The Clown Service Read online

  He marched down High Road, weaving in and out of the crowds that were a reliable mainstay of this strip of shops and businesses.

  He cut into the Wood Green Mall, that cathedral of commerce that had consumed the old railway station, thrived and then floundered. It was a perfect microcosm of the busy world outside its walls. An arena of false light and cold tile, shining shop brands and dreamy shoppers. The echoes of conversation and dreary mall radio formed a soup of sound that drizzled over everyone’s heads as they shuffled in pre-planned loops.

  He rode the escalators, working the pre ordained circuit around the mall, letting the wall of sound embrace him as his mind wandered elsewhere. Was the radio signal important? Sometimes, synchronicity was nothing but a random hiccup in the chaos; sometimes it demanded your attention. It was possible that Jamie had simply latched on to the signal by accident. Yes, it was possible … but Shining couldn’t make himself believe that, so he would follow the lead until he could be sure.

  Having conducted a full circuit of the mall, Shining stepped back out into the street, breathing in the exhaust fumes from the chains of buses that were dragging themselves towards queues of waiting shoppers.

  He stood by a street railing and became oblivious of the rush of colour and sound, the squeal of hydraulic breaks, the hiss of opening doors, footsteps on the pavement, chatter, secondhand music leaking from everywhere. Then he opened his eyes and found himself staring right into a face he knew well. The man stood on the other side of the road, mirroring Shining. For a moment they stared at one another, Shining unable to quite believe his eyes. Then, as the bubble of shock burst, he pushed his way through the pedestrians, running to the end of the barrier so he could cross the road. It can’t be, he insisted to himself, just can’t be. All around him, Wood Green fought to keep him from crossing the road. People got in his way, traffic pushed forward, car horns sounded as Shining stepped out into the road regardless of his safety.

  ‘Watch it!’ someone shouted, their voice punctuated by the squeal of tyres.

  Shining ignored them, running between the cars and mounting the other pavement. People were staring at him, something intelligence officers did their best to avoid, but his training was lost to him, swamped by an obsessive need to confirm what he had seen.

  The man had gone. Of course he had. How could he have been there in the first place? Looking up and down the street, Shining found no sign of him.

  Shining stood a while by the pavement railing, staring at the weathered metal where the man had rested his hands. It was as if he hoped to pick up on the man’s echo, sense a trace of his passing. There was nothing.

  Of course there is nothing, he thought. Krishnin is dead.

  f) High Road, Wood Green, London

  Shining walked into Oman’s shop with such energy he made the racks of peripheral tat quiver.

  ‘Give me time!’ complained Oman.

  ‘Actually,’ Shining replied, ‘I’ve had another thought. If I were to give you a precise location, could you tell whether the signal was coming from there?’

  ‘That would be a little less impossible,’ Oman admitted, ‘which would be a relief.’

  Shining gave him the location.

  g) Section 37, Wood Green, London

  Toby was lost in reams of the typed-up impossible when he heard Shining’s feet on the stairs.

  ‘Still no desk then?’ said the old man as he entered, hanging up his coat and lowering himself onto one of the sofas with a sigh.

  ‘You’ve only been gone a quarter of an hour,’ Toby replied. ‘It’ll be months before we get so much as a pencil holder.’

  ‘Then maybe I should pass some of the time with a little story. During my walk I saw … or possibly I didn’t … something that has shone a new light on things.’

  ‘I’m glad things continue to be so clear.’

  Shining smiled. ‘Let me tell you about something that happened to me when I first joined the Service.’

  CHAPTER THREE: NOSTALGIA

  a) Soho, London, 19th December 1963

  Espionage in the ’60s reeked of boiled cabbage and old rot. It was a grim, tawdry affair that makes even the present day world of paperwork, politics and accountancy seem attractive.

