The Ipcress File

bright red OBE with the Military Stripe and the India General Service and the George VI Coronation, to say nothing of a ’39—’43 Star and a Western Desert ribbon. I began to wish I’d worn the pullover with the Defence Medal sewn on it.

The EMP shook hands rather grandly and referred to me as ‘the hero of the hour’. I celebrated by helping myself to a cigar and pretended to have no matches in order to have the EMP light it for me. He thanked me and Ross and Alice, but I knew there was more to it than that. When he began the sales talk with, ‘Mr Ross is most anxious that you should hear this from me…’ I knew what it was. Ross had finally taken over Charlotte Street. What timing! No one could challenge Ross’s competence after this IPCRESS fiasco. I heard him going on about Ross going up to ‘half-colonel’ and ‘seniority’. On the walls were photos of the EMP standing with Churchill, seated with Eisenhower, receiving a medal, sitting on a horse, and reviewing an armoured brigade while standing in a jeep. There were no photos of him as an inexperienced subaltern with his foot jammed in a drainage pipe. Perhaps people like him are born as brigadiers.

But now the conversation was taking a different turn. Ross, it seemed, wasn’t taking over Charlotte Street. The purpose of my visit was an explanation to me!

As I sorted it out afterwards, it all began because Ross wanted to be quite sure that I wasn’t working for the Jay and Dalby set-up. So he asked if he could offer me the Al Gumhuria work. They calculated that if I was channelling stuff out through Jay I’d jump at it. I hadn’t. I had told Ross to keep it. From that moment ‘my future was assured’ as the old army saying has it. Now Ross wanted me to be quite clear about his hands being clean, so he had the top brass tell me in person.

The Exalted Military Personage was very keen to hear how I got out of the Wood Green house, and at one stage said, ‘Good show!’ again, and after that, something that I still consider rather foolish for a man of his experience. He said, ‘And now is there anything I can tell you?’

I told him that I had overseas and detachment pay outstanding for nearly eighteen months. He was a little shattered, and Ross didn’t know where to put his face for embarrassment. But the EMP adopted an ‘all boys together’ attitude, and promised to action it for me if I let his ADC have details in writing. Ross had the door open, and Alice was about to go through it when I leaned across the vast highly polished desk and said, ‘When do you arrest Henry?’ Ross closed the door and came back to the desk. The EMP came around it. They both looked at me as though I wasn’t using Amplex.

At last the EMP spoke; his brown wrinkled face was close to mine. He said, ‘I should be furious with you. You’re implying a reluctance on my part to pursue the Queen’s enemies.’

I said, ‘I’m implying nothing, but I’m glad to hear that the suggestion would anger you.’

The EMP unlocked a tray on his desk and produced a slim green file; on the cover it said ‘HENRY’ in magic- marker lettering. It was about all we knew of the man who phoned Jay that night. Inside there was a note from the PM in his own handwriting, my report, and a long screed from Ross. The EMP said, ‘We are as anxious to clear it up as anyone, but we’ll have to have more facts than this.’

‘Then, with respect, sir, I suggest that you pass it on to the appropriate authority,’ I told him. ‘To be quite frank,’ Ross began, but I refused to be interrupted. I stared the EMP full in the eye. ‘This report of mine was submitted to the Cabinet. Neither you nor Colonel Ross has any right to open a file, handle a file, or comment in any way. The sphere of activities are clearly defined by the Cabinet. I’ll take this file with me, and I must ask you to treat its contents as top secret, pending the submission of my further reports to the Cabinet.’ It wasn’t that there were reasons for suspecting the EMP of attempting to cover up for the elusive Henry, but I didn’t want this file to be mislaid. At that moment I resolved that one day I would track down Jay’s highly placed friend. Something of this must have shown on my face in spite of my training.

‘My dear fellow,’ said the EMP. ‘Nothing was further from my mind than treating you in a cavalier fashion.’ I had won. I had won so soundly that the EMP produced his XO Brandy. I allowed myself to be mollified, but not too quickly. It’s great, that Hennessy XO Brandy.

