The Secret Houses

by John Gardner

  Later, he made tender love to Barbara. Afterward, he lay silent for a long time, thinking of Caspar and the responsibilities he bore with Tarot – particularly the guilt which had to be somewhere in his conscience in sending his nieces, cloaked, to act as agents.

  *

  Arnold Farthing arrived a fortnight after the telephone call that had brought Naldo leaping from beside Barbara on their day’s love-making. There had been little chance to repeat such lengthy pleasure since the second visit to Northolt, though they dined often, went to the cinema or theatre, and snatched moments to slake desire when they could.

  ‘I’m on a job,’ Naldo had told her after Arnie had telephoned. ‘It’s all I can tell you.’

  ‘And all I need know.’ She looked at him, her dark eyes still and deep as a Swiss lake viewed from under the heavy cloud of a brewing storm. ‘It’s understood, darling. I’ll ask no questions. That way I’m saved from worry.’

  It was then they made a decision. They would not break their news to their respective families until Naldo got some kind of a rest from the work in hand – and that might be some time now that Arnold had landed in England.

  When he arrived, C asked that Arnold be brought to the Northolt house for what he called an ‘O Group’ – using the tactical field jargon of infantry commanders. This took place on the day before the inquiry reconvened.

  When they had gathered, he made a small speech outlining the situation, and briefed Arnie, saying he would have a great deal of reading to do as he must catch up with Naldo.

  It was then, with the sudden craftiness of a skilled interrogator, that C turned to Naldo – ‘What,’ he asked blandly, ‘are the main clues in the Tarot crossword so far? Not the answers, but the clues.’

  Naldo stuttered for a moment, then gathered his thoughts. With some assistance from C they laid out three points.

  First, there must have been a traitor within Tarot from a very early stage. This person’s treachery had to be complex and double-edged – they decided to call the unidentified agent Troy – for not only had Troy betrayed certain operations to the Nazis, but also kept Tarot safe from the SS and SD wolves.

  ‘You must remember the importance of this point.’ C stabbed the air with his finger. Klaubert, the Devil of Orléans, had a mission in life: to rid his fiefdom of any members of the Resistance. You must recall that all units of the Maquis, in the Orléans area, together with anyone suspected of having dealings with the Resistance réseaux, were rolled up by Klaubert in short order. But Tarot was allowed to coexist with the Nazis. Given the man’s record, this could only have been done by arrangement. Tarot stayed operational until five weeks after the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944.’

  Secondly, as Naldo had seen from the files, one of the reasons that Caspar was now under such pressure was the lack of information regarding the fate of Maxine and Dédé – Caroline Railton and Jo-Jo Grenot. All other members were accounted for – shot, either in Klaubert’s headquarters or nearby. But the girls were a different matter. Certainly it was clear they had been arrested in St Benoît-sur-Loire, and there were vague hints that they were last seen being driven, by two Gestapo officers, to the railway station. One report on file suggested their final destination had been Ravensbrück concentration camp – which was synonymous with death. But what few records remained in Allied Intelligence hands showed no firm information about what had happened to them.

  ‘Obviously’ – C gave each of them a darting look – ‘the prime candidate for treachery is the fellow Fenice – Felix as they called him. But you’ve yet to read the file on him, Railton.’

  ‘Nothing on him yet, no sir.’

  ‘I want you to hear his evidence at the Enquiry before you read the personal dossier and some additional credentials. However, there are reasons why we can discount him. I do not think he’s our man. We’ll see.’ He then started to speak of the third clue to Tarot, which needed a solution. It concerned Hans-Dieter Klaubert, the Devil of Orléans himself. ‘Simply, what happened to him? Where did he go? Is he alive or dead? We need to know exactly, because without Klaubert my own personal thesis on this whole business is shot down in flames.’ He looked at Naldo Railton, expecting a comment.

