All Honourable Men

by Gavin Lyall

  Gunther swallowed. “Others have more money.” Of course he would claim he was selling, that was no crime. And the ministries were certainly richer than the Bureau. And Gunther had been in business longer than the Bureau: he must still have other clients in London.

  Gunther added: “I have an Italian naval code,” before restocking his mouth.

  “Yes? When are they due to change it?” Gunther wouldn’t cheat by selling the same information twice: the code to you, then the fact that you’d got it to the Italians. But he’d sell a code that was about to be abandoned. It was a fine line, and a funny-peculiar one, but he trod it religiously in a world where heresy was a capital offence.

  Gunther grinned, shrugged, and suggested: “The Schlieffen Plan? Do you know the latest amendments of that?”

  “If you can prove it really isn’t just a staff exercise,” Ranklin said, “we might swap it for something about the Spanish Royal Family.” Then his bacon and eggs arrived and the conversation became just nods and grunts, finely tuned to mean “Everybody knows that” or “You’re joking”. Ranklin was now convinced that Gunther hadn’t anything serious to offer and was mainly trying to find out what the Bureau knew or – just as important – wanted to know.

  So when they had finished, and called for a fresh pot of coffee, Ranklin asked bluntly: “So what are you doing here now?”

  Gunther’s eyebrows rose from his thick spectacles in mock surprise. “Selling cigars, it is my business. Have one.” He opened a silver pocket case. From their looks, they might have served to take away the taste of an over-hot curry, but not just after breakfast. Gunther lit one himself.

  The hotel didn’t exactly allow smoking at breakfast, but it didn’t want to alienate what few clients it had in the low season. Anyway, the only others left in the room were foreign tourists waiting hopefully for the fog to clear. So Ranklin lit a cigarette.

  “And how about the Eastern Question?”

  “Ach – only you English could have such a phrase, that can mean everything or nothing. No, I have nothing from there. But Serbia, I hope soon to have some most interesting news from Belgrade. You must remember to call me . . .” The conversation wound down slowly until, at half past nine, Gunther heaved himself to his feet. “Now, you will excuse me, I am going home today and first I must observe the English custom and ‘have a breath of fresh air’.” He chuckled as he gestured at the world beyond the windows.

  “I’ll come out with you.”

  Gunther had brought his cape downstairs with him and they stood on the front steps looking out on nothingness the colour of dirty washing-up water. But not silence: Northumberland Avenue was a cacophony of honking horns, clattering hooves and jingling harness. Lamps glowed, crawled past attached to the dim shapes of cabs and taxies, and vanished. On the pavement, pedestrians moved hesitantly, unbalanced, staying close to the walls and peering at the hotel name to locate themselves. One man was standing under the glow of a street lamp a few feet away, trying to read a guide-book map.

  “A true London fog,” Gunther said, as if he were viewing the Taj Mahal. Then he turned to shake hands. “You have come far – in only a year, is it? When I hear of you – I hear very little, I assure you – I think i knew him when he had just begun.’”

  “You tried to kill us.”

  “I did not see you as a future customer. Also – I think violence is not a proper part of our trade. I gave you a bad example, and I hear . . . But probably I am wrong.” His spectacles gleamed cheerily as the yellow lamplight caught the droplets forming on them. “Au revoir.”

  Ranklin took a couple of steps, then paused, professionally interested to see if he could spot the Special Branch man who should be following. Gunther had paused, too, wiping his spectacles under the lamplight.

  The man with the guide-book turned, put a pistol to Gunther’s face and fired. The back of Gunther’s head burst and his hat fell off soggily. The man ran, disappearing in three steps.

  Ranklin caught Gunther before he hit the pavement, but he was too heavy. Suddenly there was another man, helping ease him down, then blowing a fierce shriek on a whistle, but Gunther didn’t react to the sudden close noise. His eyes were already wide and unmoving in a bloody, sooty mask of gunsmoke. Ranklin felt for the pulse in the thick neck, then stood up.

  Already the doorman was gawping, pedestrians were stopping. Ranklin said loudly: “Get him inside, get a doctor, an ambulance. Quick!” And having stirred them into useless babble and motion, vanished himself.

