by Alex Gerlis
‘The Germans use a number of machines on which to send their encrypted messages – the one most used is called Enigma, but they have others, including the Lorenz. I cannot stress to you how secret this is, Prince. You must never breathe a word of it to anyone. We pass on the intelligence we decrypt to many people in the armed forces, the intelligence services and government, but very few of them are aware of the source.’
‘Don’t the Germans suspect we’ve broken their codes?’
‘Good question. We’ve gone to considerable lengths to try and cover Ultra up, mainly by giving the impression the intelligence has been gleaned by our agents rather than through signals intelligence.’
‘I appreciate you telling me this, sir, but may I ask why I’m being told if it’s so confidential?’
Harper leaned back and fiddled with the knot of his tie.
‘You’re probably more trusted than almost anyone else: you’ve operated for considerable lengths of time in enemy territory and been arrested by the Gestapo, yet we know you’ve been utterly loyal. Very few people on our side have been tested to anything like that extent. There’s another reason: you’re quite possibly going to be very exposed, operating undercover in what may be quite trying circumstances. We took the view that you’d work more effectively if you had absolute confidence that what you’re being asked to investigate is based on solid bona fide information rather than a wing and a prayer.’
Harper stood up and tightened his tie. ‘You’d better be heading back to Lincoln to sort matters out. Lance will call you tomorrow night with the address of the safe house we’ll get for you. We’ll meet you there Thursday evening.’
* * *
‘I’ve had this place up my sleeve for a while, Prince, it will be ideal for you. Don’t worry about the smell; once the windows have been open for a while, that will soon go. It’s been thoroughly checked over and done up – new doors, windows, locks, you name it. Lance, how about you show Prince round?’
They were in a basement flat in Granville Square, a slightly shabby area about ten minutes’ walk south of King’s Cross. The square itself seemed to be used as a rubbish dump, with piles of rubble from what Prince assumed were bombed buildings. There were two or three gaps on each side where houses had been destroyed. He wouldn’t have thought it was the kind of place that merited much of a guided tour. He followed King into a small sitting room.
‘Through here, Prince… mind that wire, there we are. This is the normal telephone – on the sideboard, where one would expect it. However, over in this cupboard – behind those books – there’s this other phone. You lift up the receiver and hold that button down – the one concealed at the back, that’s it – and then dial zero. That will connect through to the secure MI5 exchange. They’ll know the call is on a top-priority line linked with one of my operations. The person at the exchange will say you’re through to the Mirage Hotel and you’re to ask for Alf in housekeeping. When they ask your name, say George. They’ll know then to patch you through to me. If I’m unavailable, they’ll get a message to me. If it is urgent – really urgent – then ask if you can speak with Mary. Don’t worry, we’ll go through it all again in a moment. Come with me.’
He followed King into the kitchen.
‘You see the two light switches there? The second one is in fact an alarm: it will ring at Farringdon police station, which is just around the corner. Only to be used in an absolute emergency. Any questions?’
‘Good heavens, Lance, you’ll have poor old Richard here packing his bags and heading back to Lincoln on the next train, and I can’t say I’d blame him! These are merely precautions, Prince, just to assure you you’ll be safe here. The most important precautions of course are the ones you take yourself to make sure no one knows about the place.’
‘It does rather make me feel as if I’m back in Nazi Germany, sir.’
Harper and King chuckled, glancing anxiously at each other in case it hadn’t been meant as a joke. Harper took Prince into the lounge, where spread on the surface of a small table was an array of documents.
‘Study all these very carefully; it’s an identity to use when you go undercover: George Nicholson. These are your cards and ration book, and in this folder is your story, which you’ll study and memorise. In a nutshell, though, George, you’re an utter disgrace!’ Harper laughed loudly as he slapped Prince on the shoulder. ‘An utter disgrace indeed… dishonourable discharge from the army.’
