The End of the Web

by George Sims

  Freedson said quietly, ‘What the fuck happened? There I was not moving out of my brother’s flat for ten days. I leave it for just ten minutes and—crash!’

  ‘He must have been watching the flat.’

  ‘But who—and how did he know about the flat?’

  ‘Look, I don’t know anything. You told Bee that you had something to give her. I came here just to pick it up. That’s all I know. Tell me what’s been going on and then I might be able to say something sensible.’

  Freedson filled the small glasses with gin, then gestured his surprise. ‘So…Bee doesn’t know anything. Leo didn’t tell her…I thought he might have done. Sid—well, I suppose it’s different with Sid and Nora. She’s in the business and she’s tough. At least I used to think so. Now I don’t know. She seems to be too frightened to talk to me.’

  Buchanan said, ‘Well I want to talk to you. What is it you’re going to give me, and if you’re carrying it on you why couldn’t you post it?’

  Freedson pulled up the edge of one trouser-leg disclosing a thin hairy leg with a large plaster stuck across the calf. He undid one end of the plaster and produced a manilla envelope which had been folded up into a tiny packet. From the envelope he extracted a key.

  Buchanan said dully, ‘You got me here for that?’ His hand instinctively touched his sore shoulder.

  ‘The explanation of why I have to get rid of this now is the important part. I’ve got to explain what I’m doing to Bee and Nora. They wouldn’t come here. It’s not something I could say over the phone. And I’m certainly not going back there for the time being. My brother lives here, I’ve got some good friends here too. I could move around for months without surfacing, if necessary.’

  ‘Why did you leave London?’

  ‘I’m going to tell you everything. I want to have it all out in the open and then perhaps that masked maniac will go away. At least I hope so. Bee should know what’s been going on. Didn’t she suspect it might have something to do with that Trewartha sale?’

  ‘No—but Manny Klein had his suspicions.’

  ‘Ah, Manny—the cunning old sod. Well, it doesn’t matter who knows now. Manny probably told you that Sid, Leo and I bought all the good stuff at the Trewartha sale. Nothing spectacular—we weren’t going to make a fortune, and some of the lots were a bit damaged by water. But it was a good day’s work. We’d done well. We went out for a meal together once the sale was finished. Sid had fixed it with a porter so that we could come back afterwards, go over the stuff again and hold our own little auction. Sid and Leo were both taken by a lady’s rosewood and inlaid writing desk. By Christ, I wish they hadn’t been! It has a part cylinder front that works in conjunction with a frieze drawer. Sid fiddled about with it and found out that when the cylinder front was held at a certain point you could pull the frieze drawer out further. There was a small secret drawer at the back. In it Sid found an old notebook that had belonged to that madman Trewartha. Did you know Trewartha went right off his head in the end, lived like a hermit for the last ten years of his life? No, it’s no good, I must have something to eat. I was all nerves this morning, couldn’t eat at all. Now I feel empty, quite weak. Have something with me?’

  ‘Yes, thanks. I could eat some bread and cheese.’

  After a few minutes Freedson brought back a large plate covered with slices of black bread, Gouda cheese, liver sausage and ham. He slumped down in the chair and lifted one hand in the air to demonstrate how much it trembled. ‘You see.’ Then he made a thick sandwich of sausage and ham, and munched solidly without a word.

  When the sandwich was finished he poured himself some more gin. ‘So we all looked through the notebook. Trewartha had been one of a group of secret fascists before the war, the high-up kind who didn’t join the blackshirts or give their hand away at all, but were quite willing to see Hitler conquer Europe and come to some arrangement with him. Powerful men, all of them, a British fifth column in fact. The kind who in France gave orders for divisions to surrender without them firing a shot. Important people. You’d be surprised. Generals, M.P.s.’

  ‘General Everard, Lord Gleneale, Henry Cuyp,’ Buchanan suggested.

  Freedson’s scanty eyebrows shot up and he pointed significantly with one finger at his head. His gestures had the eloquence of deaf-and-dumb language. ‘Where the hell did you get those names?’

  ‘I didn’t get them out of a hat. Leo wrote them down, with several others, under the heading Eendracht maakt Macht!’

