The sterling affair, p.26
The Sterling Affair, page 26
She watched a policeman passing her, his eyes roving her body, as he walked. If only he knew what was hidden under her dress, she thought with a wry smile.
Using a street-craft technique taught to her by Nikita, she removed her compact from her handbag and, moving her head slowly from side to side, feigned an inspection of her lipstick, eye shadow and rouge, all the while identifying the people walking immediately behind her. She was clear. A different set of people from a few minutes ago when she had used a café window for the same purpose.
She lowered her mirror and, as she did so, caught a fleeting glance of someone—a woman whom she had definitely seen before. Not today, but a few days ago. Damn. It could be a coincidence, but, in a city of eight million people, what were the chances that this same woman was walking fifty paces behind her twice in the same week, when the routes Flora chose were always deliberately arbitrary?
Flora continued along Birdcage Walk until she reached Whitehall. The road was unusually busy, and then she saw why: just ahead of her was the tail-end of a protest march, which spanned the entire width of the road, moving slowly towards Trafalgar Square. Great. Now the buses, tubes and pavements would be even busier than usual, meaning that it would take her much longer to reach the dead drop.
As she looked at the heaving mass of people, she had the idea that, actually, she could use the protests to shake off the tail.
Increasing her pace, it took Flora just a moment to join the back of the march. As she edged her way through the masses, she looked up at the banners waving above her: LAW NOT WAR. STOP THE AGGRESSION. EDEN MUST GO!
Oh, the irony. She was marching with the anti-war protesters! Nikita would find this most amusing when she told him at their next rendezvous.
She sidled her way between the hordes of people, impressed by the great number who had gathered to protest. The pace of the march had slowed almost to a standstill and she could see ahead of her that the crowds were spilling into Trafalgar Square, centring their demonstration at the base of Nelson’s Column. Disparate shouting and mantras began magically to unify in to a single, definite chant: ‘Eden must go! Eden must go! Eden must go!’
Flora jostled through the stagnant masses, half-grinning again about the potentially explosive material concealed in her bra. The ammunition that it would give these people! It would certainly be enough to stop the war and end Eden’s premiership, and enough to bring down the British government.
‘Eden must go!’ she joined in with pleasure. She continued to chant, as she edged her way across the road to the Strand, where yet more people with placards and banners were thrusting towards her. ‘Eden must go!’ she yelled, a biting ferocity underlining her words. ‘Eden must go!’
At last, the crowds were thinning, and Flora chanced a casual look behind her. There she was, that wretched woman. She was good, Flora had to admit, to maintain her surveillance through so many people. Now what? She could carry on trying to shake her off, but pretty soon she would be replaced by another unknown Watcher. With such high-grade material on her person, it was far too risky to continue. She had to abort. Charing Cross Station was just across the road. It was time to lose the tail properly in the simplest and most illogical of ways: to catch any train out of London. It was a known fact that the MI5 Watchers only operated within the boundaries of London and no covert operation undertaken by this unit had ever broken this incredibly ill-conceived rule.
Flora crossed the road and entered the station, seeing the female Watcher in the reflection of a shop window. Inside on the concourse, she took a moment to look at the information boards. A train would be leaving for Dartford in five minutes. Close by to Dartford was a safehouse of which she could make use overnight. She hurried over to the ticket booth, purchased a ticket and passed through the invisible frontier of the MI5 Watcher section.
With a subtle raising of one eyebrow, Flora glanced at the woman standing on the other side of the barrier and actually felt a little pity for her, as she boarded the train.
She would try again tomorrow.
But so might she.
Ellen emitted an audible sigh. ‘Absolutely ludicrous!’ she complained to herself, as she watched the train shambling out of Charing Cross Station towards Dartford. That the Watchers were unable to pursue suspects outside of London was another of A4’s rules that had always irked Ellen, but today it was plain anger and frustration that she felt.
She stood in front of the barrier, watching the train until it was completely out of sight. Flora had clearly worked out that she had been followed and knew precisely what to do about it. Now there was no telling when she might return to London. Flora knew that the A4 unit did not have the resources to maintain a constant vigil at Charing Cross, waiting for her return; she could very easily jump off the train at the next station and then take the next one back and A4 would be none the wiser.
Ellen walked through the busy station and back out onto the Strand, wondering how Mr Skardon was going to take the news that Flora Sterling was fully aware that she had been under surveillance. Would he maintain it in order to keep up the pressure? Or would he terminate it, finding it a waste of meagre resources? She would find out when she returned to Leconfield House.
The protest was now in full, noisy swing. Only on this very spot on VE Day had Ellen ever seen as many people as were gathered here together, protesting against Eden’s war. The parallels, of course, didn’t end there. Directly owing to the Suez Crisis, petrol-rationing was due to commence once again the following month, with an allocation of fifty miles per week per car.
