Icelight Page 2

  The card was about the size of a wedding invitation. It showed his old rank, initials and surname, medal and degree. Below their typed names, the heads of MI6 and MI5, Sir Stewart Menzies and Sir Percy Sillitoe, had affixed their initials. From bottom left to upper right was a red ‘Top Priority’ stamp.

  Two civil servants came in, apologizing for being late.

  Cotton bowed out of the meeting, made a telephone call to Charles Portman at his office to tell them he was not coming back that day, put on his coat and went down the marble steps and through the revolving door. A Triumph 1800 was waiting at the kerb. Government departments had acquired a few of this new model. The car was called the ‘razor’ – from the side it resembled a Bentley that had been given a shave.

  The driver opened the back door for him and Cotton got in. The car smelt of new leather and Senior Service cigarettes.

  ‘Why aren’t you in St James’s Street?’ asked Ayrtoun.

  ‘Someone had a heart attack. I was filling in.’

  A fraction before Ayrtoun spoke, Cotton remembered Ayrtoun’s laugh included a loud snort.

  ‘Christ, you haven’t been reduced to waiting for the man in front of you to drop dead, have you? Driver!’

  The Triumph 1800 started up. At the end of King Charles Street they turned right towards the River Thames. It was a dull day and the Houses of Parliament looked more like a sooty silhouette than a real building against the grey sky.

  Ayrtoun yawned. ‘Do you know Croydon?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Cotton.

  The car rolled on to Westminster Bridge.

  ‘Then you won’t know of the Greyhound Hotel. Well, it’s a pub but quite a suburban meeting place. The Freemasons gather there in the functions room, the public bar reeks of beer and tobacco. But if you pause a little in the saloon bar you’ll find men with rather long eyelashes and dab hands at Brylcreem.’

  2

  COTTON SAID nothing. Instead he licked his teeth and cleaned his mouth. He had last seen Ayrtoun almost exactly a year before in Washington DC. He glanced sideways. As always, Ayrtoun was dressed in a blue, double-breasted suit and Wykehamist tie. He had a tartan rug over his knees and was holding a tin of fifty Senior Service cigarettes in his lap. Judging by the fug of smoke in the car, his strict ten-a-day habit had been abandoned.

  ‘Being away one forgets just how many pubs there are in London,’ Ayrtoun drawled. ‘They really are crawling distance apart.’

  Cotton had been entirely happy to hear nothing from or of Geoffrey Ayrtoun since December 1945.

  ‘I want to depress you as much as I can,’ said Ayrtoun.

  Cotton nodded. That was Ayrtoun. Ayrtoun smiled.

  ‘Did your father ever give you advice for life?’

  ‘Apart from a few things about money, he told me never to be impressed.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘There was his definition of intelligence.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘The ability to appreciate something without having experienced it.’

  Ayrtoun grunted. ‘That’s not bad.’ He lifted and gently shook his tin of cigarettes as if trying to gauge from the rattle how many were left. ‘I’m here because of American pressure,’ he said.

  Cotton nodded.

  ‘The Yanks are squeezing us,’ said Ayrtoun. ‘They’re worried about security. MI5 and MI6 have reacted by putting me in a painful pinch. It appears I am our cooperation. I am responsible for soothing American anxieties.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

  Ayrtoun laughed. ‘You’re going to help me handle a couple of minor problems I can’t ignore. But I assure you, your problems will be a sight less than mine.’

  ‘If I have a choice, I’ll say no then.’

  Ayrtoun smiled, almost affectionately. ‘Do you know the head of MI5?’

  ‘I know of him, of course,’ said Cotton. ‘Sir Percy Sillitoe?’

  ‘Right. A poor boy, you know.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He hasn’t made it to the inner circle. He was a colonial policeman in South Africa and Rhodesia. When he married in 1920, he and his wife were posted to Tanganyika. His wife hated it.’

  Cotton looked round.

  ‘He returned to the UK in 1922 and applied for jobs as a Chief Constable.’ Ayrtoun shook his head. ‘It took time but he did get Chesterfield and proved to be so brisk and effective that he was given Sheffield in 1926. Sheffield had a gang problem. He went through them like a dose of salts, introduced plain-clothes police and a concept of “reasonable force” that the politicians were able to overlook because he was effective.’

  Cotton glanced at Ayrtoun.