  ‘Last seen walking out of the Rue de Bourgogne headquarters, carrying a briefcase.’ Naldo pointed to the heavy file he had started to read on the previous day. ‘I haven’t got far with that, sir, but it appears he simply vanished – like so many. No signs of his death. Talk that he got out, via Spinne, the old SS network. South America?’ He gave an uncertain shrug. ‘But he could be dead.’

  C sounded almost cross. ‘I believe Klaubert’s also alive. What’s more, I think I know where to look. Read on, Railton, and in the meantime the Jules Fenice evidence will be worth probing when he comes in front of the Enquiry – which should start again in a couple of days. They have to hear the GCHQ chap, the “pianist,” and the OSS fellow who survived Romarin.’

  Three clues which, once linked and answered, might provide enough evidence for them to follow C’s long Tarot trail – his thesis – to the point where final answers had to be sought.

  Three questions in need of three answers, before they could really start work: The traitor? The girls? Klaubert?

  C left the men alone, and they set to their study like a pair of students pressed on the brink of their finals.

  *

  On that same evening, Caspar Railton returned to the house in Eccleston Square that had once belonged to his grandfather, Giles Railton, of whom there were many secrets – some under lock and key at Redhill Manor itself.

  Caspar and Phoebe spent money on the place – redecorating and, more recently, dividing off some of the rooms to make a small flat for Caspar’s mother, Charlotte.

  In her day, Charlotte Railton had been a delicate, porcelain-like beauty, with a sharp, brittle wit. Now, at the age of seventy-one, once night-black hair had turned white, but she remained slim and straight, while her sharp tongue echoed the quickness of her more youthful gift of repartee.

  After an evening drink with Phoebe – during which she had learned not to ask questions, merely to read his face and manner – Caspar tried to spend half an hour or so with his mother.

  This night he had hardly seated himself in her room overlooking the square below when she began. ‘This is a fine piece of betrayal, I must say. I’ve told him he should have flatly refused to appear. He’s not forced to, is he? I mean it doesn’t come directly under Admiralty Instructions and King’s Regulations, does it?’

  Caspar smiled, used to his mother’s fast launching into a topic without first telling him the details. ‘What’re we talking about?’

  ‘Your own son.’ She almost barked. ‘My first grandson.’

  ‘Alex? What’s he done now?’ Alexander had followed a slightly different family tradition. Having proved to be a natural for signals, cryptography, and cryptanalysis, he worked for the Government Communications Headquarters, formerly the Government Code and Cipher School.

  ‘What’s he done?’ Charlotte snapped. ‘Alex’s done nothing as yet. But tomorrow he’s going to give evidence at this damned Enquiry that seems to be set on nailing your hide, Caspar. Your own son!’ She made a sound like a cross between spitting and swearing.

  Caspar shook his head, smiling. ‘I don’t think anyone’s trying to nail my hide, as you put it, Ma.’

  ‘Hu!’ She poured herself a stiff gin and went very easy on the tonic.

  ‘Towards the end of the war, prior to D-Day and after, Alex was attached to a special department – monitoring the Nazi occupation forces. Whatever he has to say will be relevant.’ In British families connected with the secret world there is always what that trade calls interconsciousness. Wives – and husbands, where applicable – mothers, fathers, and sometimes children are made aware of the kind of job the officer does for his living, though never the details. So it was not out of the ordinary for Charlotte to speak to her son in this fashion. She had known when sh
e married her young naval officer husband that part of his family dealt in the secret trade.

  ‘You mean Alex has to give evidence against his father? He’s forced to do it?’

  Caspar smiled. ‘Ma, he’s not going to blacken my reputation. It’s not like that. I doubt if Alex has anything really new to tell us.’

  He did not know, then, that his nephew Naldo was at that moment reading Alexander’s evidence. Nor did he know how dramatic the bare facts truly were.

  Tomorrow he would hear for himself. Just as he would learn what the ‘pianist’ had to say, though he had a fair idea. Caspar had spent the ten days of grace equipping himself for a kind of ordeal.

