by TP Fielden
‘I’m very sorry – is there anything I can . . . ?’
‘Go in there an’ say a prayer,’ said the woman bleakly as she shut her door. ‘For us, for everybody.’
He walked across the street and pushed his way into the church. Though the exterior had survived the direct hit, part of the wall behind the altar had collapsed. A woman was attempting to cover the worst of it with a bedsheet, as if somehow her actions might hide the enormity of what had occurred not a week ago.
She was on her knees with her back to Guy but she stiffened when he spoke.
‘Lady Easthampton. My name’s Guy Harford. Might you spare me a minute?’
The woman did not turn.
‘Lady Easthampton.’
Looking towards the altar she said slowly, ‘That’s not my name. I am Mrs Gertler.’
‘I’m a friend of Edgar Brampton.’
She got up slowly and turned around. ‘How do you know this is me? How do you find me?’ Her enunciation was clear but coated with the patina of another tongue.
‘With great difficulty. Can we sit and talk?’
‘Put some money in the offertory box, then you speak to me.’
He walked back to the door and emptied some small change into the box with a series of thuds.
‘Come and sit here. But not too close.’
She wore no make-up and the housecoat loosely hanging around her body made it look as though there was nothing more than a skeleton inside. But her face was still beautiful, with its broad cheekbones and sharply defined chin, her eyes a misty grey-green.
‘You prefer your maiden name these days?’
‘My married name.’
‘I’d have thought your married name was Lady Easthampton.’
‘My first husband. Gertler.’
‘Ah. Are you all right? I mean . . .’ What he wanted to say was, how can you be all right, living here in this bombed-out slum when only weeks ago you were living in Mayfair, drinking champagne, cuddling up to the great and good and maybe murdering my friend?
‘I really just want to be left alone,’ she said. ‘This a terrible place, a terrible time, but with faith, things will get better.’
It’s a horrifying thing, thought Guy. I’m sitting next to this tragic beauty who could hold the key to a man’s murder and all I’m thinking is, if only I could get out my sketch pad, what I could achieve. Didn’t Betsey’s friend Gulbenkian say that he wanted the faces of war in his exhibition? What better image could there be than the layers of sorrow in this beautiful but broken face?
‘I came to visit you at Chesterfield House but you’d already gone,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘I needed to talk to you – Ed, you know. If I’m right, you were the closest to him when he died.’
She looked away. ‘I live a simple life now,’ she said. ‘No more tricks.’
‘I came to visit you in Curzon Street too.’
There was a sharp intake of breath. ‘How do you know about that place?’
‘I have a very clever friend.’
She looked ahead to the altar. ‘Edgar,’ she said, emphasising the whole of his name, ‘gave me shelter. He was good to me when there was nothing in it for him.’
‘They think you killed him.’
‘In a way I did.’
‘But not actually?’
‘Not actually, no.’
Guy looked down at her hands – refined but strong, perfectly capable of pulling a trigger. Did it make her face more intriguing because she might be a killer? He certainly wasn’t convinced by her too-easy denial.
He shifted slightly. The pews were hard and unyielding.
‘Why are you here in Paddington – what happened? Three months ago you were living in the lap of luxury and now you’re here – why?’
‘Someone very close to me. He would . . . take care of me. The Nazis took him away.’
‘Stani Zeisloft?’
The name triggered a shocked response from the woman. She jerked back, pulling her housecoat tight against her pitifully thin body. ‘You’re not from Buckingham Palace, are you? It’s a joke! You’re a . . . spy!’ she hissed. ‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Guy Harford. Look, here’s my palace pass.’
She took it but didn’t look. ‘Proves nothing,’ she said angrily. ‘I know your name because Edgar told me about you. But he was suspicious right from the start – he thought you might have been put in his office to spy on him.’
Let me savour this irony, thought Guy, when I’ve got a flatmate who’s spying on me.
‘Far from it. But I’ve been given the job of finding out what happened to him. Which is why I’m here.’
‘Did you kill him?’
