“No, I can’t believe it of Dick White. He wanted to resign from MI5 when Percy Sillitoe left in the wake of those defections. Sillitoe talked him into staying on and taking over the corner shop. No, I can’t see the comrades would ever have contemplated even allowing White to resign if he’d been theirs all along. Besides, he was at Oxford, not Cambridge.”

“Fair enough. But still, Hollis and White are as close as a fat lady’s thighs. I think we’d best leave him out of the loop for now. Everyone knows that Dick White always agrees with Hollis.”

“All right. I’ll call Patrick Dean tonight. And you call your people in MI6. But not here, eh? We’ll do it back at the hotel. Much as I admire Somerset Maugham as a writer I just don’t trust the old bugger. Or any of these awful queers he surrounds himself with. Least of all that fucking German, Walter Wolf. He may not be queer but he’s got the look of a Nazi. And let’s not forget that Maugham is an old Russia hand. He was running agents in Russia when you and I were in short trousers. Not just in Russia. But in Washington, too. Perhaps it’s no accident that Guy Burgess was here, in this house, back in nineteen thirty-seven.”

“So was Anthony Blunt.”

“That doesn’t fill me with optimism, either. The GRU-run Comintern was based in Paris. But they were almost as active down here on the Riviera, recruiting Communist refugees from the Spanish Civil War in Marseilles. Anyone shopping for suitable agents in the South of France would certainly have been interested in some of the men who were guests of Somerset Maugham in nineteen thirty-seven. After all, most of them were already leading very secret lives because of their sexual predilections. That’s always been something attractive to the Russians.”

“Blunt again.”

“He’s been interviewed by MI5, hasn’t he? As a possible suspect.”

“Several times. The FBI has had him in their sights for a while. But Courtney Young—who interrogated him—insists Anthony Blunt is innocent. That it’s just guilt by association. Still, we’ve only Anthony’s word for it that the photograph was stolen from his flat at the Courtauld in London.”

“Perhaps one of the queers who were here in nineteen thirty-seven was already a Red. I think we should ask Maugham if we can see this picture, don’t you?”

“If he’ll let you. He’s a cagey old sod.”

“Do you think he could be a Russian agent? He wouldn’t be the first Communist to own a fucking Picasso.”

“Including Picasso.”

TWENTY-SIX

Maugham was seated at the table in his brightly lit office. He tossed me a towel with which to wipe the soot off my hands, which had been clinging on to the chimney for the best part of twenty minutes.