  Ayrtoun smiled. ‘Politicians always have problems with the deserving and the undeserving poor but usually don’t mind at all seeing thugs given a taste of their own medicine by someone, in political terms, discreet.’

  Cotton nodded.

  ‘Sillitoe was on his way,’ said Ayrtoun.’ He was rewarded, given an absolute plum – Glasgow in 1931. Do you know Glasgow at all?’

  ‘I’ve only passed through it,’ said Cotton.

  ‘Dirty, bloody place, at that time plagued by razor gangs,’ said Ayrtoun. ‘It took a decade, but Sillitoe broke them too. He had to sack a few hundred policemen, but he got non-Glaswegians in, introduced wireless radios, civilian informers and showed a ruthlessly creative use of the law.’ Ayrtoun smiled. ‘He arrested Billy Fullerton of the gang called the Billy Boys for being drunk in charge of an infant – Billy got ten months for that. Then he rounded up Billy’s lieutenants. He didn’t put them in jail, he put them in mental institutions. They were told they’d be committed without trial if they didn’t cooperate. It worked. Apparently there’s something about being kept in a straitjacket and having a male nurse wave a large syringe that convinces even the hardest of thugs.

  ‘In 1942 he was knighted and given the job of coordinating policing in the whole of Kent so as to facilitate the invasion of Europe. After that he retired and bought a sweet shop in Eastbourne.’

  ‘Having been a chief constable?’

  ‘Yes. That didn’t last of course.’ Ayrtoun was looking out of the window. ‘Some of these pubs have quite exotic names,’ he said. ‘Well, strange. The Crown and Gooseberry? What would that refer to?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Cotton.

  Ayrtoun smiled. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard of Guy Liddell?’

  ‘I have,’ said Cotton. ‘He’s the Soviet expert in MI5.’

  ‘And he remains so. But everybody expected him to take over as the new head of MI5 last May. Clever, experienced and all up to date as it were, ready for the new Soviet threat.’

  Ayrtoun pointed out another pub. It was called the Lamb and Flag. ‘I know that one,’ he said. ‘That means Christ and the Crusades.’

  ‘So why was Sillitoe given the job instead of Liddell?’ said Cotton.

  Ayrtoun smiled and held up the three middle fingers of his right hand. ‘In baseball, you get three strikes before you’re out. Strike one. Miss Ellen Wilkinson, who has served under Herbert Morrison in several ways, sometimes I hope with a degree of physical pleasure, told Morrison that our disreputable old friend, “sources in Europe”, had expressed reservations about Guy Liddell. Someone in a bar somewhere had suggested he might be a double agent.’

  Cotton raised his eyebrows. ‘Why would the Minister of Education have that information and feel it necessary to talk to the Home Secretary about MI5?’

  Ayrtoun shrugged. ‘Because Morrison is an ambitious, womanizing shit and Miss Wilkinson is rather needy and wants to serve him and have him be Prime Minister.’

  Cotton nodded. Not particularly at Ayrtoun’s language. He knew Ayrtoun was rarely as offhand or dismissive as he sounded.

  ‘If they have reservations about Liddell why is he still there?’ he asked.

  Ayrtoun laughed. ‘I did say I was trying to depress you. The Yanks were not too keen on him, either. In l
ate 1941 the poor man got a report from Germany that the Japanese were intending to attack Pearl Harbour. He immediately passed this on to the FBI. They claim to have handed it on to the White House, who claim they never got it.’ Ayrtoun looked round. ‘The Yanks now say he should have sent the report to the Department of Defense. Power means you get to be very particular about addresses and the right avenues.’

  ‘All right,’ said Cotton. ‘And what was the third thing against him?’

  ‘Ah. That’s a bit murkier and has something to do with our wretched class system,’ said Ayrtoun. ‘Social balance. Sir Stewart Menzies was born into the very rich. Liddell isn’t quite in that league but he was married to the Hon. Calypso Baring – yes, that’s Baring Brothers Bank – until she divorced him in 1943. The PM thought that choosing someone less advantaged as head of MI5 – a sweet-shop owner and ex-chief constable like Sillitoe, for example – would balance Menzies better, or at least a little more obviously.’ He paused. ‘You know, you’ve either been damned clever or extraordinarily lucky.’

