‘No,’ I said. ‘I only met her for the first time earlier this evening.’
‘Your name and address were in her handbag.’ Before I could reply he carried on, ‘Anyway, best to get it over with. If you’d come this way.’
The room they took me into was walled with white tiles and bright with fluorescent lighting. There was a line of operating tables. The body was on the end one covered with a white rubber sheet. Ruth Cohen looked very calm, eyes closed, but her head was enclosed in a rubber hood and blood seeped through.
‘Would you formally identify the deceased as Ruth Cohen, sir?’ the constable asked.
I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s her,’ and he replaced the sheet.
When I turned Fox was sitting on the end of the table in the corner, lighting another cigarette. ‘As I said, we found your name in her handbag.’
It was then, as if something had gone click in my head, that I came back to reality. Hit and run – a serious offence, but when had it merited the attention of a Detective Chief Superintendent? And wasn’t there something about Fox with his saturnine face and dark, watchful eyes? This was no ordinary policeman. I smelled Special Branch.
It always pays to stick as closely to the truth as possible, I found that out a long time ago. I said, ‘She told me she was over from Boston, working at London University, researching a book.’
‘About what, sir?’
Which confirmed my suspicions instantly. ‘Something to do with the Second World War, Superintendent, which happens to be an area I’ve written about myself.’
‘I see. She was looking for help, advice, that sort of thing?’
Which was when I lied totally. ‘Not at all. Hardly needed it. A Ph.D., I believe. The fact is, Superintendent, I wrote a rather successful book set during the Second World War. She simply wanted to meet me. As I understood it she was flying back to the States tomorrow.’
The contents of her handbag and briefcase were on the table beside him, the Pan Am ticket conspicuous. He picked it up. ‘So it would appear.’
‘Can I go now?’
‘Of course. The constable will run you home.’
We went out into the foyer and paused at the door. He coughed as he lit another cigarette. ‘Damn rain. I suppose the driver of that car skidded. An accident really, but then he shouldn’t have driven away. We can’t have that, can we?’
‘Good night, Superintendent,’ I told him and went down the steps to the police car.
I’d left the light on in the hall. When I went in, I carried on into the kitchen without taking my coat off, put the kettle on and then went into the living room. I poured a Bushmills into a glass and turned towards the fire. It was then that I saw that the folder I’d left on the coffee table was gone. For a wild moment I thought I’d made a mistake, had put it elsewhere, but that was nonsense of course.
I put the glass of whiskey down and lit a cigarette, thinking about it. The mysterious Fox – I was more certain than ever that he was Special Branch now – that wretched young woman lying there in the mortuary, and I remembered my unease when she’d told me how she had returned that file at the Records Office. I thought of her walking along the pavement and crossing that street in the rain at the back of the British Museum and then the car. A wet night and a skidding car, as Fox had said. It could have been an accident, but I knew that was hardly likely, not with the file missing. Which raised the problem of my own continued existence.
Time to move on for a while, but where? And then I remembered what she had said. There was one person still left who could confirm the story in that file. I packed an overnight bag and went and checked the street through a chink in the curtain. Cars parked everywhere so it was impossible to see if I was being watched.
I left by the kitchen door at the rear of the house, walked cautiously up the back alley and quickly worked my way through a maze of quiet back streets thinking about it. It had to be a security matter, of course. Some anonymous little department at DI5 that took care of people who got out of line, but would that necessarily mean they’d have a go at me? After all, the girl was dead, the file back in the Records Office, the only copy recovered. What could I say that could be proved or in any way believed? On the other hand, I had to prove it to my own satisfaction and I hailed a cab on the next corner.
The Green Man in Kilburn, an area of London popular with the Irish, featured an impressive painting of an Irish tinker over the door which indicated the kind of custom the place enjoyed. The bar was full, I could see that through the saloon window and I went round to the yard at the rear. The curtains were drawn and Sean Riley sat at a crowded desk doing his accounts. He was a small man with cropped white hair, active for his age, which I knew was seventy-two. He owned the Green Man, but more importantly, was an organizer for Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, in London. I knocked at the window, he got up and moved to peer out. He turned and moved away. A moment later the door opened.
