Spy in Camera

Book 520: Murder Room

by Richard Grindal

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Disillusioned with life in the South of France, Hurford accepts an assignment for British Intelligence. He is told that, under the cover of a teaching post in Moscow, he will simply be expected to relay information back to Britain from a highly prized source. Once in Moscow, however, Hurford finds himself involved in a complicated chain of events which culminate in a mental and physical ordeal more harrowing than he could possibly have imagined . . .

Release date: January 14, 2016

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 183

Sample

THE first thing Hurford saw when his eyes opened was a fly on Nicole’s bare shoulders. He lay there, wondering why he had woken so abruptly,
switching from insensibility to daylight in one startling instant. Twenty years before he had often woken like that, in a mountain hut or a cave, sensing danger but finding only the frozen
brightness of the night and the rough breath of the others. Since then idleness and soft living had induced a different sort of daybreak; slow and reluctant and enervating.

Sunlight, piercing the stale warmth of the bedroom, fell across Nicole’s back and the long strands of her dark hair. Her skin was brown and coarsened by too much exposure on the beach.
Spotlighted, the fly was rubbing its front legs together. Hurford remembered peasant women washing clothes on the rocks by streams outside their villages.

Kicking the sheet away, he swung his legs over the bed. There was no danger of waking Nicole. He could tell from her breathing and from the way she lay slumped in the bed that she was sleeping
at her heaviest. The sheet, falling away, revealed her bare back down to the cleft where her heavy buttocks began. It was hard to believe that she was still only twenty-three. Her hips were the
hips of a matron even though her face was a girl’s.

The thought of girls reminded him of his interview with Monsieur Jaillot, the headmaster of the school where, until eight days ago, he had taught. Incredulity and anger at Jaillot’s
accusations had passed and given place to brooding resentment.

He walked naked into the living room. Through the window one could glimpse, past the pink walls of the house opposite, a corner of the harbour and the bay beyond. A yacht which had not been
there the night before lay at anchor in the bay. Large and white and pretentious, it dwarfed the cruisers and the launches of the vedettes and racehorse owners, a tribute to hellenic
opportunism.

The girl who had been the subject of Jaillot’s charges he could scarcely even remember. Suzanne? Brigitte? Françoise? A thin girl with large eyes and, one would have supposed,
utterly without sex. Her father, an official in an obscure government department, had laid the complaint.

He shaved and dressed slowly, deliberating whether to put on slacks and sweater or his working suit. What would Savage wear? He remembered him as clever and perceptive; as a man who was careful
to observe the conventions even though he always mocked himself for doing so. Hurford chose the suit and looked rather self-consciously in a drawer for his regimental tie. Why not? He would
certainly have worn it if he had been going to be interviewed for a job, which in one sense he was.

Leaving the apartment without waking Nicole, he walked down the steep lane to the harbour and from there to the Croisette. At a café near the Carlton he drank a coffee and smoked his
first cigarette.

The fact that he had met Savage by chance in a bar, at a time when he needed a job, did not surprise him. All his life he had held a Micawberish belief in providence. Luck, coincidence, fate,
whatever one cared to call it, invariably came to his aid in his not infrequent moments of crisis.

There was an hour to waste before he was to meet Savage in the bar of the Martinez. He walked along the Croisette between the palm trees and the sea. It was still early and the beach was empty
except for a few fanatics. A shrivelled Frenchwoman, approaching sixty, lay on a purple and yellow towel, stroking the arm of her companion. He was perhaps fifteen years younger than she, lean and
hollow-chested. “Ah, mon chou,” Hurford heard the woman’s insinuating voice. “You must hurry and bronze yourself. You are so handsome when you are bronzed!”

He thought, God, the French could make a sexual situation out of a couple of dead twigs. He had lived in Cannes for four years, imitated their life, adopted their tongue and yet had never ceased
inwardly to despise the French.

He walked along by the sea slowly for perhaps a mile and then back. When he reached the Martinez, there were still four minutes remaining before his rendezvous, but he went through the hotel
lobby and into the bar. Without thinking he asked for a Vin Blanc Cassis and then changed his order to a Scotch.

It had been in the bar of the Martinez that he had met Nicole, only a few weeks after he had come to live in Cannes. He had gone there, he remembered, looking for sex and a Greek girl named
Maria who, people had told him, was a pushover, an amateur. Nicole had been drinking with an elderly American artist. She had gone back to Hurford’s apartment that night and stayed there ever
since. She had told him she worked as an assistant in a chemist’s shop, but he found out later that she had been out of work for a fortnight. They never went back to the Martinez now, but did
their drinking in the cheaper cafés near the harbour.

