Cayle paused. ‘Have you got that drink?’
‘It’ll have to be a quick one.’ He opened a drawer in the desk and took out a glass and a bottle of Dimple Haig. He didn’t look like a secret drinker, thought Cayle, but then they never did.
‘Do you mind having it straight?’ said Hann.
‘Fine.’ Cayle got up and swallowed half of it standing. He returned to his chair and said: ‘Ever heard of a chap called Mayhew? MI5 liaison man with the Home Office.’
Hann placed the feather-pen back in its holder. ‘What about him?’
‘He called on me just before I left London. Wanted to ask some questions about Sir Roger Jameson-Clarke. There was a Special Branch man with him called Dempster — Sergeant Dempster.’
Hann sat watching him with his cold oily stare. ‘And what has all this got to do with last night?’
‘Just that Sergeant Dempster was one of the boys who grabbed me off the Red Arrow Express. Afterwards he got me talking for about an hour, and I told him everything. Then, when he’d left me, I just walked out too. I guess it was what I was supposed to do — walk into the snow and do a Captain Oates.’
‘What exactly did you tell him?’
‘As I said, everything. All about Comrade Kim, and my meeting with him, and my meetings with Maddox, and my conversation with you.’ He drank some whisky. ‘All right, I wasn’t trying for any medal. Dempster had slugged me pretty efficiently, and I didn’t get the impression he was fooling around.’
‘Just a moment,’ Hann said. He lifted the phone and asked someone to cancel his eleven o’clock appointment. ‘Now let’s try and get some of this straight. You were travelling last night on the Red Arrow Express to Leningrad when someone stopped the train and attacked you in the lavatory?’
‘I told you — it was Dempster. There were two of them, and they attacked me as I opened the door, without making sure I was the right person.’
‘Are you trying to say they were after someone else?’
‘That’s right. Dempster must have checked my empty bunk when he came aboard, after somehow finding out who’d made the booking. And it wasn’t me.’
‘Who?’
‘Kim Philby.’
For a moment Hann’s guard dropped: there was a tight crease at the corner of his mouth and his eyes seemed to have gone dead; they were not looking at Cayle or at anything else. And suddenly Cayle knew. It was with a flash of understanding in which everything became clear: even the wildest events of the last few days now seemed so obvious and simple: the whole elaborate squalid racket from the beginning, more than twelve years ago, right up to the final unplayed act.
Hann recovered quickly. He opened the drawer and brought out the whisky bottle again, with a second glass. ‘You’d better have another yourself,’ he said. ‘This may take some time.’
All Cayle’s good sense now warned him to get clear before it was too late; but his professional instincts were more powerful. Millions of printed words had been spent on the Philby story — books, articles, theories, explanations, assertions, assumptions, deductions — while all the time the truth had been lying just below the surface, known only to a tiny cabal of conspirators, traitors and spy-catchers.
It was a messy, vicious truth. But Barry Cayle had grown up with a simple faith in truth as an unqualified virtue. He might cheat on his expenses, but he would not cheat on a story; and while others in his predicament might have sought escape in expediency and humbug, Cayle stood by the duties of his trade; for in his rougher, humbler calling he was like an archaeologist who stumbles on the vital clue that invalidates a whole tradition of knowledge and accepted fact.
He was also, with a certain clumsy innocence, a brave man; for he knew now that he was walking a very narrow line. With Hann, the perils might not be as immediate as they had been with Dempster. The difference was that with Dempster, Cayle had still been ignorant, and could thus afford to be honest. Once in possession of the truth, he also became part of the conspiracy; from now on he would have to live the lie like the rest of them — by bluff, guile and subterfuge. And for the first time he began to experience perhaps something of what Kim Philby had had to live with for more than thirty years.
This first ordeal, with Hann, continued for just over two hours, with an interruption for sandwiches and coffee. Hann’s approach was less direct than Dempster’s, but none the less dangerous for that. He was quick, treacherous and sly. His one lapse, when the mask had slipped for those few vital seconds, was not repeated. For the rest of the session, he remained in perfect control.
Like Dempster, he wanted to know everything that Cayle knew; and Cayle not only had to supply him with the satisfactory answers, but to imply by those answers that he believed Hann to be something that he was not. Cayle decided from the start that his best role would be his most natural one: tough, rough, honest and gullible.
When he had finished, Hann smiled suavely and said, ‘The only thing that puzzles me, Cayle, is why you chose to come to me?’
‘Because you tried to warn me off,’ said Cayle. ‘It’s always a mistake with newspapers, and newspapermen. Your boys tried the same thing with us when we first broke the Philby story. You leaned too hard. Newspapers are funny that way — they tend to get bloody-minded if they think the authorities are holding out on them.’
‘You’re going to have a job writing this story,’ said Hann. ‘As far as this fellow Dempster’s concerned, you’ve no proof,
