Tim Glister: Red Corona

For two days Knox was grilled by interrogators in Leconfield House, and, he assumed, shadowed by Watchers, the Service’s leg men, whose job it was to keep an eye on persons of interest. Knox refused again and again to admit where he’d been on Sunday night, claiming that Holland himself had sworn him to secrecy. Eventually, the interrogators gave up, and a summary review board was convened. Knox didn’t expect to emerge unscathed, and he didn’t.

He took another swig of his beer. It was warm and flat. He needed another one.

‘Well, that didn’t take long,’ a voice above him said.

Knox looked up from his glass at Nicholas Peterson.

‘Come to rub it in, Nicholas?’

‘The DG wants to see you,’ Peterson replied. His voice was a clipped, officious staccato.

Peterson was the right-hand man of Gordon Manning, the newly installed acting director general. His garish Prince of Wales check suit, currently in fashion among a certain type of civil servant, looked very out of place in the middle of the Gresham Arms. Peterson was, according to Knox, a subservient, bureaucratic yes-man who had no business being anywhere near MI5. They did not get on.

‘You just suspended me.’

‘The Service suspended you.’

‘Of course.’ Knox reached out to finish the dregs of his beer, but thought better of it. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want anything,’ Peterson replied, ‘Manning does.’

‘Well, he knows where to find me.’

‘Don’t be tedious, Richard. He’s offering you a way back in.’

‘Really? Thanks, but I think I’m done.’

‘You’re done when the Service says you’re done. You’re suspended, not fired,’ Peterson said. ‘And when you are fired, you’ll have a résumé almost entirely covered by the Official Secrets Act.’

Knox caved. He knew Peterson was right. He couldn’t just walk away from MI5 after fifteen years, and deep down he didn’t want to.

‘Where?’ he asked.

‘Deptford.’

‘Jesus,’ Knox said, smoothing back his hair and picking up his jacket. ‘It must be serious.’

The further east they went, the worse the city looked. From the alabaster facades of Mayfair and Westminster to the shuttered shops and Blitz bomb craters of Lewisham, Knox watched the city decline through the window of Peterson’s MI5 standard-issue Ford Consul as he did his best to sober up.

‘We’ve never had it so good,’ he said to himself, parroting Harold Macmillan’s favourite slogan as he watched an old, broken-backed woman lean over to brush her cracked and pitted front step. Peterson ignored him.

Half an hour after leaving Whitehall the car pulled into a narrow turning off Deptford High Street and stopped outside a low-rise tenement block.

Knox and Peterson made their way up the dim staircase to the top floor. Peterson watched his step as they plunged into darkness between landings, making sure he never came close to touching the walls, the banister, or the half-hidden bits of detritus littering the stairs.

The higher they got, the more stale and warm the air became. At first, Knox thought this was just a lack of airflow in the old building conspiring with the summer afternoon heat. But, as they walked down the short corridor to the only open door, he began to suspect otherwise. And, as Peterson stepped into the flat ahead of him and doubled over, retching, his suspicion was confirmed.

In the hallway of the flat were two bodies. The odour was now pungent, acrid, familiar. Knox had seen, and smelled, death enough during the war to not be shocked by it now. Apparently Peterson hadn’t. Whoever these people were, they’d been lying there for a while.

Knox was curious about what two dead bodies might have to do with him. He was also curious about why there were no police officers or forensics team present but the acting director general of MI5 was. Gordon Manning emerged from a door at the end of the hallway that ran the length of the flat. He stopped for a moment on the other side of the bodies, looking at Knox and Peterson, then beckoned them to follow him as he ducked back into the room he’d just stepped out of.

Manning was a tall man. Too tall, and thin. He’d never carried either well. The three-piece grey worsted suits he insisted on wearing whatever the weather always hung off his skeletal frame, their jacket pockets bagging slightly from his habit of planting his long, bony hands in them.

Knox looked down at the corpses as he stepped around them. The bodies were neat, lying next to each other, their legs straight and arms by their sides. The men’s clothes were plain, dark, normal. They looked like the type of people you’d pass on the street without noticing, except that their mouths and noses were wet with some kind of liquid and they both had thick marks across their necks.

‘Thank you for coming, Richard,’ Manning said, as Knox stepped into the small room. ‘Though I suspect you’re wondering why you’re here.’

‘Actually, I’m wondering why you’re here, sir,’ Knox replied.

‘Those men out there,’ Manning said. ‘I want to know who killed them.’

‘Why?’ No sir this time.

‘They were troublemakers, Italians,’ he said, as if that was explanation enough. ‘Camillo Bianchi and Piero Moretti. Liked breaking into electronic systems, then holding people to ransom to find out how they’d done it. Five has been keeping an eye for some time.’

Manning slowly circled the room, as if showing it off to Knox. It had been set up as an office. A small desk strewn with a mess of papers, a few boxes stacked in a corner, and an empty bookcase.

‘They’d been pitching themselves all over,’ Manning continued. ‘National Provincial Bank, British Petroleum, even tried to get a meeting at the Ministry of Defence. After they briefly interrupted a BBC Overseas Service broadcast, the director of radio passed on their information to us.’

Knox took another look at what potential evidence the room had to offer. There wasn’t much.

‘They sound like chancers,’ he said. ‘With a couple of clever tricks.’

‘Perhaps, but those tricks were making them rather well known in some circles. People were starting to pay attention to them. Serious people. Then they seemed to drop off the face of the earth. Now we know why.’

‘The coroner estimates they’ve been dead between forty-eight and seventy-two hours,’ said Peterson, stepping through the door, face still as grey as the dead men’s. ‘But he can’t be more precise about time, or cause, until he’s done an autopsy.’

‘Can’t the Watchers give you a smaller window?’ Knox asked.

‘They were on light surveillance. Weekly check-ins only.’

‘Sounds like they weren’t much of a priority.’

‘They weren’t,’ Peterson said, the colour slowly returning to his face.

‘So, my original question,’ Knox said, turning to Manning. ‘Why are you here?’

Manning slid his hands into his pockets. ‘I’m here because of you,’ he said. ‘I need to know what happened to these men, and I need to know quickly. Five is stretched preparing for the OECD conference, but you aren’t.’

In less than a week’s time, London would be hosting the inaugural conference of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. It was a major political event, bringing leaders from nineteen of the world’s most powerful nations together in one city, and the primary reason Whitehall had been so fast to put someone else at the top of MI5. Manning was one of the Service’s longest-serving officers. Like Holland, he’d worked for MI5 through the war and ever since. He’d also gone to Eton and Oxford with most of the cabinet. He was the obvious choice.