THE PROTECTOR
Mike Lunnon-Wood
Silvertail Books ♦ London
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PROLOGUE
1984
The charred remains of the house’s wooden frame stood, stark and smoking, as the young fireman played his hose back and forth in the first rays of the morning. In the dawn shadows, a gaggle of boys in dressing gowns watched quietly, and beyond them the group of teachers and staff who had come running when the watchman raised the alarm.
The ambulance had already been gone for more than an hour, but the shocked silence hung in the early light. For most of the watchers it had been their first view of death: the pathetic charred bundle that was eased with gloved hands into the green zip-up bag. The watchman had seen the fire from the other end of the school – the flames licking out from the spare room’s window and catching the lower branches of the fir tree that had stood and shaded the house for forty years. From there, the fire had raced up through the branches, crackling and roaring. Those staff and prefects not keeping the boys in their dormitories, away from the danger, ran to help, but were forced to stand impotently back by the heat and smoke.
Later that morning, as the boys walked towards the dining hall for breakfast, they could see the grey police car still down at Mr Morton’s house, and for those who had been huddled at their dormitory windows, the topic was rich and exciting. One boy suggested that they would have to identify the body by dental records. Another guffawed at his friend’s stupidity, saying that they already knew who it was: Mr Morton. the Languages Master from the senior school. They walked quietly for a moment, each remembering the shambling old man, seemingly as old as the hills, who walked the cloistered main quadrangle in an old tweed jacket, discussing history with his twelfth year students. For those seniors he had taught there were no jokes or macabre speculative statements. They had recognised something rare in the man and, for most of them, his classes were an intellectual journey.
He had arrived in the area the previous year and agreed, after some consideration, to take the senior German students as a replacement for the sick department head. He had then begun teaching a pilot course in Russian and finally stood in teaching his first love, history. For the those lucky enough to sit before him, he managed to give the normally dry topic a fresh modern perspective. Sometimes, as a direct answer to a question, he would talk briefly of his years at Corpus Christi Cambridge. For him, the schoolboys were a refreshing change of pace, eminently suitable for a retired academic. They had none of the idle, slightly indolent ease of the Cambridge students and absorbed knowledge like computers with a discipline that delighted him. They called him Teddy, a name they thought original – but, in fact, he had been called that in 1943 when he had first gone up as a very junior Don.
What the students, staff and the policeman at the grey car didn’t know was that, in 1944, he was also called that by three men who were ostensibly employed by the Army, but seemed to spend a lot of time in Whitehall sorting out the bickering between two divisions of Military Intelligence. Teddy Morton had an eye for bright young people and, over the next thirty years, recruited many for MI6. In time, he was added to the full payroll and used when events demanded a fresh mind on an old problem, a mind unsullied by politics, departmental strife or personal vested interests.
CHAPTER ONE
In spite of the new wallpaper and pictures, the room still had a neglected air, its high ceiling showing the damp, and the threadbare carpet, the paths of feet long ago. The original furniture had been replaced by modern Swedish pine that someone had put together from a kit – as alien in the old house as the man who sat in one of the chairs. A nail protruded from a spot where a stag’s head once hung and there were stories about the young men who would throw their hats from the hall as they slid down the wide oak banisters, trying to land their hats between the antlers squarely atop the deer’s head. That was long ago. Nowadays, the huge old house just had two full time occupants, both staff. The official comings and goings were rarer now and the stand-up gas heater, with its orange and red plastic coal, sitting sadly in the hearth symbolised the economies of the times.
Yuri Simonov calmly puffed on his cigarette and occasionally fingered the razor nick on his chin with studied indifference. He liked the English cigarettes supplied to him and, as he smoked, he watched as Mrs Hogan changed the tapes on the recorder. He was a medium grade defector who had been in the United Kingdom for seven weeks now, all of it except the first two days here at the house in Sussex. All KGB were given the medium grade and, when an individual crossed over, they were debriefed where possible by the same team of people. Mary Hogan was a doctor who routinely worked for MI6 but sometimes found her skills hired out to Special Branch and MI5. Yuri Simonov was, however, a 6 catch – and, with the computer that selected code names currently on confectionery, he had been labelled “FRUIT GUM” and driven down to the wringer in Midhurst.
The house was a two-storey Georgian Mansion set discreetly off the road. In its time, it had seen many people with thick European accents repeat their stories over and over to endlessly patient listeners.
Simonov scratched at the nick again, his lank grey hair resting on the worn collar of his shirt.