Savage came in and immediately took away what Hurford had thought would be a psychological advantage by saying: “Drink up and let’s go outside. This is my only holiday of the year
and I need all the sun I can get.”

He was wearing an unbelievably dirty pair of brown linen slacks and a blue towelling shirt with a triangular tear in one shoulder. They sat on the terrace outside the hotel and drank Vin Blanc
Cassis.

Savage said: “It’s all fixed. I spoke with my contact in London by telephone last night and the job is yours if you want it. There would have to be an interview in London but
that’s just a formality; wool to pull over the eyes of the taxpayer.”

“No references needed?”

“We’ll put a tame scriptwriter on to that. Your record is the only reference we need.” He looked at Hurford and smiled. The smile could have been an apology but it was either
masked by cynicism or could not suppress it. “You’re intelligent enough to have realised that it’s not a straight teaching job.”

“If it was, you could have found a thousand people better qualified than me.

“You’d be working for intelligence. Nothing very dramatic, I’m afraid. Not even espionage in the real sense. We need a courier in Moscow. Someone to collect information from
one of our best agents and ship it home to us.”

Hurford stared through the trees that bordered the Croisette at the sea. A man in pale green trunks was water-skiing, following a motor-boat in a sweeping turn. His nonchalance was disdainful
and professional. One could almost smell the Ambre Solaire on his muscled back, see the grey hairs at his temple which the black rinse could not conceal.

“What’s the expectancy of this job?” Hurford asked and then corrected himself. “No, I’m not thinking in terms of danger. I mean how long am I likely to be in
Russia?”

“The normal tour at the Institute is three years, but I would think we’d have to pull you out before then.”

“And afterwards?”

“We can’t give you any guarantees, but if it was at all possible we’d certainly use you somewhere else. Teaching is a good cover, you know.”

If he only went for two years, Hurford reflected, he might be able to work out something with Nicole; send her enough money to keep on the apartment. Even as the thought struck him, he wondered
why he could not help applying British middle-class principles to a situation that was wholly French. No one would expect him to do the right thing by the girl, least of all Nicole herself.

They finished their drinks without discussing the proposition any further. Hurford knew the form. Details of a job like the one for which Savage was recruiting him were not settled over drinks
on an hotel terrace. Besides, what else did he need to know? He was a few years out of touch on pay rates but the rest of the routine had probably not changed much.

It was nearing midday. The rich who could afford to waste five hours of daylight in bed and the debauched who needed to, were rousing themselves and shuffling across the road from their hotels
to the beach. A young girl with long fair hair, who wore a cap tilted over her eyes, crossed the forecourt of the Martinez. In her bikini she looked frighteningly thin. Hurford tried to picture her
lying in bed beside him and the idea seemed not so much unreal as indecent.

“Bum like a choirboy.” Savage’s eyes were following the girl as well. His choice of a word that dated back long before the officers’ mess to juvenile vulgarity seemed
grotesque. “They could use her in an Oxfam ad.,” he added.

“Have the other half?”

“Some other time. I want my swim first.”

“When must I let you know?”

“It’s fairly urgent. Till we get someone to Moscow we’re wasting a damn good source, one of the best we’ve ever had in fact.”

“I’ll phone you this evening.”

“Fine! Not before six, though. I’ll be on the beach till six.”

When Hurford arrived back at the apartment, Nicole was awake, sitting on the edge of the bed and combing her hair. She wore only his old silk dressing-gown, tightly tied round her waist but
loose everywhere else. Her bare feet were large and looked somehow flat, like the pads of a heavy animal.

“Make me some coffee, Mike,” she said and smiled. He sensed that she was in one of these extremely amiable moods that had been rare for the past year or so.

He heated some of the coffee that remained from the previous evening and brought it to her in the bedroom. She was still sitting on the bed, staring ahead of her, absolutely motionless. He could
feel in her stillness that blend of complete repose and expectancy which never failed to move him. When, handing her the coffee, he leant forward, he could see her breasts. He caught a strand of
her hair and tugged at it gently.

“Wait till I’ve drunk my coffee,” she said without any emotion, without smiling.

Hurford sat on the bed beside her, fighting back the sudden urgency, trying to match her tranquillity. Finally she stopped drinking, put her cup down and then twisted suddenly, pushing him back
on the bed.

