Agent Lavender: The Flight of Harold Wilson Read online

  “Essentially, yes,” Marcia replied.

  “He has nothing scheduled overnight or tomorrow morning.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m telling you I think this is odd.”

  The senior civil servant made a noncommittal noise and walked back around his desk.

  “I’ll phone around. See where Hampton – it is Hampton tonight, isn’t it? – I’ll see where Hampton reported they were headed.”

  Marcia only nodded and turned on her heel. As she left Sir John’s office, she became lost in thoughts that unnerved her for reasons she couldn’t put her finger on.

  Harold Wilson enjoyed a good ramble as much as the next man. But in the company of two psychopathic Russians, even a bracing journey across the Dales with a flask of tea would have been uncomfortable. As things stood, he was hiking over what he was sure was private land in brogues and with an overnight bag that he now wasn’t sure he would even need. The moon was full and high in the sky, giving their escapade an eerie glow. As he squinted to avoid treading in cowpats, he tried to imagine what was next. Would the comrades greet him with a welcoming embrace and a radio broadcast? Would he take it? Or would his be a short trip to a cell where a charming man from the Caucasus stood waiting with a loaded Tokarev? He swallowed and assured himself that option did not seem particularly likely – it would be far simpler for Tulip and Lily to take care of him here and now. With a dark look he glanced at them both, but was satisfied that neither of them were holding their guns and all weapons appeared holstered.

  “How much further?” he panted, trying to avoid thinking about de facto house arrest in some suburb of Moscow. Tulip stopped and turned round, calling back to him.

  “Not very far. Maybe one, two kilometres. Come!” he barked the final syllable a little like an order, and Harold dutifully picked up the pace slightly. He was getting desperate for the loo, however, and he thought to himself that matters might have to come to a head before embarking on a cramped journey through the Baltic.

  “Just a moment,” he called, hurrying over to the edge of the field they were in and undoing his flies. Tulip and Lily evidently didn’t hear him, continuing on towards the now just about visible clifftop. Harold sighed and relieved himself, allowing himself three shakes at the end (for what was this but a special occasion?) and turned back towards the two Russians.

  Then someone shot them.

  For the second time that night, Harold Wilson dived for cover as a gun spat death at his travelling companions, the first shot catching Tulip in the side of the head with a barrelful of buckshot and sending him sprawling into the dirt. Lily swore in Russian and drew his Makarov pistol, the bulky silencer silhouetted for a moment against the moon. Harold rolled over into the bush, conscious that he was now lying in his own urine, an unpleasant situation to find oneself in. But it was preferable to the shotgun blast that Lily received as he wildly fired into nothingness. He screamed for about a minute then fell silent. Harold thought his heart was going to leap out of his chest. A man with what looked like a Barbour, flat cap and a double-barreled shotgun walked towards the two bodies, shouting about trespassers and inspecting something that Harold couldn’t see. He surmised that it must’ve been Tulip’s body when the man stood up in shock and shouted back across the fields towards his house – the lights were on and Harold could see a figure standing in the doorway – in a loud, clear voice.

  “Miriam, call an ambulance!” the farmer hollered, “I think I might’ve killed him!” The man span round as Lily gave another soft cry and Harold’s eyes darted towards the patch of ground where he lay. He was trying to reach for his Makarov, which had fallen a few feet from where he lay, but his arm was torn to ribbons and he was bleeding heavily from the neck. The farmer sprinted over to him.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he uttered, kneeling down, “Look, son, you and your friend had no right to be here, you understand? This is private property and when you come trampling along—”

  “Yob tuboyo mat, zhopa...” spat Lily, before biting down hard with a loud cracking sound. His mouth foamed up and the farmer sprang to his feet before backing slowly away in horror.

  “Miriam...” he began, quietly, then spluttered into a full-throated roar as he sprinted to his home, “Miriam, forget the ambulance! Call the police! No, the army! Call the bloody government! There’s an invasion on!”

