The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Read online

  At breakfast the next day Page picked up a glass of what he thought was water. He spluttered to discover it was neat vodka. ‘I thought all journalists started the day with vodka,’ Martina told him. At lunch time Page went with Ross Mark of the Express to fetch Wolfenden from his office. The atmosphere was extremely tense and Wolfenden was incoherent. They took him to the Terrace Restaurant of the Willard Hotel, where, after two large vodkas, he rallied a little, though his condition remained deplorable. Later, at the National Press Club bar, which was full of beer-bellied journalists shouting at each other through a fog of cigarette smoke, Wolfenden told Page his life had been ruined by British Intelligence.

  Each year on the day of the Queen’s Official Birthday the British Embassy in Washington gave a large reception on its lawns with champagne, strawberries and other traditional ‘English’ fare. Wolfenden duly attended for the Daily Telegraph and was in the middle of doing what he did best, drinking and talking, when a familiar and deeply unwelcome face came into view. It was, he later told Martin Page, his old control from MI5 in London. ‘Hello, Jeremy,’ he said, ‘it’s good to be back in business with you.’

  It was beginning again. He had not escaped. This time there was to be a further complication: the Americans wanted a piece of him. For the next six months Wolfenden was required not only to report to his British contact at the Embassy; he had also to have regular meetings with a man from the FBI. When he returned from these encounters he was in a desperate emotional state: it was so bad that Martina even suspected he might be having an affair with his mysterious contact. Wolfenden would never say who this person was or what he wanted. He began to drink even more and the passages of relative sobriety were forgotten. All the good that his loving wife had done was being destroyed; she saw the empty bottles going downstairs in brown paper bags, and this time she could do nothing to stop it.

  Wolfenden’s friends had started to notice an unpleasant smell about him, as though his internal organs were not functioning. At a press conference in September he passed out. He was sure it was just because the room was overcrowded or too hot; nevertheless, in October Martina at last persuaded him to see a doctor for a complete physical check. He had had hepatitis in Moscow and had never gone ‘dry’ to give his liver a rest; there was the possibility, the doctor thought, that the disease was still lurking in his system, but he could find no indication of jaundice. He advised Wolfenden to drink less, slow down, and avoid stress: otherwise, he said, there was nothing wrong with him.

  Wolfenden continued to meet his contacts in the Embassy and in the FBI. He continued to do his work for the Daily Telegraph, but after a second trip to the Dominican Republic at the end of September he did not leave Washington. Christmas cast its long shadow. Wolfenden, ever since the day he had locked himself in his bedroom to avoid the children’s party, had hated such forced festivities. Everything was shut; there was no one to play with; there were no newspapers to read – and, significantly, no newspapers to work for. In those days, depending on how the festivals fell, the Telegraph might go for four or five days without publishing. With no prospect of being telephoned by London, some correspondents liked to take advantage of their freedom by indulging, uninhibited, their passion for alcohol. Wolfenden went for broke.

  What happened next is known only to Martina Browne.

  When I began to write the story of Jeremy Wolfenden it was clear to me that I had to track down his widow. Whenever I interviewed his friends and contemporaries, which was usually easy enough to arrange – many of them could not understand why no one had written about him before – I always asked about Martina and if they knew where I could find her. They had peculiar and inconsistent memories of her. She was sometimes described as forceful, sometimes quiet, and often, with a lift of a fastidious eyebrow, as ‘not an intellectual’. Estimates of her physical attractiveness varied from plain to beautiful. That was not surprising since some remembered her as blonde, some as dark, some as red-headed. Then there was her accent – variously described as Irish, Scandinavian and Midlands.

  Friends such as David Edwards could not fathom why Jeremy had married at all, since what made him happiest was chasing men. The consensus, no doubt affected by a glancing reference to her in a book about espionage by Phillip Knightley called The Second Oldest Profession, was that she was a spy, and that her marriage to Jeremy had been ‘arranged’.