  ‘Really?’ said Cotton. The last time he had seen him, Ayrtoun had sneered that by joining the Colonial Service, Cotton was choosing ‘the second eleven’.

  ‘I didn’t appreciate something you obviously did.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The extraordinary extent to which colonial structures pertain in the mother country. Sillitoe’s predecessor at MI5 was also a colonial policeman, a man who brought the techniques of Empire to deal with troublemakers here. Even the Labour Government thinks the Trade Unions are better treated as tribes, some more warlike than others.’

  ‘The miners are hardly Zulus,’ said Cotton.

  Ayrtoun reached down into his briefcase, extracted and flipped open a file and handed him a piece of paper. It was the copy of a marriage certificate issued in Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia in July 1943. The groom’s name was John Sillitoe, born in 1918 and his father was named as Sir Percy Sillitoe, Chief Constable of Glasgow.

  ‘Now that really is a secret,’ said Ayrtoun. ‘The boy’s mother is Mary Museba of the Bemba tribe. Oh, Sir Percy paid for the boy’s education, but his white wife and children have no idea. Nor, of course, does the Prime Minister.’ Ayrtoun held up a hand. ‘And just to balance this out, don’t forget that Sir Stewart Menzies’ first wife made the most gruesome accusations about his sexual tastes before she ran off with someone else, that his second wife is a depressive, an invalid, and that he is currently taking advantage of one of his secretaries, described in the latest report on her as ‘highly unstable with suicidal tendencies’.

  Cotton handed back the birth certificate. ‘Why are you telling me all this exactly?’

  ‘To give you some perspective, old man,’ snapped Ayrtoun. ‘Sillitoe has run slap bang into resentment at MI5 and has come amply supplied with the stuff himself. On his first meeting with the Prime Minister, he was given the wrong file and made to look a complete fool. He took it as a declaration of war by his own staff. You were at Cambridge, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’d loathe you, of course, as “book-learnt”.’ Ayrtoun smiled.

  ‘Sir Percy is fighting a war of attrition. Did you know the poor bastard is no longer privy to Cabinet minutes? Menzies is.’ Ayrtoun shook his head. ‘Attlee is much tougher than people think. Sir Percy may be the poor boy but he’s going to have to earn his minutes.’

  Cotton winced. ‘I take it the Americans are aware of his difficulties?’

  Ayrtoun laughed. ‘Let’s say Sir Percy has quite enough on his plate at the moment. That priority card you have in your pocket is your passport. Keep it safe.’

  ‘And Sir Stewart Menzies?’

  ‘He also has his hands full, I assure you. But both of them are au fait with something that is about to happen.’

  ‘Would that be something to do with Brylcreem? Open season on homosexuals?’

  ‘Right. The American pressure for us to tighten security is a gift to a pansy-crushing department run by a man called Robert Starmer-Smith. He’s assisted in legal and policing matters by an Inspector Radcliffe of Special Branch. Sir Percy is in no position to stop any of this but the Americans on the other hand are pleased to see any sort of action. MI6 is happy to stay out of it as long as their own buggers are left alone.’

  ‘What would my job be?’

  Ayrtoun was in no hurry. He lit another cigarette and puffed. ‘Damage limitation, I suppose you could call it.’

  Cotton sighed. They were on Streatham High Road. Ayrtoun pointed at the Goose pub.

  ‘And where does the Greyhound fit in?’ Cotton asked.

  ‘The love that dares not speak its name has watering holes and meeting places,’ said Ayrtoun.

  ‘All right,’ said Cotton.

  ‘What have they been giving you to do?’ asked Ayrtoun.

  ‘Colonial stuff,’ said Cotton unobligingly.

  Ayrtoun let out one of his spectacularly loud, snorting laughs. ‘Are you on for something a little more interesting?’

  ‘I’ve just been reading about Malaya,’ said Cotton. ‘I quite liked the sound of that.’

  Ayrtoun frowned. ‘Do you even know how long it’s been since I slept?’

  ‘No idea at all,’ said Cotton.

  Ayrtoun grunted and closed his eyes.

  At one level, Cotton was relieved. He preferred the uninterrupted whine and rumble of the vehicle to Ayrtoun’s voice. Ayrtoun had aged in a year, looked pasty, had put on some more weight. Never tall, he now looked like some spiteful, long-nosed Buddha. Someone in Washington had said ‘the problem with Ayrtoun is that he doesn’t so much brief you as lambast you. You have to pick through all that violence and translate.’ Cotton looked up. The driver had run into problems, got his directions confused. The Triumph made several turns before they got on to North End.