  The nearby Prime Minister made a note to pass on the man’s concerns at the next opportunity, and rolled out of his bed of mud and human waste. Rising to his feet only once the farmhouse had turned out all its lights and, presumably, locked and barricaded all its doors, he looked about him, gave an apologetic glance towards Lily and Tulip, and started trudging towards an old barn. As had been the case for so much of his career, Harold Wilson was at the mercy of events.

  The Cabinet Secretary winced as he took another sip of coffee. Neither the Car Service nor Home Office had replied to his hurried telephone calls of the past two hours. It was unusual enough for any senior minister to be out of contact for more than an hour, but having one leave under such circumstances augured rather ill. Sir John Hunt had been in Whitehall for his entire professional life and had made his career out of not being unduly flustered by the Profumo Scandal. As such, he was not a man used to being overtaken by events. It was not the done thing for the head of the Home Civil Service to just lose a Prime Minister. This was not Australia, after all.

  The telephone rang, jolting him from his reverie. He grabbed the receiver, gave a nonplussed salutation and jotted down the latest report from the Department of Transport. Shortly afterwards, he paused for a moment and dialled out again.

  “Vivian, could you please get me the Lord President of the Council?”

  North Walsham Police Station, as would be expected for a small civic building in the middle of rural Norfolk, was closed for the night. Sergeant Bert Gooch was hardly in the most charitable of moods when he arrived, giving an uncharitable glance to Constable Fipps, who was obscenely chipper for a 3AM start.

  “So, what is this then, Fipps?” he said as the car turned onto the High Street. “Mass suicide? Coup attempt? Perhaps a Soviet advance guard has come along to occupy Holt?”

  “That’s, er, what it sounded like, Sarge.”

  “What?”

  “The report from Mr Barham. Sounded like he just shot two Russian spies.”

  Sergeant Gooch muttered blasphemously to himself as they passed the railway station. This was the problem with The Broads. Decades of underinvestment, centuries of inbreeding and millennia of isolation had given rise to an agrarian population that seemed to think that anyone who didn’t wear corduroy and hold their trousers up with string was a spy. Fortunately, most of the old farts seemed to think it was still 1936 and therefore assumed that Mr Baldwin was Prime Minister. An assurance that the nation stood ready to face down Mr Hitler – if it came to that, of course – was usually enough to earn a cup of tea and an hour’s sit down.

  “Mark my words, Constable Fipps, he’ll have shot a hiker from the Midlands, so all we need to do is get the shotgun off him, make his wife a cup of tea and then get Norwich to send a Black Maria down. Hopefully we’ll be able to get an extra three hours’ overtime.”

  The rest of the journey passed in silence, with only a momentary pause as Gooch forgot the correct junction and almost sent the police car careening into the marsh outside Briggate. Arriving, even he struggled to deny the evidence in front of him.

  “This doesn’t look like our alphabet, Sarge,” Fipps was saying, staring intently at the paper they had found inside the larger man’s jacket, “Frapon...Bnnbcoh...some of these letters are upside down!”

  “Do be quiet, Constable, I am doing my best to get a statement from Mr Barham.”

  Irritated, Gooch returned to taking the statement from the farmer, who, three whiskies later, had finally recovered enough composure to talk in complete sentences. Gooch reviewed his notes.

  “So. To recap. You were startled shortly after half-p
ast two this morning by a disturbance. You are used to poachers and trespassers on your property, because, in your own words, you grow the best King Edwards in the entire county. At this point, without giving prior notice of your intentions, you stormed out into the night and fired a warning shot directly into this man’s torso.”

  “I never meant… it was a warning shot…”

  “Yes, and the second one was a warning too, I suppose?”

  “These are expensive potatoes, officer,” Barham replied, “you can’t take risks if someone is trampling all over them after they’ve been planted. It ain’t right. And besides, I only fired at the second chap when I saw he had a gun!”

  “We’ve recovered that weapon, so for now I’m prepared to believe you. Did you get a look at the third man? See where he went?”

