Summerland

4 NATURAL LIMITATIONS, 30TH OCTOBER 1938

The rest of the night was a blur. Rachel huddled in exhaustion in an adjoining suite. The hotel doctor, a small bald man with a reassuring manner, inspected Kulagin and proclaimed him dead.

Then he checked Rachel’s injuries while a sheepish-looking Allen stood nearby, nervously running his fingers through his thin, combed-over hair.

The final shot kept echoing in Rachel’s head. Could she have said something to stop Kulagin? She cursed herself for being clumsy with the sapgun, and for not insisting on having spirit Watchers around. Maybe they could have caught Kulagin before he Faded.… But no, Harker would never have agreed to putting any Summer Court operatives on the case.

Special Branch showed up, two polite but hard-faced officers in bowler hats. Rachel nursed a whiskey the major brought her and gave them a statement. The Branch men were confused by the absence of the victim’s spirit to interview, but after a call from the SIS liaison officer, they became much more polite.

Rachel was in a daze when the major draped his coat over her bathrobe and put her in a cab.

The streets of midnight London were blue-tinged and quiet. The rain had stopped and puddles gleamed in the street lights. Rachel drifted off to fitful sleep to the soft whirr of the car’s electric motor, cheek pressed against the cold glass of the window. The driver’s voice startled her awake.

‘’Ere we are, ma’am. Have a good night now.’

The cab stopped in front of the red-brick house she shared with Joe in St John’s Wood, near Regents Park. There was frost on the ground, and Rachel was shivering when she made it to the door. Their German maid, Gertrude, started fussing over her before she made it past the entrance hall, where Joe’s old spirit armour stood like a metallic guardsman.

‘Are you all right, Mrs White? You are looking terrible, if you don’t mind that I say.’

Rachel nodded. It hurt too much to talk.

Then Joe was there, in the purple Turkish-style smoking jacket she had always found ridiculous; short and rugby-solid Joe, with his weather-beaten face and thick, close-cropped chestnut hair and the permanent marks on his temples from an RAF spirit armour’s Crookes crown. He said nothing, just took her in his arms and held her tight.

For a moment, she was ready to love him all over again, just for that, and for his smell, for all his comforting imperfections, the lantern jaw that pressed against her shoulder, the tiny unkempt hairs in his ears. Then her breath grew short, his arms felt heavy around her and her heart started fluttering like a bird caught inside a house.

‘Joe, it is perfectly all right,’ she whispered, pulling away. ‘It was a dreadful night. But I am fine, really.’

‘I know you are,’ he said, taking her hand and squeezing it gently. ‘Come on, love. Let’s get you to bed.’

Allen would have called him, she knew. Until his recent leave of absence, Joe had been the Winter Court liaison officer for the Royal Aetheric Force. That was how they had met, at a staff meeting in Blenheim Palace. He had less Etonian polish and was less eager to impress than the Court spies. He did not drink, which in Court terms made him something like a fish without gills. The smile and a kinship born out of not quite belonging had led to a dinner, a dance and, two years ago, marriage.

‘I think I will have a bath first, if you don’t mind, dear.’

‘Of course.’ He gave her a familiar shy smile, quick like a wingbeat, and kissed her forehead. ‘I will wait up with some tea.’

‘Yes, dear. Tea would be lovely.’

He stood watching as she went up the stairs to the master bathroom. She closed the door behind her and sat down, back against the door, and let the tears come.

* * *

Later, she awoke in their bed, shaking. The warmth of the tea and the bath had faded. Chills of bone-deep exhaustion ran down her spine, but she could not get back to sleep. She looked at Joe next to her and wanted to embrace him again, bury the image of Kulagin’s face in his broad back.

Instead, she sat up and hugged her knees. She did not want to wake him. He had trouble sleeping. At night, the soul-fragments he carried from the war spilled out and made cold spots in the bedroom. When it got really bad, tendrils of ectoplasm sneaked out from his mouth and nose like the roots of a dead white plant. He was calm now, for once, asleep on his belly in a half-crawl, clutching his pillow.

Besides, holding him too tight would feel like grinding the ends of a fractured bone together, wrong and cruel, and she was not ready for that, not yet.

She sneaked out of the bed, wrapped herself in a dressing gown and went into the hallway. The house was quiet. It was four in the morning. She stopped at the door of the empty nursery and thought of Kulagin’s wild children. Then she went into her study, sat down in front of the electric typewriter and started writing her report.