This is ridiculous, thought Guy – I think she may have killed him; she thinks I may have killed him.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘you have to try to trust me. I actually quite liked Ed, though now you’ve told me what he thought I can see why he was rather distant. But Mrs Gertler – may I call you that? – what did he have to hide, why was he suspicious? Had he done something terribly wrong?’
‘I was the thing he did wrong,’ said the woman. ‘He died because of me.’
Guy looked at her.
‘What happened? How did you become involved with him?’
She looked at him warily. ‘Are you going to arrest me? Shoot me?’
‘Of course not. Look, I’m just a pen-pusher at the Palace. I have absolutely no authority, and pretty soon I won’t be working there any more.’
‘You don’t look dangerous,’ she conceded. ‘I know dangerous men – you lack the devil inside.’
A woman came into the church, the door shutting behind her with a slam. ‘Mrs Harnett,’ said Suzy, a movement of her head saying it was nothing to worry about. ‘She comes to do the flowers.’
They both watched as the newcomer nodded then walked up to the altar. She had brought with her sprigs of buddleia, no doubt plucked from the bomb sites outside, which she arranged in a pair of stone vases. Once, they may have seemed like a pathetic offering to the Almighty, but in the present circumstances they looked bountiful. She topped up the vases with water and was gone.
Guy looked at Suzy Easthampton – or Gertler, as she now called herself. If there was to be any point to all the trouble he and Rodie had gone to, he had to find out what she knew in order to help find Ed’s murderer – unless she herself was the culprit. He’d get nowhere by a full-on interrogation; he would have to take a gamble.
He hesitated before plunging in.
‘I’ll tell you what I know about you. Then, if you want, you can tell me what you know about Ed. Is that OK?’
‘I have nothing else to do.’
‘I doubt it’ll come as a surprise to learn that you’ve been watched, more or less since the moment you arrived here from Paris in 1935.’
‘Yes, of course. In every country I have lived, people watch. They spy, they snoop, they tell.’
‘It’s not really like that here. But you’re, well, you’re a most unusual person. You came here with this man Stani Zeisloft but after six months he disappeared, apparently back to Paris. To those watching you, it looked as though he’d set you a number of tasks, most of them to do with getting close to men in powerful positions. Zeisloft’s obviously a very wealthy man, since he kept a suite at the Dorchester Hotel and he found you that flat in Mayfair. Am I right so far?’
‘Your spies don’t impress me much. What more have they got?’
‘Your name is Zsuzanna. You were used to get information out of these men which you then passed back to Zeisloft. He’s an arms dealer, and he used what you told him to help build up his empire. Or maybe he just sold the information on to the highest bidder. Either way, and put simply, a rich and crooked man uses a beautiful woman as a front to get information he couldn’t gain access to himself.’
‘It’s not against the law.’
‘I didn’t say it was,’ said Guy, smiling. ‘I lived for many years
in Tangier and, out there, you’d be granted honorary citizenship for your enterprise. But back here it’s a dangerous game. Do you have a gun?’
‘Everybody has a gun.’
He wondered if it was nearby, maybe in her bucket of cleaning materials.
‘For a time you were very rich. Don’t you find this . . . these circumstances you’re in . . . rather difficult?’
‘It was never my money. I worked for Stani, it was a job. I didn’t like it much but he’d rescued me from a difficult situation in Budapest. My husband was murdered, I had no money and nowhere to go. He took me to Poland, and we had what you might call an affair, but mainly it was business. He was a kind man, Mr Harford.’
‘He was an arms dealer. Anyway, he provided you with enough money to play the role of socialite. Eventually you found your way to Ambrose Easthampton and married him. He sends his regards, by the way.’
‘You’ve seen him?’ She didn’t seem particularly surprised, but then long ago she’d come to terms with the fact that in a police state there’s no such thing as privacy.
‘Yes. He told me you paid him to marry you.’
‘Yes.’
‘And gave him pocket money to stay married to you.’
