'I'm not trying to. It's simply that he wasn't the sort of man to pick up this sort of information. He was just a delivery agent for second-class mail.'
'He put in his own reports too.'
'Most of which he could have copied from the magazines and papers he bought in the streets. For the sort of thing we've been talking about he just didn't have the background—and he certainly didn't have the contacts, Fred.'
Sir Frederick sighed, then shook his head. 'You can say what you like, Neville. But at the end of the day the only clue we've got points to him. And—' he tapped the file, 'there's circumstantial evidence in here that backs it up, too.'
Richardson grasped thankfully at last at the answer to the question which had been nagging him increasingly: 'What clue?'
Sir Frederick half smiled. 'The one you brought to us, Peter—
the one Narva gave to David's friend, and he gave to David, and Professor Freisler handed on to you: the Little Bird from dummy2
East Berlin.'
'The little dickey bird?'
'He started as Dickey Bird, curiously enough, short for Richard von Hotzendorff. He was rechristened Little Bird in
'61. Born in Konigsberg, which is now Kaliningrad, in 1914.
David would have recognised him straight away, naturally—'
'David's signature is on the authorisation transferring the file from active to dead,' said Macready. 'His and Latimer's.
July 1970—that would be the yearly clear-out.'
'So he'd have remembered the circumstantial evidence too, then,' Sir Frederick nodded.
Richardson looked at him expectantly.
'Nothing to do with oil, I'm afraid, Peter—Neville's right there. There isn't a smell of it.'
'What is there a smell of?'
'The warm South—Italy. Three smells of it, too: Hotzendorff was there first with the German army in '42 and '43. The second time was twenty-five years later.'
'Twenty-five?' The addition rolled in Richardson's brain like a jackpot number. '1968.'
'Early in that year. He was dead before the end of it.'
'And Narva was buying into the North Sea.'
'Exactly.'
'The Italian trip isn't in the file.' Macready's tone was aggrieved.
dummy2
'No. We didn't know it until after he was dead.'
'And there was a third time.' Now there was nothing casual about Macready's question, his voice was sharp.
'Not for Hotzendorff, there wasn't. Not long after he died his wife —his widow—got out of East Germany with her three children. She came to us to enquire about his pension. Or at least his gratuity—'
'She got out? You mean we didn't get her out?' Macready cut in quickly.
'We didn't—she did.'
'On her own, with three children? She must be a woman of considerable initiative. The East Germans don't like losing children—did she say how she'd done it?'
'She had friends, she said. And some money saved—it can be done with that. She also said that her husband had placed some money in Italy on his last trip. With a bit of a pension it would be enough to bring the family up, if we could drop a word here and there.' Sir Frederick looked from one to the other of them. 'She said they'd always planned to retire there one day. We had no reason to doubt her story. . . .'
Oh, brother! thought Richardson—a woman of considerable initiative!
'I suppose Little Bird really is dead—or that he hasn't just migrated to sunnier climes?'
Sir Frederick looked at him a little reproachfully. 'I said we didn't doubt her story, Peter—I didn't say we didn't check on dummy2
it. Although it might have been better in this instance if we hadn't.'
The obvious question hung in the air between them for a moment, unasked.
'We checked his death in the hospital files in Moscow, and we closed down his contact network—that was all routine.
And then we ran another check on her eight months later in Italy, just to make sure he hadn't been clever.' Sir Frederick looked from one to the other of them bleakly. 'And it was David Audley who had the job of setting up the checks.'
'Okay—that does it.' Macready turned away from the desk to stare directly out of the window into nowhere, nodding spasmodically to himself.