  The path to her door was a long and discouraging one. ‘Find the nanny,’ Knightley told me in El Vino, the Fleet Street bar where Wolfenden drank with Ricky Marsh on a panicky return trip from Moscow. ‘If you could get to the agent…’

  But where was she? Most people seemed to think America, where she had lived before, escaped, and successfully reinvented herself after the Chisholm debacle. Only Martina would know the truth about Wolfenden’s last days; and it was the mysterious circumstances of his death which had done so much to increase his reputation.

  After many months of dispiriting struggle with American telephone directories I finally tracked Martina Browne to the Republic of Ireland. There was some checking and vetting first, but she agreed to see me. She met me at the airport. She looked, unsurprisingly, unlike any of the descriptions I had been given: handsome, bright-eyed, well-dressed. She had charm and presence, but life seemed hard. We went to her house on a small estate. She is a social worker, specialising in grief counselling, but the Republic has had to suspend such programmes until it receives more money from the European Union: grief is temporarily unassuaged.

  Martina has a teen-ager daughter, to whom she introduced me. She also has a son by her second marriage. She called him Ruari after her old boss in Moscow, but the second marriage had ended in separation.

  After she had made some tea she gave me Jeremy’s letters to her and showed me the monochrome cine-film of their wedding, which she had had transferred that morning to a video cassette. There they were on the steps of the church. It was all out of focus and trembly. I could vaguely make out young, smudged versions of Godfrey Hodgson and John Miller at the reception. In the final shot Jeremy turned, smiling, to the camera, knelt down on the floor, cigarette in mouth, drink in hand, and danced with a small girl. It was heart-rending.

  I asked her about his final day. This is what Martina said:

  ‘I woke up late on the morning of December 27th, about ten am. We had been at home the night before and he had been drinking very heavily. We had a row and he passed out on the sofa. I got up and went to the bathroom. The door was locked. We never locked the door. I called out but there was no answer. I could hear the extractor fan going inside. I went and got a beer-can opener and opened the lock with it. He was lying across the room with his head up against the bath. I thought he had fallen. He was moaning and breathing. I put my arm round him and called out, “Jeremy”. I touched his face. His eyes were closed. Then they opened, looked round, and closed again. I went out and rang Stephen Barber and told him to come round immediately. I rang the doctor who had given him a check-up in October. He wasn’t helpful. He told me to ring an ambulance. So we got him to the hospital.

  ‘I had a sense of impending doom. I tried to get him to talk. He was making sounds, but nothing came out. In the hospital they kept shouting at me.’ ‘What happened? Where were you?’ They didn’t know what to do with him. I was in the waiting room with Stephen Barber. I think they gave him a lumbar puncture. I decided I had to go and ring his parents. I rang them and woke them up. I went back to the hospital and as they came along the corridor I knew.

  ‘I went into his room and he just looked so peaceful. I sat with him. I was numbed. I wanted him to be alive. I think I tried to say a prayer. I wanted him to sit up. I rang his parents and told them. I was glad I’d warned them. Then Stephen Barber had to go off and ring the office. He had to get the news of Jeremy’s death into the first edition.

  ‘The front page of the paper the next day said he died “suddenly” and this may have led to the mystery. By the time the autopsy was done and the de
ath certificate had been issued he was not news any more. I met someone in Washington who said he had heard Jeremy shot himself. The official cause of death was “fatty liver”. The doctor said it was “like hepatitis”, so Lady Wolfenden wouldn’t be too upset. He had had hepatitis badly in Moscow and never stopped drinking afterwards.

  ‘The following March when I was in London I had a call through Ruari Chisholm to go in and see Ml6 to talk about his death. They were thinking that the death might have been suspicious. It was part of the mystique around Jeremy that people would assume there had to be odd causes. The longer it goes on the more I ask myself: Did I miss something?’

  I said: ‘Was he dressed when you found him in the bathroom?’