‘Ambrose is a child. He’s a drunk, he’s bankrupt, he’s fat and he’s lazy. But like all you Englishmen, he thinks he’s better than everyone else.’
‘Not me,’ said Guy, shaking his head. ‘I work for a living.’
‘What do you do, then, when you’re not bobbing and bowing to the King and Queen?’
‘I’m a painter. But let me finish this – you used your new-found status as a future peeress of the realm to get to know the people surrounding the royal family. You went with your father-in-law Lord FitzMalcolm to a ball at Balmoral Castle, and that’s where you met Ed Brampton.’
‘Yes.’
‘But how on earth did you end up sharing a flat with him in Curzon Street, for heaven’s sake? When he had a home, a wife and family, and you had your, er, protector Zeisloft?’
She looked at him coldly with her grey-green eyes. ‘You are going to kill me,’ she said with an emotionless voice.
‘Don’t be ridiculous! I’ve told you, I’m a low-paid assistant private secretary working for the King and Queen, I don’t kill people.’
She sighed. ‘I don’t mean you, personally,’ she said. ‘But if I tell you this, I will die. I’ll die anyway, one way or the other. Maybe another direct hit’ – she spat out the words, waving her hand to embrace the broken street outside – ‘maybe another bullet like Ed’s . . .’
Guy shook his head.
‘Well, I’ll tell you. My husband – my real husband – was a doctor in Budapest. He had a brilliant start and a dazzling career ahead. But he was a Jew and he spoke his mind. In Hungary we had a man called Gömbös who did not like Jews – need I say more? It wasn’t safe for me to stay in Budapest after my husband died, and Stani Zeisloft took me away. We lived in Warsaw, then Paris, until we came here. He is a very clever man.’
‘And an arms dealer.’
‘No longer an arms dealer, Mr Courtier. He was arrested by the Nazis five months ago. I don’t know where he is or what’s happened to him.’
‘Arrested? By the Nazis? I thought he was their man? Working for them?’
‘He, too, is a Jew. Jews don’t help Nazis, except in one way.’
Guy ran his hand through his hair. Rupert’s briefing on Suzy Easthampton – Gertler now – seemed to have been pinpoint-accurate. But suddenly the picture had turned hazy.
‘I’m sorry, I’m confused. I had a very clear picture in my mind as to what you were doing, cosying up to the royal family. But now I’m getting the feeling it can’t be right. Tell me, please, what you were paid to do by your Mr Zeisloft. And why.’
‘It can’t hurt now. It was his idea to engineer me a place at the centre of London society so that I could eavesdrop conversation and pass it back. To someone in Stani’s position, every last morsel of information has a value – and to him, the further you rise up, the more value it has. People’s attitude here to the war was very important to him. Not everybody is one hundred per cent behind a continuation of the war – many are not, for a whole raft of reasons. What they want is an honourable settlement.’
‘I don’t think, where Hitler’s concerned, there’s such a word as “honourable”.’
‘Your opinion’s not worth very much though, is it? It’s what those people think and, as you’ve said yourself, you’re just a poorly paid pen-pusher at the Palace. These are people with power!’
‘So – you and Ed?’
‘I met him in the ballroom at Balmoral. My father-in-law – Lord FitzMalcolm – was talking to the King and Queen, and Edgar was standing around with nothing much to do. I could see he was in a bit of pain and went to talk to him. He told me about losing his leg in the last war, and we had a nice little talk. He told me he was disappointed that his wife and children had left London for the country and that, as far as he could tell, he’d be working every day until the war was over with no chance to see them. Duty, duty, duty, he said. So I told him his first duty was to take me out to tea when he was back in London and he was so delighted. I think everybody took that poor man for granted, including his precious wife.’
‘So what happened next?’
‘We saw quite a bit of each other – it was always very proper but I could tell he had a soft spot for me. And that was it, really – I thought we’d probably go out to dinner a few times and I’d get some gossip and pass it back to Stani, and that would be it.’
‘You weren’t trying to get close to the Duke of Gloucester?’