As she edged into the thronging mass of people, she took her time to look around. She was surrounded by men and women of all ages and social classes, and who all desired the same outcome: to stop the war in Egypt and to oust Eden as prime minster. It was a sentiment that Ellen shared with them. ‘Get Eden out,’ she whispered to herself. As much as she would have liked to have joined in fully with the demonstration, first and foremost she was on duty for MI5, where one’s personal politics had to be disregarded.
She pushed through the crowds out of the top corner of Trafalgar Square and onto Pall Mall. As she walked, she was deep in thought about where Flora Sterling might have been headed. They had followed her from Harold Austin’s flat on an obviously random route around London. But where would she have gone, had she not realised that she was being followed? Ellen needed to look at a map.
Twenty minutes later, Ellen entered Leconfield House on Curzon Street and took the stairs to the third floor. For the moment, she wanted to avoid having to tell Mr Skardon that the surveillance operation had been unequivocally compromised during her watch, and so she headed into the general office of the A4 section. On guard at the entrance to the room, maintaining sentry over the four telephones on her desk, was the bullish secretary, Miss Brogren. As always, she was wearing a smart white blouse and navy skirt, and her spectacles, with glass as thick as a submarine porthole, were perched on the bridge of her nose.
‘Good morning,’ Ellen greeted.
Miss Brogren offered an icy smile. ‘Morning,’ she replied, tonguing a boiled sweet from one side of her mouth to the other.
The office was spacious with large windows which, had they not been so terribly filthy, would have given a view over the Georgian houses opposite. In her two years of working here, the glass had never once been cleaned, making Ellen wonder if perhaps it were another way of helping to safeguard the secrets within. More likely, though, it was due to budget constraints. Whatever the reason, the end result was that the overhead strip lighting was nearly always switched on, giving the room an artificial, slightly oppressive atmosphere. Again, perhaps it was a deliberate choice. There were twelve desks in the centre of the room, each having two seats, thus giving a workstation for all twenty-four members of the A4 Watcher section, were they ever to be present in the room at the same time. Around half of the seats were currently occupied. The walls of the room were lined with several bookcases and locked filing cabinets.
Instead of going to her desk, Ellen headed to the rear of the room, where there were three large blackboards, procured from a recently closed local junior school. Affixed to the centre blackboard were photographs, covertly taken by the section, of Flora Sterling, Harold Austin, Nikita Sokolov and various other associates and known connections. The right-hand blackboard contained numerous notes, pieces of intelligence and scribblings in coloured chalk. Above it all, in white letters, were the words THE STERLING RING.
Ellen’s eyes were drawn to a single word, handwritten in red letters further down the board: Jericho?? The recent addition of two question marks by an unknown hand underlined the uncertainty of the intelligence which she had obtained from the boy in St James’s Park, where Nikita Sokolov had, according to the child, said that he would have to pass information to a person of that name. However, a search of the registry indexes matched nothing at all to that designation, and doubt among the men of A4 that the intelligence was reliable was becoming more vocal. Uncertainty had crept into her own thinking and she had to reassure herself on several occasions that she had heard the boy correctly. In fact, she had repeated the name Jericho back to him to ensure that she had understood properly. Of course, he could have been mistaken, or completely fabricating what he had heard; but the boy had correctly identified Harold Austin, and Mr Skardon had confirmed that an undercover operation did exist by the name of Sawdust. So, why should Jericho not be real, too?
Ellen glanced at the men around the room. Most were at their desks, smoking and typing up their surveillance logs. For the majority of them, Jericho was not an active line of enquiry.
‘You bored, Miss Ingram?’ one of them—John Potter—called over to her with a smirk. ‘I could do with a coffee, if you don’t mind.’
Ellen smiled. ‘The refreshments room is just along the corridor, third door on the right. You’ll find everything you need there.’
He snarled, rolled his eyes and moodily returned to stabbing his forefinger at the typewriter keys, whilst drawing on the pipe dangling from beneath his greying moustache.
She slowly cast her eyes across the photographs of the main players in this unfolding drama: Harold Austin; Flora Sterling; Nikita Sokolov. But, she reasoned, it couldn’t be a case of intelligence passing—wittingly or otherwise—along a simple three-person chain, and then out to Moscow. Nikita had known for a very long time that he was under MI5 surveillance; there was no way he would be the person responsible for getting the intelligence out of the country. Was it really so outlandish to think that the reason for Flora Sterling’s taking regular convoluted routes around London was to dead-drop the intelligence to a person, codenamed Jericho? But then how did Jericho get it out of the country?
‘Miss Brogren?’ Ellen called, receiving a scornful over-the-shoulder glare. ‘Might I have the keys to cabinet 42, please?’
Miss Brogren dutifully unlocked a drawer of her desk, removed a set of keys and strolled over to the run of filing cabinets under the windows.
Ellen matched her pace and they arrived at cabinet 42 at the same moment. Miss Brogren unlocked it, took a step back and watched, as Ellen pulled open the top drawer.
Trying to ignore the heavy scrutiny of the secretary, Ellen ran through the file dividers until she came to one marked SURVEILLANCE LOGS. She thumbed through the sub-dividers until she reached FLORA STERLING. Pulling out the file, she offered a wooden smile to Miss Brogren and headed to the open bookshelves at the side of the room, whence she removed a London Street Atlas. Behind her, she could hear the cabinet being hastily relocked.
