A Colder War. Charles Cumming

       14

      Kell spent the next two days, from half-past eight in the morning to ten o’clock at night, in Wallinger’s office on the top floor of the British Embassy. SIS Station was reached through a series of security doors activated by a swipe card and a five-digit pin. The last of the doors, leading from the Chancery section into the Station itself, was almost a metre thick, heavy as a motorcycle and watched over by a CCTV camera linked to Vauxhall Cross. Kell was required to open a combination lock and turn two handles simultaneously before pulling the door towards him on a slow hinge. He joked to one of the secretaries that it was the first exercise he had taken in almost a year. She did not laugh.

      In accordance with Station protocols the world over, Wallinger’s computer hard drive had been placed inside the Strong Box prior to his departure for Greece. On the first morning, Kell asked one of the assistants to remove it and to reboot the computer while he made a brief mental inventory of the personal items in Wallinger’s office. There were three photographs of Josephine on the walls. In one, she was standing in a damp English field with her arms around Andrew and Rachel. All three were wearing outdoor coats and smiling broadly beneath hoods and caps – a happy family portrait. On Wallinger’s desk there was a further framed picture of Andrew wearing his Eton morning suit, but no photograph of Rachel from her own schooldays. The Daily Telegraph obituary of Wallinger’s father, who had served in the SOE, was framed and hung on the far wall of the office beside another large picture of Andrew rowing in an eight at Cambridge. Again, there was no comparable photograph of Rachel, not even of her graduation day at Oxford. Kell did not know a great deal about Wallinger’s children, but suspected that Paul would have enjoyed a closer and perhaps less complicated relationship with his son, largely because of the broad streak of unemotional machismo in his character. There was very little else of a personal nature in the room, only an Omega watch in one of the desk drawers and a scuffed signet ring, which Kell could not recall ever having seen on Wallinger’s hand. Finding the largest desk drawer locked, he had asked for it to be opened, but found only painkillers and vitamin pills in half-finished packets, as well as a handwritten love letter from Josephine, dated shortly after their wedding, which Kell stopped reading after the first line out of respect for her privacy.

      The hard drive gave him access to the SIS telegrams that Wallinger had sent and received in the previous thirteen months, copies of which were also being read by one of Amelia’s assistants in London. Wallinger’s internal communications within the Station, and to the wider Embassy staff, had not been automatically copied to Vauxhall Cross, but Kell found nothing in the intranet messages to the Ambassador or First Secretary which appeared out of the ordinary. Amelia had gone over the heads of SIS vetting to ensure that Kell was given immediate DV clearance to read anything in Turkey that might help him to piece together Wallinger’s state of mind, as well as his movements, in the weeks leading up to his death. He was permitted to read four ‘Eyes-Only’ telegrams on Iranian centrifuges that had been seen only by H/Istanbul, Amelia, the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister. The classified internal report into the failed defection of Sadeq Mirzai had been copied to Jim Chater, who had added his own remarks in anticipation of a similar CIA report into the incident. Kell could find nothing in the manner in which the recruitment of Mirzai had been handled, nor in the planning and execution of the operation, that seemed problematic or misjudged. As Tremayne had suggested, the Iranians must have been alerted to the defection, likely because of an error in Mirzai’s tradecraft. Only by talking to Chater face-to-face would Kell be able to get a fuller picture.

      On his third afternoon in Ankara, Kell took a taxi to Wallinger’s suburban villa in Incek, a property owned by the Foreign Office and occupied by successive Heads of Station for most of the previous two decades. Turning the key in the front door, Kell reflected that he had searched many homes, many hotel rooms, many offices in his career, but had only had cause to snoop on a friend once before – when searching for Amelia two years earlier. It was one of the healthier house rules at SIS and MI5: staff were required to sign a document pledging not to investigate the behaviour of friends or relatives on Service computers. Those caught doing so – running background checks on a new girlfriend, for example, or looking for personal information about a colleague – would quickly be shown the door.

      The villa was starkly furnished in the modern Turkish style with very little of Wallinger’s taste apparent in the décor. Kell suspected that his yali in Istanbul would be quite different in atmosphere: more cluttered, more scholarly. It appeared as though a cleaner had recently been to the property, because the kitchen surfaces were as polished as a showroom, the toilets blue with detergent, the beds made, the rugs straightened, not a speck of dust on any shelf or table. In the cupboards, Kell found only what he would have expected to find: clothes and shoes and boxes; in the bathroom, toiletries, towels and a dressing-gown. Beside Wallinger’s bed there was a biography of Lyndon Johnson; beneath the television downstairs, box sets of all five series of The Wire. The villa, as soulless as a serviced apartment, revealed very little about the personality of the occupant. Even Wallinger’s study had a feeling of impermanence: a single photograph of Josephine on the desk, another of Andrew and Rachel as children hanging on the wall. There were various magazines, Turkish and English, paperback thrillers on a shelf, a reproduction poster of the 1974 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. Kell read through a few scribbled notes in a foolscap pad, found an out-of-date diary in the desk, but no hidden documents, no letters concealed behind pictures, no false passports or suicide note. Wallinger had kept a tennis racket and a set of golf clubs in a cupboard under the stairs. Feeling somewhat foolish, Kell checked for a hidden compartment in the handle of the racket and for a false bottom in the golf bag. He discovered nothing but some old tees and two hardened sticks of prehistoric chewing gum. It was the same story upstairs. Checking behind drawers, unscrewing lampshades, looking under cupboards – Wallinger had hidden nothing in the house. Kell moved from room to room, listening to the intermittent sounds of birdsong and passing cars in the suburban street outside, and concluded that there was nothing to find. Tremayne had been right – Wallinger’s heart had been in Istanbul.

      Kell was in a bathroom adjacent to the smaller of two spare bedrooms when he heard the front door opening and then slamming shut. The sound of a set of keys falling on to the surface of a glass table. Not an intruder; it had to be someone who had legitimate access to the villa. A cleaner? The landlord?

      Kell left the bathroom and walked out on to the landing. He called out: ‘Merhaba?’

      No reply.