  She thought for a long time. She said nothing. Her little sitting room had some framed religious texts on the walls. She had been crying, but now she seemed bemused. I looked at some photographs on the sideboard. In one of them Martina was blonde with thick mascara: she had gone from Helen Shapiro to Dusty Springfield.

  Eventually she said: ‘Isn’t that incredible? I can’t remember … He was either wearing clothes or pyjamas. He wasn’t naked. But the locked door bothered me … Unless he sensed that something was going to happen and he didn’t want me to find him … Did he take just one more drink knowing that it was going to kill him?’

  Then she showed me the death certificate and the autopsy report. The Coroner’s Office pathology report showed a blood/alcohol level of 0.06 per cent. This is not in itself remarkable (the breathalyser limit is 0.08), but for a reading taken perhaps thirty-six hours after he had had a drink it is very high. The autopsy was done at 1 pm on 28 December. He was six feet tall and 135 pounds; the pronounced time of death was 11.55 pm on 27 December 1965. The report read:

  Police report is not available at this time. The physician who had been treating the patient called to state that during the short hospitalisation before death the patient had a carbon dioxide combining power of 0 and that to his knowledge the patient had not had massive gastrointestinal bleeding.

  Anatomical diagnoses:

  Fatty liver

  Ruptured esophogeal varices with haemorrhage from the nose and mouth

  Apneumatosis of left lung

  Bilateral pulmonary congestion and pulmonary edema of right lung

  Chronic fibrosing and calcific pancreatitis.

  Numbers three and four are normal post-mortem changes. Numbers one, two and five are consistent with chronic alcohol abuse and death from liver failure.

  A more detailed narrative reported:

  The sclera are moderately jaundiced but no jaundice is seen on the skin. There is no evidence of trauma on the scalp, face, trunk, or extremities. The oral cavity does not show any evidence of injury … The cut surfaces of the lungs show marked congestion and edema in the right lung and the left lung is almost completely airless and has a dark purplish congested appearance. There is no evidence of consolidation, pulmonary embolism or aspirated material.

  The liver is enlarged to six finger breadths below the right costal margin and the edges are rounded. The liver has a bright yellow colour and appeared to be extremely fatty. Cut surfaces of the liver show a yellow fatty appearance … The pancreas is extremely firm and throughout shows small focal areas of scarring and cut with a gritty sensation, indicating focal calcification. The kidneys are pale, suggestive of haemorrhage.

  CAUSE OF DEATH: Fatty liver.

  It was signed by Dr Marion Mann, Mr Compton attending.

  These are a classic set of symptoms for death from excessive alcohol consumption. The pancreatitis was typical, so was the liver damage and the ruptured esophogeal varices, which are like burst varicose veins in the abdomen caused by blood being unable to go on its normal course through the liver.

  Unless I was being defrauded on a magnificent scale it appeared that, at the astonishing age of thirty-one, the most brilliant Englishman of his generation had drunk himself to death.

  Everyone in the Chisholm household had been involved in spying: even the children had been given boxes of sweets by Penkovsky in the park. What about Martina Browne? How come she was so handy at prising open doors with a bottle-opener?

  SIS did not usually busy itself recruiting among working-class fifteen-year-old school leavers; nor was an advertisement on the noticeboard of a Catholic social club a promising manoeuvre. Martina herself denied being an SIS officer, though she made ambiguous remarks about her role. She had dinner with Greville Wynne and formed the impression that he was too nervy to take the pressure. She once referred to her own job as ‘looking through keyholes’, but told me that that was just a ‘throwaway remark’. Even if she was not telling the truth, it did not seem important as far as Jeremy Wolfenden was concerned. What mattered in his life was whether the marriage had been a fake, a security front; and his surviving letters to her – ‘Darling Mina-Wife’ – proved that it had been based on love.