  At that time I was still a few months away from a department of my own. My specialist area of espionage had thrived during the Second World War but petered out as the Service focused elsewhere. That said, there was still enough money and enthusiasm to bring me onboard as a sounding post for other sections. You couldn’t move for funding and the obsession with the Russians was at its peak. If someone in the war office suspected our Soviet friends of being able to fly, they would have had a Cambridge graduate on the roof flapping his arms within forty-eight hours.

  I operated out of a creaking office building in Soho. I would walk to work through a maze of blue neon and questionable promises. Posters offered glamour that the threadbare carpets and well-worn stages could never live up to. It was a place of honey traps, luring the lustful into dark, sordid interiors where their money would be drained away as surely as their dreams. It couldn’t have suited us better.

  The front door of the office peeled like an Englishman on a package holiday. The electric bells to the left offered a life insurance company, a tailor, a travel agency and a film production house. They were all as fake as the pneumatic dancers that jiggled on the advertising poster of the club next door.

  Stepping inside, you might have thought you had been transported to a solicitor’s office from Dickens. The entrance hall was a mixture of black and white floor tiles and the sort of dark, dreary wood that feeds on natural light.

  The Service was an uneasy combination of confused scholars and old soldiers; each quite incapable of understanding the other. The concierge, George, was from the military school – an aged infantryman who had lost his left arm during the war. He compensated for this loss of mass with a paunch that stretched the buttons of his suit jacket until they threatened to pop. It was the sort of belly you can only gain through liquid refreshment, a sack of digested beer that he hauled around like a camel’s hump.

  ‘Morning, Mr Shining,’ he would say, looking up from his copy of the Daily Mirror, before offering a comment on the weather. Those meteorological statements had the stiff formality of codewords, shifting alongside the seasons. ‘Fresh as you like,’ he would say during the cold of winter; ‘Damp enough for Noah,’ when it was raining; ‘Bright as a button,’ when the sun shone. If he ever varied from his script I certainly never heard it. He was reliable, old George, as much a part of the fixtures and fittings as the creeping mould or the carpet that did its best to hold the stairs together.

  I’d work my way up to the second floor, where I had my office alongside the fake travel agency, its small windows filled with wilting posters of beaches and old monuments.

  I had done my best to make the office comfortable, but it was like placing a cotton valance on a bed of nails. The building fought all attempts at pleasant habitation. The windows were draughty and their sills collected dead flies. The wallpaper was damp to the touch and the furniture creaked when you applied weight to it.

  On the morning the Krishnin affair began, I had planned to continue observation on a young man who claimed he could trap ghosts. I had little doubt he was nothing more than a delusional unfortunate surrounded by empty tea chests and with an overactive imagination, but dealing with him beat sitting in that damn office.

  It was not to be.

  ‘You busy?’ A moustache poked its way around my door frame. It was luxuriant, that moustache; you could have painted a wall with it in no time. It was attached to Colonel Reginald King, our War Office presence and most upright of the army lot. He wore his previous life like a security blanket: picture of the Queen on his wall and medals in a case – the sort of things you find shoved away in a dull pub corner these days. If he listened to anything other than marching band music he kept the secret well. He had infected the entire top floo
r with pipe smoke and tubas.

  ‘Let me put that another way,’ he continued, before I had time to answer, ‘can you put whatever you’re up to aside for a bit? I need you to help me with a thing.’

  ‘A thing’. This casual attitude towards operations was part of the military affectation. They were quick to insist others stuck to operation classifications and code names but spent their entire careers involved in ‘shindigs’, ‘ruckuses’ and ‘bits of business’. Perhaps it made them sleep better at night, downgrading their acts of murder or terrorism to nothing more than ‘little barneys overseas’.

  ‘What do you need?’ I asked, but he had already begun to walk off down the corridor, obliging me to follow.

  I shoved my paperwork back in a desk drawer, locked it and gave chase as he made his way downstairs.

  ‘Got a little picture show for you,’ he was saying, his rich voice being sucked up by the stairwell like nourishment. ‘Chap I want you to take a look at.’

