Legacy Read online

  ‘Credible, intriguing and admirably developed . . . a substantial and entertaining book’

  Scotsman

  ‘Alan Judd writes exceedingly well, and Legacy is a pleasure to read . . .’

  Evening Standard

  ‘A twisty, accomplished and engaging Cold War thriller’

  Kirkus

  ‘This espionage thriller is a standout’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘The book is a solidly constructed, beautifully observed snapshot of a lost world’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Judd keeps plot and action centre-stage . . . he has written a novel perfect for brightening up a drizzly winter Sunday’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘A clever, sensitive tale . . . an engaging evocation of the cold war’

  Sunday Times

  ‘A meticulous exercise in cold-war paranoia with the consequences felt down the generations’

  Guardian

  ‘Mr Judd has written a first class novel’

  Belfast Telegraph

  ‘Strongly plot-driven . . . The story is suavely and efficiently handled’

  Literary Review

  ‘The action is enlivened with realistic accounts of espionage’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Funny, exciting and sad, as well as revealing . . . its clarity and pertinence demand our attention in a way which not many novels do’

  New Statesman

  Born in 1946, Alan Judd trained as a teacher but instead became a soldier and diplomat. He is now a full-time writer, contributing regular current affairs articles to various newspapers, most frequently the Daily Telegraph, as well as writing regular book reviews and acting as the Spectator’s motoring correspondent. He is the author of several novels drawing on his military and diplomatic experience, the first of which, A Breed of Heroes, was later filmed by the BBC. The Devil’s Own Work, a literary ghost story inspired by Judd’s meeting with Graham Greene, won the Guardian Fiction Award.

  Also by Alan Judd

  Short of Glory

  The Noonday Devil

  Tango

  The Devil’s Own Work

  Breed of Heroes

  Uncommon Enemy

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers, 2001

  This edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Alan Judd, 2001

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Alan Judd to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

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  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-84739-773-7

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-47110-105-2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  To Bim

  CONTENTS

  BERLIN, 1945

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  BERLIN, 1945

  EXTRACT TO PF 48/78/76 FROM GEN 100/472 (RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICE (RIS) OPERATIONS AGAINST BRITISH AND ALLIED SERVICE PERSONNEL OVERSEAS).

  BER/1 minute 51 to H/BER, p.2 cont.

  4. They left the café at about 2125hrs. Subject paid for both. He is described as about 5' 10" with light brown hair, centre parting, clean shaven, ruddy complexion as if used to living in the open, aged 28–30 approx. No obvious distinguishing marks. His uniform was clean and pressed and he wore the crown on his shoulders. His beret was blue.

  Comment: MORNING LIGHT is still confused by British uniforms and insignia. When shown examples and questioned again, he was certain that subject was wearing battledress and was a major. It is probable that he was attached to a headquarters but was still wearing divisional flashes (unidentified), and possible that he was Royal Engineers. MORNING LIGHT was sure he was not a Gunner (the only cap badge he recognises).

  5. The woman was about 5' 7" with shoulder length blonde hair which shone as if washed. She wore a cream shirt or blouse and a loose, floral-patterned skirt. They were smart and clean, as if new. She had black shoes with heels and nylon or silk stockings with no ladders or holes. She carried a black handbag and wore make-up and nail varnish. MORNING LIGHT could not say whether she wore any rings. Her German was native Berlin, her English fluent.

  Comment: MORNING LIGHT’s own English is such that almost any other German he hears speaking it sounds fluent to him. Asked to describe the woman’s features, he stressed that she was beautiful (‘bild schon) and that her teeth were very good (‘ebenmassige Zahne) but was vague on particulars.

  6. They continued to talk animatedly when they left the café and turned right before crossing the road into Bernauerstrasse. MORNING LIGHT followed them as soon as he had settled his bill but did not regain sight until he saw them turn into Friedrichstrasse and into the Russian zone. He did not follow them in. Although they did not touch each other or walk arm-in-arm, they gave the impression that they would be more than friendly (‘mehrals freunde’). Subject appeared to hesitate as they entered the Russian zone and she went a few paces ahead before stopping. They both laughed, and the British officer followed.

  Comment: MORNING LIGHT believes the woman was of good background (‘aus guter Familie’) because she naturally paused for subject to open the door for her on leaving the café, which, ‘being a British officer’, he naturally did. She was not the usual Nazi Party/Communist Party call-girl. Asked why he was sure this was a controlled operation rather than a girl operating on her own – or not operating as a tart at all – he insisted that no woman in Berlin can now dress and look like that without support and protection. There are no ‘nice rich girls’ left in Berlin, he says, and her returning to the Russian zone is, in his eyes, conclusive. There were also two men at a nearby table who appeared to take an interest in the couple. He could not describe them, beyond saying they were middle-aged and ordinary (‘unscheinbar’). An interest in the girl was natural enough but he had a feeling (‘das Gefuhl haben’) that they could have been surveillance (SV).

