“Any correspondence or files?”
“No. Absolutely nothing. The postman hasn’t made a delivery there since he took over six months ago. His mail must go to the embassy. None of them have much mail even at the Press Centre. And that’s all official stuff from UK sources. Invitations, press releases. That sort of stuff. But there is one thing. He’s got a bird he sees regularly. A real doll. Looks Russian or Italian. Very dark, flashing eyes and rather sultry.”
“Who is she?”
“I haven’t found out anything about her except that she doesn’t live permanently in London. She generally spends the night with Grushko when they meet and she takes the Cardiff train home but I don’t know where she gets off. Once or twice she’s stayed at a flat in Hammersmith after meeting Grushko. I’m checking on whose flat it is.”
“Is she anything more than a girlfriend?”
“I think she is. I’m not sure.”
“Why do you think that?”
“They’re obviously fond of one another. But they look like conspirators.” He laughed. “They seem to talk almost too much and too earnestly for just lovers.”
“What about Maguire-Barton?”
“He’s got a pad in Pimlico. A conversion. Three bedrooms. Quite swish. And it’s paid for by a public relations company. Lobbyists. It’s pretty exhausting following him, he’s a real busy bee. Goes to everything he’s invited to. Especially embassy parties. Mainly eastern bloc ones but to others as well. And what’s even more interesting is that our friend Grushko is nearly always at the communist receptions at the same time. But they never leave together. And …” he paused, smiling, “… the most interesting thing is that Grushko’s girlfriend has been escorted by Maguire-Barton on two occasions. Once to the Italian Embassy and once to the Dutch Embassy. Grushko wasn’t there on either occasion.”
“Anything else?”
“Maguire-Barton has two or three girls he sees regularly. All-night jobs. Sometimes his place, sometimes theirs. Seems to be a lavish spender. I asked for permission to check his bank account but Painter says he needs more grounds before he could authorise it.”
“Have you checked over Maguire-Barton’s file in Archives?”
“It doesn’t go back very far. They’ve not been checking him for long, and before the surveillance started there’s very little if anything of interest to us.”
On the tenth day Chapman followed Maguire-Barton’s taxi to the Embankment on the south side of the river and walked behind him as the MP strolled past County Hall towards the Festival Hall.
Chapman hung back as Maguire-Barton walked into the Festival Hall and across to the cafeteria. He saw him standing with a tray in the short queue for tea and then Chapman saw Grushko sitting at one of the window tables alone.
Grushko and Maguire-Barton sat at separate tables but after ten minutes Grushko stood up, walked to Maguire-Barton’s table and bent over for a light for his cigarette. Smiling his thanks the Russian picked up the folded newspaper from the table beside Maguire-Barton’s arm and walked back to his seat. Maguire-Barton left five minutes later and Chapman followed him back to the flat in Pimlico. It was the first time that they had established a positive and covert connection between the KGB man and the MP. Harris confirmed later that Grushko had met his dark-haired girlfriend at the Golden Egg in Leicester Square. They had gone to the Zoo and then back to his Kensington flat. He left alone at eight o’clock the next morning and later the girl had taken the Cardiff train.
9
The cabin on the SS America was small, with two berths, one over the other, and two small lockers for clothes and hand luggage. But Molody had slipped the steward ten dollars and he had got the cabin to himself. As he sat on the lower berth he wondered why Collins had ordered him to leave the United States within forty-eight hours. The orders came from Moscow and he was to go to London and be prepared to stay there indefinitely. It didn’t seem like a routine posting. He had been doing a good job for Collins in the United States but Collins had seemed tense and apprehensive. He had been given the London address of the Cohens who had apparently already moved to England. But Molody wasn’t a man who indulged in doubts and introspection.
For the first two days he had been mildly seasick but by the third day he had recovered. He spent a lot of his time playing cards with some of the stewards and it was from them he learned about the Overseas Club which provided cheap accommodation in London. He learned too about the various rackets the crewmen ran to augment their earnings, and he realised that there were going to be even more opportunities for earning quick easy money in London than he had had in Canada and New York.
He found the crewmen impressed by his story of his wealthy Canadian father with the huge estate in Vancouver, and he regaled them with stories of how, despite the money his father gave him, he had worked as a cook in a labour camp, as a gold prospector, a long-haul truck driver and a gas-station attendant. By the time the ship docked at Southampton he had added to his legend a nagging wife who he had walked out on. It seemed to go down well and bit by bit he had fabricated a past that explained and fitted his present life and character.
At the Royal Overseas League off St. James’s Street he only added to his story that he had been given a Canadian government grant to study Chinese at London University’s School of Oriental and African