‘Mr Higgins. What brings you here?’
‘I won’t come in, Sean. I’m on my way to Heathrow.’
‘Is that a fact. A holiday in the sun, is it?’
‘Not exactly. Belfast. I’ll probably miss the last shuttle, but I’ll be on the breakfast plane. Get word to Liam Devlin. Tell him I’ll be staying at the Europa Hotel and I must see him.’
‘Jesus, Mr Higgins, and how would I be knowing such a desperate fella as that?’
Through the door I could hear the music from the bar. They were singing ‘Guns of the IRA’. ‘Don’t argue, Sean, just do it,’ I said. ‘It’s important.’
I knew he would, of course, and turned away without another word. A couple of minutes later I hailed a cab and was on my way to Heathrow.
The Europa Hotel in Belfast was legendary amongst newspaper men from all over the world. It had survived numerous bombing attacks by the IRA and stood in Great Victoria Street next to the railway station. I stayed in my room on the eighth floor for most of the day, just waiting. Things seemed quiet enough, but it was an uneasy calm and in the late afternoon, there was a crump of a bomb and when I looked out of the window I saw a black pall of smoke in the distance.
Just after six, with darkness falling, I decided to go down to the bar for a drink, was pulling on my jacket when the phone went. A voice said, ‘Mr Higgins? Reception here, sir. Your taxi’s waiting.’
It was a black cab, the London variety, and the driver was a middle-aged woman, a pleasant-faced lady who looked like your favourite aunty. I pulled back the glass panel between us and gave her the ritual Belfast greeting.
‘Good night to you.’
‘And you.’
‘Not often I see a lady cab driver, not in London anyway.’
‘A terrible place that. What would you expect? You sit quiet now like a good gentleman and enjoy the trip.’
She closed the panel with one hand. The journey took no more than ten minutes. We passed along the Falls Road, a Catholic area I remembered well from boyhood and turned into a warren of mean side streets, finally stopping outside a church. She opened the glass panel.
‘The first confessional box on the right as you go in.’
‘If you say so.’
I got out and she drove away instantly. The board said ‘Church of the Holy Name’ and it was in surprisingly good condition, the times of Mass and confession listed in gold paint. I opened the door at the top of the steps and went in. It was not too large and dimly lit, candles flickering down at the altar, the Virgin in a chapel to one side. Instinctively, I dipped my fingers in the holy water and crossed myself, remembering the Catholic aunt in South Armagh who’d raised me for a while as a child and had anguished over my black little Protestant soul.
The confessional boxes stood to one side. No one waited, which was hardly surprising, for according to the board outside I was an hour early. I went in the first on the right and closed the door. I sat there in the darkness for a moment and then the grill slid open.
‘Yes?’ a voice asked softly
.
I answered automatically. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’
‘You certainly have, my old son.’ The light was switched on in the other box and Liam Devlin smiled through at me.
He looked remarkably well. In fact, rather better than he’d seemed the last time I’d seen him. Sixty-seven, but as I’d said to Ruth Cohen, lively with it. A small man with enormous vitality, hair as black as ever, and vivid blue eyes. There was the scar of an old bullet wound on the left side of his forehead and a slight, ironic smile was permanently in place. He wore a priest’s cassock and clerical collar and seemed perfectly at home in the sacristy at the back of the church to which he’d taken me.
‘You’re looking well, son. All that success and money.’ He grinned. ‘We’ll drink to it. There’s a bottle here surely.’
He opened a cupboard and found a bottle of Bushmills and two glasses. ‘And what would the usual occupant think of all this?’ I asked.
‘Father Murphy?’ He splashed whiskey into the glasses. ‘Heart of corn, that one. Out doing good, as usual.’
‘He looks the other way, then?’
‘Something like that.’ He raised his glass. ‘To you, my old son.’