Her love-making was aggressive and commanding. Usually he would have accepted it almost passively, but today she triggered off an equal savagery inside him. In a single instant of floodlit
clarity before the downward vortex of passion, he realised it was because he knew this would be the last time.

Afterwards he sat and watched her at the dressing table as she put up her hair.

“I’ve been offered a job,” he said at last.

“By your English friend?” Her intuition surprised him. He had mentioned his first meeting with Savage but nothing more.

“It’s a teaching post in Russia.”

“I don’t wish to go to Russia.”

“Why not? You know nothing about the country.”

From this starting point, slowly, elaborately, like two people playing a Chinese game, they built up their quarrel. They knew all each other’s moves, but this did not make the exchanges
any less intense. Sarcasm was replaced by bitterness, bitterness by clumsy anger.

“Go back to your regiment!” she hissed at him. “Go back and enjoy your schoolboy games. Play at being a British officer again. What does it matter if you’re
middle-aged?”

“I’ve already told you it’s a teaching job. Are you stupid?”

“Past forty and already inadequate.” She did not know his age but had to taunt him where a Frenchman would have been most vulnerable.

“You’re right. I should have sense enough to know I’m too old to satisfy a waterfront nymphomaniac.”

“And what do you hope to find in Russia? Some whore as middle-aged as yourself?”

“My self-respect perhaps.” He knew he sounded pompous and British and all the other things she affected to despise and the knowledge made him even angrier.

“Oh, foutez . . . ”

He looked at her, wondering how long ago his disillusionment in her and the life they led had began.

THE canvas was undated, but immediately recognisable as an early Heike. An abstract built up on a diagonal axis, cobalt and mauve predominated, as
they so often had in the painter’s work during his Nordic period.

Bartle had been gazing at it for several minutes, satisfied now that the painting was hung in a manner consistent with its excellence—and its price. Eight thousand seven hundred and fifty
new francs. The fact that his friends would assume, as they were supposed to, that it was a copy, only added in some perverted way to his pride of possession. He remembered the subterfuges he had
invented, the precautions he had taken to conceal his identity when it had been bought, for cash of course, from the gallery in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré. His only regret was that he
could not risk refurnishing his flat to provide a setting worthy of the Heike. Even so, there could be other pictures and perhaps a genuine antique or two, if he was discreet. He sat down at the
horrid little walnut bureau from Tottenham Court Road, took a sheet of paper and began earning the money that could pay for them.

The list which he had to compile each week was a long one, but he had an exceptionally retentive memory and never needed to keep notes, which reduced the security risk. Thirty-seven items had
been ordered during the week for the Ministry of Defence research unit in Dorset. Chemicals, optical and laboratory equipment, even office furniture; he listed them all, with quantities or
dimensions in every case. He had long ago ceased to wonder how the list could be of value to a foreign power and now no longer believed that it was. The whole operation was a piece of organised
stupidity, intelligence for the sake of intelligence, to satisfy some bureaucrat in a Moscow office. As an order clerk in the supply department of the Ministry, he was prepared to accept that other
countries might also have Civil Servants who created work to justify promotion, another assistant, a bigger samovar.

When the list was finished he pulled out the copy of Little Dorrit from the bookcase. Why were the Russians obsessed with Dickens? Because they were eighty years out-of-date in their
culture or because it suited them politically to pretend that the life Dickens portrayed was typical of Britain today? The fact that he could despise the people for whom he worked was
comforting.

The day was the fourteenth of the month. He subtracted fourteen from thirty-one, turned to page seventeen and began coding the list. As a security precaution, its futility amused him, but the
actual work, the orderly transfer of letters to cyphers, gave him satisfaction.

When he had finished it was almost time for his rendezvous with Donaldson. This week it would be at the Admiral Codrington. As he left the room, he glanced once more at the Heike, savouring the
pleasure that it gave him and which was worth, he knew now, all the humiliation he had endured.

The Admiral Codrington was full of young men in chukka boots and girls whose thighs were too fat for mini-skirts. A middle-aged rake who had tried to stay young by having his hair styled, was
chatting up his girl friend.

He said urgently: “Can’t we go back to your place for a quickie?”

“No question, sweetie. Carl will be home any moment.”

“We could borrow Peter’s flat.”

“Borrow? At a fiver an hour? It’s extortion!”

“Come on, darling. Just because your husband’s a Jew, you don’t have to be mean about money.”

“Why not? I’d be paying, wouldn’t I? Or has your wife increased your pocket-money?”

The door op. . .