The Harry Palmer Quartet. Len Deighton

lapel. He saw me looking at it and removed it and pressed it into my hand without saying a word. Considering the place he was going, he could have given me the TV.

      When all the commotion had faded, Ross said, a little patronizingly I thought, ‘And now I suppose you’ve got something that can’t wait another moment.’

      I said, ‘I have, if you like homard à la broche,’ and I took him to the kitchen to show him.

      Ross made a joke then. He said, ‘Do you come here often?’

      ‘I do,’ I said. ‘I know the chef.’

       31

      [Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Joyful renewal of old acquaintance. Throw yourself wholeheartedly into your work.]

      It was midnight when I got to Charlotte Street. The whole place was a hive of activity. Alice wore green lisle stockings and asked my permission to use the IBM. Jean wore a new round-necked, sleeveless, button-through tailored dress in tangerine linen, one small gold ear-ring, the one she hadn’t lost, and a centre parting. I gave Alice a list of names, and when she went away I smudged Jean’s lipstick.

      All the people arrested were being taken down to Carshalton, and at 3.30 A.M. they were bursting at the seams, so Alice told Ross, and he fixed an alternative detention centre because it was so important to keep all the detainees separate.* The IBM went on buzzing and clattering, and at 6 A.M. there was a meeting at Scotland Yard. The police were very worried, but Ross had got one of the 4th Secretaries from the Home Office along there, and then they were even more worried. By 8 o’clock the worst part was over. At 8.9 A.M. Murray, who had arrested Dalby shortly after being hit on the head, phoned from Liphook to say he was holding a man named Swainson, and would I send a car. Swainson, it seemed, was K.K.’s real name. I sent the car and had it drop Jean and myself off for breakfast.

      ‘A plan to brain-wash the entire framework of a nation,’ said Jean, over the coffee and croissants. ‘It’s hardly credible.’

      ‘It’s credible all right,’ I told her, ‘and we haven’t entirely eradicated it! I don’t know which was more surprising even now; Dalby working for the other side, or Ross master-minding the whole operation that netted him.’

      ‘Did Ross know what was happening when he transferred you to WOOC(P)?’ asked Jean.

      I said, ‘He half guessed. That was why he put Murray in to spy out the land. When he heard the news of my near arrest in the strip club he let Dalby understand that he was suspicious of him. A very dangerous thing to do. In this case it paid off, for, to prove his loyalty, Dalby did a very efficient job in Lebanon. I remember seeing Ross at the airport when he returned from Beirut after seeing Dalby.

      ‘To what extent Dalby’s action in the Lebanon was against Jay’s wishes we shall never know, for Dalby made a point of shooting all the people in the car with Raven, you remember.’

      Jean said, ‘So Carswell wasn’t such a fool?’

      ‘He wasn’t,’ I said. ‘Even to the “concens” having fever and Right-wing views – both being conducive to Communist thought reform. Of course, at first, the fact that Carswell’s statistics began to show up the whole plot was a pure coincidence. But as soon as possible, Ross had Carswell hidden away. That was why I could find no trace that he had ever existed through Charlie at C-SICH. Ross was frightened for Carswell’s safety.’

      Jean added, ‘To say nothing of the fact that, as things are right now, if Jay says nothing, Carswell might provide the only guide to the extent of operation IPCRESS. By the way is IPCRESS a figure from Greek mythology, the allusion to which I should immediately catch?’

      I said, ‘No, it’s a distorted word that one of Ross’s men invented from the words “Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress”, which is a clinical description of what they did in the haunted house.’

      ‘And what they started to do to you at Wood Green,’ said Jean.

      ‘Exactly. They had three basic systems. The “haunted house” system, for want of a better word, depended on mental isolation. They used phoney ambassadors to convince the subject that he was completely alone, or phoney policemen (but they dropped the policeman idea after we got the fellow at Shoreditch by accident) – civilian clothes were safer. At Wood Green they even had radiant heating and cooling systems to alter the temperature as often as they wished. Switched lights on and off to give a one-hour-long day or a thirty-six-hour-long night. It was all to throw the mind off balance, and as Pavlov discovered, this is much easier to do to someone physically weak.’

      ‘What would they have done to you if you hadn’t escaped?’ asked Jean. It was nice to know someone had been worried.

      ‘Escaped is too strong a word,’ I said. ‘Luckily I had enough information about their methods to make an informed guess. Most of the previous inmates never dreamed that they were still in England. There was no point in getting out of the house only to find yourself thousands of miles behind the Iron Curtain. As to the next stages; the beginning is this severing of connections, a feeling of isolation and physical and mental fatigue and uncertainty; that’s what they started with me. Tension and an uncertainty; about what will please and what won’t please. Any sort of humour is dangerous to the technique. You’ll notice how the American treatment after my arrest on Tokwe, had these same basic characteristics. Well, had I stayed at Wood Green the next stage would most likely have been the memorizing of long passages of dialect. Probably they would have told me to memorize that long document about my trial.’

      Jean poured out some more coffee. I was very tired, and just talking about how near I had come to being converted made my throat nervously dry. ‘After that?’ Jean said. She lit a Gauloise and passed it across to me.

      ‘Group therapy. We know they had five others there at the same time as me. Maybe even more. The tape recordings of moans and groans and talking in sleep in a foreign language must have worked everyone up to a fever pitch, but since it was identical to the tape that Keightley had found, it only encouraged me. Soon there would be group meetings, and we would be allowed to discover that one is an informer, to increase the tension. Then there is the confession and autobiography stage. This is detailed. Things like why you smoked, had love affairs, drank, mixed with certain people.’

      ‘Had love affairs?’ said Jean.

      ‘I escaped before that part,’ I said.

      ‘Now I know why,’ said Jean. ‘It was very sweet of you.’

      I drank my coffee. The sun shone brightly in the Soho street below. Large blocks of ice stood outside restaurants and melted into the gutter. A man in a straw boater arranged a large Severn salmon across a wet marble slab. Around it he carefully placed soles and turbot and scallops and flat oysters and portugaises that looked like pieces of rock, and herrings and mackerel, and a fountain of water played over it, and Jean was talking to me. I turned and gave her my full attention.

      ‘What happened after the mutual confession stage?’

      ‘You don’t have an ulterior motive?’ I asked.

      ‘Oh, every woman understands brain-washing. It’s letting a husband get furious about a new hat and then knowing when to ask him to pay for it. Just when he starts to feel guilty.’

      ‘You don’t know how right you are,’ I said. ‘The whole process is one of discovering weaknesses; preferably the subjects find their own. Self-criticism, etc. Then the third phase is using the information so far gained to create what is technically called “abreaction”. This is caused by intense mental work, indoctrination by meetings. In fact by overwork and stress, and is the culmination of all brain-washing. Abreaction is the point of no return.’

      ‘How do you know when you’ve reached it?’ asked Jean.

      ‘You