‘Who? Oh, the man who Edgar was going to work for? No, why would I? He would hardly be likely to start selling me royal secrets, now, would he?’
‘You didn’t have instructions from Zeisloft to get close to the Duke? To seduce him? To get him to think differently about, how shall I put it, his loyalties to the country?’
Suzy Gertler looked at him oddly. ‘I don’t know where you get that from, Mr Harford. My job was to get gossip, and plenty of it. Not to hang around some useless royal duke and listen to him heehawing his way through life. I don’t think he would know anything that’d be of use to Stani.’
Guy paused. ‘So let me get this straight. You were never asked by Zeisloft to ingratiate yourself with the Duke? To win him round? To encourage him to think that the throne might be his in the event of a German invasion? That his position as Regent meant that when the King was removed, he would become, overnight, both king and emperor under the German flag?’
The wasted beauty looked at him in astonishment.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ted Rochester looked with pride at the typed sheets of paper in front of him. Thank heavens the libel laws, which High Court judges used to club poor journalists to death in England, did not extend to America and the New York Boulevardier!
People can be so unkind in wartime. When the bombs are falling and our youth are dying, why do they spend time talking about the Marquess of Carisbrooke?
Maybe it’s because, as the grandson of Queen Victoria, he made a fuss when forced to give up his German title of Prince Alexander of Battenberg during the last war.
Drino, as he’s known, thought he’d be made a Duke – but when old King George got wind of this, he marked him down to Marquess.
People call him a snob, but now they call him worse. Word has got out that in Madrid, just before the war, Drino was arrested in a public lavatory. The details do not bear repetition in a newspaper of repute but he made the cardinal error of calling upon his sister, Queen Victoria Eugenie, to make bail. People in London say that if you’re lucky enough to have a sister who is a queen, you should not embarrass her. Drino, 55, has been married to saintly Irene, only daughter of the Earl of Londesborough, since 1917.
Such a shame his British readers would never get to
savour this delicious morsel! Nor this:
What is it about Sir Oswald Mosley’s moustache that entrances them so? Currently languishing behind bars in London’s Holloway Prison – Fascists are so out of fashion these days! – Sir Oswald still has a string of admirers who come to visit on an almost daily basis. A recent arrival was the Hon Sonia Cubitt, daughter of the garrulous Mrs Alice Keppel (and, it’s said, of her paramour King Edward VII). Few women can resist the baronet – for example, while married to Lord Curzon’s daughter Lady Cynthia, he became ascloseasthis to Cynthia’s younger sister Lady Alexandra. And to her stepmother Grace, Lady Curzon. Mercifully, locked away in jail for the duration, he will have to pay more attention to his second wife Diana, who deserted her first husband to be with the Fascist leader. Let’s hope the warders at Holloway keep a copy of Debrett’s handy to check how to address their top-drawer visitors!
The typescript had a final paragraph and it was to this he paid closest attention. Dare he do it? Would he get away with it?
As the saying goes, you can’t get the staff these days. Even Buckingham Palace is having problems filling the gaps made by old retainers dropping off the perch. Once upon a time, blue-blooded devotees of royalty would queue up at the Palace gates eager to serve their Sovereign. Nowadays it’s Tom, Dick, and Harry who clock in – chaps who spend all their spare time in the pub with a lady of easy virtue, and worse. Time for His Majesty to get a grip on his staffing!
Ted Rochester knew not the meaning of loyalty. Though he’d done well out of Guy since his arrival at Buckingham Palace, with the occasional story about the King or Queen dropping like rare crumbs from the table, he continued to resent the fact that Guy knew about the Windsors and he didn’t. But he wondered whether this paragraph – if it ever got back across the Atlantic – would cut off his one and only royal contact.
He decided to drop it.
Instead there was a piece of candy-floss nonsense about the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose.
The younger princess is a bit of a miracle – she is, after all, not quite eleven years old. Word reaches me that recently she hurled all her German textbooks to the floor and announced she would never study the language again.