  “I didn’t really. When I heard this bloke here speaking Russian, I ran for my life back into the house. I don’t think the other one was with the two here though, he sounded Yorkshire.”

  Gooch rolled his eyes heavenwards. No doubt Alan Bennett had been out gallivanting with Russian shooting enthusiasts again.

  Harold Wilson shook himself awake after an hour’s sleep in what was probably the draughtiest barn between London and the Urals. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he realised that he was, at this moment, more open to exposure than any time since the trip to Leningrad in ’59. That had not really been his fault either, but Barbara had been so insistent at dragging them all to the ballet that he had almost missed the meeting at the halfway house. Comrade Lotus had not been pleased at the delay, threatening him with a rather public unmasking if it happened again. It was a fitful memory that Harold had returned to innumerable times over the past seventeen years, but until recently, he had never really expected to see it acted upon.

  That had been before Tulip and Lily had got themselves shot, though. Harold smiled darkly to himself at the spectacle of the whole thing. Years of the most intense teaching by the First Directorate, and self-defence training in Siberia had not prepared the duo from being brought down by an irate farmer convinced that the two of them were after his spuds. It was an absurdity that seemed fitting for the farce that the night was turning into. Harold rolled out of the sack that had been functioning as an impromptu sleeping bag, remembered what the straw was sticking to and made a note to request a shower as soon as the submarine entered the Baltic.

  The barn didn’t offer much. It was depressingly lacking in terms of weaponry, maps of East Anglia or anything that would provide even a rudimentary means of signaling to the Foxtrot boat that he assumed was waiting just off from rendezvous at Sea Palling. Not for the first time, he cursed both his handlers and the Norfolk countryside. Rolling fens and farmland offered almost no security from either the elements or MI5. He looked at his pocket watch, holding it less than an inch away from his eye. He’d been gone for over three hours now. Despite everything he had done to leave quietly, the relevant people would surely have noticed his absence by now.

  “What I cannot quite fathom, Sir John, is precisely why you have summoned me.”

  It had been a rude awaking for Edward Short. The Lord President of the Council had opened his eyes less than forty minutes ago, having been informed that he was now the most senior ministerial figure in the country. He had listened with increasing incredulity to the news that the Prime Minister, who had been so lethargic in recent months as to almost render that position moot, had suddenly decided to leave Downing Street on a whim. The Cabinet Secretary’s eyes flickered over to the ornate clock, a gift from one of the Archdukes of Austria, that dominated the mantelpiece. It was telling him that the United Kingdom had been without a visible Prime Minister for over three hours, which in the view of the civil service was three hours too long.

  “I have outlined the situation, Mr Short. I am sure you understand the level of concern.”

  “But this strikes me as being somewhat excessive,” the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party replied, “it’s certainly against Harold’s nature, but he can be prone to sudden outbursts. I would not be surprised if he did want to go and visit a friend.”

  “Are you aware of any friends that the Prime Minister has in Norfolk, Mr Short?”

  “Well...”

  “Whom he would decide to visit at midnight in the middle of Autumn?”

  “He...”

  “Without leaving a single message for either the Cabinet Office or his Private Secretary?”

  “It is...”

  “Choosing to take a car without any form of police escort?”

  Short surrendered.

  “I admit that it does seem a little out of character.”

  “Indeed it does. As the Cabinet Secretary, I become rather concerned with matters that are ‘a little out of character’ when they involve the head of government.”

  Ted Short fell back into the armchair. A dull ache in his back reminded him that it was the middle of the night and that he was very close to the retirement that he had promised to his wife. This was so typical of Harold. Leaving Ted to clean up for him just because he fancied eloping to the seaside with a strumpet from the typing pool, or whatever he was up to.

  Archduke Ferdinand’s clock chimed the quarter-hour.

  “Mr Short, I have to ask you again.” Sir John said, more intensely than he had wanted, “Will you authorise a search to take place? We cannot really do much unless either you or the Home Secretary agree to it.”