  Croydon had a bottleneck, caused by a narrowing of the road at the Whitgift almshouses. While they waited, some way back from the traffic-lights, Ayrtoun came to and looked across at a full triple window display of Snow White in the arcade of a department store.

  In its own way it was a remarkable thing, of solid wood beds and chairs and automaton figures, including blue birds moving on a wide halo-type circuit round Snow White herself, and the crackling sound of ‘Whistle While you Work’ from a loudspeaker.

  ‘Not much of a Christmas,’ said Ayrtoun, pointing at the window. ‘That’s pre-war, barely dusted off. The show’s grubby and the tinsel’s sad.’

  The lights changed and the car moved on. It did so slowly but did not stop, creeping along after the traffic-lights towards the High Street corner of the Surrey Street market.

  Ayrtoun sat up and made a beckoning gesture. A slight young man, dressed in a pale-tweed suit and brown brogues that could only have come from the black market, ran across the road and opened the front passenger’s door of the slow-moving car. He brought in chill and a faint smell of toffee apples, roasting chestnuts and something like overripe oranges.

  The young man jumped in beside the driver, slammed the door and removed his hat. He had blondish curly hair that had been much oiled.

  Ayrtoun sighed and pointed. ‘May I introduce you to Derek Jennings,’ he said. ‘The boogie-woogie bucal boy from Company Bum.’

  The boy had already shrunk down in his seat and was twitching his hat in front of his face as if it were something between a fan and a wide-brimmed mask.

  ‘Derek is affecting discomfort that he might be seen with us in a chauffeur-driven car. Absolute horse shit, of course. Unless, of course he doesn’t think the car quite grand enough.’

  Ayrtoun pointed again at Derek’s small, curly head.

  ‘I should inform you, Colonel,’ said Ayrtoun, ‘that Derek tells the Inland Revenue he works as a freelance journalist or stringer. At one level at least, one of the liberal or muck-raking professions, isn’t that right, Derek?’

  Derek did not answer.

  Ayrtoun cleared his throat and turned his head
a little towards Cotton. ‘He also works for us, of course. Five quid a week, isn’t it, Derek?’

  Derek did not reply. They passed the Swan and Sugarloaf pub.

  ‘Now that is a nice name,’ said Ayrtoun.

  When they reached the Red Deer, Ayrtoun spoke again.

  ‘I’ve been thinking of giving you a raise, Derek,’ he drawled, ‘commensurate with some new things you’re going to have to do. What would you say to … seven pounds ten?’

  ‘Better a tenner,’ said Derek.

  Ayrtoun laughed, apparently delighted. Even the driver let out a snigger.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Derek,’ said Ayrtoun. ‘I’m offering you fifty per cent more than you’re getting now. Do you understand that?’

  Derek nodded.

  ‘Of course, you also understand the offer is entirely conditional,’ Ayrtoun said. ‘You do realize that, don’t you? Let me repeat – there are some new things you’re going to have to do to earn it.’

  No one spoke. After about five hundred yards, the road turned again by the Royal Oak.

  ‘The person beside me,’ said Ayrtoun, ‘is Mr Cotton. Colonel Cotton as was. A real soldier, Derek. While you were fumbling with nylon stockings and ducking down alleys to get away from the police, he was hunting down and killing our enemies. You will be reporting to him. Now how can I put this? Whether dither or necks, Mr Cotton cuts through things. Is that clear to you? And he has assistants for less lethal work. One is a rather fearsome Jock, from Glasgow, who keeps piano wire and razor-blades in his hatband. Mm? I imagine for you a fate worse than death would be to have that waifish little face chopped up, wouldn’t it, Derek?’

  Cotton had never been cast as the bogeyman before, knew of no razor-wielding Jock assistant and was not sure how effective Ayrtoun’s words would be until he saw that Derek had been unable to resist glancing at him in the rear-view mirror. They were approaching a place called Purley.

  ‘Pull up near the cinema, will you, driver?’

  Ayrtoun got out a small pad the size of cigarette papers. ‘Jot down your telephone numbers, will you?’ he said to Cotton. ‘All right, Derek, out you get.’