A Perfect Spy

“Oh my dear, they were all sorts of trouble. Each one dottier than the next and if they weren’t pregnant they were running off with unsuitable lovers, cutting their wrists. I could have opened a Marie Stopes clinic for them full time if we’d believed in birth control in those days. Now we’re hybrids. Our girls are on the pill, but they still get pregnant by mistake.”

“They did the interpreting for us,” Membury said, filling himself a pipe.

“Was there an interpreter involved in the Greensleeves operation?” Brotherhood said.

“No need,” said Membury. “Chap spoke German. Pym handled him alone.”

“Completely alone?”

“Solo. Greensleeves insisted on it. Why don’t you talk to Pym?”

“But who took him over when Pym left?”

“I did,” said Membury proudly, brushing wet tobacco from the front of his disgraceful pullover.

There is nothing like a red-backed notebook to instill order into desultory conversation. Having spread one very deliberately among the débris of several meals, and shaken out his big right arm as a prelude to becoming what he called a little bit official, Brotherhood drew a pen from his pocket with as much ceremony as a village policeman at the scene of the occurrence. The grandchildren had been removed. From an upper room came the sounds of someone trying to coax religious music from a xylophone.

“If we could get it all down first I can come back to the individual specifics later,” said Brotherhood.

“Jolly good idea,” said Mrs. Membury sternly. “Harrison, darling, listen.”

“Unfortunately, as I have already told you, most of the raw material on Greensleeves has been destroyed, lost or misplaced, which puts even greater responsibility on the shoulders of surviving witnesses. That’s you. Now then.”

For a while after this forbidding warning there was relative sanity while Membury with surprising accuracy recalled the dates and content of Greensleeves’ principal triumphs and the part played by Lieutenant Magnus Pym of the Intelligence Corps. Brotherhood wrote diligently and prompted little, only pausing to wet his thumb and turn the pages of his notebook.

“Harrison, darling, you’re being slow again,” Mrs. Membury interposed occasionally. “Marlow hasn’t got all day.” And once: “Marlow’s got to get back to London, darling. He’s not a fish.”

But Membury continued swimming at his own good pace, now describing Soviet military emplacements in southern Czechoslovakia; now the laborious procedure for prising small gold bars out of the Whitehall war chests which Greensleeves insisted on receiving in payment; now the fights he had had with Div. Int. to protect his pet agent from being overused. And Brotherhood, despite the little tape-recorder that nestled once more in his wallet pocket, set it all out for them to see, dates left, material centre.

“Greensleeves didn’t have any other codename at any time, did he?” he asked casually as he jotted. “Sometimes a source gets rechristened for security reasons or because the name’s already been bagged.”

“Think, Harrison,” Mrs. Membury urged.

Membury took his pipe from his mouth.

“Source Wentworth?” Brotherhood suggested, turning a page.

Membury shook his head.

“There was also a source”—Brotherhood faltered slightly as if the name had nearly escaped him—“Serena, that was it — no it wasn’t — Sabina. Source Sabina, operating out of Vienna. Or was it Graz? Maybe it was Graz before your time. Used to be a popular thing that, anyway, mixing up the sexes with the cover names. A quite general trick of disinformation, I’m told.”

“Sabina?” cried Mrs. Membury. “Not our Sabina?”

“He’s talking about a source, darling,” Membury said firmly, coming in much more quickly than was his habit. “Our Sabina was an interpreter, not an agent. Quite different.”

“Well our Sabina was an absolute—”

“She wasn’t a source,” said Membury firmly. “Now, come on, don’t tittle-tattle. Poppy.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Brotherhood.

“Magnus wanted to call him Poppy. We did for a bit. Source Poppy. I rather liked it. Then up came Remembrance Day and some ass in London decided Poppy was derogatory to the fallen — poppies are for heroes, not traitors. Absolutely typical of those chaps. Probably got promoted for it. Total buffoon. I was furious, so was Magnus. ‘Poppy is a hero,’ he said. I liked him for that. Nice chap.”

“That’s the bare bones done, then,” said Brotherhood, surveying his handiwork. “Now let’s flesh them out, can we?” He was reading from the subject headings he had written at the beginning of his notebook before he came. “Personalities, well, we’re touching on that. Value or otherwise of national servicemen to the peacetime intelligence effort, were they a help or a hindrance — we’ll come to it. Where they all went afterwards — did they attain positions of interest in their chosen walk of life? Well, you may have kept up with them, and there again you may not. That’s more for us to worry about than you.”