‘And you, Liam.’ I toasted him back. ‘You never cease to amaze me. On the British Army’s most wanted list for the last five years and you still have the nerve to sit here in the middle of Belfast.’
‘Ah, well, a man has to have some fun.’ He took a cigarette from a silver case and offered me one. ‘Anyway, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?’
‘Does the name Dougal Munro mean anything to you?’
His eyes widened in astonishment. ‘What in the hell have you come up with now? I haven’t heard that old bastard’s name mentioned in years.’
‘Or Schellenberg?’
‘Walter Schellenberg? There was a man for you. General at thirty. Schellenberg – Munro? What is this?’
‘And Kurt Steiner?’ I said, ‘Who, according to everyone, including you, died trying to shoot the fake Churchill on the terrace at Meltham House.’
Devlin swallowed some of his whiskey and smiled amiably. ‘I was always the terrible liar. Now tell me what is this all about?’
So, I told him about Ruth Cohen, the file and its contents, everything, and he listened intently without interrupting.
When I was finished, he said, ‘Convenient, the girl’s death, you were right about that.’
‘Which doesn’t look too good for me.’
There was an explosion not too far away and as he got up and opened the door to the rear yard, the rattle of small arms fire.
‘It sounds like a lively night,’ I said.
‘Oh, it will be. Safer off the streets at the moment.’
He closed the door and turned to face me. I said, ‘The facts in that file. Were they true?’
‘A good story.’
‘In outline.’
‘Which means you’d like to hear the rest?’
‘I need to hear it.’
‘Why not.’ He smiled, sat down at the table again and reached for the Bushmills. ‘Sure and it’ll keep me out of mischief for a while. Now, where would you like me to begin?’
Berlin
•
Lisbon
•
London
1943
2
Brigadier Dougal Munro’s flat in Haston Place was only ten minutes’ walk from the London headquarters of SOE in Baker Street. As head of Section D, he needed to be on call twenty-four hours a day and besides the normal phone had a secure line routed directly to his office. It was that particular phone he answered on that late November evening as he sat by the fire working on some files.
‘Carter here, Brigadier. Just back from Norfolk.’
‘Good,’ Munro told him. ‘Call in on your way home and tell me about it.’
He put the phone down and went and got himself a malt whisky, a squat, powerful-looking man with white hair who wore steel-rimmed spectacles. Strictly a non-professional, his rank of brigadier was simply for purposes of authority in certain quarters and at sixty-five, an age when most men faced retirement, even at Oxford, the war had been the saving of him, that was the blunt truth. He was thinking about that when the doorbell rang and he admitted Captain Jack Carter.
‘You look frozen, Jack. Help yourself to a drink.’
Jack Carter leaned his walking stick against a chair and shrugged off his greatcoat. He was in the uniform of a captain in the Green Howards, the ribbon of the Military Cross on his battledress. His false leg was a legacy of Dunkirk and he limped noticeably as he went to the drinks cupboard and poured a whisky.
‘So, what’s the situation at Studley Constable?’ Munro asked.
‘Back to normal, sir. All the German paratroopers buried in a common grave in the churchyard.’
‘No marker of course?’
‘Not at the moment, but they’re a funny lot, those villagers. They actually seem to think quite highly of Steiner.’
‘Yes, well, one of his sergeants was killed saving the lives of two village children who fell into the mill race, remember. In fact, that single action was the one thing that blew their cover, caused the failure of the entire operation.’
‘And he did let the villagers go before the worst of the fighting started,’ Carter said.
‘Exactly. Have you got the file on him?’
Carter got his briefcase and extracted a couple of sheets stapled together. Munro examined it. ‘Oberstleutnant Kurt Steiner, age twenty-seven. Remarkable record. Crete, North Africa, Stalingrad. Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves.’
‘I’m always intrigued by his mother, sir. Boston socialite. What they call “Boston Brahmin”.’
‘All very fine, Jack, but don’t forget his father was a German general and a damn good one. Now, what about Steiner? How is he?’