Prince had just picked up the file when the doorbell rang. He heard King open the door and then call him into the lounge. Standing next to him was a tall woman, perhaps in her late fifties, wearing a dark blue raincoat belted tightly at the waist. It was raining, and when she removed a scarf wrapped round her head, she gently shook her hair: steel-grey hair, flecked with white streaks, hanging over her shoulders. She looked Prince up and down in a manner he had become used to.
So that’s who you are.
‘Audrey, this is Richard Prince, who I was telling you about. Prince, this is the one other person who’ll know about you. Audrey and I worked together for many years, but I’ll let her tell you her story. Shall we sit down? Lance, did you get in any whisky as I asked?’
There was a delay as Lance King fussed over the whisky, Audrey remonstrating with him for giving her such a small glass and Prince not even being asked if he wanted any as a glass was placed in front of him. Audrey sat on the edge of the sofa, her legs crossed at the ankles and holding her whisky glass on her lap with both hands. She looked shy – almost nervous – but when she spoke, it was in a confident voice.
‘Hugh is very kind when he says we worked together; in fact I was very much his subordinate – indeed, I was most people’s subordinate. Unlike so many others of his seniority, though, he was always most kind and proper with me. He was one of the few who managed to avoid treating me as a mere clerk.’
‘I’m afraid Audrey no longer works for MI5 as such.’
‘Well I don’t work for them at all, Hugh – there’s no “as such” about it. I wish I did. It’s only because of your kindness that I’m still able to be indirectly involved in this work.’
‘Perhaps if you give Prince some background…?’
Audrey sat back on the sofa, taking care to place her handbag by the side of it, and then took a sip of her whisky, nodding approvingly and declining Harper’s offer of a cigarette.
‘I started working for MI5 before it was MI5. In 1909 I was a teenage typist at the Home Office and was sent on secondment to a new organisation called the Secret Service Bureau. Its role was to coordinate counter-espionage in this country, and in particular what was perceived even then as the threat of Germany. My secondment became a permanent post and I was promoted to secretary and then office manager. At the start of the Great War the organisation became a section of the Directorate of Military Intelligence within the War Office. It was designated as Section 5, hence becoming known by the name MI5. Lance, would you care to give me a drop more whisky? There’s no need to be mean.
‘By the 1920s – especially towards the end of that decade – our filing and records system was an utter shambles and I was asked to sort it out. In doing so I developed an unrivalled knowledge of people in this country who had come to MI5’s attention and the organisations they belonged to. During the 1930s I was especially interested in the growth of support for fascism: not just Mosley’s miserable outfit but also organisations even more extreme and secretive than his – and then there were the people who never belonged to any organisation but who were sympathetic to varying degrees to Nazi Germany.
‘During this period I began to clash with some of my superiors who I felt devoted far too much attention to what they perceived as a communist threat and didn’t take the threat of fascism in this country seriously enough. Mosley’s British Union of Fascists had somewhere in the region of fifty thousand members at one point, but I felt there were too many people in MI5 who were too ready to dismiss this as a law-and-order issue rather t
han a serious fascist political challenge. Hugh, I ought to say, was most certainly not one of these people, and nor were you, Lance, though I think you joined MI5 a bit later?’
King nodded. ‘A year before the war.’
‘I felt my superiors were ignoring those in this country sympathising with Nazi Germany. They wanted to concentrate what limited resources we had on what I call the foot soldiers of fascism – people who certainly should not be ignored but who were not that important in the great scheme of things. I understand you were involved in that case in Lincolnshire in 1942, Mr Prince?’
‘That’s correct – Lillian Abbott, former member of the British Union of Fascists, harbouring a Nazi spy.’
