The Leader

by Guy Walters

  ‘I think you’re right,’ said Armstrong. ‘It liked him too.’

  ‘Sometimes he used to come back home, and Lucy would still be up, and, and . . .’

  Her voice drifted off. Armstrong saw her eyes glistening.

  ‘Mrs Craven?’ he asked.

  She took out a handkerchief and gave her nose a sharp blow.

  ‘My daughter, Captain Armstrong. She disappeared three weeks ago.’

  ‘Disappeared?’

  ‘That’s right. Not long after her boyfriend was taken away by those . . . those fascists.’

  She spat the last word out with venom. It was clear that Mrs Craven regarded the word as a vulgarism in itself; there was no need for her to add a swear word.

  ‘What happened to her?’ asked Ted.

  ‘She told me that she was going to join the Freedom Council.’

  Armstrong and Ted looked at each other.

  ‘You know it, do you?’ asked Mrs Craven, noticing the men’s glance.

  ‘Not as much as we’d like,’ said Armstrong. ‘It’s actually the reason why we came.’

  ‘What? Are you trying to find Lucy?’

  ‘No, not exactly – we’re trying to find the group itself. I thought that you might have some sort of contact with them.’

  ‘I pleaded with her,’ said Mrs Craven, ignoring Armstrong’s request. ‘I told her that she couldn’t go down the same route as Alan had gone . . .’

  ‘Alan?’

  ‘Her boyfriend, Captain Armstrong. He’s called Alan Jacobs. He was part of it, you see, part of the Freedom Council, and I told Lucy that she couldn’t go out there and fight like he had, because she would only get hurt. But then she told me that I would have joined them if I was her age. She was right, but I didn’t let on. Anyway, the next morning I came down for breakfast, and there it was, her letter.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘That she had gone off to fight for what she believed in, and nothing was going to stop her.’

  ‘Can we read it?’ asked Ted.

  ‘I burned it,’ said Mrs Craven. ‘She asked me to.’

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘I’m sorry to be so persistent,’ said Armstrong, ‘but we really must find her. Has she made any contact with you at all?’

  ‘None.’

  Mrs Craven shook her head and looked into the empty fireplace.

  ‘Can you think of anywhere that we might try?’

  ‘If there was somewhere, I would have tried it myself.’

  ‘How about her friends? Do you think any of them might know? A friend of Alan’s perhaps?’

  She shook her head again. This was infuriating, thought Armstrong. Lucy was probably no more than a mile or two away from where they were sitting.

  ‘How about a restaurant?’ he said. ‘A pub maybe? Did she work somewhere? Perhaps there was a colleague she mentioned a lot?’

  Mrs Craven lifted her head.

  ‘A restaurant! Why didn’t I think of it before?’

  * * *

  She took it badly, and what made it worse was that it was too risky for her to go home and comfort her mother. It was Benny who told her – he had brought back a copy of The Blackshirt that morning, and as soon as she saw his face she knew that something was seriously wrong. At first she thought it had to be about Alan, that he had ‘committed suicide’ in prison, as so many others had done.

  Nothing could have prepared her for what she read. There, underneath the main headline concerning the escape of Captain Armstrong, were the words ‘Bolshevik MP found dead’. She could barely read the story, a story that revealed how her ‘cowardly’ and ‘treacherous’ father had assaulted a prison guard and escaped from the Isle of Man with Armstrong in order to instigate a ‘wave of Jewish-inspired terror’. When she reached the sentence that gleefully informed readers that they should be thankful the sea was such a cruel mistress, Lucy started tearing up the newspaper, and kept tearing it until the bare wooden floor was littered with hundreds of smudged scraps. Benny could only stand and watch, occasionally stretching out a tentative hand of comfort. The hand was neither rebuffed nor ignored, but merely not noticed.

  * * *

  ‘And I say he’s a goddamn phoney,’ barked Ambassador Bingham.

  ‘But sir, shouldn’t we just . . .?’