  Chapter Ten

  Alexander Percival Railton barely glanced at his father as he gave evidence in a polite, matter-of-fact manner. Reading it – and there was much more in the file than the bare essentials given to the Board of Enquiry – Naldo and Arnie both thought of coroner’s courts they had attended. Alex’s words read like the cold, scientific comment an autopsy surgeon would read out – bleak facts with no hint of the suffering contained within the words.

  Early in 1944 Alex had been moved from Bletchley Park, home of the GCHQ during the conflict, to an old house on the perimeter of the village of Arkley, near the London suburb of Barnet. This was the headquarters of the Radio Security Service, known as Box 25, Barnet.

  The Radio Security Service was staffed by what were known as VIs – Voluntary Interceptors – who, sometimes working from their own homes, often without any special equipment and always in great secrecy, were initially responsible for detecting enemy traffic from Britain. After the Nazi occupation of Europe, however, they found to their surprise that they were able to intercept an almost incredible amount of enemy signals traffic. Their role changed, and RSS reached out, plucking Wehrmacht and Abwehr secret signals and orders from the dark invisible core of the new Nazi Empire.

  By 1944, the RSS had become an enviable professional organisation, with its VIs logging up to three hundred intercepts a day, all of which were sent to Barnet, where they were identified, sorted, and deciphered.

  Alexander’s job at Box 25 was, with others like him, to assist with the decrypting and analysis of German radio traffic prior to the D-Day landings. While doing this, the GCHQ experts gave full cooperation to those running Operation Fortitude, the huge deception plan devised to misdirect the German High Command into thinking the inevitable invasion would take place in the Pas de Calais area. Many devices were used, from ‘ghost’ armies – which existed only on radio – to elaborate cloak-and-dagger disinformation operations.

  ‘I was to deal with what we called “new” or “difficult” Wehrmacht signals.’ Alex told the Board. And more mischief besides, Naldo thought, reading it later.

  ‘I have been given to understand that you require the details of what we called the Orléans Russians.’ He paused, and the chairman gave a slight nod.

  ‘On February 3, 1944, I received an intercept from a V.HS/120, which was immediately identified as a hand cipher. At first I thought it was one of SOE’s people transmitting. The groups were not of the type used by German signals, though they were familiar to any of us who had heard signals from agents in place. I immediately copied the signal and asked for more details. The transmission went on for some two minutes. Later I attempted to decipher, using all known methods, but nothing made any sense. It was sent on to Bletchley Park for further investigation.’

  A few days later Alex received a similar intercept from the same source. ‘Again it made no sense, so we asked the direction-finding boys to pinpoint the signals and their strength. I then received permission to sweep the area myself.’

  ‘Would you give us the findings of the DF station,’ the chairman interrupted apologetically.

  ‘It was the Orléans Sector.’ Alex all but threw away the information, anxious to continue what he considered a riveting story. He had quickly picked up two more signals. ‘Even on the second hearing I could recognise the sender’s handwriting,’ he said, not in a boastful manner, but firmly – a man giving expert evidence. The decrypt made no sense, so he set to work trying all possible combinations.

  Through February, March, April, and May, Alexander Railton listened to the signals on a regular basis. ‘The pattern soon became plain. He transmitted at one A.M. British Time, on every third day.’ Alex immediately reported the signals to both Baker Street and Broadway Buildings.

  ‘I thought SOE or SIS might be able to snatch and identify him.’

  The chairman interrupted by saying they had copies of reports from two signal stations which confirmed the intercepts. They had heard them and reported they did not come from any known agent.

  Alex continued. ‘On April 16, while sweeping the Orléans Sector, I picked up a receiving station. It was very faint, and, of course, we had no idea of the position – but the direction-finding stations judged it was far to the east. A long way off. There was no doubt that this station was responding to the operator whom we later called the Orléans Russian.’

