“Definitely not. Almost pleased with himself. May I speak?” she asked respectfully.
“Certainly!”
“Well, I have been thinking. I saw him last night before he went down to Aldershot. He said something like ‘all is never what it seems’ with reference to Miss Mortimer. It seemed he had found something he wanted to pursue.”
“He had said as much to me some weeks ago,” Callows said. “Said he wanted to stay on it.” He looked at Black. “Get onto the duty officer. I want his files. Everything, the FRUITGUM tapes, Arnold’s work and the interview notes from Aldershot. All these killings over some honey trap files girl? Doesn’t make sense!”
The following morning, as Sir Martin stepped into his office, there to greet him was Adrian Black, for once the usual smile missing.
“Well?” Callows asked.
“We seem to have misplaced Arnold’s stuff,” he said.
“What?”
“Arnold’s notes and the FRUITGUM material. No longer in the files. The lot. Gone.” He paused while Callows dropped his case on his desk, his mind racing at what the statement meant.” I’ve been up all night on it. Arnold’s comment to your secretary: ‘all is not what it seems…’ Mortimer was just a bonus. There’s something else afoot here. Milburn security has been breached. Someone in this building, someone with access all down the line, has walked off with all Arnold’s work.”
“Who else has been advised of this?” Callows asked.
“No-one, Sir,” Black answered, “but I’ve called in two others. One was Mrs Hogan, and the other is Mortimer’s lawyer. He was in the next room when Arnold spoke to her. He remembers the question Arnold put. One question only. He asked her why she dumped the Long Knives File. She answered that she didn’t. She was emphatic about it. Mrs Hogan confirms the name as the same that triggered the initial search.”
“So we’ve been so paranoid about a mole we missed the real issue,” Callows said.
“That’s the way I read it, Sir.”
“Right. Get Burmeister in and let’s see where we go from here.”
It was in the next day’s interviews, when Adrian Black was talking to the Assistant Head of Registry, that the break came.
Mrs Holloway was a career Six administrator who had been working in Main Registry at Century House for seventeen years and her lead came almost as an aside.
“Of course, Henry was all through the old files by that time. He had two girls pulling hard copies for him.”
“Did he find what he was looking for?” Black asked.
“No, not directly. The file he was after was on the computer system, but we came across a reference. It’s almost impossible to completely erase the existence of material when you have multiple cross referencing taking place.”
“Sorry. Explain?”
“When a long search is on, and material is slowly coming together, we store it in hard copy form. Only once sections are complete do we load it onto the system and dump the hard copies. All those entries are entered and referenced.”
“And he found something?”
“No, I did – although at the time I wasn’t sure what it was. I told him some days later that I recognised the signature of the depositor. The individual compiling the file.”
“Who was that?”
“Teddy Morton.” She paused and smiled at the memory. “You won’t remember him. You were still with Five when he retired. He’s dead now I believe.”
“Did the name mean anything to Henry Arnold?”
“Oh yes. The pair were thick as thieves over the years. Teddy was about ten years older than Henry, an academic part-timer who came on the full time payroll in the mid-Sixties, while still retaining his chair at Cambridge. Henry was chuffed with the discovery. If Teddy Morton had been the man pulling the Long Knives thread then that was significant.”
“In what way?” Black asked.
“Teddy Morton was brilliant. In his day, he was the clearest thinker in this murky little pond of ours. If he had been on Long Knives for any time at all then there was skullduggery in the plot. He never wasted his time. Yes, Henry Arnold and Teddy were well respected. The other in that trio during the cold war years, was of course, Gabriella Kreski. “
“Now that name rings a bell…”
“Should do. She must be in her eighties now. She ran the Gdansk net. You’ll have covered her work at Lincoln when you trained. She was WILLOW.”
Black nodded as he remembered the case studies. She had lectured once, a softly spoken woman with grey hair – and that had been fifteen years ago.
“But Long Knives is long after she retired, surely?”
“Yes, but she knew Teddy Morton better than anyone. He was her protégé after she came in. She channelled his thinking. Taught him to think like a spy. Him a Cambridge man, it should have come naturally.” That was a direct dig at his MI5 background and the Burgess Philby Maclean group of five, all recruited from Cambridge. He smiled and thanked her and, the next day, he drove down to Brighton to pay Gabriella Kreski a visit.
“Put Mahler on, if you will,” she asked, settling slowly into a lumpy looking armchair with a sigh.
He did so, carefully handling the old recording and watching Gabriella Kreski in the mirror as the old stiff arm jerked across the turntable and lower itself onto the record.
Her face was deeply lined, pale and dry, but her brown eyes were bright and alert beneath a tight cap of almost white hair. According to records she was now eighty nine years old, but beneath the frail exterior she was as tough as old leather.
“So you want to know about Teddy, yes?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Why?”
“I need to know how he was, how he thought…”
“That’s no answer,” she said crisply.
“You are still covered by the official secrets act?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Edward Morton was working on a file before he retired to Australia. That file has since been removed. Apparently, every trace if its existence has gone. I need to know what it was, what it involved. Then maybe I can