  ‘No we darn well should not! I do not like reading reports about Commie generals who come out of nowhere, who may not even be real generals, and who are about as believable as a horse with feathers.’

  Bingham threw the bulky dossier on to the desk. The idea of a plot by Moscow to secretly overthrow the British Government was preposterous, absurd. Stalin may well be a crafty so-and-so, but not even he could mount something this ambitious. It was horsecrap, pure BS.

  ‘With respect, sir,’ said Carl Parsons, Bingham’s second consul, ‘much of this does look real, and there has been a whole lot of talk on the intelligence grapevine . . .’

  ‘Talk! Grapevine my ass! It’s always talk, Parsons! Do you know how damaging talk is? If we listened to everything that came out of DC, every loose word, every scrap of gossip, every bit of tittle-tattle, every cranky document, well, we’d get no real work done. Do you know, Parsons, only the other day I received a letter from the FBI saying that one of their informants had sworn on oath that good Queen Wallis was buying dope down in Limehouse. Our job is not to believe nonsense, Parsons, but only to trust the facts, pure and simple. Do I make myself absolutely plain?’

  ‘You do indeed, sir.’

  ‘At last. I’m so happy, Parsons. It’s so good of you to finally see things your dear little ambassador’s way.’

  Parsons smiled dutifully at the ambassador’s sarcasm.

  ‘When you’re our great country’s representative in, I don’t know, the Congo, then you can deal in as much crap as you care for, Parsons, but while you’re here at the Court of St James you leave off this bullshit. Goddit?’

  ‘Goddit, sir,’ Parsons replied.

  ‘Now then, I’m sure you’ve got work to do.’

  Parsons rightly took that as an invitation to leave. He turned briskly on his heel and walked over the soft carpet towards the door.

  ‘One more thing, Parsons.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘If you tell anybody about this, even one of your fancy women, then you really will find yourself in the goddamn Congo.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Without a paddle, Parsons!’

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  Parsons left the room and closed the padded door behind him. Bingham grunted and pinched the bridge of his nose. He opened his eyes and disdainfully flicked through the dossier. Jesus wept – look at this shit. ‘Top Hat’, ‘Dog’: even the general’s codenames looked phoney. This guy Krivitsky was having a ball. What did he want? A house in Florida?

  * * *

  At first she thought they were HMSSP and had tricked her mother. They were the right age, and somehow their faces and their height didn’t fit with their workmen’s clothes. It was two days since she had learned about her father’s death, and Lucy was standing in the vastness of an empty warehouse down by the river at Wapping.

  Armstrong’s escape and killing of the two policemen had earned him heroic status in the eyes of the Freedom Council. Like the rest of the country, Lucy and her fellow members had been following the news with much interest, and had started to find the exasperation in the tone of reports in The Blackshirt and Action almost amusing. The size of the reward for apprehending Armstrong had trebled in the space of two days, and the Leader’s apoplectic fury could easily be discerned between the lines of his radio announcements:

  ‘This execrable piece of vermin must be hunted down and dealt with with the utmost severity! I say to you all now, if any man among you is hiding this traitor, then he and his family will be met with a punishment equal to the one that awaits the cowardly captain. Let there be no lair in which this man can skulk! For the good of the country, I say to you this: B
e vigilant! Be wary! Be patriotic!’

  There were three of them waiting in the warehouse. Alongside her were two senior members of the Council, men she knew only as Martin and Nick. Both were in their late thirties, and carried guns, guns she knew they had used only a fortnight ago in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate a member of the HMSSP.

  A blindfolded Armstrong and Ted were bundled by Danny and Benny into the warehouse, their hands roughly tied up behind their backs. Armstrong knew that they were taking an understandable precaution, but for a hateful moment he feared he had walked into some outlandish trap, a view reinforced by the cold press of a muzzle against his temple.

  ‘Search them!’ a voice ordered.

  The two men were vigorously frisked. The only items their clothes yielded were some coins and Ted’s keys.

  ‘Get on the floor!’ the voice barked.

  Armstrong and Ted were pushed down, their heads forced against the rough concrete floor.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Armstrong replied for both of them.

