Barry Maitland: Chelsea Mansions

‘But you didn’t tell us,’ Brock said.

Kuzmin shrugged. ‘I had no evidence. It was only a theory.’

‘And it left you in control of Mikhail’s fortune. Did you tell Sean Ardagh here about your theory?’ Both men were silent. ‘You both knew about the connection between Nancy Haynes and Mikhail Moszynski after they were murdered, but you said nothing to us.’

‘We decided that it wasn’t relevant to their deaths,’ Sean said.

‘No,’ Brock objected. ‘You were terrified that it might lead us to the truth about what happened to Lionel Crabb back in 1956. So terrified that when you heard Kathy was in America asking about a picture of Nancy on her sixteenth birthday in London, you hopped on the first available transatlantic plane to drag her home.’

Sean looked as if he’d bitten into something sour. ‘We had two priorities. The first was to protect Vadim, who is a particularly valuable asset of ours, and is rather vulnerable at the present time. The second was, yes, to avoid reopening an old scandal that still has the power to cause trouble.’

‘I think you’ll have to explain that to us,’ Sharpe said.

Sean shifted in his seat. ‘Before the war, Nancy’s father-Ronnie Elgin was his name-was a commercial attache in the State Department who was also clandestinely involved in gathering foreign intelligence. When Gennady Moszynski visited San Francisco in 1939 with a party of Soviets, Ronnie cultivated him, and even encouraged the infatuation that he saw developing between the Russian and his wife, Nancy’s mother. Although a committed communist, Gennady was an idealist; he believed in a brotherhood of nations and was appalled by what Stalin had done during the thirties. The three of them promised to remain friends, and after the war Ronnie made contact with Gennady again, and they exchanged low-level commercial information, with the aim of improving understanding between their two countries. Then, in 1956, after Krushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin, they had the chance to meet up again in London, hoping that the Cold War might be coming to an end.

‘Ronnie was also friendly with his UK counterpart, Toby Beaumont’s father Miles, who had joined MI5 after he left the army at the end of the war, and he facilitated their meeting in London.

‘But Miles was ambitious. He wanted to persuade Gennady to give them much more. He argued that the time was right, that the old Stalinist hardliners in the Kremlin were being challenged by Krushchev, and he wanted to offer Gennady a prize to gain his masters’ trust.

‘Now through his old diving friends he had heard that MI6 had hatched a risky plan to send a frogman down to investigate the cruiser that brought the Soviet leaders to the UK. The whole project was flawed. Apart from anything else, MI6 weren’t supposed to operate within the UK, that was our remit, and there was a lot of bad feeling about it in MI5. It seems that Miles Beaumont got it into his head to turn the tables on MI6 and betray the plan to Gennady. The Russians captured the frogman.’

‘Commander Crabb,’ Brock said.

‘Yes. According to what Gennady told Mikhail, they took him to London, to the basement of Miles’s house, where Gennady was supposed to carry out an initial interrogation of Crabb, before he was smuggled back to Russia on one of the Soviet airliners that had come over for the visit. But Gennady was too rough. Crabb died. They buried him there in the basement. Later the body was exhumed, and all but the head and hands were removed and dumped in the sea near Portsmouth, as you said, Brock.’

‘Did Miles Beaumont have authorisation from MI5 to do this?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Hell no. He did it completely off his own bat. He was a bit of a loner, by all accounts. An arrogant bastard. He never reported it afterwards.’

Brock was watching him closely. ‘But it was discovered?’

‘After a while,’ Sean said reluctantly, ‘suspicions were raised.’

‘There was a cover-up.’

‘All the same, this is old history,’ Sharpe said. ‘Is it really so vital that it’s not made public now?’

‘That an MI5 officer arranged the kidnapping and murder of an MI6 officer by the Russians? Toby Beaumont thought so, and so do a number of other people who were around at the time.’

‘Well,’ Sharpe said, ‘you’ll have our cooperation.’

‘We’d appreciate it.’

When Ardagh and Kuzmin had gone, Sharpe gave a little smile. ‘Money in the bank, Brock. He’ll have to pay for our silence.’

Brock drained his glass. ‘Case closed then.’

T oby Beaumont gathered himself up and stood rigidly to attention-like a prisoner of war, Brock thought, that’s how he sees himself now, ready to give his name and serial number and nothing else. But he looked exhausted; prison was doing him no good, the effort involved in maintaining his front becoming too hard.

‘I brought you some reading matter,’ Brock said, and placed a small parcel of books on the table between them. He watched Toby open the package and peer at the titles: a new history of Napoleon’s campaigns, a reprint of Richard Burton’s 1855 book, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah. Toby looked pleased, until he turned over the third book, The Buster Crabb Mystery.

‘You’ve probably read that one,’ Brock said. ‘I imagine you buy each one as it comes out, wondering if they’ve finally discovered the truth. Well now they have, Toby, thanks to Nancy Haynes, though we won’t be reading about it. Like you, they prefer to keep it buried.’

Toby’s expression was unreadable behind the dark lenses.

‘Tell me about your father. He must have been a remarkable man.’

Toby remained silent.

‘I’m told he wasn’t a team player.’

‘He was a team leader.’

‘Why did he kill himself?’

Toby sniffed, but didn’t answer.

‘Did he change his mind about what he’d done? Did he realise that he’d never be able to explain to his friends how he’d betrayed a fellow officer to the Russians? Was he riddled with guilt at how it had turned out, once that brute Gennady got his hands on Crabb?’

Toby still said nothing.

‘It was while you were away, fighting on the Suez Canal, wasn’t it? I wondered if there was some connection. So I checked your army record, and discovered that you weren’t up at Catterick Camp on the twenty-sixth of April 1956 as you said. You were on leave.’ Brock leaned forward. ‘You were there, Toby, weren’t you, at Chelsea Mansions when they did it? You were part of it, helping. And I wondered if your father killed himself out of a feeling of guilt for having involved you? Or was his suicide the price they demanded, when they finally worked out what he’d done-the price to keep you out of it, to let you continue in your military career?’

Toby took a deep breath and spoke in a low voice. ‘It’s a matter of loyalty, Brock. In the end that’s the most important thing, loyalty to your kin.’

Brock rubbed his beard thoughtfully. ‘Apparently an unknown woman looked after Crabb’s grave for twenty years after he was buried. His family denied it was any of them. I wondered if it might have been your mother.’

Toby got abruptly to his feet. He picked up the first two books, but left the one on Crabb lying on the table, and turned and marched away.

B rock ducked his head through the low doorway of the old pub, steadying the tray of drinks in his hands. Across the dappled lawn, in the shade of a large oak tree, he saw the three of them around a table, heads together, discussing a photograph. They had met at one of Suzanne and Brock’s favourite country pubs on the way to Battle, and Brock paused for a moment in the sun and took a deep breath, thinking what an enormous relief it was to be out of London, like escaping from an airless room.