“I think we should assume KGB until proven otherwise. Adrian, you had better get together with 5 and SB. Brief ‘em. Let ‘em know there’s been a murder.”
“With due respect, Sir Martin, this isn’t your normal high street murder. This was a team put together for something quite specific. The man we had in that safe house. It’s my patch. I want in on the story. I want to know what I am up against here.”
Callows considered it for a moment. Then, with a sinking finality, he said, “I’m sorry, Adrian. You know I can’t do that.”
The media did get hold of the story. A Midhurst policeman, having to justify his long shift, related the occurrence to his wife who used the story to excuse his non-appearance at a dinner party. Within an hour, a large National Daily short of lead stories had begun piecing together the bits – and, at 4am the following morning, the D Notice Committee immediately authorised the Director General’s request and a notice was slapped on the issue.
Special Branch and Security Service specialists were swarming all over the safe house, Tansey-Williams having reluctantly handed the matter over to them. Operations within the Realm, he grudgingly had to agree, were their responsibility.
He did, however, decline to make available the transcript tapes or advise the MI5 case officer of the details of Yuri Simonov’s de-brief.
CHAPTER TWO
His shoulder ached. It was always bad in the damp. He stretched the arm high over his head to ease it, then leant back to the icon on the scarred wooden table. With the small scalpel in his right hand, he scraped the grime from the painting’s surface. His hands were what people noticed first, those and his eyes, and the powerful aura he exuded.
The hands were large, with powerful cords of muscle built by the constant rhythmic squeezing of a piece of India rubber that was never out of reach. Some people smoked, some drank. Titus Quayle did both and squeezed bits of rubber.
The psychiatrists had found it interesting, a legacy of the two years in the dark filth of the Libyan prison. They likened the bond between the man and inanimate object to a child with his security blanket. But they were wrong. If they had looked into his flinty blue eyes they would have known that. He was forty-six years old but the time in the prison made him look older. Almost two years later, his skin was still scarred and his once rich black hair was laced with grey at the temples. He kept it cropped short and, as he bent over the icon, listening to the rain on the tin roof, he occasionally ran a hand across the aching shoulder.
He stopped, leant the postcard size painting against an earthenware jug and sat back to study it, his right hand taking the piece of rubber from the bench and squeezing it.
Born in Malaya in 1941, he was the only child of a quiet wraith-like librarian’s daughter who had uncharacteristically run off and married the seventh son of the Earl of Dagenham, Charles Moncrief Montague Quayle. Realising that, as the seventh son, he was unlikely to benefit from his father’s estate, Quayle had given the entire family the traditional two fingered salute at the dinner table one night and the next day booked passage to Singapore, collecting the librarian’s daughter en route to Tilbury docks. He was convinced that, beneath the quiet nature and ill-fitting staid dresses, there lurked a ripe body and an adventurous spirit – and by Christmas 1938 they were managing a rubber plantation in Malaya’s Cameron Highlands. Emily Quayle would often walk the rows of trees with her husband, supervising the tappers. And when their son was born, she felt she could not be happier. Charles Quayle had always hated his proliferation of Christian names and his wish had been that his son should have one name and a short one at that. And so, reared on the tales of Scott’s Antarctic Expedition and the courage of Captain Oates, he had called his son Titus. For Emily, the existence was idyllic.
But it wasn’t to last long.
When war came to Malaya, Charles Quayle dispatched his wife and new son down to fortress Singapore, bravely took his gun and stupidly stood in the way of the entire Imperial Japanese Army – leaving his widow and child to spend the next few years in Changi prison. After the war, Emily met and later married another Englishman, an engineer who came and went from their lives as projects and the drink permitted, and with some relief she accepted the new Earl’s correspondence offer to educate young Titus in England.
The quiet tough little chap arrived at Southampton with his mother in 1948 and was immediately enrolled in a preparatory school allied to Eton. From there on, the years flashed by, the boy showing a real aptitude for languages and history – and, in 1959, he entered Corpus Christi College at Cambridge.
He was now alone, his mother having died several years before when a Yemeni had thrown a hand grenade into the car she was driving through Aden. His stepfather, drunk beside her after a night in the mess, had survived after the removal of a leg but in his guilt had never spoken to Titus again.
His tutor at Cambridge was Edward Morton, a German and Russian Languages specialist. The kindly quick-witted Don soon became more than just mentor to the young man, the pair of them sitting up late at night discussing theology, politics, history, playing chess or poring over the tutor’s small collection of Russian icons.
The art form became Quayle’s escape from the modern world and he found, in his first fumbling attempts at restoration, a real pleasure. Twenty-five years after leaving Cambridge, he could still not walk past a damaged or neglected piece without
