Icelight

  Also by Aly Monroe

  The Maze of Cadiz

  The Washington Shadow

  Icelight

  Aly Monroe

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by John Murray (Publishers)

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Aly Monroe 2011

  The right of Aly Monroe to be identified as the Author of the Work

  has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  All characters in this publication – other than the obvious historical

  figures – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or

  dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British

  Library

  eISBN 978-1-84854-491-8

  John Murray (Publishers)

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  To Inés

  born 15 September 2010

  1

  THREE DOORS down from Peter Cotton’s office in London there was no door. Nearly five years before, on 10 May 1941, the last night of the Blitz, in a raid that inflicted considerable damage to many buildings, including the Houses of Parliament and St James’s Palace, one bomb dropped from one of 550 German bombers had scored a direct hit on a Georgian town house.

  Standing in St James’s Street, directly in front of where the house had been, the right-hand wall was bare, blackened brick, revealing only how slapdash Georgian bricklayers were when their work was not on view. About twenty per cent of the back wall retained vestiges of what had been there, and the left-hand wall even had ragged remnants of the floors. Like a house-sized display cabinet marked out by strips where the dividing walls had been, that side exposed a human-scale domestic hopscotch. It had retained some chimney pieces, one decidedly grand in yellow and white marble on the first floor, something plainer and more discreet on the second, and bits of a small, metal fireplace at the very top. There was also a weathering patchwork of paint and ragged wallpaper – a block of stained red flock, something torn, green and leafily Chinese above it, and a thick patch as brown as Windsor soup at the top for the servants.

  The most striking thing was an ornate cast iron bath still clinging to what remained of the third floor. It tilted and one foot of the bath was in the air, and on clear days it was possible to see that it was being held up by the battered water pipes, wrenched out of the tiled wall and now resembling twisted copper and lead creepers.

  ‘Another bloody bath!’ said Charles Portman. Portman was usually called the Office Manager but much preferred to see himself as akin to a Company Secretary. His tone struck Cotton as remarkably similar to his father’s when some carol singers had come round the Christmas before. ‘Not more bloody singers!’ Cotton didn’t know quite what Portman meant – that because so many baths had been exposed by German bombs the sight of baths in distress was getting vulgar or trite? That someone else should have done something about them? But his tone had all the plaintive, put-upon huff of an old-style Whitehall stickler finding himself inconvenienced. At least Cotton’s father had had to respond, open the door and put on a smile, before he said ‘Well, I hope you’re better than the last lot.’ Any inconvenience to Portman was entirely assumed. For Cotton, Portman’s exasperation was just one more of the dreary, uselessly surreal reactions of 1946. Britain’s plumbing had been exposed.

  Their office was near the corner with Ryder Street. It was called temporary and consisted of four floors of an Edwardian building above the discreet showroom and London commercial office of a manufacturer of coal- and wood-burning stoves and ranges based in Stirling in Scotland. The Colonial Department of the Intelligence Services had a separate entrance and a staircase too narrow to admit more than one person at a time. Cotton worked on the first available floor. Above him was the Africa floor, the Asia floor and the Rest of the World floor.

  For the first five months of 1946 (while Portman attempted, unsuccessfully, to have the range manufacturer evicted as ‘unfitting’) Cotton was set to quantifying the costs of intelligence work in West Africa. In this he was assisted by a reluctant seconded civil servant called Stiles – ‘I am administrative grade, sir, not executive’ – and an insistently delicate secretary called Phyllis he had to share. ‘Now I don’t want to get flustered’ was one of her favourite remarks. ‘I really don’t.’

  Cotton was told that this task would amount to ‘an incisive insight’ into the colonies. By May however, he had learnt quite enough of the workings of Whitehall to report to the Head of Colonial Intelligence, Sir Desmond Brown, that he thought it ‘germane’ to mention that ‘the team’ were actually going to produce quantified costs, and that some ‘possible anomalies had come to light’.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  As an example, Cotton showed him that The Gambia (a very small colony) and Nigeria (a very large one) claimed to have the same intelligence budget, while Sierra Leone (a small colony) had more than either.

  ‘That’ll be the damned diamonds,’ muttered Sir Desmond. He looked up. ‘Have MI5 and MI6 collaborated on these figures?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Cotton. ‘They refused to cooperate.’

  This meant that the sizeable amounts tracked down represented only one small part of what was actually being spent on Colonial security.

