Legacy - Hardcover

Alan Judd began writing while in the Foreign Office. His biography of Ford Madox Ford won the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Award. He recently published a biography of Mansfield Cumming, founder of Great Britain’s modern Secret Service. Judd writes regularly for the Daily Telegraph in London.

CHAPTER ONE
LONDON, MID-1970s

It was a warm summer when Charles Thoroughgood left the army and joined the Secret Service but politically the world was deep in the Cold War. He moved to London and rented a basement flat in Kensington with a view of sodden detritus in the well of the building and the housekeeper's kitchen. He suspected that, from behind her dirty net curtains, she spent days and nights in unprofitable surveillance of his own uncurtained window. "Slack Alice," Roger Donnington, his colleague and flatmate, had dubbed her. "Face that would stop a coal barge."

One autumn Monday, he got up after a restless night to a humid, muggy London. The flat's tiny bathroom had no window and the electricity was off. Shaving by candlelight was a slow operation because he had to keep moving the candle as he traversed each cheek, and it was difficult to get any light at all beneath the chin without risk of singeing. He had long owned an electric razor, a present from his mother, but it had never left its box. The idea of using it had always felt like a concession to something, perhaps a luxurious and corrupting modernity. It was irrelevant now, anyway, because he had used the battery for his radio. Calling an electrician to restore mains power had, so far, proved too great a concession for either him or Roger.

The milk and butter in the powerless fridge smelt rancid. Someone would have to throw them away, sometime. He made toast in the gas stove, covered it with Marmite and drank black tea. He tidied the bedclothes on his double mattress on the floor, put on his light suit and flicked a tie free of the clothes crammed on the hook on his bedroom door. Before leaving he knocked on Roger's door. Roger had his own mattress in the sitting room, with the television at its foot. Charles had got in late the night before, so had no idea whether Roger was alone or accompanied. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder. "Okay?" he called.

Roger's groan became a cough. "Okay."

It was not to be a normal day at the office, though few were at that time. He was glad of that: secret service seemed so far to provide the advantages of bureaucratic employment--security, purpose, companionship and, though he might not yet have admitted it to himself, the pleasing consciousness of service--without the monotony he assumed to go with office life. He wouldn't need his bike that day, so left it propped up against the bedroom wall.

The best features of the flat were the front door of the building and the curving staircase, both of a size and grandeur to give an impression of spaciousness and opulence within. It had been cheaply converted into flats during the 1950s and 1960s and already the additions seemed older and more worn than the house. The plaster was cracked, paintwork faded, doors warped and skirting boards had parted company with their walls. The door of Charles's flat was tucked beneath the bottom turn of the staircase, so that stepping from it into the entrance hall was literally to enter a bigger and brighter world.

Out on Queensgate, he turned left towards Hyde Park after a deliberate glance across the wide street to check that his car was undamaged. The rush-hour traffic was heavier than usual, perhaps in anticipation of further wildcat strikes on the Underground, and the delay in crossing the Cromwell Road gave him the pretext to look about as if seeking a quicker way. He did the same at Kensington Gore, then walked behind the Albert Memorial and into the park. He walked unhurriedly, trying to establish a regular but not purposeless pace.

He looked back around again before he crossed the Serpentine Road and took one of the footpaths to Marble Arch and Speakers Corner. Anyone following would have to keep well back, or ahead or to the side, but then close quickly before Charles entered the Marble Arch subway. Presumably they would have car as well as foot surveillance, and radio. A car team might become a foot team when they needed to close, but to do that the cars would have to loiter in the busy Park Lane or Bayswater Road, which was never easy.

Once in the subway and reasonably sure he was out of sight, he broke the rules by looking behind without an obvious reason. None of the figures in the park was hurrying. No puffy, sweaty man or woman suddenly appeared at the top of the steps. Perhaps they were waiting in Queensgate for Roger, if they were there at all. They might have a long wait.

In Oxford Street he made for C&A, where he bought two pairs of black socks. It was cooler in the store and he loitered a while among the suits, before taking a back street to Marylebone Station, walking slowly with his jacket over his arm. At the station he bought a day return to Beaconsfield. The newsagent had sold out of The Times because the printers had gone on strike during the night, leaving only the early editions available. There would be time to find one later. He settled for the previous week's Economist.

