Icelight

by Aly Monroe

Genres: Historical Fiction; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Book 3 in the Peter Cotton spy thriller series, for fans of John le Carré and Robert Harris. Winner of the 2012 Ellis Peters Historical Fiction Award Praise for Aly Monroe 'Splendid . . .Monroe provides terrific and convincing historical atmosphere' The Times 'Skilful and evocative . . . [a] stylish and impressive debut' The Economist 1947. Threadbare London endures the bleakest, coldest winter for decades. Food rationing is worse than during the war. Coal supplies run out. The Thames freezes over. Against a background of black ice, blackouts and the black market, agent Peter Cotton is seconded to Operation Sea-snake. MI5 is in the grip of civil war; MI6 is riddled with traitors. Unsure who to trust - or even who is pulling the strings - Cotton, ever the outsider, must protect an atomic scientist caught up in a vicious homophobic witch-hunt, limit the damage caused by a bully-boy MP, rely on a rent-boy informer and, despite the murderous attentions of a couple of Glasgow razor boys, embark on a ruthless hunt of his own. The Peter Cotton spy thriller series: Book 1: The Maze of Cadiz Book 2: Washington Shadow Book 3: Icelight Book 2: Black Bear Short story: Redeemable

Release date: October 13, 2011

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 448

Sample

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 the 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 spoke.

‘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.

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.’

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 late 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 wa. . .