Elin brought the supper and we started to eat. She said, ‘Alan, why did you leave the … the Department?’
I hesitated with my fork in the air. ‘I had a difference of opinion,’ I said shortly.
‘With Slade?’
I laid down the fork gently. ‘It was about Slade – yes. I don’t want to talk about it, Elin.’
She brooded for a while, then said, ‘It might be better if you talked about it. You don’t want to keep things locked up.’
I laughed silently. ‘That’s funny,’ I said. ‘Telling that to an agent of the Department. Haven’t you heard of the Official Secrets Act?’
‘What’s that?’
‘If the Department found I’d talked out of turn I’d be slung into jail for the rest of my life.’
‘Oh, that!’ she said disparagingly. ‘That doesn’t count – not with me.’
‘Try telling that to Sir David Taggart,’ I said. ‘I’ve told you more than enough already.’
‘Then why not get it all out? You know I won’t tell anyone.’
I looked down at my plate. ‘Not of your own free will. I wouldn’t want anyone to hurt you, Elin.’
‘Who would hurt me?’ she asked.
‘Slade would, for one. Then there’s a character called Kennikin who may be around, but I hope not.’
Elin said slowly, ‘If I ever marry anyone it will be a man who has no secrets. This is not good, Alan.’
‘So you think that a trouble shared is a trouble halved. I don’t think the Department would go along with you on that. The powers that be don’t think confession is good for the soul, and Catholic priests and psychiatrists are looked upon with deep suspicion. But since you’re so persistent I’ll tell you some of it – not enough to be dangerous.’
I cut into the steak again. ‘It was on an operation in Sweden. I was in a counter-espionage group trying to penetrate the KGB apparat in Scandinavia. Slade was masterminding the operation. I’ll tell you one thing about Slade; he’s very clever – devious and tricky, and he likes a ploy that wins coming and going.’
I found I had lost my appetite and pushed the plate away. ‘A man called V. V. Kennikin was bossing the opposition, and I got pretty close to him. As far as he was concerned I was a Swedish Finn called Stewartsen, a fellow traveller who was willing to be used. Did you know I was born in Finland?’
Elin shook her head. ‘You didn’t tell me.’
I shrugged. I suppose I’ve tried to close off that part of my life. Anyway, after a lot of work and a lot of fright I was inside and accepted by Kennikin; not that he trusted me, but he used me on minor jobs and I was able to gather a lot of information which was duly passed on to Slade. But it was all trivial stuff. I was close to Kennikin, but not close enough.’
Elin said, ‘It sounds awful. I’m not surprised you were frightened.’
‘I was scared to death most of the time; double agents usually are.’ I paused, trying to think of the simplest way to explain a complicated situation. I said deliberately, ‘The time came when I had to kill a man. Slade warned me that my cover was in danger of being blown. He said the man responsible had not reported to Kennikin and the best thing to do was to eliminate him. So I did it with a bomb.’ I swallowed. ‘I never even saw the man I killed – I just put a bomb in a car.’
There was horror in Elin’s eyes. I said harshly, ‘We weren’t playing patty-cake out there.’
‘But someone you didn’t know – that you had never seen!’
‘It’s better that way,’ I said. ‘Ask any bomber pilot. But that’s not the point. The point is that I had trusted Slade and it turned out that the man I killed was a British agent – one of my own side.’
Elin was looking at me as though I had just crawled out from under a stone. I said, ‘I contacted Slade and asked what the hell was going on. He said the man was a freelance agent whom neither side trusted – the trade is lousy with them. He recommended that I tell Kennikin what I’d done, so I did and my stock went up with Kennikin. Apparently he had been aware of a leak in his organization and there was enough evidence around to point to the man I had killed. So I became one of his blue-eyed boys – we got really chummy – and that was his mistake because we managed to wreck his network completely.’
Elin let out her breath. ‘Is that all?’
‘By Christ, it’s not all!’ I said violently. I reached for the whisky bottle and found my hand was trembling. ‘When it was all over I went back to England. I was congratulated on doing a good job. The Scandinavian branch of the Department was in a state of euphoria and I was a minor hero, for God’s sake! Then I discovered that the man I had killed was no more a freelance agent than I was. His name – if it matters – was Birkby, and he had been a member of the Department, just as I was.’
I slopped whisky into the glass. ‘Slade had been playing chess with us. Neither Birkby nor I were deep enough in Kennikin’s outfit to suit him so he sacrificed a pawn to put another in a better position. But he had broken the rules as far as I was concerned – it was as though a chess player had knocked off one of his own pieces to checkmate the king, and that’s not in the rules.’
Elin said in a shaking voice, ‘Are there any rules in your dirty world?’
‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘There aren’t any rules. But I thought there were. I tried to raise a stink.’ I knocked back the undiluted whisky and felt it burn my throat. ‘Nobody would listen, of course – the job had been successful and was now being forgotten and the time had come to go on to bigger and better things. Slade had pulled it off and no one wanted to delve too deeply into how he’d done it.’ I laughed humourlessly. ‘In fact, he’d gone up a notch in the Department and any muck-raking would be tactless – a reflection on the superior who had promoted him. I was a nuisance and nuisances are unwanted and to be got rid of.’
‘So they got rid of you,’ she said flatly.
‘If Slade had his way I’d have been got rid of the hard way – permanently. In fact, he told me so not long ago. But he wasn’t too high in the organization in those days and he didn’t carry enough weight.’ I looked into the bottom of the glass. ‘What happened was that I had a nervous breakdown.’
I raised my eyes to Elin. ‘Some of it was genuine – I’d say about fifty-fifty. I’d been living on my nerves for a long time and this was the last straw. Anyway, the Department runs a hospital with tame psychiatrists for cases like mine. Right now there’s a file stashed away somewhere full of stuff that would make Freud blush. If I step out of line there’ll be a psychiatrist ready to give evidence that I suffer everything from enuresis to paranoic delusions of grandeur. Who would disbelieve evidence coming from an eminent medical man?’
Elin was outraged. ‘But that’s unethical! You’re as sane as I am.’
‘There are no rules – remember?’ I poured out another drink, more