He knew the forty-minute journey. Whether or not they were following by car, they would have to put at least one watcher on the train with him. If there were any "they." He read until the approaching Chilterns countryside gave reason for glancing about the carriage. It was tempting to get off at one of the small stations before Beaconsfield to see who got off with him, but that was cinema stuff. The trick in evading surveillance, they were told, was not only to get away but to give the impression you weren't looking for surveillance because you were innocent of anything that would merit it. At Seer Green, the last halt before Beaconsfield, he glimpsed a Ford Escort in the car park with Russian diplomatic number plates. He saw it too late to get the number but was sure enough of its origin. They were supposed to report all such sightings.

At Beaconsfield a grizzled, grey-haired man wearing jeans and incongruously polished brown shoes got off with him. Charles walked unhurriedly up the station approach, pausing to look in a shop window at the top. The man crossed the road and became engrossed in an estate agent's window. Charles continued his walk, turning left towards Old Beaconsfield, with its stockbroker Tudor avenues, neo-Georgian mini-mansions and moguls' houses of the twenties and thirties, with large unseen gardens and new Jaguars and Rovers in swept gravel drives. The low cloud had thinned enough to permit weak sunshine.

He strode purposefully into Hughes's, the Mercedes dealership. The forecourt was lined with polished secondhand saloons described as "nearly new," with their distinctive vertical headlights and squared-off, no-nonsense styling. Beige seemed the most popular colour, followed by red. To one side was a trio of elegant sports models with their dished roofs and thick, rounded leather seats. Immediately outside the showroom was a luxurious new S class, gleaming silver and easily the biggest car there. Charles paused by it before entering the show-room and wandering with what he hoped was critical detachment among the new cars within.

A salesman sat smoking at a desk with a telephone, a notepad, a Mercedes brochure and a copy of Glass's Guide, the trade price list. He had rubbery features and crinkly dark hair. Charles watched through the window as Brown Shoes crossed the forecourt to the older saloons. His back was to the showroom but he could probably see it in the car windscreens. The salesman took two long pulls on his cigarette before stubbing it out and slipping Glass's Guide into his desk drawer. He rose and came over to Charles, his features now composed into a rubbery smile. "Can I help, sir?"

"I'm thinking of buying a car."

"Just what we like to hear, sir. Mercedes, I take it?"

"Could be."

"Anything you'll be wanting to trade in?"

"No, I'll pay cash."

He made himself the ideal customer, accepting a cigarette while they discussed models and prices over coffee. The salesman was happy to talk residual values but became vague when asked pointed questions about trade prices. Brown Shoes studied the sports cars on the forecourt. They walked round the new cars in the showroom, then outside to the one and two year olds nearby. Brown Shoes crossed the forecourt to the older saloons, still with his back to them. Charles gave the impression that cost was less important to him than style and comfort, that he might be inclined to wait for the new mid-range model, that he would probably look in on Jaguar, BMW and Rover dealerships, with a possible nod in the direction of Volvo. There was the family to think of, and Volvo seemed to make a great thing about safety, which no one else did. Unless, of course, he allowed himself to be wooed by the new S class. That would presumably be even more solid and long-lasting than a Volvo and he particularly liked it in silver.

"You look every inch a Mercedes man, if I may say so, sir," the salesman said as they shook hands and Charles pocketed his card. "Love to see you in one."

Clutching his brochures, Charles carried on towards Old Beaconsfield. He had provided anyone watching with a reason for his visit and himself evidence, in the event of questioning, as to what he had been doing. He had ensured that the man in the dealership would remember him. He had also created time and space to spot surveillance.

It was not far but few walked the busy road. They might have a team of cars on him but, Brown Shoes having remained on the forecourt, he was sure he was the only walker. In an Old Beaconsfield tea shop he lingered over more coffee and ate shortbread, reading his magazine and listening to the conversation of two mothers with children at the same school. They were discussing a third whose marriage had broken up, whose mother was dying and whose child was ill.

"I didn't like to ask too much," said one. "She looked so awful, as if she might burst into tears at any moment. White as a sheet.&q...