James Bond: The Authorised Biography Read Free

…’
    ‘Exactly.’
    Urquhart was very, very thin and managed to combine baldness with quite startlingly thick black hair along his wrists and hands. As with the statues of Giacometti he seemed to have been squeezed down to the stick-thin shadow of his soul. Happily his expense account, unlike his colleague's, stretched to a bottle of respectable Chianti.
    From the beginning I attempted a bold front, and had produced the photograph of Bond and Fleming before we had finished our lasagne .
    ‘Well?’ I said.
    ‘Oh, very interesting. What a good-looking chap he was in those days. Still is, of course. That's half his trouble.’
    ‘You mean he's alive? James Bond's alive?’
    ‘Of course. My dear chap. Why else d'you think we're here?’
    ‘But all this nonsense from your Mr Hopkins – the Official Secrets Act. He almost threatened me with gaol.’
    ‘Alas, poor Hopkins. He's had a dreadful lot of trouble with this dreadful lot. He has a hernia too. And an anaemic wife. Some men are born to suffer.’
    Urquhart smiled, exposing over-large false teeth.
    ‘No, Bond's an interesting fellow. He's had a dreadful press of course and then the films – he's not at all like that in real life. You'd like him. Perhaps you ought to meet him. He enjoyed your book, you know – your Life of Ian . Made him laugh, although, between the two of us, his sense of humour's not his strongest point. No, we were all extremely grateful for your book. Hopkins was certain that you'd smelled a rat, but I told him not to worry.’
    ‘But where is Bond and what's he doing?’
    Urquhart giggled.
    ‘Steady. We mustn't rush our fences. What do you think of this Chianti? Brolio , not Broglio as Ian would insist on spelling it. But then he wasn't really very good on wines. All that balls he used to write about champagne when the dear old chap couldn't tell Bollinger from bath water.’
    For the remainder of the lunch we chatted about Fleming. Urquhart had worked with him during the war, and, like everyone who knew him, was fascinated by the contradictions of the man. Urquhart used them to avoid further discussion of James Bond. Indeed, as we were leaving, he simply said, ‘We'll be in touch – you have my word for that. But I'd be grateful if you'd stop your investigations into James Bond. They'd cause a lot of trouble if they reached the papers – the very thought of it would do for Hopkins's hernia.’
    Somewhat lamely I agreed, and walked away from Kettners thinking that, between them, Hopkins and Urquhart had managed a deft piece of hushing up. Provided I kept quiet I expected to hear nothing more from them. But I was wrong. A few weeks later Urquhart rang again, asking me to see him in his office.
    It was the first time I had entered the Headquarters building up by Regent's Park which formed the basis for Fleming's ‘Universal Export’ block. I was expecting something altogether grander, although presumably all secret services adopt a certain camouflaging seediness. This was a place of Kafkaesque oppressiveness – grey corridors, grey offices, grey people. There were a pair of ancient milk-bottles outside Urquhart's door. Urquhart himself seemed full of bounce. He offered me a mentholated cigarette, then lit one for himself and choked alarmingly. The room began to smell of smouldering disinfectant, and it was hard to tell where Urquhart ended and the smoke began.
    ‘This business of James Bond,’ he said. ‘You must forgive my seeming so mysterious the other day. I really don't enjoy that sort of thing. But I've been contacting the powers that be, and we've a little proposition that might interest you.’
    He paused, tapping a false tooth with a cheap blue biro.
    ‘I'll be quite honest with you. For some time now we've been increasingly concerned about the Bond affair. You are by no means the first outsider to have stumbled on it. Just recently we've had some nasty scares. There have been several journalists. They have not all been