* * *

‘And exactly why was it, Major, that you felt the need to leave the room at that juncture?’

Brigadier Oswald ‘Jasper’ Harker, Director of Section B of the SIS—Counter-subversion—leaned over his desk and pushed his tanned, angular face forward until it looked like he was about to launch himself at Major Allen’s throat. It was five thirty in the afternoon, and both Rachel and Allen had been summoned to the director’s office for a debriefing.

‘Well, the thing is, sir, Mrs White was, uh…’

Allen squirmed. He was holding the sweat-blotted remains of his report in his thick-fingered hands like a talisman. Rachel sat quietly next to him, glad that Harker’s fierce scowl—accentuated by the brigadier’s coal-black eyebrows—was not directed at her for the time being.

‘Come on, man, spit it out!’

‘Well, sir, she asked me to leave. And she was not entirely decent when I reluctantly complied.’

‘Bloody hell, White! The Soviets may resort to honeytrap tricks, but we have to stick to fair play or we are no better than they are. What did you think you were doing?’

Rachel cleared her throat and flinched. It still hurt to talk, and she was wearing a scarf to hide the bruises.

‘Sir, the major’s version of events is—’

‘White, I do not care whose version is correct.’ The brigadier sat down heavily. ‘The fact is that Kulagin played us for fools. Look around you, both of you. What do you see? Where are we?’

Harker waved at the rough, whitewashed walls of his tiny office. The single small window high up on one wall showed a dismal glimpse of the Wormwood Scrubs green, gently furred by frost. A rusty electric heater in a corner struggled to keep the room at Harker’s preferred Bombay temperature.

Rachel and Allen glanced at each other and stayed silent.

‘Exactly! The bloody Spooks get Blenheim Palace and crystal castles in Summerland, but where does Her Majesty’s real Secret Intelligence Service end up? In a prison. Miraculously, we get a chance—one chance!—to catch the Spooks with their spectral pants down, and what happens? One of you lets our source fight a duel and the other, the other—’ Harker’s face was red as his fury almost choked him. ‘The other first saves him and then lets him blow his brains out! And gets her picture taken for the blasted Sunday paper.’

The brigadier slammed his palm on an open page of The Times on his desk. It showed a blurry photograph of the scene in the Langham, a surprised-looking Kulagin with Rachel’s arms wrapped around him. Thankfully, her face was not visible.

‘The last time I checked, we still had the word “Secret” in our job description, for God’s sake.’

Harker took a deep breath. ‘You are dismissed. But make no mistake, we are not done. I will confer with Vivian and the deputy chief regarding the ultimate fate of Mr Kulagin. If I can use your hides to patch the holes in this sinking ship, I will. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Allen said. The major slunk out of the room, head bowed, the tattered remains of his report in one hand, trying to make his hulking form as small as possible. Rachel waited until he closed the door behind him.

‘What is it, White?’

Rachel could barely get a whisper out.

‘There is one item I … omitted from my report, sir. For your ears only.’

‘And what would that be?’

‘Mr Kulagin did volunteer some information, sir. The identity of a mole within the SIS. Code name FELIX. In the Summer Court.’

Harker blinked. ‘Well, well, well. Now that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?’ he said.

‘I thought so, sir.’

‘Perhaps God is not a Communist after all. So who is this FELIX, then?’

‘Peter Bloom.’

The brigadier raised his eyebrows in a furry wave of astonishment. Then his eyes brightened.

‘I see what is happening here, White. I see what is happening. I should have seen it from the start.’ He paused and massaged his forehead.

Rachel seized the opening. ‘Sir, it is my recommendation that we act upon this information with all possible speed and inform Noel Symonds’s Section in the Summer Court. With respect, sir, it might go down better if it came from Deputy Director Liddell.’

Harker clicked his tongue. ‘No. Absolutely not.’

‘Sir, I know how strongly you feel about us making the collar here, but the Russians are not stupid—they will assume that Kulagin has told us everything he knows. They might extract Bloom, dismantle his network. And as Bloom’s in the Summer City, sir, surely the Summer Court is better placed to—’

The brigadier held up a hand. ‘White, you have been here longer than I have, yes?’

Rachel nodded. Yes, and you are on that side of the desk only because you went to Eton with Sir Stewart and are able to pee standing up, she thought to herself, keeping her face neutral.