  7. Action: Given that we now know MORNING LIGHT’s wartime reporting to have been accurate, his judgement on such apparently trivial matters is worth taking seriously. It should be possible to identify the erring major by checking army headquarters lists of field officers, concentrating on those recently detached from fighting divisions and starting with Sappers. Although this may well turn out to be a straightforward security matter, we should not bring in the Military Police at this stage but, with the new GADFLY programme in mind, we should look first for any opportunity for development. Army Intelligence Corps representation has recently been beefed up and I suggest we start with them. If this is to become the first GADFLY case, we need to act a.s.a.p. – this day if possible. May I go ahead?

  RH

  BER/1.

  1

  LONDON, MID-1970s

  It was a warm summer when Charles Thoroughgood left the army and joined the secret servi
ce but politically the world was deep in the Cold War. He moved to London and rented a basement flat in Kensington with a view of sodden detritus in the well of the building and the housekeeper’s kitchen. He suspected that, from behind her dirty net curtains, she spent days and nights in unprofitable surveillance of his own uncurtained window. ‘Slack Alice’, Roger Donnington, his colleague and flatmate, had dubbed her. ‘Face that would stop a coal barge.’

  One autumn Monday, he got up after a restless night to a humid, muggy London. The flat’s tiny bathroom had no window and the electricity was off. Shaving by candlelight was a slow operation because he had to keep moving the candle as he traversed each cheek, and it was difficult to get any light at all beneath the chin without risk of singeing. He had long owned an electric razor, a present from his mother, but it had never left its box. The idea of using it had always felt like a concession to something, perhaps a luxurious and corrupting modernity. It was irrelevant now, anyway, because he had used the battery for his radio. Calling an electrician to restore mains power had, so far, proved too great a concession for either him or Roger.

  The milk and butter in the powerless fridge smelt rancid. Someone would have to throw them away, sometime. He made toast in the gas stove, covered it with Marmite and drank black tea. He tidied the bedclothes on his double mattress on the floor, put on his light suit and flicked a tie free of the clothes crammed on the hook on his bedroom door. Before leaving he knocked on Roger’s door. Roger had his own mattress in the sitting room, with the television at its foot. Charles had got in late the night before, so had no idea whether Roger was alone or accompanied. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder. ‘Okay?’ he called.

  Roger’s groan became a cough. ‘Okay.’

  It was not to be a normal day at the office, though few were at that time. He was glad of that: secret service seemed so far to provide the advantages of bureaucratic employment – security, purpose, companionship and, though he might not yet have admitted it to himself, the pleasing consciousness of service – without the monotony he assumed to go with office life. He wouldn’t need his bike that day, so left it propped up against the bedroom wall.

  The best features of the flat were the front door of the building and the curving staircase, both of a size and grandeur to give an impression of spaciousness and opulence within. It had been cheaply converted into flats during the 1950s and 1960s and already the additions seemed older and more worn than the house. The plaster was cracked, paintwork faded, doors warped and skirting boards had parted company with their walls. The door of Charles’s flat was tucked beneath the bottom turn of the staircase, so that stepping from it into the entrance hall was literally to enter a bigger and brighter world.

  Out on Queensgate, he turned left towards Hyde Park after a deliberate glance across the wide street to check that his car was undamaged. The rush-hour traffic was heavier than usual, perhaps in anticipation of further wildcat strikes on the Underground, and the delay in crossing the Cromwell Road gave him the pretext to look about as if seeking a quicker way. He did the same at Kensington Gore, then walked behind the Albert Memorial and into the park. He walked unhurriedly, trying to establish a regular but not purposeless pace.

  He looked back around again before he crossed the Serpentine Road and took one of the footpaths to Marble Arch and Speakers Corner. Anyone following would have to keep well back, or ahead or to the side, but then close quickly before Charles entered the Marble Arch subway. Presumably they would have car as well as foot surveillance, and radio. A car team might become a foot team when they needed to close, but to do that the cars would have to loiter in the busy Park Lane or Bayswater Road, which was never easy.

  Once in the subway and reasonably sure he was out of sight, he broke the rules by looking behind without an obvious reason. None of the figures in the park was hurrying. No puffy, sweaty man or woman suddenly appeared at the top of the steps. Perhaps they were waiting in Queensgate for Roger, if they were there at all. They might have a long wait.

  In Oxford Street he made for C&A, where he bought two pairs of black socks. It was cooler in the store and he loitered a while among the suits, before taking a back street to Marylebone Station, walking slowly with his jacket over his arm. At the station he bought a day return to Beaconsfield. The newsagent had sold out of The Times because the printers had gone on strike during the night, leaving only the early editions available. There would be time to find one later. He settled for the previous week’s Economist.

  He knew the forty-minute journey. Whether or not they were following by car, they would have to put at least one watcher on the train with him. If there were any ‘they’. He read until after Slough, when the approaching Chilterns countryside gave reason for glancing about the carriage. It was tempting to get off at one of the small stations before Beaconsfield to see who got off with him, but that was cinema stuff. The trick in evading surveillance, they were told, was not only to get away but to give the impression you weren’t looking for surveillance because you were innocent of anything that would merit it. At Seer Green, the last halt before Beaconsfield, he glimpsed a Ford Escort in the car park with Russian diplomatic number plates. He saw it too late to get the number but was sure enough of its origin. They were supposed to report all such sightings.