  ‘Well, I don’t think we really want to involve the Treasury at this stage,’ said Sir Desmond. ‘After all, we don’t have all the pertinent information, do we?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Sir Desmond congratulated Cotton on his progress, took over the files – ‘These are all of them?’ he asked – and Cotton was sent on a month-long course to a sizeable, extraordinarily gloomy Victorian country house in Buckinghamshire. There he had to dress for dinner served by uniformed maids but eat food reminiscent of school, though accompanied by wine and, for those who wished, supplemented by port and Stilton. During the day he attended classes, might listen, for example, to a military historian on classical strategies in the morning and, after lunch, to an unidentified person with a handle-bar moustache on counter-insurgency techniques. He also took part in what were called ‘exercises’. These varied from possible choices in situations called hypothetical but often based on real life operations, to debates on what were called ‘issues of the day’.

  When considering what university to go to, Cotton had been told that he was a Cambridge man, not an Oxford one. He had never properly understood why until listening to the man who was running th
e course, an Oxford don. In a peculiarly unctuous voice, the don explained to them, as if they were undergraduates, that the British Government had embarked on a disastrous over-commitment: it was spending heavily to maintain the country as a world military power and had also insisted on an expensive policy of nationalizations and the establishment of a welfare state, all while ignoring the creation of wealth that made such policies practicable. Luckily Britain had a bulwark against politicians. It was called the Civil Service.

  Cotton was now getting restless, and mentioned this to his father when he visited him in Peaslake after the course ended at the end of June.

  ‘If you’ve made a mistake you’ll just have to stick to it you know. You’ve only been there for six months.’

  Cotton grunted. ‘The old “keep calm and carry on” has become “keep quiet, and do please try to look complacent”!’

  His father frowned at him. ‘It was all right to be spoiling for a fight during the war, of course it was. But things are going to take time to get back to normal.’

  ‘I’m not sure we are going to get back and I’m not sure that “normal” has not moved on. All we’ve got now is more rationing – that’s less of everything. I’ve just done a month surrounded by people whose shirts are fraying, but with maids bobbing at us. We get time off work to queue for two ounces of cheese. I can’t get my shoes repaired. The clothes ration is notional and never quite becomes material enough to wear.’

  James Cotton looked pained. ‘Well, I’ve dug out some things.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I had a lot of shirts made in Mexico. Some I haven’t even worn. They might help.’

  Though slightly short in the sleeves and tight at the collar, the six shirts had been cut on an ample width for a hot climate. They felt odd in London, too delicate, too light and slippery under Cotton’s two heavy suits. But they felt new.

  At the beginning of July, Cotton returned to St James’s Street to find a group of German POWs had removed what he thought of as Portman’s bath from the bombed house. He stopped and pointed upwards. Despite the summer, the POWs were all wearing greatcoats, and the corporal who spoke to Cotton had a rag tied round his right boot to keep upper and sole together.

  ‘The bath,’ said Cotton. ‘How did you get it down?’

  The corporal smiled and got one of his companions to hold up a length of scaffolding. The scaffolding was hollow and at one end they had jammed a half-moon edging tool, the kind of thing used to cut turf.

  ‘Cut pipe,’ said the corporal making a jabbing movement. He made a face. ‘Mostly poke. Then crash!’

  The POWs had no guard or supervision as they sorted through the rubble. They did have two carts and two huge dray horses. In one cart Cotton saw the bath, the door of a cooking range, bits of a flattened galvanized water tank, a bell-pull, and what was left of a chandelier – it had lost its crystal decoration and looked like some stripped winter vegetable. The other was for wood, from the looks of what was left of a charred solid mahogany table and more obvious examples of firewood.

  ‘Suffolk horses,’ said the corporal.

  Cotton nodded and pointed to where the grand fireplace had been. The corporal shrugged.

  ‘Onteek,’ he said – and it took Cotton a moment to understand he was saying ‘antique’ and, given his subsequent shrug, that ‘dealer’ came after it.

  The POWs had started a fire to burn off what could not be salvaged and to cook some potatoes in a pot. The corporal indicated the space the house had occupied.

  ‘Rich woman,’ he said. ‘Lady-in-waiting.’

  Cotton nodded. ‘Where are you stationed?’

  ‘Hendon,’ he said. ‘Usually? We walk. Six miles here. Six miles there. Bigger problem is brewery. They want horses back. So they don’t give us mash any more. We scrounge.’

  ‘The antique dealer?’

  ‘Naturally,’ said the corporal mildly. ‘Turnips, one big sack. Oats, four bags. Some carrots.’ He smiled and shrugged. ‘Too cheap. But no shit, no roses.’

  The corporal showed him a hand-drawn map of the area, with the bombsites they had already cleared and those they still had to do. They had forty-three bomb-sites altogether and had cleared thirty-eight. The corporal explained they had a keen interest in the different types of bomb. From their point of view incendiary bombs had been best.

  ‘They cleared everything for us.’

  Their main fear was the risk of unexploded bombs. He pointed at the almost demure heap of rubble, some of it now sprouting weeds.

  ‘Clink,’ said the corporal. ‘It’s hard to avoid clinks. If ever you see us running, you run too.’