  * * *

  Ranklin blundered his way back to Whitehall Court, numb, shivering with shock and simple disbelief. Life could seem so strong. A growing plant could crack through stone; men clung to life with the ghastliest of wounds. So how could it be so fragile? You snapped off a flower head, unthinking. A man turned away and died, from just two little bullets.

  * * *

  They met in a small room in a Pall Mall club, a good place for a private meeting on virtually neutral ground. The rest of the time, it seemed to be the unread part of the library: sets of thick books that must represent lifetimes of patient work. Had they died happy?

  He found himself explaining for the umpteenth time: “If I had stayed, the Branch officer would have hung on to me, at least as a witness. I was quite prepared to explain myself, as I did later to Detective Sergeant Dix—” He nodded to a solid, placid and heavily moustached man being self-effacing on the outskirts of the seated group. “But not there and then, not in public.”

  “But also,” the man from the Home Office said, “it seems that you made no attempt to catch the assassin.”

  “He’d vanished in the fog. I had no more chance of grabbing him than the Branch officer had,” Ranklin pointed out.

  “The officer was supposed to be following van der Brock, not protecting him,” Sir Basil Thomson said. On looks alone, his long face kept a funeral parlour and his nose a pub; in fact, he headed the Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department and Special Branch – effectively, all its plainclothes detectives.

  The Home Office man frowned. He was young and trying – too hard – to keep his end up in grand and mysterious company. He was also the only one who was going to have to write a report; Sir Basil, the Commander and Major Kell of the counter-espionage service were all their own bosses.

  He said: “Nobody seems to have thought to be armed – except the assassin.”

  “It has never been Government policy that policemen in Britain should normally wear sidearms,” Sir Basil said. “I cannot, of course, speak for the Secret Service.” His past experience of the Bureau, particularly an occasion when they had certainly been armed, had left him officially Deeply Concerned and privately Bloody Furious.

  “Sorry,” Ranklin said, “I hadn’t got a gun, either. Not that I’d have started blazing away in that fog anyway.”

  “Delighted to hear it,” Sir Basil said coldly.

  “And we don’t even have a proper description of the man, just –” the Home Office man turned a copy of the Evening Standard on the table to read from the front page “– ‘about five feet six tall, long dark overcoat, face obscured by a scarf.”

  “Like most sensible people out in that fog,” Kell observed.

  The Commander grunted and said: “Professional,” and everyone but the Home Office nodded sagely. He blinked at them and tried another tack: “Then was this van der Brock known to have had any enemies?”

  Now everyone smiled; the Commander even chuckled, but left the answer to Kell, who said: “He was a notorious seller of state secrets, so at one time or another every Power in Europe had reason to want him dead. However, I believe he was so even-handed that each Power expected he’d be selling to them next week, so let him live. Until today.”

  “Probably your lads who did him in,” the Commander said cheerfully. “We shall miss him.”

  “We shan’t, that’s for certain,” Kell said. “But I’m afraid it still wasn’t us.”

  The Commander grinned at the
Home Office. “Well, that narrows it down for you. Only Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia and a few others to suspect.”

  Sir Basil’s voice had become grave. “All highly amusing, gentlemen, but his death doesn’t fall to your charge. He’s my unsolved murder – and likely to be a highly publicised one, if the press get any inkling of his true job. They’re already aroused by the way he was killed, assassination-style.” He tapped the Evening Standard.

  “Can’t you stifle those bloody editors?” the Commander asked. “I mean, ask for their responsible co-operation? It’s my Bureau which will suffer from this: other dealers getting wary of us, perhaps even blaming us for the murder. So, believe me, we’d very much like to see this solved. Only,” he added, “I don’t think it’s solvable.”

  The Home Office consulted his notes. “I believe there was something about him picking up a poste restante letter . . .”

  Sir Basil craned his skinny neck to summon the detective sergeant into action. Dix coughed and said: “We didn’t find anything that looked like such a letter on him, sir. One theory is that it might have been an introduction that he could show at the door of one of the ministries in Whitehall. And he left it there or destroyed it after his visit.”

