Death of a Unicorn

‘And as we are aware,’ said Ronnie, ‘a deadline was eventually met, in an unpleasantly literal sense.’

‘He was a terrible coward. I mean, he didn’t give a hoot what anyone said or thought, but the slightest scratch and he wanted trained nurses hovering over him with antiseptics. That’s still one of the worst things about it for me, though I tell myself it must have been over in an instant.’

‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Ronnie, casually. He had probably never, even at his liveliest, been much interested in questions of pain and blood, but the more theoretical side of what had happened seemed genuinely to have caught his imagination now.

‘One more point before I contribute my mite,’ he said. ‘These men who interviewed you in Brierley’s flat, they more or less told you they were expecting to hush the whole thing up?’

‘Oh no. All they said was they’d try and keep me out of it.’

‘Very altruistic.- Think of it the other way round. If they want to play it down, how enthusiastic do you think they’re going to be about the newspapers learning that a glamorous and titled young lady has been the dead man’s closest friend? I think I mentioned this when we met at Cheadle. Doesn’t it strike you as extremely odd that nobody from that day to this, in spite of intense journalistic speculation at the time and continued interest ever since, has asked you whether you have any light to throw on the matter?’

‘I’ve always taken it for granted. I shut that door, you see. It was all over. But I do see it’s a bit odd.’

‘More than a bit. Remember the fuss over the Dockers? In the papers for months on end. If there hadn’t from the very first been a decision to hush things up, you’d have been there too. A decision from somewhere quite high up, what’s more. Not because of the Barbados swindle, either. They’d have wanted all the publicity they could get for that, to discourage the others. One’s conclusion is that Brierley had been up to something which if it became generally known would thoroughly embarrass the British Government.’

‘But he wasn’t remotely interested in politics.’

‘One doesn’t have to be. We are now moving into what you might call my territory. If I may say so, Mabs, you yourself did not at the time give much impression of political awareness.’

‘Lord, no. I was totally self-absorbed. I’ve just been reading some stuff I wrote about it soon after. A mass of things must have been going on—Korea, the Cold War, the King dying, Eisenhower getting elected, all that business with Mossadeq in Persia—but you’d hardly know from what I wrote that it had been happening at all.’

‘The Cold War is the element that concerns us. You may have since gathered, Mabs, that I was not quite the dilettante Party member I made myself out to be at the time. I was, in fact, quite a hard-line Stalinist and was very well in with King Street. My function was that of an agent provocateur, really. I posed, I am sorry to say, as the kind of civilised chap to whom Party members with doubts might turn for advice, and I could then warn King Street—or in certain cases, Moscow—that they were no longer to be relied on. I tell you this to some extent to show good faith. You have put yourself in my hands and I am offering a reciprocal hostage. I have not so far admitted it to anyone else.’

‘You didn’t have to.’

‘Well, I’ve done it now. What are you up to?’

‘Eating a crumb of pie. Like your champagne. Sealed in blood.’

‘Don’t tell Fred or he will smother you with Levi-Strauss. Yes, I was, you might say, the traitor’s traitor. But when Brierley took over at Night and Day I got a message from my control demanding an emergency meeting. He gave me instructions that I was to do all I could to find out the source of Brierley’s funds. I assumed at the time that he believed them to emanate from the CIA, and that the object was to use Night and Day for crypto-propaganda purposes, as with Encounter?’

‘Oh yes, that’s what they were doing, but no one had told Stephen Spender.’

‘Something like that. You may be amused to know that Dorothy Clarke is convinced that Brierley got his funds from the Kremlin, for the sole purpose of manoeuvring her out of her position and thus undermining the self-confidence of the British ruling caste.’

‘Mrs Clarke! It was her who told you about me and Mr B!’

‘Not exactly told. She’s stood the years pretty well, but she’s stone deaf now, almost. She misheard something I said and took it that I knew already. What do you think about her suggestion?’

‘It must be nonsense, surely.’

‘I think so. What about the CIA?’

‘I don’t think it was anything like that. I mean he wasn’t getting funds from anywhere. Not a steady flow. He’d made a bit of money somehow and started gambling with it in the City and done well enough to persuade other people to let him gamble with theirs. He told me once that he lived by surfing an ever-breaking wave. I don’t think there was ever money coming in that he could rely on.’