‘Joined in nineteen seventeen, sir, just before the war ended.’

‘All that experience and you still don’t see it, do you? Well, let me break it down for you.’ He held up a finger. ‘A rambunctious Russian turns up, causes all manner of trouble, claims he wants to defect, but clams up when senior officers are present. Why?’

Rachel stared at Harker blankly.

The brigadier continued, ‘Because he thinks he has a better chance of fooling the female officer assigned to interview him, of course! He pretends to open up, makes her feel special, then gifts her with information, claiming that there is a mole in a sister Service. He gives her a sound trashing just to make sure he looks serious. And finally, he blows his brains out, so we can’t question him further.

‘We take his “information” at face value, make complete fools of ourselves in front of the Spooks, and while we squabble, the Russians have a field day with those bloody Luddites and other idiots who think the dead are taking their jobs. How does that sound to you, White?’

Like the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my life, Rachel thought. The rage flowed into her, icy and potent like vodka. It filled her to the brim until it felt like any motion or word could disrupt its delicate surface tension and spill it out, all at once.

She sat still and breathed deeply until the tide of her ire receded. The brigadier leaned back.

‘Well, White?’

‘With respect, sir,’ Rachel said slowly, ‘I interviewed Kulagin for two weeks. He was not an agent provocateur. I stake my professional reputation as an interrogator on that. Yes, I believe it was not his intention to cooperate fully with us, but if there is even a chance that the intelligence he shared is genuine, we must act upon it.’

‘Well, there you have it. It cannot be possibly be genuine.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Bloom was vetted. We know his people. I personally know his people. It simply isn’t possible that he is a traitor.’

‘As I have been saying for years, sir, this is exactly our problem—discounting the potential depth and breadth of Soviet penetration of the Service. Counter-subversion is all well and good, we can follow the money trails of the British Communist Party or the Luddites all we want, but if you are denying even the possibility of a real threat—’

‘White. Stop. Please.’

Rachel swallowed. Her throat felt like a raw wound.

‘If you are denying it, well, that is just … incompetence.’ As she spat out the last word, her voice died.

‘You have just proven my point, White,’ Harker said. He smiled faintly, and his voice was warm and understanding. ‘You know, when I was in India, I once had an officer whipped for speaking to me much the same way you just did. Good practice, that. Would do a world of good here, make no mistake. But I would not be a gentleman if I did not appreciate your limitations.

‘Kulagin chose you as his target since he was able to play your pet obsessions, you see. All these hysterics—’ The brigadier tutted. ‘That has always been my concern with you, White. This is difficult, nerve-wracking work, and I will say you have done well with the odd Irishman and Luddite and the like. Remarkable, really, given your natural limitations. But when I last reviewed your record, it looked to me like you did your best work in the Registry. A supporting role would be better suited for your sensibilities, at least temporarily. Shorter hours, less of a strain on your nerves. I am sure Joe would agree, don’t you think?’

Rachel was speechless. The world spun around her.

‘I believe there is an opening in the Finance Section. Miss Scaplehorn could really use a person of your calibre.’

‘I would rather resign,’ she croaked.

‘You have that option, of course. However, in that instance we would have issues with your pension and Ticket. That would be extremely regrettable.’

‘I—I—’

‘No need to say anything, White, you have to allow yourself time to heal. Why don’t you take a few days off and then report to Building F on Thursday? Dismissed. And give my best to dear old Joe, will you?’

* * *

Rachel strode along the main corridor of Wormwood Scrubs. Voices, footsteps and metallic ectophone ringtones echoed constantly from the walls of brick and concrete, drowning out the confused chorus of her thoughts. She could not face her tiny cell of an office—hers not much longer—and so she grabbed her coat and made her way to a side exit that opened into a small square, formerly the prison’s exercise yard.

The cold air cleared her head. The early evening sky was overcast. She could not see past the high red-brick walls, but the capital’s lights turned the clouds into sheets of amber and purple. She imagined that was how London looked from Summerland. What was it like to be Peter Bloom, to see the celestial city above and know that he was weakening its foundations with every action, every thought?

Her career was one thing, but a mole in the Summer Court—it was a wound in the very heart of the Service. Maybe that was why Harker refused to believe it. It defied his conception of natural order. And yet it made sense. The recent operations in Spain had been minor disasters. They still had no good assets in Russia itself, and a mole was a simpler explanation for that than an omnipotent Presence.