  The Home Office added this all up. “Then he could have visited a ministry last night, when you’d lost him in the fog?”

  Sir Basil nodded and put on a slight smile. “There is, in fact, other evidence that he did.”

  Everybody looked at him, puzzled. Then Ranklin said: “Money. I bet he had a lot of money on him.”

  “Over £200 in gold and bank notes. How big a secret does that suggest to you gentlemen?”

  “Then,” the Home Office said, “surely all you have to do is ask around the ministries to find out which—”

  “We have already asked the most likely – and they say they will, reluctantly, check. Whether anyone will admit they spent tax-payers’ money on such people . . . Would you?”

  There was a silence. Then Ranklin asked: “Are you letting the newspapers know any of this?”

  “We haven’t done so, not yet.”

  Feigning hesitancy about telling Sir Basil how to run the Yard, Ranklin said: “Publishing the fact that he’d sold us a secret might nullify that secret’s value.”

  The Commander nodded firmly. “Quite right. If – as a nation – we’ve gained something from his visit, let’s for God’s sake keep it, whatever it is.” He looked around, collecting agreement. “But does this mean he was killed for revenge?”

  “Not necessarily,” Kell said. “It could still have been prevention – if he was killed by a foreign power. They needn’t know he’d already passed the secret on.”

  There was another silence – a rather uneasy one on Sir Basil’s part, Ranklin thought. Perhaps he was torn between wishing it were a foreign power – what could he be expected to do against that? – and fearing public outrage that foreigners could do such things in London.

  Rather too casually, Kell asked the Commander: “Will you know eventually who it was?”

  “Oh yes. In a few weeks or months it’ll seep out on the grapevine. No proof, of course, but we’ll know.” But they were just showing off in front of the young Home Office. Gratifyingly, he gazed at them with horrified awe.

  A slight wind had worked up around tea-time, thinning the fog. And although the wind had gone and there were now millions of coal fires adding their mite to the air, you could now see for ten or fifteen yards. The Commander paused on the steps of the club, perhaps calculating whether it was bad enough to excuse not going home. He could, rumour had it, always find somewhere to spend the night.

  “Any private theories about Brock?” he grunted.

  Ranklin, who had spent half the day trying to have a theory, shook his head. “None, sir.”

  “Well, as I say, it’ll come out in the end.”

  “I could do with it being a bit sooner. The Standard quoted the waiter as hearing me called ‘Captain’ and quite a good description of me.”

  “We don’t have to be invisible in this business.”

  “I’m thinking of Gunther’s own firm. They’ll be reading every last comma for hints as to what happened, they might recognise me and then think I was leading Gunther into a trap.”

  “Aren’t you being overly imaginative?”

  “They’re competent,” Ranklin said, “and they’re widespread. That’s why we have dealings with them.”

  “What d’you want to do about it, then?”

  But Ranklin, rashly, hadn’t thought that far. “Er. . . nothing dramatic, I suppose . . . But if we do come across any answer, I’d like approval to pass it on to Gunther’s partners.”

  “You aren’t developing a sense of justice, are you?” The Commander eyed him closely. “It would be entirely inappropriate in your work. Now, for me, it would be rather suitable. They could say ‘He’s a swine, but a just swine.’ I’d like that. But I’m Chief of this Bureau and you’re not, and my sense of justice is all we need.”

  “As evidence of our good faith?” Ranklin suggested. “For good future relations?”

  The Commander was still looking at him. “Umm. Well, perhaps. . . Did you like this van der Brock?” he asked casually.

  “Like him? I don’t think so, particularly . . . He was more like . . . family. One of us.”

  That was just the sort of answer the Commander’s temper had been waiting for. “No he bloody well wasn’t! Only we are us.”

  5

  The fog cleared the next day and more typical March winds blew in. The railway companies found out where their trains were and began moving them to where they ought to be. Scotland Yard made no visible progress on the Gunther case and wished the popular papers would shut up about it. Ranklin surreptitiously opened a file on the case and kept it in the Registry – a single, albeit locked, bookcase – misleadingly labelled “Historical/Biblical Espionage”. The Commander believed he’d invented spying and wasn’t interested in history.

