Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

‘I’ve had a good look through the Special Branch report,’ M declared, tapping the cardboard dossier on his desk. ‘Anything you’d like to add?’

She had prepared herself thoroughly for this strangest of debriefings. She knew that it would be a coded match, that to say anything explicit would be dangerous. She tried to judge what signals to give.

‘Well, I did voice my concerns about my suitability for field work in this area, M.’

‘And you were absolutely right, Joan. I mean, you could find yourself in danger again, couldn’t you?’

She tried to react as calmly as possible to this tacit threat. She knew now that he had set the whole thing up as a message to her. A warning shot. Despite the implied brutality, she felt sure that he did not mean her any real harm. It was merely a petulant reminder of his power over her. Now they were caught up in a self-generating algebra of distrust. A farcical algorithm: that she knew that he knew that she knew that he knew and so on. She had to find a way out of that, to let him know that she could keep a secret.

‘There’s been a security risk,’ she offered. ‘And we’ll have to proceed with extreme caution.’

‘My thoughts exactly,’ M rejoined.

‘The important thing is that proper cover is maintained, for everyone in the department. For this operation and any other.’

‘Yes,’ M agreed with a thoughtful nod. ‘Proper cover must be maintained.’

Of course she had been his cover for that long double game of his life. She loathed the deception that he had practised on her but could not help but respect the way that he had carried it out. This capacity for deceit and utter ruthlessness had become necessary for the times they lived in.

‘It’s been a wretched business, Joan,’ M said with a thin smile. ‘But you’ve acted with initiative and, might I say, with extreme discretion. I’d like to put you out of harm’s way for a while. You’re due a bit of leave. Take a couple of days off.’

‘That’s hardly necessary, M.’

‘Please,’ he insisted. ‘It’ll be for the best.’

‘Very well then. Thank you.’

It would give her time to think, she reasoned. She could not go on being his cover for much longer but to ask for a transfer now would never do. She would have to find someone to replace her first. She took a good look at Maxwell Knight. The epitome of the English gentleman of a certain class, the finest dissembler on the face of the earth. He could lie from the depths of his soul. His flair for espionage was at one with his odd occult beliefs and clandestine sexuality. But it suddenly struck her that this perfidious world could one day be tricked by its own guile. That this theatre of treachery, of disinformation and counter-intelligence would inevitably deceive itself. M put his pipe to his mouth, clenched his teeth around it and lit a match.

‘Now,’ he puffed, drawing in the flame, his gaunt visage wreathed in smoke, ‘17F should be here by now. Can you show him in?’

Joan stood up and walked to the door. She was light-headed from lack of sleep. Her nerves were shot but she knew that she had to keep calm and carry on. Like everybody else. A minor character in the drama, playing out the simple surface rituals. Going out into the ante-room to engage in a silly flirtation with the handsome commander from Naval Intelligence.

When Anna asks you about your sister, you know it’s serious.

And this is your chance to make your confession. To tell the story of Jenny.

The sister you got rid of all those years ago.

Jenny was the creative one in the family, you say. We grew up in the suburbs, a nice upbringing but, you know, boring. Jenny always made things seem more exciting than they really were. She was a punk before anybody else we knew. She went to Slough Art School and then dropped out in the second term. She left home and moved to London.

You stop for a moment and glance across the table at her. Anna Guttridge. A harsh name for someone so pretty. You met her at Andy Begg’s party. You flirted with her and she seemed interested. You talked about the 1980s: it’s some sort of project of hers. You meet for a drink and it turns out that she’s a writer, researching a book on the New Romantic scene or something. And she knows about your sister. Usually Jenny gets written out of that story. Maybe because she never played the game with the press. And it’s her voice in your head, saying: Johnny, she’s a journalist, of course she seems interested in you, but she’s only interested in the story. You want to reply that you can’t help yourself, that you have to take every chance you can get. It’s not easy, you know. Jenny never foresaw how hard it would be for you. To get close to people.

And in order to get close to anyone you’ll eventually have to tell them what happened to your sister. What you did to her. And you hope, well, maybe this time they’ll understand. At least Anna seems interested in Jenny in the first place. And despite everything you do want to keep her memory alive. You owe her that much. You continue: in 1978, 1979, Jenny was moving around. She ended up squatting in this big terraced house in Islington. She was singing in a few short-lived punk bands.

Where did she get the name Pirate Jenny? Anna asks. You tell her that it came from this Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill song about a servant girl in a port town who dreams the pirates are going to come and kill all her masters. Jenny used to say that our only honest sense of utopia is dreaming of a dystopia for our enemies, that we want vengeance as much as we want redemption. Anyway, she’d got hold of this buccaneer outfit that had been hired from Berman’s and Nathan’s in Shaftesbury Avenue and never taken back. This was a good two years before Vivienne Westwood had a runway show of her first pirate collection and well before Adam Ant started his swashbuckling act. Sartorially, Jenny was way ahead of the game. And in other ways, too.

How? Anna asks, and you watch the quizzical curl of her top lip, the blue-green eyes that seem slightly out of focus, a smatter of tiny freckles around her nose. You marvel at the beautiful curiosity of her face.

Well, you know, right after punk no one was sure what was going to happen. Jenny had plenty of ideas. Then Anna asks: and where were you around this time?

And there’s that voice again. The voice in your head telling you to be careful. Jenny’s voice. She’s still looking out for you, despite what you did to her. You’ve got to be careful how you tell her story. You don’t want to scare Anna off. You got away with it after all these years but you still remember those questioning looks you used to get when you first started going out after she disappeared. The looks you still get sometimes.

Oh, I was still living at home, you say. I used to go up and stay with Jenny some weekends. When she got the band together, you know, Black Freighter, I used to roadie for them.

This is not quite the truth but not exactly a lie either.

Black Freighter, right. Danny Osiris’s first band.

Oh no, you correct her. It was always Jenny’s band.

Sorry, it’s just—

I know. Danny’s such a big star now. But back then he was still Danny Ogungbe. It was odd because when they met they were living in the same street. Almost next door to each other. With a Nigerian father and a Polish mother, Danny was a working-class soul boy who still lived with his parents in a two-room flat with no bath and an outside toilet. That part of Islington was pretty squalid back then. That’s why there were so many squats in the area, you know, a lot of empty houses declared substandard by the council. Anyway, Danny was a bright kid and very good-looking — the combination of African features with pale skin and fair hair made him appear quite other-wordly. He’d grown up on the wrong side of the Essex Road but he was full of dreams. He’d done acting classes at the Anna Scher school and had taught himself to play jazz-funk on a battered old Fender copy. And he had this fantastic soul voice. He started going around to Jenny’s squat to practise. They both knew other musicians so a band began to take shape. It was Jenny’s idea at first, it was her project. The Black Freighter was a ship of fools come to liberate the world from reason. She’d got hold of a Minimoog, one of those early analogue synthesisers that played only one note at a time, which was actually ideal for Jenny. She was never that musical, you see. But she was full of ideas and she wrote fantastic lyrics. The idea was to be adventurous without being self-indulgent. They were plugged into that post-punk, year-zero feel.