Patrick’s mother hovered in the doorway.
‘Darling, we’ll be fine,’ the Colonel said. ‘You needn’t worry.’ And the smile he sent his wife was a dismissal.
As she left, he wheeled himself towards the table and his book, retrieving, as he went, a glass decanter from a nearby shelf. ‘You’ve changed your hair,’ he said. ‘I can’t say I approve. I’m rather fond of red hair on a woman.’ The decanter, like his nearly empty glass, held dark red liquid. ‘Port,’ he told me, with another smile. ‘A particular weakness of mine, I’m afraid. I always did like a nice glass of port of an evening. Would you care to join me?’
Ever the charmer, I thought. Only now, I was immune. All I saw was a man who’d done murder; who’d ordered my grandmother’s murder, and Deacon’s; who’d stolen my own life as surely as if he had killed me, as well. It was all I could do to control my emotions – to stand there without giving vent to my rage. But I knew that my only hope now of defeating the man was to make him feel comfortable; get him to talk. To confess.
I accepted the wine he held out, though I had no intention of drinking it.
Standing, I watched him refilling his glass; watched his face. He hadn’t changed much from his photographs. Men didn’t change much, as a rule. And yet I’d failed to see it. As with Deacon, when I’d met the Colonel weeks ago, I’d seen an old man, nothing more.
Now it was obvious, even without the moustache, who he was.
‘I must say, I expected you sooner,’ he said, settling back in his wheelchair, the glass in one hand. ‘I told the others. They underestimated you rather badly, I believe.’
‘But you didn’t?’
‘Well, perhaps just a little.’ The smile had retreated to his eyes. ‘I should imagine you have questions. Do sit down.’
‘I’d rather stand, thanks.’
‘I’m an old man, in a wheelchair. Hardly a danger.’
I couldn’t let that pass. ‘Tell my grandmother.’
He’d been about to drink, but he lowered his glass. ‘Ah, your grandmother. Yes, that was unavoidable. They thought she was too great a risk.’
‘“They”?’
His eyes indulged me. ‘I’m an old man, in a wheelchair,’ he repeated. ‘What I did, I did a long, long time ago, when I was young. I couldn’t do it now. You surely don’t believe that I could kill a man with these?’ He held his hands towards me, veined and frail.
I didn’t answer. But I’d learnt to never underestimate the elderly. Age and frailness notwithstanding, I would not have turned my back to him.
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘It was different then. One had ideals, you see. Time steals those from us, one by one – you’ll find that out yourself, when you get old, like me. You’ll find that the things you once held to be truths will seem ridiculous, unworthy…but in those days…’ He broke off, and paused. ‘Your generation’s never been to war. You couldn’t hope to understand.’
‘I understand the difference between killing someone in a war, in combat, and cold-blooded murder.’
‘Do you, now? I wonder.’ Looking down, he tilted his glass so that the port inside it caught the light, a clear, deep red, like blood. ‘Would you care to hear my version of the story?’
I’d been counting on the offer. Moving as close as I dared, I selected an armchair that backed onto the bookcases, facing both him and the door. As I sat, I felt the thin line of wire press into my skin, and I hoped they were hearing this, down in Nick’s van, at the foot of the drive. ‘Yes, I would,’ I said.
John Lawrence Cayton-Wood – ‘JL’ to acquaintances and ‘Jack’ to friends and family – had been born into that elevated level of society where everything he would become was already decided. He’d obediently followed on the path his parents set for him – first boarding school, then Eton; then, because he was a second son, and by tradition in his family second sons took a commission in the army, he had finished off his schooling at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Coming out an officer, he’d found himself, a few years later, fighting in North Africa. El Alamein had ended his career.
He’d refused, out of pride, to return home a cripple. And since the wound in his leg had stubbornly resisted proper healing, he had looked around for prospects outside England. An old friend of the family had put him in touch with the man who had, at that time, wielded the greatest influence over all business done at the harbour in Lisbon, and Cayton-Wood, offered a job, had accepted, though his sights had been set, even then, on the highest position. He’d turned the whole of his intellect to that task, and after three months of plotting and intriguing he had managed to disgrace, and then displace, the man who’d hired him.