  ‘Did he, by God! He must have copied that out of the notebook. It was a list of key members of the group. “Unity makes strength.” It could have done too. Imagine if Hitler had invaded Britain what effect a group like that could have had. But what a stupid thing for Leo to do! You see, we were all out of our depth, fooling around with real danger. Why the hell did we do it? I blame Sid. Yes, all of it down to Sid. He can be very persuasive, you know. Anyway, that’s my excuse. Sid talked us into it.’

  ‘Into what?’

  ‘Sid said we shouldn’t include the desk in the knockout, said we’d all have an equal share in the desk and its contents, that we should meet at his flat and discuss what to do with it at our leisure. So that’s what we did. We met at Sid’s flat a week later when he’d had the furniture brought up in a van. By that time he’d come up with this mad idea. He’d been looking into things, found out that a lot of the men on the list were dead. But three were probably alive and one certainly was, alive and extremely prosperous. A merchant banker named Henry Cuyp, Managing Director of the Arkadie Company, now living in Eaton Square. So Sid said we should offer to sell him the desk and the contents intact.’

  ‘Blackmail. Chard must have known that was a possible charge that could be brought.’

  ‘Sid was sure he could handle it. You’ve never met him, have you? He’s not as strong as you but he’s got just as much nerve. For a while we thought he had pulled it off. He went to see Cuyp, took along some photostats of pages in the notebook, and offered to let Cuyp have the desk complete with contents for £50,000. Cuyp didn’t get excited about it. Sid said that Cuyp seemed to regard it as an unfortunate business but nothing more dramatic—said he would have to contact some friends and let Sid know. By that time we’d found out that General Sir Claude Everard was definitely alive too. Very interesting about Everard. You see, he had a big job in the Army in 1939 but lost it in 1940, so perhaps someone somewhere had suspicions about him. Now he’s living in South Africa, owns a great estate there. He’s probably as wealthy as Cuyp. Like Sid said, £50,000 wouldn’t seem a great sum to men like that.’

  ‘Did you get it?’

  ‘Not a sausage. Fact is, old Sid had met his match in Henry Cuyp. He would never admit it but that’s the truth. Cuyp kept on promising that he would keep to his side of the bargain if he was given enough time, and Sid believed him. Of course he’s a mighty smooth and shrewd character, Henry Cuyp. Everything he said was reasonable. That others were involved and they would have to help him find the money. Eventually he said that Everard was coming to the U.K. in August and the business would be settled then. So Sid agreed. I mean, he might threaten to send the notebook to a newspaper, but what satisfaction would he get out of that when there was even a remote chance of getting the cash? The funny thing is we all reacted differently to that notebook. I just thought “What’s in it for me?” and “Can Sid finagle it?” Whereas for Sid it was also some kind of revenge for his being buggered about by the Nazis during the war. He got his knee smashed somewhere in Italy you see. There’s a lot of suppressed aggression in Sid. You wind him up and off he goes.’

  ‘What about Leo? It was out of character for him. At least I should have thought so.’

  ‘You’re right. Poor old Leo. He didn’t like it much. But he’d become a rather cynical character you know, always wondering what life was all about. He was the only one of us who was really interested in that notebook, kept
poring over it. Part of it was in a simple code. Leo made sense of most of it eventually. It seemed to make a much bigger impact on him—the mystery about that madman Trewartha, the plot, all the men who had been in it, who the “Court-Card” on the list was. Sid and I didn’t care about all that. We were just interested in the idea of some tax-free cash.’

  ‘What do you think happened to Sid?’

  ‘No idea. We knew he was waiting for a call from Cuyp. Then suddenly he vanished. And with Leo dying more or less the same day, it was too much of a coincidence for me. I know Leo died of a heart attack but he couldn’t have killed the girl. Not a chance! So with Sid and Leo both gone—just as if somebody had leant down and taken two pawns off a chess-table—I wasn’t going to wait around for other moves of the same kind. So I came here. The thing about today is that I tried to be too crafty. I didn’t want to give you my brother’s address, yet I wanted to meet you somewhere out of the way. So that was my mistake. But the man in the mask made one as well. There was too much menace! If he had just come up to me behind the altar and hit me once with his fist as hard as he hit you, he could have had the key. But that mask and the gun—I was so scared I couldn’t get a word out or think straight. Talk about a steam-roller to break a nut!’