‘I wrote a report in early 1939 pointing out that there were three levels of fascist threat in this country. The first level was the most high-profile but, in my opinion, the least dangerous – that was the ordinary rank-and-file members of the British Union of Fascists. The majority of these people were gullible fools who once the war started would fall into line. The next level comprised people like Lillian Abbott: more dangerous, motivated by ideology and perhaps less easy to identify. The most dangerous level was made up of the people who perhaps avoided joining organisations and whose involvement in pro-fascist and indeed pro-Nazi activities was clandestine in nature. I wrote that there were a number of characteristics common to members of this group: virulent anti-Semitism and anti-communism; individuals were difficult to identify, often using assumed names; and finally they were more likely to be upper middles class or even upper class, with a number of members of the aristocracy being associated with it.’
Hugh Harper patted Audrey’s knee as he interrupted her. ‘I can tell you that Audrey’s report was not well received in MI5. By then I was in charge of the section dealing with foreign espionage in this country, so I was not directly involved. The decision was made to keep the report in the pending tray, where it stayed until September ’39. When the war started, dear Audrey rather rattled a few cages with a characteristically blunt “I told you so” memo. The powers-that-be didn’t like it one bit; they took it all rather personally. Audrey has an admirable but very direct style to her writing, and I’m afraid that accusing senior officers of negligence was not going to win her many friends.’
‘But I wasn’t looking for friends, Hugh: I was concerned about enemies.’
The others in the room chuckled as Lance King poured more drinks.
‘In any case, I didn’t outright accuse people of negligence: I merely implied it. But thereafter it was a classic case of blaming the messenger. They moved me to the section that liaised with police forces outside London, and then I was hauled before an internal tribunal where they wondered whether I was a communist sympathiser – this was based on nothing other than the fact that I’d volunteered the information that I’d voted Labour in the 1935 general election. Then they questioned me about my best friend – a Jewish girl I was at school with. I’m afraid I rather lost my temper and told them they were following a line of questioning more common in Nazi Germany.’
‘Oh Audrey… Audrey…’ Hugh Harper patted her knee once more and lounged back on the sofa. ‘I offered to bring her into my section, but they weren’t having any of it. The most I could do was to persuade them not to sack her.’
‘They arranged for me to be transferred to the Department of Transport. It’s a tedious job: at MI5 I used to work late into the night and at weekends. Now at least I have time to assist Mr Harper. You see, what he didn’t know at the time was that I was concerned during 1939 that my warnings would be ignored, so between my report coming out and my being moved to Transport, I compiled a long list of all the people I felt fell into the third category I mentioned. This was quite improper, of course; most certainly a dismissible offence. I justified it by telling myself it was in the national interest. This folder took many months to put together – I’d type the details onto flimsy sheets of A4 and remove a sheet at a time in the lining of my handbag.’
‘I bumped into Audrey in Whitehall in 1942, I think it was, and told her I was in trouble on a case, and she was able to help me more or less immediately. She has since been of invaluable assistance – not least in consulting the file she kept. I told her earlier this week about you, Prince: that we’d need you to go undercover, to infiltrate you into a world where you might find some lead to Milton. She will help you with that.’
Audrey stood up and placed her empty glass on the table, walking over to the window to draw the curtains even tighter then turning round to face the room like a teacher in front of a blackboard. She asked Lance King to pass her handbag and removed something from it, holding it to her chest like a love letter.
‘In May 1939, I investigated a small group that met once every few weeks in the private dining room of a hotel in Pimlico, not far from the Houses of Parliament. There was an Italian waiter there – a refugee from Mussolini – and he claimed he’d overheard the diners toasting Hitler. I arranged for a watch on the place the next time the group met: there were just eight of them, plus a guest speaker who told them he worked for the Treasury and who spoke about how the Jews controlled the banks and the money supply in this country. I discovered he did indeed work for the Treasury: in fact he was a senior civil servant by the name of Arthur Chapman-Collins. I searched his office one night and discovered locked in a drawer the most shocking material: notebooks filled with nonsense about Jews, lists of names of people he claimed were secret Jews conspiring to control the country. The Treasury rather reluctantly agreed they had no other option but to discipline him, but I was furious when I discovered they’d allowed him to submit his resignation before the hearing. I desperately wanted to get my hands on him – he was, after all, very much the kind of person I described as being in the third category: upper middle class and not a member of any organisation, unknown to us before.
