42
Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor
“You knew him?”
“Kim Philby?” asked Graham Seymour. “I’m not sure anyone really did. But we were acquainted. He gave me my first drink. My father nearly killed me. Him, too.”
“Your father disapproved of alcohol?”
“Of course not. But he loathed Kim.”
They were seated at the small table in the corner of the kitchen, next to a leaded window overlooking the moorland. The window was black with night and lashed with rain. Between them lay the remnants of Miss Coventry’s thoroughly English supper. At Seymour’s request, she had departed early, leaving the two spy chiefs to tidy up for themselves. They were alone in the cottage. Not entirely alone, thought Gabriel. Philby was with them.
“What did he give you to drink?”
“A pink gin,” said Seymour with a trace of a smile, “at the bar of the Normandie. He used it as his office. He used to arrive there around noon to read his post and have a drink or two for the sake of his hangover. That’s where the Russians reestablished contact. A KGB officer named Petukhov walked over and handed Philby a card. They met the following afternoon at Philby’s apartment and put in place their tradecraft. If Philby had something he wanted to share with Moscow, he would stand on the balcony of his flat on a Wednesday evening with a newspaper in his hand. He and Petukhov used to meet in an out-of-the way restaurant in the Armenian quarter called Vrej.”
“If I remember correctly, there was another wife. A third wife,” Gabriel added. “An American, for a change of pace.”
“Her name was Eleanor Brewer. Philby stole her from Sam Pope Brewer, theNew York Timescorrespondent. She drank almost as much as Philby. They were married not long after Aileen was found dead in the house in Crowborough. Philby was positively overjoyed when he received the news. My father never forgave him.”
“Your father worked with Philby?”
“My father refused to have anything to do with him,” said Seymour, shaking his head. “He’d known Kim during the war and was never seduced by the famous Philby charm. Nor was he convinced of Philby’s innocence in the Third Man affair. Quite the opposite, actually. He thought Philby guilty as sin, and he was furious when he learned Philby had been given a service retainer and posted to Beirut. He was not alone. There were several senior officers in London who were of a similar mind. They prevailed upon my father to keep an eye on him.”
“Did he?”
“To the best of his ability. He was as shocked as everyone else when Philby disappeared.”
“It was 1963,” said Gabriel.
“January,” elaborated Seymour.
“Remind me of the circumstances. Titian and Caravaggio, I can do in my sleep,” said Gabriel. “But Kim Philby is rather outside my area of expertise.”
Seymour carefully refilled his glass with claret. “Don’t play the fool with me. Your bloodshot eyes tell me you brushed up on Philby on the flight from Tel Aviv. You know as well as I do what happened.”
“George Blake was arrested for spying for the Soviets.”
“And promptly sentenced to forty-two years in prison.”
“Then there was a Russian defector who told British intelligence about a so-called Ring of Five agents who had met when they were students.”
“The defector’s name,” said Seymour, “was Anatoliy Golitsyn.”
“And let’s not forget Philby’s old friend from Cambridge,” said Gabriel. “The one who suddenly remembered he had tried to recruit her as a Soviet spy in the thirties.”
“Who could possibly forget Flora Solomon?”
“Philby started to spiral dangerously out of control. On the Beirut party circuit, it was not unusual to find him passed out on the floor of the host’s apartment. His decline did not go unnoticed by Moscow Center. Nor was the KGB unaware of the rising threat against him. Yuri Modin, the controller of the Cambridge Five, traveled to Beirut to warn Philby he would be arrested if he ever returned to Britain. As it turned out, trouble came to Philby instead, in the form of his closest friend, Nicholas Elliott.”
Seymour picked up the thread of the story. “They met in an apartment in the Christian quarter, at four o’clock in the afternoon on the twelfth of January. The room had been thoroughly bugged. My father was sitting over the recorders in the next room. Philby arrived wearing a turban of bandages and two black eyes. He’d taken a couple of drunken falls on New Year’s Eve and was lucky to be alive. Elliott foolishly opened the windows to let some fresh air into the room, and let in street noise as well. Much of the conversation is unintelligible.”
“You’ve heard the recording?”
Seymour nodded slowly. “I used the privilege of my office to listen to the tapes not long after I became chief. Philby denied everything. But when he returned to the apartment the next afternoon, he offered a partial confession in exchange for a grant of immunity. Elliott and Philby met a few more times, including once over dinner at Chez Temporel, one of Beirut’s most expensive restaurants. Then Elliott left Beirut without making any provision for Philby’s security. Philby made his escape on the night of January twenty-third, with the help of Petukhov, his KGB contact. Within a few days, he was in Moscow.”
“What was your father’s reaction?”
