Barry Maitland: Chelsea Mansions

‘Right.’ Sir Philip jumped to his feet, snatched up his papers and name plate and said, ‘Let’s leave them to it, shall we?’ and swept out of the room, followed by the others.

‘Well,’ Sean said, looking across at Sharpe and Brock balefully. ‘That was a fuckin’ ambush, yeah?’

‘Of your own making, Sean,’ Sharpe said affably. ‘Let’s have no more obfuscation, shall we?’

‘Very well. Care to tell me how your mind is working, Brock?’

‘In early 1956 a man called Lionel Crabb, nickname Buster Crabb, was summoned to a meeting with the First Sea Lord, Louis Mountbatten, who asked him to undertake a special mission organised by British and American intelligence agencies. Crabb was a war hero, a frogman who had fought against the Italian underwater forces attacking British convoys and naval ships sheltering in Gibraltar, but by 1956 he was retired, drinking too much, a bit out of condition. Nevertheless he agreed to do what was required of him, to carry out an underwater inspection and photography of a Soviet cruiser, the Ordzhonikidze, which was due to bring an official delegation of the top Soviet hierarchy to the UK in April. The ship was of interest to the British and Americans because of its extreme manoeuvrability, thought to be due to underwater turbines. On April the nineteenth Crabb dived into Portsmouth Harbour near the Russian cruiser, and was never seen again.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Ardagh looked bored. ‘Everybody knows the story. So what? How can you connect this to Chelsea Mansions, for goodness’ sake?’

‘In June of the following year some fishermen near Pilsey Island, about ten miles east of Portsmouth Harbour, found the badly decomposed remains of a man wearing a Heinke two-piece diving suit, similar to the one Crabb had been wearing. However the head and hands of the corpse were missing, and identification was difficult. Nevertheless, an inquest determined that it was Crabb, cause of death unknown, an open verdict returned.’

‘So?’

‘There’s very little information about what Toby Beaumont’s father did after the war. Toby told us he was in import-export, which sounds to me like a euphemism for spooks. I think he was involved in Crabb’s death, and Nancy Haynes heard about it from her mother, whose husband had been the American intelligence liaison officer on the case, just before she died. And Nancy probably thought it would be tremendous fun to go to London and tell Toby, whose father had been the senior MI5 man, and Mikhail Moszynski, whose father had been their KGB contact, about this fascinating bit of Cold War history that tied them together. Except that Toby idolised his father and would do anything to suppress the story, and Moszynski saw it as a way to blackmail Toby into selling him the hotel. How does that sound?’

‘A bit far-fetched,’ Sean said. ‘Why would the CIA and MI5 have the KGB involved?’

‘I don’t know, but that photograph of them together outside Chelsea Mansions proves they were. There have been theories that Anthony Blunt, the British Soviet spy, was involved in the Crabb story. Maybe Miles Beaumont was a Russian agent too. The first step will be DNA tests with Crabb’s relatives to see if that skull really is his.’

‘Oh dear.’ Sean examined his fingernails. ‘You know that the files on Crabb are locked away, classified until 2057, do you? Speculations like this, flying around the Met, could make a lot of people very uncomfortable.’

Sharpe said, ‘Who else is party to your speculations, Brock?’

‘DI Kolla, and a Canadian consultant, John Greenslade. He’s signed the Official Secrets Act. It won’t go beyond them, provided I’m satisfied that we’ve got to the truth.’

Sharpe turned to Ardagh. ‘Well then, what do you think?’

Sean sighed. ‘All right. Let’s get together again later today. I’ll tell you what I can.’

They met again in Sharpe’s office at five thirty. This time Brock brought Kathy, and Ardagh too was accompanied, by Vadim Kuzmin, who gazed around the room with the keen eye of a public servant picking up clues of status in the size of the desk and the quality of the leather chair behind it.

Sean cleared his throat. ‘I’d like to warn you that we may discuss matters that are covered by the Official Secrets Act 1989.’

Sharpe said, ‘What about Mr Kuzmin?’

‘Vadim has signed the Act, Commander. He is a consultant to MI5 and MI6. I’d like to invite him to speak.’

Kuzmin continued looking around the room. ‘Do you have a drinks cabinet, Commander Sharpe?’

Sharpe frowned. ‘I do.’

‘I’d like a small Scotch, if you don’t mind. Just as it comes. No ice or water.’ Then he added, when Sharpe got to his feet, ‘But not too small.’

‘Anyone else?’ Sharpe glowered at them. Kathy and Sean shook their heads, but Brock said, ‘I’ll keep Mr Kuzmin company.’

Sharpe handed out the tumblers and sat down again.

Kuzmin tasted, nodded approvingly, and began. ‘One day, when Mikhail was down in the cellars, directing the men working on the latest building stage, I made a joke. “Mikhail,” I said, “what is going on? Is this where the bodies are buried?” He looked shocked and hurried me away upstairs. “What do you mean?” he said. “What have you heard?” Eventually I persuaded him that it was just my little joke, and he relaxed and told me a story. When his father Gennady was in his final days in the Marlinsky Hospital he was haunted by bad dreams. During his life he had had many dark experiences. For two and a half years he had endured the siege of Leningrad and witnessed terrible things-bombing, starvation, cannibalism-and he had killed Germans. But there was one death in particular that bothered him, not in St Petersburg, but in London. He told Mikhail of a house in London where he had murdered a man with his bare hands. The house was Chelsea Mansions, he said, and the body was still there. By this stage Gennady had returned to the Orthodox faith, and he was convinced that the victim’s body would rise up and drag him to hell if it was not given a proper burial.

‘Mikhail said that this was why he had bought the house, to carry out his father’s dying wish. But although he had torn the building apart, he had found no body, and he had become convinced that the old man was delusional.

‘Then, from nowhere, an American woman comes to him and tells him that she also is Gennady’s child, and Mikhail’s sister. She too has been told old stories by a dying parent, stories of a love affair in San Francisco and of spies in London, and of something secret and terrible that happened in 1956, the year she went to London with her parents. This woman has photographs to show Mikhail, including one of Gennady and her family standing outside the house where this secret thing happened. It is the house belonging to the man who took the photograph, an English spy, and Mikhail recognised it as Toby Beaumont’s house, the only part of Chelsea Mansions that he had not been able to acquire.

‘Mikhail told me about this the same day the woman told him. Unfortunately he had already spoken to his mother about it. She was very angry, and he wanted me to calm her down, but when I went to see her she said it was all lies and wouldn’t discuss it. Later I went back to her room to speak to her again and found her with Sir Nigel Hadden-Vane. She seemed to be demanding something from him and he looked very agitated, and she slammed the door in my face when I made to go in.

‘The next day I had to go to Russia on business, but when the American woman was murdered Mikhail phoned me in Moscow and told me that he was afraid that his mother might be responsible, to avoid disgrace for Gennady. I thought this could be possible, arranged for her by Sir Nigel. Then when Mikhail was killed I thought he must have quarrelled with Sir Nigel, who had had him killed too.’