‘I did get to question him, but he refused to cooperate. At one stage I even considered trying to have him arrested, but then we received a letter from his solicitor informing us he’d died: he blamed us for harassing him and had apparently gone to Ireland to get away from it all, and he died there of what we were told was stress. He was buried in some village cemetery in the middle of nowhere.’
‘When did you receive this letter?’
‘I think it would have been July – possibly late June – 1939. I’ll need to check my notes. Certainly it was around two months before the war began, and then of course I was moved on and left MI5. Here’s a photo of Chapman-Collins.’
She passed round the photograph of a nondescript man probably in his forties, with a receding hairline, a pale complexion and light-coloured eyes that looked as if they were moving. His mouth was slightly open, as if in mid speech. The reverse of the photograph was stamped ‘HM Treasury’.
‘Early last November, I was on my way into work on the 29 bus. I was sitting on the top deck as usual, from where I spotted Arthur Chapman-Collins.’
She paused and moved back to the sofa.
‘You’re certain it was him?’ Prince was looking at the photograph as he spoke. ‘He doesn’t look terribly distinctive.’
‘But remember I’d met him in real life, Mr Prince, and I’m utterly convinced that he was the man I saw in Charing Cross Road. He was standing in the entrance of a bookshop and the bus had come to a halt, so I was able to get a good look at him. I know he was meant to be buried in an Irish cemetery, but I also know I saw him: I was only a few feet from him, but as I stood up to get off, the bus set off again. The next stop was Trafalgar Square, and by the time I walked back to where I’d seen him, he’d vanished. I spent two hours in the area looking for him, but with no luck.
‘To be frank with you, I’d always felt I’d mishandled the Chapman-Collins case. I should have been much firmer and insisted on him being arrested at the outset rather than let the Treasury deal with it as an internal disciplinary matter. I had a niggling feeling he might be a more significant character on the far right
than I originally thought: he was after all a senior civil servant and was risking an awful lot. And now I’m convinced that he is alive, and that someone has gone to an effort to fake his death, which would prove how important he is. I was so convinced I came to see you, Hugh, didn’t I?’
‘You did, Audrey, and you asked me to do you a big favour.’
‘I don’t know what your view is on informers, Mr Prince, but I’ve always been rather sceptical about them.’
‘I know how you feel; I’ve always had mixed feelings about them myself. I feel they tell you what they think you want to hear.’
‘Before the war I’d occasionally used an informer called Curtis, first name Vince. I always believed Curtis was far closer to the pro-German wing of the British far right than he was to Mosley’s lot, and I remember he once mentioned that he knew British people who recruited for the Germans, though he wouldn’t be drawn on that. I’d heard that he was one of the fascists detained under Defence Regulation18B at Brixton Prison, and Hugh arranged for me to go and visit him. I think he agreed to see me out of curiosity. When I showed him this photograph of Arthur Chapman-Collins, he said, “Oh, that’s Arthur Walker. He’s one of those who was helping recruit for the Germans.” Those were his exact words; I wrote them down straight after we met. But when I asked him to elaborate, he clammed up, as if he regretted saying it and ended our meeting there and then.
‘When Hugh got in touch to ask my advice over Milton, I straight away thought of Chapman-Collins. If he is indeed alive – and I am convinced he is – then I believe he could be the link to Milton. I think it’s more than possible he recruited him. Find Chapman-Collins and you may well find Milton.’
‘And how would you suggest Prince goes about finding him?’
‘I’ve been told you’re a highly regarded police officer, Mr Prince – a detective, no less! Treat Chapman-Collins as a missing person; maybe ask around where he lived. Lance has given you a file which contains what details I have on him, last known address, et cetera. I have one further piece of information that may be of help: do listen carefully.