  At Beaconsfield a grizzled, grey-haired man wearing jeans and incongruously polished brown shoes got off with him. Charles walked unhurriedly up the station approach, pausing to look in a shop window at the top. The man crossed the road and became engrossed in an estate agent’s window. Charles continued his walk, turning left towards Old Beaconsfield, with its stockbroker tudor avenues, neo-Georgian mini-mansions and moguls’ houses of the twenties and thirties, with large unseen gardens and new Jaguars and Rovers in swept gravel drives. The low cloud had thinned enough to permit weak sunshine.

  He strode purposefully into Hughes’s, the Mercedes dealership. The forecourt was lined with polished secondhand saloons described as ‘nearly new’, with their distinctive vertical headlights and squared-off, no-nonsense styling. Beige seemed the most popular colour, followed by red. To one side was a trio of elegant sports models with their dished roofs and thick, rounded leather seats. Immediately outside the showroom was a luxurious new S class, gleaming silver and easily the biggest car there. Charles paused by it before entering the showroom and wandering with what he hoped was critical detachment among the new cars within.

  A salesman sat smoking at a desk with a telephone, a notepad, a Mercedes brochure and a copy of Glass’s Guide, the trade price list. He had rubbery features and crinkly dark hair. Charles watched through the window as Brown Shoes crossed the forecourt to the older saloons. His back was to the showroom but he could probably see it in the car windscreens. The salesman took two long pulls on his cigarette before stubbing it out and slipping Glass’s Guide into his desk drawer. He rose and came over to Charles, his features now composed into a rubbery smile. ‘Can I help, sir?’

  ‘I’m thinking of buying a car.’

  ‘Just what we like to hear, sir. Mercedes, I take it?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Anything you’ll be wanting to trade in?’

  ‘No, I’ll pay cash.’

  He made himself the ideal customer, accepting a cigarette while they discussed models and prices over coffee. The salesman was happy to talk residual values but became vague when asked pointed questions about trade prices. Brown Shoes studied the sports cars on the forecourt. They walked round the new cars in the showroom, then outside to the one- and two-year olds nearby. Brown Shoes crossed the forecourt to the older saloons, still with his back to them. Charles gave the impression that cost was less important to him than style and comfort, that he might be inclined to wait for the new mid-range model, that he would probably look in on Jaguar, BMW and Rover dealerships, with a possible nod in the direction of Volvo. There was the family to think of, and Volvo seemed to make a great thing about safety, which no one else did. Unless
, of course, he allowed himself to be wooed by the new S class. That would presumably be even more solid and long-lasting than a Volvo and he particularly liked it in silver.

  ‘You look every inch a Mercedes man, if I may say so, sir,’ the salesman said as they shook hands and Charles pocketed his card. ‘Love to see you in one.’

  Clutching his brochures, Charles carried on towards Old Beaconsfield. He had provided anyone watching with a reason for his visit and himself evidence, in the event of questioning, as to what he had been doing. He had ensured that the man in the dealership would remember him. He had also created time and space to spot surveillance.

  It was not far but few walked the busy road. They might have a team of cars on him but, Brown Shoes having remained on the forecourt, he was sure he was the only walker. In an Old Beaconsfield tea shop he lingered over more coffee and ate shortbread, reading his magazine and listening to the conversation of two mothers with children at the same school. They were discussing a third whose marriage had broken up, whose mother was dying and whose child was ill.

  ‘I didn’t like to ask too much,’ said one. ‘She looked so awful, as if she might burst into tears at any moment. White as a sheet.’

  The other nodded. ‘Dreadful for her. Of course, those highlights she has don’t help.’ No one else came in. Surveillance would have been briefed to identify anyone with whom he had even an apparently accidental encounter. They would have had to put someone, most likely a couple, in the shop with him. He ruled out the mothers, who had been there for some time. Had it not been for Brown Shoes, he’d have been pretty sure he’d left them – if they were on him at all – in London.

  Charles was approaching thirty, a supposedly vigorous age; the year in which a man might feel he entered full estate, experienced but forward-looking, fecund and purposeful. Instead, he spent more time musing upon the past than anticipating or shaping his future. This was partly why he had chosen Beaconsfield for what they called his dry-cleaning run. He had been brought up not many miles away and had spent a short time there on an army methods-of-instruction course in a former prisoner-of-war camp. His memories of that period were vivid. He was fitter then, going for hard daily runs through the beechwoods after hours in the classroom. It was a cold autumn with woodland carpets of crisp red, yellow and golden leaves and lungfuls of frosty air. He was keen, always running in army boots, pack and webbing, drawing a rifle from the armoury to make it harder. He wasn’t sure now why he’d done it so intensively. The approved military purpose – fitness – was part of it, but there was always something else – a craving for solitude amidst the very public life of the army, an escape from daily occupations, or from thought. Whatever he was running for or from, he felt better for putting himself through it. He didn’t run so much now, nor so hard.