  The screening room was part of our production house facade, a small cinema filled with tip-up seats grown shiny through use and the ghosts of dead cigarettes. We all smoked in those days – tobacco was as ubiquitous as water and we thrived on it. It kept the smell of the building at bay.

  ‘Maggie,’ said the Colonel, shouting at a small woman whose head sported a cheap perm and bright pink spectacle frames. ‘Get Shining a coffee, would you?’ He didn’t bother to consult my wishes on the matter; I would accept this token of civility whether I wanted it or not.

  She sighed and rose to her feet under the great weight of all that curled hair. ‘Milk or sugar?’ she asked, with the enthusiasm of a woman about to clean up after her dog.

  ‘Both please,’ I said, knowing that the coffee would need all the help it could get in order to achieve flavour. Those were the days of powdery, instant, light brown flour that managed to look vaguely like coffee when water was added to it but had long given up on tasting like it.

  We entered the screening room, the Colonel waving me to a seat as he moved towards the projector.

  ‘Never know how to work the wretched thing,’ he admitted. ‘Where’s Thompson, damn him? He’s the only one that understands its arcane bloody ways.’

  He stepped out for a moment, hunting for Thompson, a pleasant young man whom I hoped would one day come to his senses and find a better career.

  I sat and smoked.

  I was used to hanging around the place at the casual beck and call of others. I was like a cherished stapler, passed between offices and frequently lost under a pile of expenses claims.

  ‘Sorry to keep you,’ said Thompson as he entered at the back, which just goes to show how polite he was. After all, it hadn’t been him that was detaining me. ‘Nobody else seems able to work the projector.’

  ‘I’d have been willing to have a go,’ I declared, ‘but I didn’t want to confuse our superior by showing excessive signs of intelligence.’

  ‘Certainly doesn’t pay in our line of work.’ Thompson smiled.

  ‘Ah!’ said the Colonel, once more gracing us with his presence. ‘All set then? Good man, Thompson. Reel on top.’

  The film opened with a blurry shot of the Oceanic Terminal at Heathrow. A Vickers V10 was disgorging its passengers onto the tarmac. The camera man was no threat to Hollywood. The lens jerked around until he managed to focus it on one passenger in particular, a middle-aged, dark-haired man who was so bland in appearance he could only be a spy.

  ‘Know him?’ the Colonel asked as the camera followed its target towards the terminal entrance.

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘We think you soon will. Russian, by the name of Olag Krishnin. Our dossier on him is so thin we have to put a paperweight on it to stop the wind blowing it away.’

  ‘But there’s enough in there to mark him out for special interest?’

  ‘We think he’s working in a similar field to you.’ The Colonel became evasive; nobody liked discussing my field. I imagine vice squad have the same problem: everybody talking around the subject. ‘He’s published a couple of papers in your line.’

  ‘Such as?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s all beyond me. Distant viewing or something …’

  Remote viewing, I decided. The esoteric spy’s Holy Grail.

  ‘When was this filmed?’ I asked.

  ‘A couple of days ago. The Met flagged him up and eventually I got to hear about it.’

  I could smell the brandy and cigar smoke of the Colonel’s club. People like him did most of their work via the old boy’s network.

  ‘Any idea where he’s gone now?’ I asked. It was all very well to show the man getting off a plane, but if the surveillance had stopped there then how was I to know whether he had subsequently got back on one?

  ‘Turns out he has a house over here, bugger’s been living on our doorstep for eighteen months. Bloody embarrassing, frankly. Our friends in Special Branch have been keeping an eye on him, but they’re getting restless.’

  This was normal. Nobody enjoyed the mind-numbing aspects of surveillance and it was a frequent complaint by Special Branch that they had enough on their plate without having to act as watchdogs for us.

  ‘So I should take over?’

  ‘There’s no point in just pulling him in,’ said the Colonel. ‘We need to know what he’s been doing here all this time. Keep tabs on him, size him up, give me something to work with.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘give me what you’ve got and I’ll liaise with the boys in blue.’

  b) Farringdon Road, Clerkenwell, London, 19th December 1963

  You couldn’t blame Special Branch for balking at surveillance duty. It was (and is) the most excruciatingly dull business.