Back at her desk, Ellen opened the file of surveillance logs, containing pages and pages of forms, labelled B.2.A., which were typed descriptions of the reconnaissance conducted by the A4 section. The first was written by her colleague, George Caldwell, and was dated 7th March 1956.
Flora STERLING
Observation was taken up at Number 1 Cambridge Square at 5 p.m. and half an hour later STERLING came out and walked home.
Twice during the evening, the police were called by local residents to our men.
Observation withdrawn at 11 p.m.
G. Caldwell
Number one Cambridge Square was Harold Austin’s residence. Flora had left his flat and gone home. Nothing more, apparently. Ellen turned to the next log. This one was longer, starting at Cambridge Square and tracing her back and forth across London in an obvious attempt to shake off any potential Watchers. On this occasion, she had succeeded, giving the Watcher, Geoffrey Partridge, the slip at Layton Place in Kew.
Ellen located Layton Place in the Street Atlas, noting that it was very close to Kew Gardens railway station, a likely escape route.
Taking a pencil from a handle-less mug which now served as her stationery receptacle, Ellen drew a wonky circle around Layton Place, then returned to the surveillance logs. The next three showed Flora going to the cinema alone, going shopping and meeting an unidentified female for lunch. The fifth log commenced at Cambridge Square and, once again, involved a complex route, which Ellen followed on the atlas. It screamed out to her as an obvious attempt not to be followed, whereas, in the previous three logs, Flora had taken a direct route to the cinema, shopping arcade and restaurant and then had gone straight home.
Ellen sat up with deepening interest. This log was in two parts. In the first part, the Watcher, Angela Jones had lost sight of Flora on Mortlake Road and consequently withdrawn her observation at 3.33pm. By chance, Flora had then been spotted at Kew Gardens railway station, where the Watcher had followed her all the way home. The Watcher’s signature was scrawled at the bottom of the log: John Potter.
‘Mr Potter,’ Ellen called over. ‘Still want that coffee?’
John Potter pulled the pipe from his mouth. ‘Spitting feathers, here, love.’
Ellen smiled and carried the surveillance log over to his desk, placing it so as to bar the keys of his typewriter.
John Potter looked up uncertainly at her.
‘I’ll make you a coffee while you remember everything you can about when you first caught sight of Flora Sterling in this report.’ She gave another exaggerated smile and headed to the refreshments room to make him a coffee. It seemed a fair exchange and would be the last waitress service that she would be providing him for a time to come. She made him his coffee perfunctorily, her mind occupied by that which she believed she was finding revealed by the surveillance logs.
Ellen returned to the general office and passed John the cup of coffee.
He held the log in the air and asked, ‘Why the interest?’
‘Just working on a possible line of enquiry,’ Ellen replied.
‘Not Jericho?’ he sneered.
Ignoring the comment, Ellen said, ‘So, what do you remember?’
‘Well, it’s all here, isn’t it,’ he said, handing her back the log. ‘That’s rather the point of them, Miss Ingram.’ He took a sip of coffee, winced at the temperature and then returned to squinting at the piece of paper curled inside his typewriter.
‘You said in your report that you spotted Flora Sterling approaching Kew Gardens railway station,’ Ellen said, disregarding his attempt to dismiss her.
John Potter huffed and shot her a look of annoyance.
‘From which direction was she walking? Only, you never stipulated that in the log.’
He remained silent and Ellen couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Finally, he exhaled a long breath and then said, ‘North Road.’
‘Sure?’
‘Very—she was coming up the steps to cross the bridge into the station.’
‘Are you absolutely certain of the time you first saw her: 3.55 in the afternoon?’
‘Yes,’ he answered exasperatedly. ‘Listen, love. I’ve been doing this job a very long time. Much longer than you, in fact. I know that I need to log times accurately and that’s just what I did.’
‘Do you think she saw you, or knew that she was being followed?’
‘In my assessment, no,’ John said.
‘And she went directly home: no stopping at a shop or meeting a friend?’ Ellen asked.
‘Does it say so in there?’ he said, nodding to the document in Ellen’s hand.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing else you can recall that didn’t end up in your log?’
‘No.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied, heading back to her desk. She located Mortlake Road on the atlas with ease, just a few streets from North Road, where John Potter had picked her up.
Studying the map carefully, Ellen couldn’t fathom why the journey from Mortlake Road to North Road had taken twenty-two minutes; it appeared that it should take no more than five to ten minutes, depending on where it was on Mortlake Road that Angela Jones had lost sight of Flora. Unfortunately, Angela was off sick with a slipped disc in her back, so Ellen was unable to ask her.
She continued looking through the surveillance logs, finding a further three in the vicinity of Kew Gardens railway station. She became increasingly convinced that the dead drop was somewhere in that geographical area. She stood up, about to run her theory past another of her colleagues, when Mr Skardon entered the office.