‘Hullo, Rachel.’

Roger Hollis stood at the yard entrance, wearing a dapper charcoal-grey raincoat and carrying a small bouquet of flowers. He had what one could charitably call a dour face, wavy brown hair and a boyish complexion in spite of his thirty-two years of age.

‘Roger? What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be making tea for your new chief in Blenheim?’

For all her resentment of Harker, Rachel had to admit that there was something unfair about the fact that the Domestic Sections—F, V, A and others—were squeezed into the Scrubs, whereas the Foreign Intelligence and Summer Court Liaison Sections had the resplendent Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire to themselves.

‘Oh, I drop in from time to time—to see old friends.’

Rachel smiled. It was an open secret that Roger’s former secretary Kathleen Wiltshire in Section V was his mistress.

‘Anyway, I came by and heard that you were in the lion’s den today, didn’t find you in your office and remembered this was your escape. How did it go?’

‘Did Allen say something? I swear that man gossips more than the secretaries.’ Rachel sighed. ‘I came away with a faceful of lion dung. It looks like I am to assist Finance with their sums from now on.’

‘You are not serious.’

Rachel smiled wryly. Roger tended to have a calming effect on her. They had been friends since a tennis match that Laura, one of her school friends, arranged a few years ago in an attempt to integrate her into the society of her peers, and—Rachel suspected—in a poorly hidden attempt at matchmaking. Nothing ever happened between them, but she recognised something familiar in him. Beneath the arrogance and boyish charm, there was a void that needed to be filled, and that had drawn him to the Service.

‘There was an incident with a source,’ she said. ‘Somebody had to take the blame.’

‘Well, that seems unusually thick, even for old Jasper.’ Roger cleared his throat and the sound turned into a hacky cough that had persisted since a bout of tuberculosis in Hong Kong. It was worse than Rachel remembered.

He wiped his lips with a handkerchief. ‘Why don’t you come in from the cold and tell me all about it?’

* * *

Rachel’s office had been converted from a two-person cell. It was windowless and she tried to spend as little time in it as possible, preferring to work in the senior staff room or the library. As a result, her small desk was mainly a parking lot for memos and copies of files, covered in yellowing piles of paper with a musty smell. She sat on the edge of her desk, offering Roger her chair.

Without naming Kulagin or going into the details of the operation, she explained the situation.

‘Basically, my worry is this: if we do not do something quickly, this mole is going to disappear deep into its hole and take our vegetables with it. I am positive that as we speak, the NKVD is thinking about how to get their man out and do as much damage as they can in the process. I won’t be able to prevent that while filing expense forms for Miss Scaplehorn.’

‘What do you have in mind?’ Roger asked.

‘Well, we both know a few Young Turks in the Summer Court—Burgess, Pickering, Symonds, that lot—and some of them still attend the Harrises’ soirées. I could simply drop a hint that there is a cuckoo in their nest.’

Roger leaned back in the chair. ‘Did our misbehaving defector provide a name?’

A terrible, paranoid thought struck her with the chill of the night air. Roger could go to Harker, tell him that she was planning to go over his head. It would be the logical thing to do. She looked at him, considering. His eyes glinted black in the flickering light of the unadorned lightbulb in the ceiling. Then he coughed and was her friend Roger again.

Much as she loathed the old boys’ network that allowed men like Harker to attain high positions without any real qualifications or competence, Roger was the one case where she had used her own rank to help a friend. He had applied to the Service twice and been rejected. The argument against him was that he had associated with dubious characters during his time as a journalist in Hong Kong. To Rachel, that only meant he had been doing his job properly.

She had gone to Sir Vernon, the head of the Service at the time, and suggested that Roger be allowed to apply one more time, and that she would vet him informally and take responsibility for him. As a result, he became her assistant. He had never given her cause to regret her decision—he was a conscientious researcher with occasional flashes of brilliance, and she had been happy for him when Blenheim snapped him up. Still, it did not hurt to be cautious.

‘No,’ she said finally. ‘Just a codename. FELIX.’

