All the Colors of Darkness

“Good Lord, no. Cedric was far too selfish to serve his country for any longer than he had to. He involved himself in a number of ill-advised business ventures. One after the other. I’m afraid, Mr. Banks, that charming rogue as he was, my late lamented husband wasn’t much good at anything. His main interests in life were fast cars and even faster women. We stayed together for appearances’ sake, as married couples did then, but God knows how long it would have lasted if it hadn’t been for his accident. The woman he was with walked away without a scratch.” Edwina gazed directly at Banks. “I always hated her for that, you know,” she said. “Not that I wished it had been the other way around. I just wished they had both died.”

She must have noticed Banks’s look of mingled curiosity and horror because she went on quickly. “Oh, I didn’t do it. Really. I didn’t fix the brakes or anything. I wouldn’t know how. Don’t think this is a A L L T H E C O L O R S O F D A R K N E S S

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murder confession. It was just the end of something for me, and it would have been an even more perfect end if his silly little whore had died with him. You can hardly imagine how miserable my existence was then. This was in late October 1956, well before Viva and the swinging sixties. In fact, it was right at the height of the Suez Crisis, and I think Cedric was involved in the oil business then. Suez was the main tanker route, of course. Typical of him to be putting his money in quite the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway, things were very difficult all around. The only bright spot in my life was Laurence.”

Banks noticed the tears in her eyes, but with a supreme effort of will she seemed to absorb them back into the ducts. He could feel the sun warm on his cheek and his shirt was sticking to his back. “The spying,” he said gently. “How did that come about?”

“Oh, yes, that. Would you believe it but Dicky Hawkins—an old war colleague of Cedric’s—actually asked me for permission to recruit Laurence? This was in his last year at Cambridge, 1967. He’d shown a remarkable facility for modern languages—German and Russian in particular—and a keen grasp of contemporary politics. He was good at sports, too. Not for Laurence The Beatles, marijuana and revolution. He was about as dyed-in-the-wool blue as you could get. While others kids were out buying Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Laurence was running around the hills playing soldiers with the army cadets and collecting military memorabilia. And he didn’t buy it to sell it to hippies on Carnaby Street later, either. Somehow all that just passed Laurence by.”

“They must have had a few reservations about taking him on, though,” Banks said. “Given your . . . well, your lifestyle at the time.”

Edwina laughed. “It was still early days for me, remember, but yes, I was starting to make a name for myself, and I was mixing with a rather heady crowd. Most people think the sixties didn’t start until the Summer of Love in 1967, but for those of us who were there at the beginning, in London, at any rate, it was all over by then. 1963, 1964, 1965. Those were the years. All the people I knew wanted to change the world— some from the inside, some through art or Eastern religion, some by violent revolution. But wasn’t that a wonderful bonus?”

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P E T E R R O B I N S O N

“You mean Laurence spied on you and your friends?”

“I’m quite sure nothing slipped by him. But Dicky and his pals weren’t really interested in all that. They didn’t take that scene in the least bit seriously. Not here, at any rate. I mean, everyone sang and talked about revolution, but nobody actually did anything. Dicky’s lads knew who the real dangers were. And where. It was overseas they were interested in. Mainland Europe was the hotbed of terrorism back then, or starting to be. Germany. France. Italy. Cohn-Bendit, Baader-Meinhof and the Red Army Faction. We had our moments in little old Britain, mostly courtesy of the IRA or the Angry Brigade, but in comparison with the rest of the world we were still something of a sleepy backwater.”

“So you told this Dicky Hawkins that it was all right to recruit Laurence?”

“The question was a mere courtesy. It clearly didn’t matter what my answer was. Anyway, I can’t say I was happy about the idea, but I told him he was welcome to give it a try, that I wasn’t Laurence’s keeper and wouldn’t stand in his way. I wasn’t quite sure whether he would succeed or not, but he did. The next thing I knew Laurence was off on training courses for a couple of years, learning how to drive fast in city centers and God knows what else, and I didn’t see much of him. After that, he changed.”

“In what way?”

“It was as if he’d taken a part of himself, cut it off and hidden it away where no one could ever see it. It’s hard to describe, because on the surface he was as charming and funny and witty as ever, but I knew that he couldn’t tell me most of what he’d been doing since I saw him last. And I probably suspected that I didn’t want to know, either.”

“So what did you do?”

“What could I do? I accepted it and life went on. I’d lost part of my son, but not all of him. Whatever they did to him, they didn’t kill his love for his mother.”

“Do you know which branch of the intelligence services he worked for?”

“MI6. His facility for languages sealed it. That’s why he spent a good part of his time undercover overseas. East Germany, Russia.

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Czechoslovakia. I remember his first real assignment was in Prague in 1968. I don’t know what he was supposed to do there, but I assume he had to mingle with the students and help make things difficult for the Russians, or report on developments there. After that . . . who knows.

I do gather that some of the assignments he handled were not without danger.”

“He never told you any details?”

“One thing Laurence could do better than anybody I have ever known was keep a secret.” She noticed that her glass was almost empty and swirled the dregs around the bottom.

“Want another?” Banks asked, spotting the waiter hovering on the fringes.

“I’ve had enough.”