  “Well, given that Roy is in Brussels,” Ted sighed, managing to avoid adding ‘again’ with some degree of bitterness, “I suppose that I am left with little alternative. I shall chair Cabinet, as well, but I would rather leave it until after seven. I do not want to have to tell the Chancellor that I have dragged him away from what little sleep he can get because the Prime Minister fancied a jolly at the coast.”

  “I very much hope your theory is correct, Mr Short.”

  Something about Sir John’s tone did not fill Ted with confidence. Where the bloody hell was Harold?

  Where two had been, now stood twenty. Sergeant Gooch’s discovery of a pistol on the second man had automatically shunted the crime scene to the top of the priority list. Against all his reservations, he could admit to a certain childish glee at the situation that took him back to childhood when the Germans had been the most likely invaders of the Norfolk countryside.

  The chap from ballistics, who had arrived from Norwich twenty minutes ago, was slowly turning the gun around in his white-gloved fingers, giving him the impression of a homicidal snooker referee.

  “Definitely Eastern Bloc,” he was saying with the hushed excitement of a lepidopterist suddenly realising that they are about to have a new species named after them, “can’t really say much beyond that, but I would have to say that it was meant for covert work, given the silencer and everything.”

  “His mate had one as well.” Constable Fipps said, pointing at the second corpse, now illuminated by a stoplight brought up with the rest of the Special Branch equipment. There was another flash of light as the photographer finished documenting the area.

  Gooch surveyed the scene, marvelling at how quickly things could be mobilised if enough noise was made. Only two minutes after finding the gun, Gooch had been informed of another macabre discovery about a mile-and-a-half away by a passing motorist. Two more bodies had been found, one a member of the Met, the other an official-looking bloke in a peaked cap. That, added to the fact that an even more official-looking Rover P5 had been found next to them, abandoned, had driven the last remnants of sleep from Gooch’s eyes. He looked around, noticing Chief Inspector Lambert chatting to one of the goons from forensics.

  “...both of them have ID,” he was saying “which I assume would make this something worth talking to the Met about as soon as possible. I cannot fathom why an official car would be here, but I would assume that this necessitates informing London about. There’s not many of those Rovers in use anyway, and it certainly looks Ministerial.”


  Lambert glanced over at Gooch, calling him over.

  “Sergeant,” he said, “I would appreciate it if you and Constable Fipps had a look slightly further afield. It is something of a priority that you find whoever was with the two men here and bring him to safety.”

  “Do you have any idea who it could be, DCI?” he found himself saying before being silenced by the bushy eyebrows of the law.

  “I obviously know nothing more than you do,” Lambert snapped, “but I would assume from your report that it is a middle-aged man, not in peak physical condition, who fled the scene out of terror.”

  Gooch stood still for a moment, collecting himself, before another barked order from DCI Lambert prompted him to grab Constable Fipps and follow the muddy footprints that led towards the canal.

  Watching them amble away ungracefully, feet lit by torchlight, Lambert turned at the sound of a kerfuffle coming over from the main road. The area had been secured, but they had yet to block off the road leading towards the farm and three early-morning drivers had slowed down to enjoy a mawkish observation of the crime scene before being told to clear off by the two officers monitoring the road. As the commotion increased in volume, Lambert headed down himself, almost slipping on ground that had rapidly turned into a quagmire with the rapid arrival of the CID.

  “I didn’t agree to this, not at my age, and certainly not at this time of night,” Ted Short muttered as he was ushered into Downing Street, accompanied by Sir John Hunt and Roy Mason. With Jenkins out of the country, the Defence Secretary was the natural person to take his place at the head of the triumvirate charged with sorting out the mess that the country found itself in. Marcia and Mary were waiting in the Prime Minister’s Office, Joe Haines having met them on the way in. Another clock, this one probably once owned by Genghis Khan or the Dalai Lama, was chiming five as they sat down. Short hesitated for a moment, before settling himself into Harold’s seat behind the desk.