Settled in the top office, he’d soon developed a comfortable lifestyle, moving freely among the elite men and women of Lisbon society; dances and parties and Embassy functions and glittering nights at the local casinos. It had been at an Embassy luncheon, in fact, when he’d first been asked whether he’d be interested in doing secret work to help his country. His connections, he’d been told, were unmatched; his background impeccable; his abilities obvious.
Faced with such flattery, he had said yes. At the time that he had been recruited into it, the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, had been focusing resources on Spain and Portugal. The SIS – also widely known as MI6 – was in charge of all British intelligence work done on non-British soil. It had several branches, and one – Section V, as in ‘Victor’ – was dedicated to counter-espionage, meaning that it gathered information on all secret foreign operations being planned against the British. Portugal and Spain were fertile hotbeds of such plans, in those years. Lisbon, in particular, with all its foreign agents moving openly amongst each other, lent itself to careful observation.
Cayton-Wood began by finding and recruiting, on his own, a web of sub-agents, almost all of them Portuguese nationals, all of them strategically located, who could keep him well informed. Some he found in the households of foreign ambassadors; some in the better hotels. And of course, he had Vivian Spivey. He’d met Spivey one day by chance, at the harbour, and though they were not of the same social class, he’d been aware of what he’d gain by being friendly to the man. Spivey worked for Reynolds.
Ivan Reynolds didn’t like Jack Cayton-Wood. He’d said so to his face, and to as many other people who would listen. Not that it did Cayton-Wood any harm, because Reynolds himself wasn’t really well liked, but it did create difficulties from an intelligence perspective. Reynolds’s oil was a vital resource for the British, though his loyalties were suspect. Spivey could keep Cayton-Wood informed of shipping movements, but his snooping round the offices was limited by co-workers. Even Regina, with her greater access to Reynolds’s mail and his phone calls, could not get as close to the man as the SIS wanted. So, since Reynolds snubbed Cayton-Wood socially, no course was left but to bring in a new man; a new agent.
Deacon.
From the start, Cayton-Wood didn’t care for him. He favoured men with weaknesses; with vices he could turn to his advantage. A man who liked drink, or young women, or boys, could be bribed along, or threatened with exposure. Andrew Deacon was, in Cayton-Wood’s opinion, quite the worst sort of a man to have to work with: He was honest.
Worse still, he was observant, and intelligent – both qualities that made him rather dangerous to Cayton-Wood. Because, for several months now, Cayton-Wood had been discreetly sharing information with the Spanish. Nothing vital, in his view. But, having long shared Winston Churchill’s own opinion of the Soviet regime, that it was a disease bent on spreading like cancer across the whole world, Cayton-Wood had thought it unforgivable that certain facts should not be shared with Franco, who’d made such a valiant stand against the communists. That Franco’s sympathies lay with the Axis hardly mattered, not when one took in the broader picture, because when this current war was over, with the British and Americans triumphant, it was obvious their guns would then be turned towards what Churchill called the ‘poison peril’ in the E
ast – and Spain, in that fight, would be once again their ally.
Cayton-Wood’s conviction that the Spanish ought to be informed of certain British plans that might affect them might have remained only that – a conviction – had it not been for Manuel Garcia, who’d walked into the British Embassy one morning with an offer to turn double agent if he and his wife could be promised safe passage to England, to start a new life, at the war’s end.
Garcia was not the first enemy agent to offer his services. By that late stage of the war, when it seemed almost certain the Allies would win, a great many foreign agents had left their sinking ships and were already ‘doubled’, sending useless information back to their home countries under tight British control.
For someone like Manuel Garcia, who transmitted his reports each week by radio, the usual procedure was for Cayton-Wood to choose a lesser agent, fluent in Morse code, who’d act as the controller; who’d accompany Garcia every week to the transmission site and sit beside him, making sure he said what he’d been told to say – a mix of truths and half-truths and straight lies, designed to misinform the enemy and steer his forces in the wrong direction.