  ‘My name is Captain James Armstrong and this is Ted Frost, editor of the Daily Sketch.’

  ‘Do you have any proof of that?’

  ‘No,’ said Armstrong.

  ‘Get him up! Not both of them! Just him!’

  Armstrong was pulled up and made to face the source of the voice. The man sounded tough, thought Armstrong, and he was glad of it.

  ‘You’ve got a beard.’

  Armstrong nodded. ‘Disguise,’ he replied.

  ‘Profile.’

  Armstrong’s head was turned ninety degrees. He slightly resented that he wasn’t allowed to do it on his own, but he stopped himself getting angry.

  ‘You certainly look like him.’

  At last, thought Armstrong.

  ‘I’ve got a few questions for you,’ the voice said.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Where and when did you receive your Military Cross?’

  The question took him aback. They had obviously done their homework.

  ‘At Festubert,’ said Armstrong. ‘On the night of the twenty-third to the twenty-fourth of November 1914.’

  ‘Which regiment were you in?’

  ‘The 8th Gurkha Rifles.’

  ‘Battalion?’

  ‘The second.’

  ‘What did you do in the years running up to the war?’

  Christ, thought Armstrong, how did they know about this?

  ‘I spent two years escorting map-making expeditions throughout Nagaland.’

  ‘Where specifically?’

  ‘The Dihang river mainly.’

  ‘Where did you meet your wife?’

  ‘In hospital.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Mary Elizabeth Armstrong.’

  ‘Maiden name?’

  ‘Elliott.’

  The questions were beginning to make Armstrong wince. They had made their point.

  ‘All right,’ he snapped, ‘I know what you’re going to ask next. You’re going to want me to tell you how and when she died. Fine, if that’s what you want to know, I’ll tell you that as well. It was the—’

  The questioner interrupted him.

  ‘Captain Armstrong,’ he said, his voice losing some of its menace, ‘you don’t have to tell us. I’m quite satisfied you’re who you say you are.’

  Armstrong felt the grip on him relax.

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘I’m grateful.’

  ‘Take off their blindfolds,’ said the voice.

  Armstrong squinted slightly, even though the light was dim.

  ‘Hello, Captain Armstrong,’ the voice said. ‘We’re very honoured to have you here.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Armstrong, rubbing the back of his head.

  ‘I’m sorry about the rough treatment – you too, Mr Frost. I hope you understand.’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ said Armstrong. ‘You certainly know all about me.’

  ‘Let’s just say that we like to do our research properly. By the way, my name is . . . well, it’s not my real name. For the time being, just call me Nick.’

  Armstrong looked at the faces of the small group as Nick introduced them. Nick and the man who had shoved the gun against his temple looked hard and weary, as though they had not slept or eaten for the past six months. The younger men were a little more wide-eyed, more naïve-looking, but they seemed tough and keen. And then of course there was Craven’s daughter, who shared her father’s dark looks and diminutive height. Her hair was scraped back tightly, and although her expression was bordering on the fierce, Armstrong fancied that he could detect that her face could have its softer moments. However, for the time being she resembled her firebrand father in full flow on the floor of the Commons.

  ‘You look very much like your father,’ said Armstrong.

  Lucy raised her eyebrows. It had been said before.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ added Armstrong.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘How’s my mother? How’s she doing?’

  ‘Bearing up.’

  Lucy nodded and smiled sadly.

  ‘Bearing up,’ she said, letting the words roll around her mouth.

  There was a brief silence before Nick spoke.

  ‘What can we do for you, Captain Armstrong?’

  ‘First, I’d like you to have a look at a file that I have obtained. I think you will find its contents disturbing, to say the least. And second, well – it’s really quite simple. I want you to help me.’

  * * *

  Sir Roger clutched a whisky tumbler as he looked through the reports. So far there had been no sign of Armstrong, not even the slightest trace. His men had visited nearly two hundred addresses all over the country in the past two days, and they had drawn a blank. Sir Roger had told his agents to be extremely rigorous in their enquiries, something about which they had no qualms. Anybody who gave rise to even a semblance of suspicion was to be taken in and, if necessary, thoroughly debriefed.