  Martina Browne was known to Jeremy Wolfenden’s friends as a romancer. When she arrived in London after his death her Greenford accent had become ‘pure Sloane Square’. She would invent stories about her childhood and her past; the one she told you in the evening contradicted in several respects the one with which she had enthralled you at lunch.

  It is possible that Martina felt humiliated by the fact that all this activity was going on in the Chisholm flat without her being involved. The West was saved by information carried out by Janet and Ruari – even little Ali-boy was said to have helped; and she had just peeled the potatoes from O.Y. Stockmann and washed the children’s faces. It is possible that, far from concealing anything, Martina Browne had actually exaggerated her involvement.

  Everyone who saw her in the days following Jeremy’s death was struck by the depth of her grief and the dignity of her self-control. This was more than could be said for Jeremy’s father.

  Jack Wolfenden made a dreadful impression on Jeremy’s friends and colleagues when he and his wife arrived in Washington for the funeral. ‘How are you?’ he had written in a postcard to his son a few months earlier. ‘And how behaving?’ His line was that he would not visit Jeremy in America unless he could make it fit in with a lecture tour or some more serious purpose. The Wolfendens were shown around by Jeremy’s Telegraph colleague Stephen Barber and his wife Deirdre. The funeral was in Washington Cathedral. Eileen Wolfenden did not cry; she felt it was a question of somehow enduring it. Martina was distraught but brave. Afterwards, they all went out to dinner. Martina sat slumped and stunned at the table while Jack Wolfenden made the others play word games. No one who knew him doubted that at a deep level his love for Jeremy remained intact, but at times he seemed more concerned to make sure everything was done properly than to inquire how his first-born and prodigious son came to be dead at the age of thirty-one.

  Eileen Wolfenden thought they should at least see the doctor who had treated Jeremy in hospital, but he was away for the New Year holiday. Stephen Barber told her that everything possible had been done, and after a while, Eileen Wolfenden felt she had better accept it. Her husband’s attitude was the Evangelical ‘Where they fall…’He felt that his son had been given a chance, a great chance, and that now there was no more to be said. He was not what his wife called a pry-er; he was a man who knew better than most how to take a tip over brandy in a Pall Mall club, and if SIS had wanted to warn him not to ask too many questions he would have known how to read between their lines. Eileen Wolfenden meanwhile had to face the bitter fact that never again in her life would she know the sense of wonder and possibility that Jeremy had given her.

  Within hours of Wolfenden’s death, John Sparrow, the warden of All Souls, asked Jack Wolfenden if the service of commemoration could be held at the college. He agreed, and the memorial service took place at All Souls on 5 February 1966. The Telegraph was disappointed that the service was not in Fleet Street, that the soul of Jeremy Wolfenden was finally claimed by the world of scholarship, not journalism; but the paper had done little to deserve
the honour.

  It was a dismal day. A train arrived from Paddington bearing many of the young men and women who had been inspired by the hope and ambition that Jeremy Wolfenden had given them. Their sense of what was possible in their own lives contracted with his death. Some say that they never recovered it.

  John Sparrow gave an address in which he compared Wolfenden to a comet with a long orbit.

  ‘Two words recur insistently when I think about him,’ said Sparrow:’ “brilliant” and “lovable”. Brilliant he certainly was. He came here with a fine record as a scholar of Eton and then Magdalen; he got his First with an alpha in every paper; had he wanted an academic career, the way lay open to him. But he was a dedicated professional, and the call of Fleet Street was strong. He wanted above all to be a foreign correspondent – “to roam the world with that wild brotherhood” – and that meant that “he came to Oxford with his friends no more”. Those who knew tell me that he would have risen to the very top of his chosen profession, and I do not doubt it.

  ‘But in that unfulfilled promise lies less than half the tragedy of his early death. That was his loss, and his profession’s.

  ‘The real tragedy is our loss. For if he was brilliant, he was lovable too. He had a gay manner, a lively mind, an affectionate nature, and an open heart. Those who knew him have lost a friend, and those to whom he was closest have lost much more than that.