‘There seems no reason to doubt a complete recovery. There’s an RAF hospital for bomber crews with burns problems just outside Norwich. Rather small. Used to be a nursing home. We have Steiner there under secure guard. The cover story is that he’s a downed Luftwaffe pilot. Rather convenient that German paratroopers and Luftwaffe aircrews wear roughly the same uniform.’
‘And his wounds?’
‘He was damn lucky there, sir. One round hit him in the right shoulder, at the rear. The second was a heart shot, but it turned on the breastbone. The surgeon doesn’t think it will take long, especially as he’s in remarkable physical shape.’
Munro went and got another small whisky. ‘Let’s go over what we know, Jack. The whole business, the plot to kidnap Churchill, the planning. Everything was done without Admiral Canaris’s knowledge?’
‘Apparently so, sir, all Himmler’s doing. He pressured Max Radl at Abwehr headquarters to plan it all behind the Admiral’s back. At least that’s what our sources in Berlin tell us.’
‘He knows all about it now, though?’ Munro said. ‘The Admiral I mean?’
‘Apparently, sir, and not best pleased, not that there’s anything he can do about it. Can’t exactly go running to the Führer.’
‘And neither can Himmler,’ Munro said. ‘Not when the whole project was mounted without the Führer’s knowledge.’
‘Of course Himmler did give Max Radl a letter of authorization signed by Hitler himself,’ Carter said.
‘Purporting to be signed by Hitler, Jack. I bet that was the first thing to go into the fire. No, Himmler won’t want to advertise this one.’
‘And we don’t exactly want it on the front of the Daily Express, sir. German paratroopers trying to grab the Prime Minister, battling it out with American Rangers in an English country village?’
‘Yes, it wouldn’t exactly help the war effort.’ Munro looked at the file again. ‘This IRA chap, Devlin. Quite a character. You say that your information is that he was wounded?’
‘That’s right, sir. He was in hospital in Holland and simply took off one night. We understand he’s
in Lisbon.’
‘Probably hoping to make it to the States in some way. Are we keeping an eye on him? Who’s the SOE’s man in Lisbon?’
‘Major Arthur Frear, sir. Military attaché at the Embassy. He’s been notified,’ Carter told him.
‘Good.’ Munro nodded.
‘So what do we do about Steiner, sir?’
Munro frowned, thinking about it. ‘The moment he’s fit enough, bring him up to London. Do we still house German prisoners of war in the Tower?’
‘Only occasionally, sir, transients passing through the small hospital. Not like the early days of the war when most of the captured U-boat people were housed there.’
‘And Hess.’
‘A special case, sir?’
‘All right. We’ll have Steiner at the Tower. He can stay in the hospital till we decide on a safe house. Anything else?’
‘One development, sir. Steiner’s father was involved, as you know, in a series of army plots aimed at assassinating Hitler. The punishment is statutory. Hanging by piano wire and by the Führer’s orders the whole thing is recorded on film.’
‘How unpleasant,’ Munro said.
‘The thing is, sir, we’ve received a film of General Steiner’s death. One of our Berlin sources got it out via Sweden. I don’t know if you’ll want to see it. It’s not very nice.’
Munro was angry, got up and paced the room. He paused suddenly, a slight smile on his mouth. ‘Tell me, Jack, is that little toad Vargas still at the Spanish Embassy?’
‘José Vargas, sir, trade attaché. We haven’t used him in a while.’
‘But German Intelligence are convinced he’s on their side?’
‘The only side Vargas is on is the one with the biggest bank book, sir. Works through his cousin at the Spanish Embassy in Berlin.’
‘Excellent.’ Munro was smiling now. ‘Tell him to pass the word to Berlin that we have Kurt Steiner. Tell him to say in the Tower of London. Sounds very dramatic. Most important, he makes sure that both Canaris and Himmler get the information. That should get them stirred up.’
‘What on earth are you playing at, sir?’ Carter asked.
Eagle Has Flown, The Page 2