Shard Calls the Tune
By Philip McCutchan
When Hedge is presented with a covert message informing him that Kolotechin, the head of the Russian security police, the KGB, is about to defect, Hedge is sceptical. Kolotechin wouldn’t defect … or would he?
And matters take a different turn when several witnesses claim to have seen a man resembling Hedge lurking outside the toilet where the informer was found dead…
Detective Chief Superintendent of the Yard, Simon Shard, takes great pleasure in informing Hedge of the witness statements. As leader of the Special Branch attached to the Foreign Office, Shard is well respected. Providing asylum to Kolotechin could have non-favourable repercussions, but he would be a big prize for Britain. And there was no better man to take on Kolotechin in Naples but Hedge, much to his intense dislike. He considered field work too dangerous and preferred his comfortable office job, but the Head of Security had other ideas.
With Hedge on his own mission, Shard finds himself dispatched to Moscow to bring home a British scientist who was imprisoned there. As Shard and Hugh-Jones find themselves in a a battle to save their lives, the pieces of the puzzle fall together.
No one could have known how the destinies of Kolotechin and Hugh-Jones would entwine…
Philip McCutchan began writing in 1956. Prior to this, he joined the Royal Navy on the outbreak of World War Two as an Ordinary Signalman and ended the war as a lieutenant, having served in destroyers, aircraft carriers, cruisers, a battleships battlecruiser, an armed trawler, and an ocean boarding vessel. For three years after the war he sailed in Orient Liners on the Australian run and then for a time became an assistant master in a preparatory school.