  Alex was still working on a possible decrypt and got his breakthrough shortly after this faint trace of a mother station. The pattern of groups was identified by an officer of Signals Station 52A at Bicester who maintained they were those of an SOE radio operator coded Descartes. ‘We gave her the frequencies and got her to listen out. She heard one signal and was positive that it was not Descartes’ fist. Not his handwriting. Someone had cleaned out Descartes and was using the cipher he had learned. We knew that from the pattern of groups, though they still made no sense when decrypted.’

  Three nights later, while receiving yet another signal, a senior colleague suddenly identified the mother station as Russian. ‘I should have known,’ Alex said with grave self-criticism. ‘It was a case of not seeing the obvious because I did not expect it. The mother station was clumsy, and kept inserting the letter R. That was an old, outdated, insecure spacing technique. We then went back to previous signals, decrypting with the Descartes cipher, and it all became very obvious. I felt foolish. Very foolish.’

  The outcome was that the distant operator and his mother station had translated his cipher from the original Roman alphabet into a revised form of Cyrillic alphabet. The resultant form produced a kind of bastard Russian if you used a straight decrypt from Descartes’ original code.

  ‘I believe you’ve been furnished with decrypts in English covering all the signals,’ Alex said.

  The chairman nodded and asked if there were any questions from either the Board or Caspar.

  To Naldo and Arnie, reading the heaps of paper in Northolt, the decrypts made little sense. The sender, originating somewhere in the Orléans Sector, was known to his mother station as Nikolai; the mother station was Sentinel. As for the rest, they were the kind of thing that the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Overseas Service had sent out every night during the four years of Occupation – messages that made sense if the receiver was already briefed regarding their meaning.

  Some were repeated every couple of weeks or so: The night will be dark next month and Tomorrow the dead will rise up appeared to be the favourites.

  ‘The thing of interest is that someone in the Orléans Sector was sending signals on a regular basis to a Russian controller, using the cipher learned by an SOE “pianist” known as Descartes,’ C said later.

  Naldo wondered if this was in reality the person they had coded Troy – the traitor within Tarot.

  As for Descartes, they were to hear about him from the next subject brought in to give evidence – the SOE ‘pianist’ who had worked for a short period within Tarot.

  The real name of the ‘pianist’ was Frederick Drake. He was a homosexual, but to his superiors this in no way counted against him – as, at that time , it did to so many of his sexual preference, particularly in military circles.

  On Drake’s first tour of duty he had been arrested with two other agents soon after landing in Vichy France. The Vichy police had put them i
n prison for three months.

  After his release, Drake did two further tours, proving great courage and wit. On his final tour he became a senior SS officer’s lover and then entrapped him with blackmail, sending back vital information regarding supplies and troop movements. His brush with Tarot had taken place during his second tour.

  The thing everybody – both the Board and the unseen readers in Northolt – noticed about Drake was that he volunteered no information. It was as though the first experience in the field had proved a salutary lesson. He waited for the questions and then answered them in direct, simple terms.

  ‘You were parachuted into occupied France on the night of November 7th/8th, 1943?’

  ‘No.’ Direct; his English mellow with a no-messing-about undertone.

  ‘That is on record.’ The chairman fiddled with his papers, flustered.

  Drake gave a tired smile. ‘The record states I was landed in France on that night. I refused to parachute anywhere; it was much too dangerous.’

  To give him credit, even the chairman laughed before rephrasing the question. ‘You were landed in France on the night of 7th/8th November 1943. By what means?’

  ‘I was taken in by a Lysander aircraft.’

  ‘Whereabouts did you land?’

  ‘In a field.’ He paused, waiting for the chairman to indicate that he should give more details. The donnish man nodded and Drake went on: ‘In a field about twenty kilometres from Orléans.’

  ‘What was your field name?’

  ‘Denis.’

  ‘And your orders were…?’

  ‘To link up with another radio operator on a bridge to the north of Orléans – near Meung.’

  ‘What was the field name of the other radio operator?’

  Drake answered flatly. ‘Descartes,’ he said.