Alice and I had a car waiting to take us back to Charlotte Street. We rode in silence almost all the way, but just before Goodge Street Alice said, ‘Not even Dalby would have attempted that.’ It was as near as Alice ever came to admiration. I gave her the green file and said airily, ‘Give this one of our file numbers, Alice.’ But my triumph was short-lived, for later that afternoon she brought in the two files I’d left in Waterman’s car. You could never beat Alice.

That evening Ross rang and said he had to see me, about Jay. And Carswell, Painter, Ross and I had a conference. The end was inevitable, and it came on Saturday. Jay was paid ?160,000 to open a department working directly between Ross and myself. On this same day a Jensen 541S sports car went off the Maidstone by-pass while going at an absurd speed. There was one occupant, a Mr Dalby; death, they said, was instantaneous.

There was still much work to do at Charlotte Street. K.K., late of Wood Green, wanted to claim diplomatic immunity, but failed. I put an advertisement into France-Soir, thanking Bert for his offer of help, and telling of my cancelled tour.

Alice bought an electric coffee-mill for the office, so that we could have real coffee, and I got all my back pay and allowances. I paid the pianist at the ‘Tin-Tack’ thirty shillings and sent Alf Keating an oil heater. The dispatch office was making a book on the Open; I put five shillings on Munn & Felton’s (Footwear) Brass Band. A little note from Chico thanked me for doing his requisitions the night he went to Grantham, and Jean sewed a patch into my brown worsted trousers.

On Tuesday I had a visitor; the American brigadier from Tokwe. He brought two large cardboard boxes with him, and after lunching at the ‘Ivy’ we returned to the office to watch a demonstration.

From the cardboard boxes he brought a wooden contraption, its paint chipped and faded. When fitted together it was about six feet long; attached to each end was a red automobile light. It wasn’t until he showed me photographs of the battered motor cycle they had dragged from the ocean floor that I realized Dalby’s ingenious scheme.

This wooden plank bolted to the back of a motor cycle was what I followed across Tokwe the night I was arrested. The motor bike was too small to register on the radar screen. Dalby moved the block across the road, and connected the HT wires to kill the only witness. He used the High Speed TV, then threw it into the sea nice and near my car, knowing that it would be detected by echo sounders, and that my close proximity would implicate me. Then he drove away relying on wind, a good silencer, and confusion. He dumped the bike in the sea off another part of the island, having left the road and travelled across open country. The two men that Jay’s network had working for the USMD[31] told the British authorities that the Americans were holding on to me, and the Americans, that the British had asked for my return. After that, Jay took over, and brought me into the UK as a hospital case.

I appreciated the work that this officer had done. He felt he owed me a debt. I told him about Dalby being killed, and he didn’t look surprised or cynical, so I left it at that.

He asked, ‘This feller, Dalby; the Reds had brainwashed the guy, huh?’

I said we weren’t sure, but perhaps we looked for motivation in the wrong places these days. We tend to forget that there are people who are simply after money and power, and they have no psychological complications at all. I said I thought Dalby and Jay were both like that, and that a feud had been not so far away when it all blew up in their faces.

‘Money and power, eh?’ said the Brigadier. ‘Just a simple case of a couple of well-informed SOBs.’

‘Perhaps that’s about it,’ I said.

‘I asked Dalby for you at Tokwe,’ he told me, and I said I knew.

‘I just had a hunch, you know what I mean,’ he said.

I knew what he meant.

And he said, ‘Can I ask you just one more thing?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘How were your people so sure that Colonel Ross and Miss Bloom (that was Alice’s other name) — I mean to give no offence, you understand.’

I said I understood.

‘But how were they so sure that Ross and Miss Bloom couldn’t be…well, reached?’

I said that there were people who were very difficult to brain-wash.

‘Is that so?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘Obsessional neurotics; people who go back twice to make sure the door is locked, who walk