  Cotton turned and looked around him. A uniformed maid was pushing a baggage trolley with three cases of wine up the hill. As Cotton watched, the poor girl suffered what was usually called ‘an elastic incident’ – the waist of her knickers parted. Immediately she snatched at them in a twisting motion by her right hip. The trolley started to tip. Expressionless as a tango dancer, she swung her hips back and lifted one leg from the knee to secure the cases of Château d’Yquem, and then tied a knot in her uniform. Her exposed shoe had a wooden sole, a poor substitute for leather.

  The German corporal grunted, a noise that made approval sound like desire. ‘Now she,’ he said, ‘is a good worker.’

  At his office building, Cotton saw that the stove and range manufacturers had applied some paint to their showroom. It was undeniably grey, quite near battleship grey, but it had become the brightest, freshest thing in the street. Apart from that and the Germans, the only observable activity was that the bomb-damaged Bunch of Grapes pub in Jermyn Street was repaired and open for business again.

  By November, when mist and soot mingled in the cold, Cotton was taking comfort that he was due for a review early in the New Year. One of his considered options was resignation. He was now working on the Sterling Area. While the British Government emphasized the beneficent effects of civilization that Empire had brought, it had to place this against the need to limit expenditure and grab as much as it could in dollar earnings from the colonies and dominions. Someone had worked out that ‘nationalist groups’ in colonies might notice this.

  At a large, very bad tempered meeting in Whitehall in the second week of December, Cotton heard an officer ask why ‘the teeth of the British working class should be more valued than the welfare of my black charges.’

  More impressively, an elderly gentleman from the Indian Civil Service wearing a winged collar and striped trousers described the Treasury’s behavior as ‘equal measures of incompetence and arrogance’. He went on at some length, and during his clear and probably entirely accurate portrayal of Treasury dishonesty, a man turned to Cotton and whispered.

  ‘No gong now.’

  Cotton did not quite hear. The man expanded.

  ‘The old buffer is burning his boats! After years of service he has decided to ruin his retirement for the sake of what he wants to believe are his principles.’

  There was a break for refreshments. Cotton saw the old man was shaking from fatigue and indignation. He felt some sympathy, but he didn’t want to be like that.

  That evening he began writing a letter to his sister. Joan lived in New York, was married to a banker called Todd Buchanan and had three children. The year before, they had encouraged him to think of making his life in the US.

  ‘The future is here,’ Todd had said. ‘Great Britain is over. Give yourself a chance, Peter. Make your life in Manhattan. Here we have possibilities that are not limited and not reduced.’

  On Friday, 13 December, Peter Cotton went into work to learn from Portman that a senior Colonial Intelligence agent called Leonard Lloyd had suffered a serious heart attack and was now in Charing Cross Hospital. Lloyd handled the desk for Malaya, Singapore and the Straits Settlements.

  When Charles Portman asked him to take over ‘for the time being’, Cotton surprised himself. His first reaction was pure Whitehall: not me. He softened it when he s
poke.

  ‘You do know I know next to nothing about Malaya.’

  ‘You wrote that paper on dollar earnings,’ said Portman.

  ‘But that was about dollars. I wrote about Malaya because it’s such a high dollar earner, and we need to get rubber and tin production up. I don’t really know anything about the place.’

  ‘The desk has to be manned,’ said Portman. ‘In any case, all you’ll really be doing is listening and taking notes. You have a meeting in King Charles Street at eleven this morning.’

  ‘Christ! Can’t we cancel?’

  ‘Sir Desmond says we don’t cancel.’

  Cotton groaned and accepted a very large file. As he flicked through it he did find enough material for a brisk vicarious holiday – words like ‘batik’ and ‘sarongs’, and a fruit called ‘rambutan’.

  Around ten o’clock he was interrupted. Charles Portman put his head round the door.

  ‘Bad news, I’m afraid. I’ve just heard Lloyd died about nine this morning. They did everything they could, of course. The funeral will be private but doubtless there will be a memorial service later. I’ll keep you informed.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Cotton. ‘How old was he?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ said Portman. ‘Early forties?’

  ‘Wife? Children?’

  ‘Certainly a wife. One, perhaps two children? Lived in Epsom, I think. Sad business,’ said Portman, and left.

  Cotton closed the file, then reopened it and flicked to the political part.

  At eleven o’clock, Cotton was in an empty office at the Whitehall end of King Charles Street. There was an oil painting of a muddy hunting scene above an unlit fire, a round table and four chairs.

  The door opened and a secretary came in.

  ‘Is there somebody here called Colonel Cotton?’

  Cotton nodded and she gave him an envelope.

  He opened it. Inside was a small, whitish bit of paper, more scrap than sheet, and a stiff card suitable for invitations.

  The small note told him that a car was waiting for him downstairs and that he should make his excuses for the rest of the day.