  So Ranklin wasn’t worried that he’d found the file when he was called into the inner office. The Commander fluttered a message at him. “They want you at a meeting at the Admiralty – or rather, they want me or our Turkish expert.”

  “Who’s ‘they’, sir?”

  “It sounds like a conference of the powers: the Foreign Office and the India Office, as well. That’s why I’m not going myself.” He grinned. “They may have wheeled out the big guns to bully me into something and they can’t if I’m not there. So just say what an interesting idea and you’re sorry you can’t take a final decision yourself.”

  “The India Office?” That Office handled, as one would expect, Indian affairs, and Ranklin hadn’t thought of it as being interested in Turkey. But, old-maidishly, India could imagine enemies at very long range. Until now, it had usually been Russia, but with her more-or-less an ally, perhaps the Turkish Empire – stretching to the Gulf of Persia – had been promoted to bogeyman.

  “Yes, them. The only other clue is that they expect you to be au fait with the Baghdad Railway. What d’you know about it?”

  Ranklin shuffled his thoughts. “It adds on to the existing line from Constantinople into central Turkey. They’re building an extension through the mountains on the south coast and down across Syria to Baghdad. And probably further, to Basra and perhaps the Persian Gulf—”

  “‘They’ being?” the Commander prompted, smiling.

  “Some German company—”

  “Right. Hold those two thoughts in mind: a German company and the Persian Gulf, and you’ll see what’s exercising minds at the Foreign Office. Sir Aylmer Corbin’s going to be at the meeting.”

  “Ah.” Corbin headed the anti-German faction in the Foreign Office, seeing the shadow of a Pickelhaube helmet darkening the map of Europe. Asia Minor too, it now seemed. “Do you know who else will be there?”

  The Commander consulted the message. “Hapgood from the India Office. You don’t know him? He’s a very. .
. worthy chap. Most able.”

  Or, decoded, Hapgood did not come from one of the great landed families. Presumably not even from one of the great university families, who made up in brains what they lacked in acres. Well, bully for Hapgood making it to the India Office. Poor isolated sod.

  “I believe he’s one of a select few who understand the rupee.”

  To Ranklin the rupee was just currency. “Understands it?”

  “Perhaps he can make it do tricks. Climb a rope and disappear.”

  “I’d think anyone in the City can do that with mere pounds,” Ranklin said with some feeling.

  “I don’t know who else. The meeting’s at three o’clock so you’ve time to swot up the latest on the Railway.” The Commander struck a match, lit the message, and moved the match to his loaded pipe as he watched the paper burn out in an ashtray. He disliked paperwork, which was a good thing in espionage; on the other hand, he set fire to a lot of wasterpaper baskets.

  * * *

  The alcove in the Admiralty entrance hall hadn’t been built for a life-size statue, so a rather small version of Nelson watched Ranklin hand over his hat and coat. Then he was led up a stone staircase, along a corridor with a vaulted roof like a tunnel, and into a room that seemed more like a study than an office.

  A well-heaped fire blazed in the grate, being poked constantly by a man in vice-admiral’s uniform sitting on a corner of the leather-and-brass club fender. Three other men in civilian clothes sat in a collection of chairs, the one in the best leather arm-chair being Sir Aylmer Corbin of the Foreign Office.

  Ranklin couldn’t remember ever having been introduced to Corbin; from a certain moment Corbin knew him, but the moment itself had passed unnoticed, at least by Ranklin. It was the way things worked in Whitehall: once you realised a man was important or useful, you knew him and be damned to introductions.

  Now Corbin bobbed up to shake Ranklin’s hand. He was a smallish man with pale eyes and a thin, stretched face like a featherless baby bird’s. His movements had a birdlike briskness, too. “Ah, Captain Ranklin from the Bureau. You may not know Vice-Admiral Berrigan, our host here? And Hapgood from the India Office? And you’ve met Fazackerley.”