest me some while back. Before, during the first months — first couple of years indeed — I’d struggled against the bars as it were, knowing it was quite the wrong thing to do, that survival came from blocking out all the terrible minutiae of the place, all the insulting brick, and thinking of anything else.
Originally, to set against the hopeless impotent struggle I made against my anger, there had been twenty or so other prisoners in the new security wing, who, even if one saw them rarely, one could occupy one’s thoughts with. At exercise or in chapel — my goodness, how we all believed then — there was little opportunity for talk, but one soon got round that. The trick was to memorise the odd words, particular faces, momentary vignettes: how one man held his dinner knife like a penholder, another lifted a cup like a Duchess, a third spoke in the purest tones of Stockbroker Surrey. And then one would take this visual and aural booty back to one’s cell, to feed on it, rationing it out, during the eighteen hours solitary we did every day then. One’s company, in those few moments of company, became transfers which one took back and coloured in one’s mind, vehemently, with daring strokes and bright hues, giving the train robbers and rapists a brilliance which, despite their previous activities, they never possessed inside. Men who had hiked a million from a mail train and had had the imagination to invest most of it in Post Office bonds before they were caught, here became monumental nonentities, empty spirits, razed tablets. So that afterwards — at the end of table tennis or Steptoe and Son in the hall — I would bring these skeletons back with me to my cell and put flesh on them bit by bit, and then set them moving as bearable, even interesting companions.
I would take a single characteristic of a man I’d exchanged no more than a few words to at exercise, a child murderer perhaps — a habit, say, of rocking on the balls of his feet, hands dug deep into his jacket pockets, and from this isolated trait I would form a whole new character and set him free in some happy context.
From such unpromising material one formed a whole repertory of imagined characters and serial dramas and I eventually learnt to occupy myself continuously with my unknown friends about the building in this way. All one needed, like a sleeping pill, was that one initial characteristic, some dull reality — a certain hairstyle or an extended ear lobe — which then became a talisman for all sorts of high and quiet adventure. Some people, I learnt — often those of an academic or artistic bent — think of nothing but violent sport in prison, motor racing and such like, pursuits which they had no interest in whatsoever when they were free. I on the other hand, who had once been fond of such athletic activities, would create fantasies of leisured, rather donnish talk in musty circumstances — a recreation I should have loathed in the real world.
A long prison sentence, inexorably, invents and opens up all the possibilities of the world for you — a lifetime’s subscription to the National Geographic magazine running through one’s head night after night. That, indeed, is the punishment. One creates the Monaco Grand Prix or the easy chat at the high table with a sharpness and reality which is only matched by the subsequent realisation that such things can never be part of your future. Thus one comes to regret one’s imagination. And the hours that you had looked forward to, alone with it, building the world, become hours dogged with the knowledge of a sour end — like evenings with a girl that you enjoy as much as ever in an affair that she has told you has no future.
So it had been for me in Durham. In the first two years there had been my anger; anger at being framed by Williams to save his skin — an anger so fierce that for days on end I thought it would literally eat me away with its violence, an anger that was absolutely isolated, a monument on an empty plain. And because of it I couldn’t talk, or eat or sleep then. Later, when I had come more to ‘accept matters’ (yes, learning to live in prison is like coming to terms with the loss of someone loved, even though it was oneself) there had been the brief company of the others, and, for all its dying falls, there were the invented Odysseys and conversations I’d made with them. But then Mountbatten’s ‘top-security’ reforms were questioned; his idea of corralling so many dangerous louts together seemed an increased risk, and one by one my library of characters was dispersed to other jails so that eventually, by the spring of 1971, there were only half a dozen of us left in ‘E’ wing and finally only one other man, one of the train robbers, whom I barely saw at all.