A Little White Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

room and vanished. We usually lunched together. First I knew was when he didn’t show. I asked the boys
here, but all they knew was the telegramme and they won’t say what was in it or who it was to. Five hours later he boards a Russian freighter in the docks. I reckon all he had was the clothes
on his back. Took me till yesterday to find out that much. Bloke in the dockyard recognised him. Came to me for a bit of the old backshish. I filed it, of course. Had to. It’s news. Front
page of the dailies back in Blighty this morning. If Hugh Gaitskell hadn’t died last night it’d be the lead. You can’t have a career like Charlie’s and not be
news.’
    Alliss was a pig. The mixture of professional greed and personal pique made for a distasteful fool. Troy was beginning to share Hussein’s silent contempt. He feared it might find its voice
very soon. Alliss showed no sensitivity to what Troy might be feeling.
    ‘O’ course if I could find out who that telegramme was to, I’d really have a coup. That’d stick it to those dozy buggers on the Sunday Times. Insight Team my left buttock
– more like Shortsight Team.’
    He chuckled at his own wit, jowls jiggling, mirth rippling down to his fingertips, Scotch in his glass splashing over onto his trousers. He rubbed it into the fabric with the thumb of his free
hand. Seemed not to mind. One more stain on a suit of boozer’s motley.
    ‘O’ course, I can’t say I’m surprised. I mean, is there anyone half sane who really believes Charlie was innocent? I don’t care how many times the government set
some pillock on his hind legs in the Commons to clear his name. Charlie was one of them – Burgess, Maclean, Leigh-Hunt. It all fits. If the government didn’t know our Charlie was
a spy, then they’re the last ones who didn’t.’
    Troy had been the first to know. 1956. While the Suez débâcle rumbled on. He had told no one. It was no one else’s business. It was between Charlie and him. And how dearly and
how often had he wished there had been nothing between Charlie and him. That they should be like children, schoolboys again, when they had had no secrets. He had packed Charlie off to live with his
lies one autumn day, one Indian summer’s afternoon, seven years ago, knowing they would not meet again. A year later, somehow, MI6 had learnt the truth. Charlie had made too many mistakes, or
some recently defected Russian had pointed the finger – Troy neither knew nor cared which – and Charlie had retired from the Secret Service in a flurry of corridor speculation and to a
wishy-washy Commons denial, so limp and unconvincing it had fallen not to the Foreign Secretary, but to the most junior of his ministers, a rising starlet of the Conservative Party, Timothy
Woodbridge. Woodbridge had exonerated Charlie, gently berated the press for their gossip and cornered his little piece of history as author of what the same press had dubbed ‘the Woodbridge
Statement’. The last Troy had seen of Charlie was a farewell drink in a pub in St Martin’s Lane. He seemed grateful to Troy that Rod had come to his rescue – and Troy had said
nothing to this, because Rod had done so without telling him. He had done exactly what he thought Troy required of him without even mentioning it. And for that Troy was grateful. Charlie would not
have come to him.
    Each time was the last time. A slapdash sequence of partings, each potentially riddled with finality. Now this was the last. Now he really had gone.
    ‘Why now?’ said Troy, more to himself than to the two journalists.
    For a second he thought Hussein was going to speak, but Alliss stubbed out the remains of his cigar and sounded off.
    ‘Had enough,’ he said bluntly. ‘If you ask me he never much cared for the job. After all, if he really has ended up in Russia, then it was only a cover, wasn’t it? I
think he just got tired of it. It’s a big territory. You can find yourself in Jerusalem one day and Aden