  Krishnin had taken occupation of a little terraced house just off Farringdon Road. Using their usual persuasive tactics, Special Branch had forced their way into the house opposite. Having been convinced that their cellar was about to fill with sewage unless fixed by the local council, the occupants were now taking a holiday with the wife’s sister in Cornwall. We’d slap a little concrete around once done and they’d be none the wiser.

  Their bedroom window gave a good view of Krishnin’s house. My predecessors had shifted a cheap dresser out of the way so that a desk and chair could be placed there, shaded by net curtains.

  We made an unwelcome intrusion in that little room of frilled valances and floral wallpaper. A bored copper had been poking around – there was evidence of his nosiness all over the place. I did my best to cover up after him, strangely uncomfortable – given the reason I was there – with intruding into their lives. The bedroom was littered with personality, pictures in frames, pots of half-used make-up, opened letters (which I had no doubt the previous surveillant had taken the time to read). We never think how we might look to others as they poke through these, our private spaces, rooms that are extensions of ourselves.

  Nobody had had the opportunity to install listening devices across the road so I was soon left to wonder what point I was serving, sat there staring at a house’s empty windows. I would know if Krishnin left the house or if anyone visited him. As intelligence went this was pathetically thin. The fact that he had been there for some time just made it worse.

  It’s not that it was unusual to discover a foreign agent living on our soil – the Russians weren’t idiots; they knew their tradecraft. There were bound to be enemy agents working under cover identities up and down the country (we certainly had a number of our people behind the curtain, after all). Espionage would be plain sailing if we knew everything the moment it had happened. Still, the fact that Krishnin had been present for so long and yet had remained beneath our attention either meant he was up to nothing of any great importance, or he was playing a decidedly long game. One had to assume the latter, of course – spies are paid to be pessimists – but I couldn’t see how our limited surveillance was going to bring us any closer to the truth.

  I had hired a private contractor so that I had cover
should I feel the need to do anything radical like sleep. He was a burly private detective by the name of O’Dale. He’d acquitted himself well in the war and came vetted for Service use.

  He arrived a couple of hours later and immediately started earning his wage by putting on the kettle.

  ‘This the sort of job where I get to ask questions?’ he said while carrying two mugs into the bedroom. I could have pointed out that he was already doing so.

  ‘You can ask all the questions you like,’ I told him, ‘but I doubt I’ll be able to answer them. We’re just keeping an eye on someone. Watching pavements and waiting to see if he’s a waste of our time.’

  He pulled a chair over and settled in with his tea. I was surprised at his appearance; I had been expecting a functional rock of old tweed and flannel but he was quite the dandy, in a three-piece suit and hat.

  ‘I’ve done my fair share of this sort of thing,’ he admitted. ‘You lot only call me in on the boring jobs.’ He took off his hat, a perfectly brushed, brown bowler, and sat it upturned in his lap as if he intended to eat nuts from it. ‘I suppose that’s only natural; you’re hardly going to go private with the juicy stuff.’

  ‘You’d be surprised how little of it is juicy,’ I told him. ‘It’s not the most exciting profession in the world.’

  ‘You want to try my line of work. Coma patients get more action.’

  We agreed a rota that would see the house covered all day and he left me to it, promising to return at six. By then I had decided to attempt something new – you can only look at lace curtains for so many hours before deciding your plans need readjustment.

  In those days my list of agents was negligible. Thankfully one of them was exactly what we needed in order to get things moving.

  Cyril Luckwood was a strange little man. He worked for the post office, shuffling and sorting mail. An undemanding job that suited him. It gave him time to think and Cyril had always been a big thinker. Whenever I saw him he had stumbled on a new idea, from an innovative design for vacuum flasks to using bleach to run car motors. Nothing ever came of these ideas. For Cyril it was all about the dreaming. He was a man that liked to solve problems people might not be aware existed.