“Where’s the newspaper?” asked Preston.
“He left it when he finished. ... Hold on. ... Then the proprietor came over and cleared the table, taking the dirty bowl and paper back into the kitchen area. ... He’s inside the taxi and cruising. What do we do ... stay with him?”
Preston thought furiously. Harry Burkinshaw and the B team had been taken off Sir Richard Peters and allowed a few days’ rest. They had been out in rain, cold, and fog for weeks. There was only one team on the job now. If he split them up and lost Berenson, who then went on to make his contact somewhere else, Harcourt-Smith would have his hide nailed to a barn door. He made his decision.
“Len, leave one car and driver to tail the taxi. I know it’s not enough if he slips away on foot. But switch the rest of your people to the ice-cream parlor.”
“Will do,” said Len Stewart, and went off the air.
Preston was in luck. The taxi went straight to Berenson’s West End club and dropped him off. He went inside. But then, thought Preston, the contact could be in there.
Len Stewart entered the ice-cream shop and sat until closing time with a coffee and the Evening Standard. Nothing happened. He was asked to leave at closing time and did so. From up and down the street the four-man team saw the staff of the shop leave, the proprietor close up, the lights go out.
From Cork Street, Preston was trying to get a phone tap on the ice-cream shop and a make on the proprietor. He turned out to be a Signor Benotti, a legal immigrant, originally from Naples, who had led a blameless life for twenty years. By midnight Preston had a tap on the ice-cream parlor and on Signor Benotti’s home in Swiss Cottage. They produced nothing.
Preston spent a sleepless night at Cork Street. Stewart’s relief shift had moved in at 8:00 p.m. and watched the ice-cream shop and Benotti’s house through the night. At 9:00 on Friday morning, Benotti walked back to his shop, and at 10:00 it opened for business. Len Stewart and the day shift took over at the same hour. At 11:00, Stewart called in.
“There’s a small delivery van at the front door,” he told Preston. “The driver seems to be loading gallon tubs of ice cream. It seems they do a customer-delivery service.”
Preston stirred his twentieth cup of awful coffee. His mind was fogging with lack of sleep. “I know,” he said, “there’ve been references to it on the telephone already. Detach a car and two people to stay with the van. Note every recipient of ice-cream deliveries.”
“That only leaves me a car and two people here, including myself,” said Stewart. “It’s damn thin on the ground,”
“There’s a bidding conference going on up at Charles. I’ll try to get an extra team,” said Preston.
The ice-cream van made twelve calls that morning, all in the St. John’s Wood/Swiss Cottage area, with two as far south as Marylebone.
Some of the deliveries were in apartment buildings, where it was hard for the watchers to appear inconspicuous, but they noted every address. Then the van drove back to the shop. It made no afternoon deliveries.
“Will you drop that list at Cork on your way home?” Preston asked Stewart.
That evening, the phone-tap people reported that Berenson had had four telephone calls while he was at home, including one in which the caller turned out to have a wrong number. He had made no outgoing calls. Everything was on tape. Did Preston want to play it? There was nothing remotely suspicious on it. He thought he might as well.
On Saturday morning, Preston played the longest shot of his life. Using a tape recorder set up by the Technical Support people, and a variety of excuses to the householders, he called up each one of the recipients of the ice cream, asking whenever a woman answered if he might speak to her husband. Since it was Saturday, he got all but one.
One voice seemed slightly familiar. What was it—a hint of accent? And where could he have heard it before? He checked the name of the householder. It meant nothing.
He ate a moody lunch in a café near Cork Street. The connection came to him over the coffee. He hurried back to Cork Street and played the tapes again. Possible—not conclusive, but possible.
Scotland Yard, among the copious facilities of its Forensic Science Department, has a section devoted to voice analysis, which is useful whenever a target criminal, having had his phone tapped, denies it was his voice on the tape. MI5, having no forensic facilities, has to rely on Scotland Yard for this sort of thing, an arrangement usually secured via the Special Branch.
Preston called Detective Sergeant Lander at home, and it was Lander who fixed a priority meeting in Scotland Yard’s voice-analysis section that same afternoon. There was only one technician available, and he was loath to leave his televised football game to come to work, but he did. A thin young man with thick-lensed glasses, he played Preston’s tapes half a dozen times, watching the illuminated line on the oscilloscope screen rise and fall to record the tiniest shades of tone and timbre in the voices.
“Same voice,” he said at last, “no question about it.”
On Sunday, Preston identified the owner of the accented voice by using the Diplomatic List. He also called a friend in the Physics Department of London University, spoiled his day off by asking for a considerable favor, and finally telephoned Sir Bernard Hemmings at his Surrey home.
“I think there is something that we should report to the Paragon Committee, sir,” he said, “tomorrow morning.”
The Paragon Committee met at 11:00 a.m. on Monday, March 2, and Sir Anthony Plumb asked Preston to make his report. There was an air of expectancy, although Sir Bernard Hemmings looked grave.
Preston detailed the events of the first two days following the distribution of the Ascension Island paper as briefly as he could. There was a stir of interest at the news of Berenson’s odd and very brief call from a public phone box on the previous Wednesday evening.
“Did you tape-record that call?” asked Sir Peregrine Jones.
“No, sir, we couldn’t get near enough,” replied Preston.
“Then what do you think it was for?”