But Cayton-Wood hadn’t let anyone else be Garcia’s control. He had done it himself. He’d been able, that way, to send any and all information he thought should be sent. He’d thought it one of the more amusing ironies of his business that Garcia, who considered himself a traitor to Spain, was in fact being one of its most useful agents.
There were a few bumps, of course. Someone – he didn’t know who – had got wind of the leak, and was trying to trace it. But Cayton-Wood managed to steer the suspicion to Reynolds.
A neat trick…except it brought Deacon, now, into the picture. And Deacon, disturbingly, chose to make friends with Garcia.
While Garcia didn’t know that his reports to Spain were full of truths and not misinformation, Cayton-Wood knew Deacon wouldn’t be so easy to deceive. One stray comment from Garcia would be all that it might take, and Deacon’s too-sharp brain would do the rest. He’d be on to the game in a heartbeat.
The solution, of course, would have been to have Deacon shipped back to New York, and given Cayton-Wood’s ruthless expertise in all things underhand, it should have been a simple thing to do, but Deacon proved to be a harder person to get rid of than the other men he’d targeted.
And then had come the 28th of January, and the cutting off of Allied oil supplies to Spain. And Cayton-Wood had seen, almost immediately, how he could, with one move, help the Spanish and dispose of Deacon.
The idea of an oil embargo was, to him, ridiculous, and reckless. Franco’s forces were already doing all they could to hold a brave line against the communists, but the danger remained. Taking away the country’s oil would hurt the common people, bring them hardship, make them suffer. They would protest, and the communists would use that to their own advantage, seeking to destabilise the government.
That had to be prevented, at all costs.
Cayton-Wood knew, thanks to Spivey, that one of Reynolds’s tankers, the Hernando, was already in the mid-Atlantic, having just received instructions to change course from Spain to Lisbon. Soon it would be in the harbour, under his control. And if the oil went missing while the ship was at its berth, and somehow found its way to Spain, well…such things happened, in a war.
It would be easy enough to put the blame on Reynolds, with his family connections in Franco’s government, and the daily cables that he’d been receiving from Madrid, begging him to help lift the embargo. Not to mention the fact that he had a Spanish secret agent working on his staff – Manuel Garcia, who had access to a transmitter.
That it would be Cayton-Wood, alone, who used the transmitter to send the needed information to Madrid would never cross the mind of anyone in SIS. Garcia could deny he’d been involved, but he would never be believed. He’d be discredited, and lose his chance to live his dream of starting a new life in England. Unless – and here, thought Cayton-Wood, lay the true stroke of brilliance – unless Garcia wanted to do Cayton-Wood a favour, in return for having everything put right with SIS.
All that Garcia would have to do – and Cayton-Wood had no doubt he would do it – would be to say, on the record, that Deacon had also been part of the scheme to ship oil to the Spanish; that Deacon and Reynolds had planned the whole thing, and had tricked him into helping them by making him believe that they were doing it for Britain.
Exit Deacon. And, since the question of Reynolds’s loyalty would have been answered, the SIS wouldn’t bother sending a new agent to take Deacon’s place. Garcia would stay on, and would continue to perform his useful functions, more firmly than ever under Cayton-Wood’s thumb.
As plans went, it came close to perfection.
Putting it in action was an easy thing to do.
He began by taking Deacon out for tea. Across the table, he apologised. ‘I may have been a little heavy-handed when I ordered you to stay clear of Garcia. You were using your best judgement, as you said. In fact, given our latest position with Spain, it appears to me your friendship with Garcia could be useful.’ And he told him why.
Deacon listened quietly, his gaze from time to time drifting around the small restaurant as though he were looking for someone. ‘And I’m to do what, exactly?’
‘Observe him. Just that. Take your drives in the country, the way you were doing. Have dinner at his house, invite him to yours. Be as sociable as you like with the Garcias, provided you keep your eyes open.’