  However, there was one particular place that Sir Roger had ordered his men not to visit. Although the Leader was due to fly out to Germany, for the time being Sir Roger wanted Armstrong’s son and mother-in-law left alone. If the Leader demanded they be taken in, then he would do so, but he was not going to be the one to suggest it. He would also warn the leader that such a move might prove counterproductive, especially if the public or the French got wind of it. For Sir Roger, hostage-taking was not a matter of conscience, but one of deep practicality.

  Chapter Eight

  Special Relationships

  August–September 1937

  CARL PARSONS WAS damned if he was going to keep quiet. General Krivitsky was the real McCoy, he was sure of it, and there was nothing Ambassador Bingham could say that would convince him otherwise. Since the dossier had arrived, he had been unable to sleep, much to the chagrin of his latest girlfriend, a cipher clerk from West Virginia called Rose. She knew something was wrong, but he refused to tell her, because he was aware that it was dangerous to know a secret this big, and he didn’t wish that danger on her.

  It had to get out. Although Parsons, like many of his fellow countrymen, didn’t care much for the fascists, he had far less time for communism. They could work with Mosley, but with some Moscow stooge – no way. Bingham was a fool, but then Bingham was a businessman, not a diplomat.

  But who should he tell, and how? The dossier was locked in the ambassador’s safe, and there was no way he was going to attempt breaking into that. If he was caught – and he had no doubt that he would be – then there was a chance he would be charged with espionage, which would mean the electric chair back in the States. No, there was no way he would be able to get the dossier. It wasn’t cowardice that stopped him, but the knowledge that he would fail in the attempt. He was no lock-picker or safe-cracker. Besides, he could remember enough of the salient points to give the Brits a good idea of what was what.

  Parsons ran through a list of Brits in his head. He didn’t particularly car
e for many of them, found them a little too superior for his liking. The worst was that prick William Joyce, whom he had had the misfortune to meet at a reception at the ambassador’s residence a few months back. He remembered Joyce had made a speech that had attacked the United States for harbouring ‘international financiers’, which everyone at the event correctly took to mean the Jews. Parsons remembered the guy who had been standing next to him, a Member of Parliament with an attractive wife. He had overheard the man telling his wife, very sotto voce, that he had it on good authority that the reason why Joyce was so virulently anti-Semitic was because Mrs Joyce had once had an affair with a Jew. Parsons had smiled, enough for the man to notice and then to strike up a conversation. He was one of the few fascists who didn’t seem so stuck-up. What was the guy’s name again?

  * * *

  The Freedom Council’s reaction to Armstrong’s plan was similar to Ted’s – surprise, followed by a realisation that if it worked, it would work spectacularly well. It would mean an end to any long-running attritional war of resistance, a war which would give Mosley a reason to take away even more freedoms. They also agreed to Armstrong’s suggestion that the Council could use its network throughout the country to set up opposition cells. However, both Martin and Nick were more immediately concerned with the contents of the HMSSP file, as Nick told Armstrong one morning at the Council’s safe-house in a dilapidated Georgian terrace in Wapping.

  ‘We have to stop this,’ he said. ‘There’s no way that we Jews are just going to be herded into these resettlement camps like sheep.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Armstrong. ‘But I think it’s more important that we concentrate on dealing with Mosley and the aftermath of his assassination. If he goes, then the whole apparatus will crumble. We’ll all be safe then, the Jews included.’

  ‘But we have to sort this out NOW!’

  Nick smacked the back of his hand violently against the file. Armstrong didn’t say a word – he would let Nick’s temper run its course. Over the past few days he had come to realise that he needed to handle both Martin and Nick with the very softest of kid gloves. They were clearly strained and tired, the bags under their eyes and their unkempt appearance testament to many wakeful nights. Although they were clearly resourceful men, doubtless brave, they were both hotheads.