  ‘You’ve no idea who he could be?’

  ‘Someone hired by Cuyp—well I suppose that’s most likely. But Sid didn’t figure he would do anything like that. I don’t know. All I want now is to be finished with it.’

  ‘You’ve put me in an awkward position.’

  ‘You mean about going to the police? Forget it. I know the police will have to come into it. Nora seems to think that by doing nothing everything unpleasant will go away. But she’s got to face up to it. The police will have to make inquiries. I doubt if they’ll bring charges against me. First of all, they’ve got to have Cuyp as a witness to a charge of blackmail. No jury is ever going to convict me on your story about what I told you in a bar in Smids Steeg. No, you go ahead, tell Bee and Nora what happened. Tell Nora she must go to the police. It’s going to be an unhappy ending for Nora as well as for Bee I’m afraid. Something really bad must have happened to Sid. I scare myself stiff just thinking about it.’

  ‘Right. I’ll do that. And the key?’

  ‘The key opens a Post Box in the G.P.O. in Rathbone Place. That’s a turning off Oxford Street. You’ll find the notebook there. Division of labour, you see. Poor Leo puzzled out the code in the book, Sid went to see Henry Cuyp, and I held on to our ace in the hole. What a mess! The joke of it is that none of us was hard up or needed the money really badly. Just greedy at the chance of tax-free loot. Tell Bee and Nora I’m sorry—say I regret every day—no, just tell them I’m sorry.’

  Chapter XX

  Making a phone-call to Nora Chard from the London Air Terminal was a disconcerting experience for Ed Buchanan. Even at the start her voice was uncertain, and there was a continuous background noise of a television or radio programme with bursts of laughter and applause. He explained that he had to see her, saying that he was a friend of Beatrice Selver, and had been to Amsterdam to talk to Harry Freedson. At the mention of Freedson’s name Mrs Chard dropped the receiver. When she spoke again her phrases were disjointed: ‘What does Harry want? Is it Sid? I can’t bear…Don’t say…’

  Buchanan tried to explain that he had no direct news about Sidney Chard, only an important message from Freedson, but it seemed as if Mrs Chard was unable to accept this. Her reply was even more rambling and Buchanan wondered whether she was becoming hysterical. She must have been hiding her fears for so long that she had now reached breaking point. He tried to calm her down with vague reassurances. Suddenly the incoherent sentences stopped. She agreed to see him at two o’clock and replaced the receiver.

  In a bus on his way to Oxford Street Buchanan said mentally: ‘Let’s warm up the ice-cubes’. He knew that he was going to need a drink or two before meeting Mrs Chard. No matter how he tried, he would be unable to rake up any good news for her: the facts were simply that her husband had been involved in an attempt to extort a considerable sum of money through blackmail; that one of his conspirators had died in strange circumstances, and the other one had gone abroad and was too frightened to leave his hiding-place. Unless Nora Chard had definite information about her husband’s present whereabouts, his disappearance must be considered an ominous matter. There was no need to tell her of the bizarre masked figure that had terrorized Freedson behind the altar painting, but she must be persuaded to be frank with the police.

  Buchanan walked along Rathbone Place, entered the large Post Office building there and, following Freedson’s instructions, opened the Postal Box. It contained one stout-looking envelope sealed with Sellotape. He placed it inside his windcheater jacket and walked out swinging the BOAC bag which Katie had lent him for the trip to Amsterdam. A sensation of guilt at now being involved with the blackmail plot, even though quite innocently, made him feel that a postman might come up and query his right to have opened the box.