The damnable thing about Deacon, thought Cayton-Wood, was that his eyes always seemed to be too fully open; that all of the effort one put into fooling the man was for naught. Deacon’s answer, ‘Understood,’ left Cayton-Wood with the uneasy sense that he did understand.
Still, Deacon did as he was told. He met Garcia frequently enough that Cayton-Wood’s spies could assemble a decent-sized file, filled with dates, times, and places, and photographs, all of which would, later on, be used to back Garcia’s false ‘confession’ about Deacon’s role in working with the enemy.
Then, when the Hernando finally entered Lisbon’s harbour, Cayton-Wood took the next step of contacting Madrid. That, too, was simple. He’d mastered Morse code as a boy, and he had babysat Garcia long enough to learn the Spaniard’s ‘fist’ – his own peculiar way of tapping out the chain of dots and dashes that made letters in the code. Whoever got the message at the other end would think it came straight from Garcia. Cayton-Wood knew this because he had, in fact, transmitted twice on his own, in the past. He didn’t like doing it – he did it only when the information he was sending was so clearly sensitive that even Garcia would have known that it should not be shared with Spain; but he didn’t like making the trek to the transmitter all on his own, in case somebody saw him. Far better to speak through Garcia where possible, safe in the shadows behind him, than risk getting caught.
If he’d needed reminding of that, he got it when he left the windmill after his transmission, to find Deacon and Garcia standing further down the hill, in plain view. He made a dignified retreat, but felt the weight of Deacon’s damned observant eyes. If only he himself had eyes like that, he thought, he’d be invincible.
But in the end, the person to confront him wasn’t Deacon, but Garcia.
It turned out, as luck would have it, that another Spanish agent who had been assigned to Lisbon had dropped in to see Garcia, and had mentioned how impressed the higher-ups were with his facts on the Hernando.
Cayton-Wood hadn’t expected this turn of events. He thought he’d allowed for every possible contingency in his carefully structured plan, but twice now, in this same afternoon, he’d been thrown off by people getting in his way. First it had been that young chit of a girl, Jenny Saunders, who’d stopped him from getting the papers he’d needed from Spivey’s desk. Now here was Garcia coming after him, in public – on a sidewalk, of all places, just outside the Reynolds offices – demanding he explain what he was up to.
It was too like a badl
y staged play to be real, in Cayton-Wood’s opinion – the Spaniard might as well have slapped a gauntlet down upon the pavement.
Cayton-Wood considered his options. It wasn’t the most convenient of times for him to deal with the problem. He was due across town for a meeting in half an hour. But this was something he’d known he would have to do, sooner or later. He stood, calm, while Garcia accused him:
‘You used the transmitter. Alone. You used my name. And what you have arranged would not, I think, have the approval of the others at the Embassy.’
‘I shouldn’t bother them, if I were you.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Because, Manuel, it might appear to them that you made those arrangements, and that would undoubtedly cause you some trouble.’
‘I will tell them. I will tell them that it was not me.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘but which of us would be believed? I wonder.’ He could see some of the righteousness ebb from Garcia’s face. ‘No, I’m afraid, Manuel, that when my colleagues learn of this affair – that is to say, when I inform them the petroleum is gone from the Hernando – I’m afraid things will look rather black, for you.’ He paused, for full effect. And then, when he was very sure the implications had struck home, he added casually, ‘Unless, of course, somebody put a good word in. Convinced them it wasn’t your fault.’
‘Yes?’ Garcia asked blackly. ‘And who would do this?’
‘I might.’
‘For what price?’
‘You insult me.’ He smiled. ‘For a very small favour, no more.’ And he said what it was.
Garcia listened. Shook his head. ‘I cannot do this. Not to Mr Reynolds. Not to Deacon.’
‘Oh, I think you can. I think you will. You really have no choice, not if you want to get to England, as you’d planned. Of course, you could go back to Spain, I suppose, when the war’s over, but that might be rather risky for you and your wife, if it were to come out you’d been working for our side. Who knows? With all of Franco’s agents round about these days, you might not even make it back to Spain.’ He smiled again, and left it there, and went to keep his meeting.