Making Enemies by Francis Bennett Page B

reports on both men, including the state of their private finances, will be presented to the Committee within twenty-four hours. He has already asked Colin Maitland to get the Registry to dig out all files with any reference to either man.
    ‘If we’re in the hands of the Registry,’ Adrian Gardner whispers to me, ‘it will be twenty-four days before they can even spell either name correctly, twenty-four months before we get any reports. By which time all that will be left of the planet will be a huge mushroom cloud hanging in space.’
    ‘On the face of it,’ Corless sums up, ‘the idea of Professors Lodz or Stevens giving nuclear secrets to the Soviets looks unlikely. But we can’t ignore a message from Peter just because we may not like what he tells us.’
    I am to go to Cambridge with a small specialist team and find out what I can. We are to work discreetly and thoroughly. Until I report back, Peter’s allegation is to be kept strictly within the Committee: it is not to be released to anyone, not even to SOVINT.
    ‘No formal action on Peter’s allegation is to be taken until we can confirm the charge.’ Corless reminds us that inaction, even if temporary, may be the best way of preserving Peter. For the present, we are to work entirely on our own on this one.
    ‘What about the minutes?’ Gurney asks as we push our chairs back into place. ‘We have a wide circulation list. Eyes only, of course, but many recipients. What do I do?’
    This is serious stuff. We are stopped in our tracks. Gurney looks haunted with anxiety. What is to happen to the minutes?
    ‘Bugger the minutes,’ Gardner says, and for once the feeling of the room is with him. ‘They can wait. Peter’s more important.’
    Gurney looks very unhappy. ‘It’s very irregular,’ he says. ‘I don’t think our masters will be happy about this.’
    ‘Stuff our masters,’ Maitland says, seizing his chance for ascendancy. ‘Lose them for a few days, Arthur. No one will notice.’
    ‘Who reads them anyway?’ Gardner whispers to me, with a wink.
    Corless nods his agreement. Not a single word about what we are doing is to leak out. Gurney is to sit on the minutes until he receives further instructions.
    ‘Your decision, Rupert, of course,’ Gurney says. It is as close as he will ever come publicly to dissent.
    *
    We spent two weeks in an icy, mist-ridden Cambridge and found no evidence that Stevens had met any known members of the Communist Party, let alone strangely accented men in ill-cut suits; nor that he had corresponded with scientists in Moscow or indeed anywhere else in the Soviet Union, or had any contact with anyone remotely connected with Russia or the Russians. Indeed, no meeting of any kind had taken place that could not be completely and promptly explained as part of Stevens’s academic duties or his activities as a scientific adviser to the Government. The truth, however uncomfortable, was inescapable. Professor Stevens was clean.
    By the time I got back to London a new message had come through from Peter. This time he named Stevens as the traitor.

5
DANNY
    ‘Danny! Danny!’
    I was hardly out of the taxi before Celia had thrown herself into my arms.
    ‘We thought you’d be here on Christmas Eve. The children were so looking forward to it. Come along and bring your things. Everything’s ready for you. Your room’s made up. I even saved some Christmas pudding.’
    My stepmother was much younger than my father. She had been one of his students at a time when the relationship between my parents had hit one of its coldest patches, and I suppose my father had found Celia’s warmth impossible to resist. To this day I am sure he engineered the discovery that he had a mistress. He wanted, if nothing else, to surprise my mother, to show her she had misjudged him. In my darker moments, I think he rather enjoyed showing her he had power over women, or one woman at least, and an attractive, young one at that.
    There was no