  This feeling persisted all the way along Rathbone Place and as he crossed over Percy Street, gradually changing to the equally illogical belief that now he had the vital notebook in his possession he too might be followed. In Charlotte Street he stood outside an Italian restaurant pretending to study the menu but glancing back along his path. The belief that he was under observation was absurd but he found it hard to dismiss. He knew he was now in the area where Leo Selver had died—only a few hundred feet in fact from the house in Stephen Street awaiting demolition. Phrases from the press report of the double death came into his mind. He remembered the comments of Judy Latimer’s neighbours: ‘We hardly knew her…She seemed pleasant but rarely said anything more than “Good morning”…We didn’t even know her first name…’

  When Buchanan’s parents had both been killed in a car crash he had found it difficult to accept the fact of their extinction for some weeks: during that period there had been occasions when he believed that it might have been a bad dream. It seemed equally improbable that only a month previously Leo Selver had been walking along these streets, possibly turning the very same corner, and now was a refrigerated corpse.

  Buchanan entered the Yorkshire Grey pub in Maple Street where there was a pleasant atmosphere in which he could relax and have a snack while glancing at the notebook. He ordered a Guinness, some bread and cheese, and a slice of pork-pie.

  ‘After you with the mustard, laddie.’ The man saying this as he leant across Buchanan looked as if he had done a lot of work in his time with a knife and fork. The word ‘laddie’, spoken in a mock old actor’s timbre, echoed and lingered in Buchanan’s mind. It evoked his strange conversation with ‘Mr Quentin’, and something in that faked voice reminded him in turn of another one that he had heard in the past few days. But the idea was vague and tantalizing, hovering just out of reach round a bend in his mind as did any interpretation of his intuition over the talk with Toby Crest.

  He took his plate and the glass of Guinness to a table. When he had finished the food he opened the heavy linen envelope and pulled out a small notebook bound in green leather that was worn and crumbling at the corners. About a dozen small pieces of ruled paper had been inserted, presumably to mark pages of particular interest, but Buchanan began at the start of the book. The opening pages were taken up with a few rambling notes, written in faded green ink, about the iniquities of international Jewry, the hold that Jews had on finance and politics, ‘the necessity of fighting a Jewish octopus now threatening England—a threat of similar magnitude to that of red domination.’

  The first narrow slip of paper marked the page in the notebook where there was the list of names headed ‘Eendracht maakt Macht’. Most of the other pages indicated by slips were written in code. The cipher consisted of blocks of letters without any breaks. On one slip there was a note in pencil. ‘N.B. Conversation in May 1940, between Lord Trewartha, General Sir Claude Everard
and Brigadier Fitzroy in which they discussed a list of officers in Home Command whose views on the war situation were to be sounded out with regard to possible peace negotiations.’ Another note was written in red ink with the first two words heavily underlined. ‘Trewartha’s cellar. Cellar in the kitchen made into a secret strong-room. Trewartha’s possession of a transceiver kept in the cellar.’

  Trewartha’s cellar and its secret contents were noted again on other slips, and there was a transcription in part of a later conversation between Trewartha, Everard, Cuyp and Fitzroy, with the brief underlined comment in red, ‘Treason’. Buchanan could understand the fascination that the notebook had for Leo Selver: it would have been easy to spend an hour poring over its secrets which had been hidden away for thirty-three years, but he had an appointment with Mrs Chard and he did not intend to keep her waiting.

  Walking along Charlotte Street again Buchanan heard the sound of recorded bouzouki music coming from a Greek restaurant, and it immediately evoked memories of clear blue skies above Samos, the distant wail of a klephtic song, sun beating down on deserted beaches, and waking up in the night to the endless quiet washing sound of the sea. He stopped to look up at the dirty grey sky covering London: it was rapidly darkening and there was a distinct promise of rain before long. As he hurried towards Tottenham Court Road he knew that the events of the past few days had at least got rid of his desire to find a way of life like that on Samos. He was going to make a real effort to settle down in England, even if it meant going back to work for Bathwick Mews Performance Cars.

  Bedford Place Mansions was situated within sight of the British Museum, a pleasant-looking block of flats constructed of dark red brick, probably sixty or seventy years old. The lift looked as if it might be the original one with its double wrought-iron gates: it grumbled and took its time going up two floors, coming to a halt with a shudder.

  The door of the Chard’s flat was opened by a large formidable-looking woman with dyed blonde hair the improbable colour of canary feathers. Her large grey eyes were uncomfortably alert and suspicious. As Buchanan introduced himself her face was held in a taut, faintly scornful expression. She nodded several times and made an ineffectual little gesture.