‘I see. To be honest, Rachel, I don’t think that would be enough. Death has made those reprobates cautious like old women. They all want to preen their feathers in front of C. You need something more solid to convince them. Besides, Jasper may not know his arse from his elbow, but he has a point. Maybe this Russian chap was sent here to cause havoc. You know I have tremendous respect for your judgement, Rachel, but—’

‘But what?’ She could not keep the edge from her voice. She was cranky and exhausted after the sleepless night and the meeting with Harker, and the last thing she wanted to hear was Roger agreeing with the brigadier.

‘Steady on, now.’

He held up his hands placatingly, then took out a carton of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, offered her one, took one himself and lit both with an ornate gold-plated lighter decorated with a dragon.

‘What I am saying, Rachel, is that maybe you should wait this one out. I know Liddell and Vivian respect you. They might go to Sir Stewart. I would put good money on this backfiring on Jasper.’

‘Liddell and Vivian need a scapegoat for this mess just as much as Jasper does.’

Rachel took a hasty drag from the cigarette.

‘Well, I may be in a position to do more for you, in a little while,’ Roger said.

She stared at him.

‘They say it does not hurt too much, especially with barbiturates. Trying to memorise the Ticket gives me headaches, though. I think they put extra twists and turns for the Court especially.’

‘That is splendid, Roger. I am happy for you,’ Rachel said, her voice flat.

‘I am not ungrateful,’ he said quietly. ‘I owe it all to you, Rachel. Just lay low and I will spread the word that it was all Jasper’s fault. People will believe that. A few months with Miss Scaplehorn, what is that? You can handle it. Do some busywork and relax with Joe in the meantime.’

‘The stakes are too high! I may have issues with Harker, but what if the Summer Court is compromised? If there is the faintest chance that the source was telling the truth, I have to do something.’

‘But we do not know that. We do not know who the mole is, or what they have access to. It’s not as bad as you think. You are overreacting because this brute hurt you, I can see how shaken you are. Think—think rationally for a minute—’

‘Oh, is that it? Jasper just finished telling me that my natural limitations make me unsuitable for this work. You think I am upset because the big, bad Russian hurt me? Thank you very much, Roger. I am so very glad that you explained it to me.’

‘For God’s sake, Rachel, I know you have nerves of steel. I just do not think you understand the Winter Court at all.’

‘I have been here half my life. I think I understand it well enough.’

‘With all due respect, perhaps you don’t allow yourself to understand. You don’t want to believe that incompetents like Harker get all the glory while we do all the work. But they are also petty and fight amongst themselves. That is something we can use to beat them in their own game.’

‘Sounds like it worked out for you, at least.’

What was wrong with her? She should have been pleased for Roger, but when she opened her mouth, only bitter words came out.

Roger sighed. ‘It’s all because you trusted me, once, Rachel. I am just trying to return the favour and protect you.’

‘I don’t need to be protected.’

‘Only from yourself. Do you remember what we talked about, after that tennis game?’

Rachel’s cigarette was a flaking cylinder of ash. She dropped it into the wastepaper basket. She felt numb and tired and empty and said nothing.

‘You asked me about Hong Kong, what it was like in a different country with a different language. I told you it was hard, how even after a long time you could never tell what people really thought, there was always this invisible wall of glass between you and them. That it was lonely. I think you have to decide which country you want to live in, Rachel. I’ll be here if you need me.’

His cough echoed hollowly down the corridor as he went.

* * *

Rachel sat alone for a while, looking at the faded pencil lines on the wall she used as an impromptu blackboard. Roger was right, she knew. Keep your head down, seek allies, cash in favours, bide your time. That was how it worked. And that was exactly what Bloom was exploiting.

Kulagin’s face rose up in her mind again, and behind it, another being loomed like a malevolent planet, a broad forehead, a neatly trimmed, sharp-tipped spade of a beard, larger than life, made of darkness and the souls of the dying. She thought of the agents lost in Spain. She thought of her mother in Summerland and her memory garden, her voice on the ectophone. The Empire had conquered what was once the most terrifying frontier of all, and the SIS were the Empire’s guardians. When she joined the Service during the Great War, all those years ago, everyone had understood that. They were so young, so alive. No one minded that a Registry clerk like her had stepped up and started analysing radio transcripts when they were a man short.

If you had something more solid, Roger said. And then Harker’s voice: We know his people.

Who knew Peter Bloom’s people? Who had vetted him?

It was late, and she still had access to the Registry. She sat down at her desk, excavated her ectoterminal from beneath dusty papers and typed in a query. Half an hour later she was on her way home, a brown Manila folder in her handbag.