The Distance by Helen Giltrow

Author:Helen Giltrow [Giltrow, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385536998
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2014-09-08T23:00:00+00:00

DAY 16: THURSDAY

POWELL

Thursday night. He’s working late again.

Spread out across the desk: the records retrieved from the Ealing flat. Pages ripped from exercise books, covered in Laidlaw’s patient black-ink script. Time on his hands meant narrative accounts in full sentences, but not all are like that—some are in note form, just the hurried essentials. But every one complete.

The things we knew about. The things we didn’t.

The Ealing flat was on the surveillance log—Laidlaw couldn’t make himself invisible. But they’d checked it out, or thought they had. The electoral register and the bills gave the resident’s name, one Arthur Burton: a recluse, in poor health, shunning his neighbors—but they saw lights going on, heard the radio and the TV. And heard Laidlaw visiting from time to time, with bags of shopping—calling out, It’s all right, it’s me, I’ve got my key, or Get the kettle on.

When Powell did the walk-through of the flat—the first one in, covers on his shoes, touching nothing—he found the timer switches on the lamps and radio and TV, and the cupboards full of food.

Arthur Burton was a complete fiction, his name stolen from a child who’d died in the 1930s, a largely hollow ID with no obvious connection to Laidlaw’s Russian past. His landlord was a different matter. Gordon Fox: a cover name assigned to Peter Laidlaw back in ’76, after his own name had popped up on a Soviet watch list.

Someone should have spotted that.

They found the records triple wrapped in plastic, in six different locations around the flat—in the cistern and taped to the underside of the bed frame, under the floorboards and in the freezer compartment, in the oven and in the lining of a coat—each cache spanning a different period of Laidlaw’s relationship with Knox.

The things we knew about. The things we didn’t.

Transactions logged in minute, careful detail: each tip-off, dead drop, brush pass, hidden message. And then, after every cool account: Laidlaw’s bewilderment, excitement, bafflement, frustration. The growing knowledge MI5 was watching him. The growing sense, too, of an alliance with Knox. He’s given me a good one this time and They’ll have to work harder if they’re going to catch us out.

Beyond that, yet another layer: the search for Knox himself.

The patient analysis of each transaction: not just the information supplied and what it might imply, but the method, and every clue that might be gleaned from that. Dead drop in park and Shoes ordered by credit card—details not available and Brush pass in café, didn’t see. Tradecraft??? Background? Is this a double bluff?

Got sight of the man who may have dropped off package. I attempted to follow, but failed.

The collation of the list of Russian names: question marks and strikethroughs.

Two years ago: Maybe not Moscow after all????

A period of stalling: Laidlaw’s frustration mounting. Though we’re on the same side he will not trust me and This is getting nowhere. The notes are scantier.

And then, a week before Laidlaw’s own death:

Saw package man again, am almost certain.

Details of a sighting in a street market.

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