But this time he had a feeling that things were different.
At the turning to Richmond Bridge he slowed down, noting that the white Ford did the same. Most of the traffic had filtered right, and Hawn was now on the narrow winding road along the river. The Ford was directly behind him, but had been able to drop back. There was little room for overtaking here. He came up behind a heavy lorry, and slowed still further. This time the car behind closed in enough for him again to note its number.
Then a couple of miles on, just before the main road to Teddington and Kingston, the Ford disappeared. Hawn felt almost a sense of anti-climax. He had passed the sign to Teddington, and was reaching for his map to find Fielding’s Lane, when he saw a third car in his mirror. Another damn Ford — a yellow one this time, with a black roof, two aerials and two men inside. Christ, he thought, they’re not going to start any rough stuff here, in a nice riverside spot like Teddington?
These two behind were taking it easy. They weren’t even playing the game. They made no attempt to pass him when he slowed right down to consult the map again. And they gave him plenty of time to note their number.
He passed the locks, a mock-Tudor tea-house, then the post office, and turned in the lane: but not before he had had time to see the yellow Ford cruise past.
He stopped at the last house and got out. It was the sort of place that he would have expected old MacIntyre to choose for his bachelor retirement.
The man was gaunt, with yellow cheeks stretched taut across his long face; but his eyes were still bright. He clasped Hawn’s shoulders with two strong bony hands. ‘Tommy, me old lad! Come on in.’ He was wearing a knitted fisherman’s hat, gumboots, and a very old tweed jacket. ‘Sorry I was so long — must get a bell fitted. I was out at the back with my tomatoes. I don’t suppose a worldly young man like you would be interested in anything like tomatoes?’
‘I eat them sometimes,’ Hawn said, as his host led him down a dark hall, into a small untidy room full of books. There was a log fire and it was warm.
MacIntyre nodded. ‘Not much fresh air in here. I have to have the fire going to keep my bones dry. Most o’ the time I spend out in the greenhouse.’
‘I hope you haven’t turned into one of those dodgers who go in for giant marrow competitions?’
‘Don’t be daft, man. Tomatoes are my speciality. But last summer I did manage to get some grapes going — though I’m more of a man for the grain, if y’know what I mean?’ He winked and picked an old black pipe out of a rack and began filling it from a plastic pouch. ‘You won’t say nay to a wee drop of the Glen to celebrate?’
Hawn sat down in a lopsided armchair with a broken spring prodding his left buttock. For all his age and frailty, MacIntyre’s movements were surprisingly deliberate, despite his slight limp. He reached into a cupboard and brought out a triangular bottle half full of clear liquid, and two big tumblers.
‘Steady on,’ said Hawn. ‘I’m driving.’
‘Och, it does a man some good to take a few risks. I wish I could.’ He sat down opposite, close to the fire, and pulled at his pipe with a wet crackling sound.
‘Mac, I was followed here. By three cars.’
The old man sipped his drink, sucked his pipe. ‘You’re not a sentimental man, are you, Tommy? You didn’t come down here just to keep an old man happy for a few hours. You’re either in trouble, or you need advice. Well, let’s have it. I’ve got all the time in the world — until the Great Reaper comes for me.’
‘Do you mind if I start back-to-front? How are your connections with the police, Mac?’
‘Friendly. Just the local lads, of course. Nothing grand.’
‘Can you get me the owners of those three cars that followed me here? They all had “T” registration.’ He handed him his A to Z which he had brought in.
‘Shouldn’t be too much trouble. I’ll call them now. But three cars — that’s an awful big detail. What we used to call a “Grand Slam”. You really do seem to be attracting the big battalions.’ He got up and went into the hall; and was back in a couple of minutes. He sat down and got his pipe going again. ‘You have me intrigued, Tommy. Just relax and enjoy your drink and tell me all about it. I don’t suppose there’s much help I can be, at my age, but I’ll give you what I can.’
Over the next forty minutes, and generous refills of malt whisky, Hawn recounted every detail, every impression, from Venice to Kew and the London Library. Mac interrupted only to elucidate the odd point. At the end he took out a crumpled tissue, screwed it up tight and began to clean lumps of black dottle out of the stem of his pipe. He tossed the tissue in the fire, drank from his glass, and said, ‘You’ve been very concise, Tommy. Very methodical. You always were. But what you’re trying to do is look for King John’s treasure in the Wash. It’s been tried. Everybody’s tried it. Nobody’s found it.’
‘Nobody’s tried to fathom the mystery of Hitler’s fuel supplies.’
‘True, true. But you need evidence. It’s no good telling me that a file is missing from the PRO. Or that a bigwig like Shanklin may have killed an embarrassing Intelligence officer called Frisby. That was cleared through the FO, if your information is correct. From then on it’s rather like trying to unravel a ball of string. Or peel an onion.’
‘Am I right in assuming that part of MI14’s job was to evaluate German fuel supplies?’
‘It was.’
‘And did you never have suspicions about where the Germans were getting their oil — particularly in the last year of the war, after Rumania fell?’
‘Laddie, we didn’t deal with suspicions and theories. We dealt with facts. Trouble was, in war you don’t get too few facts — you get too many. Too much information, from too many sources. Statistics galore — and you know what they say about statistics? Lies, damn lies, and so on.’
The phone rang in the hall, and this time MacIntyre was gone about five minutes. He came back, rubbing his hands together with a smooth dry sound. ‘All three hired from a place in Wandsworth called Hamilton Motors. They can check on the drivers, but only if you put in a complaint.’
‘I’ll check myself. I don’t want the police involved — at least, not at this stage.’
There was a pause, broken only by the wheeze of Mac’s pipe. ‘Tommy, you’re groping in the dark. You’ve already tangled with Shanklin, and he’s not a man who fools around. On the other hand he put you on to this chappie, French. Now that’s a mite odd of him, if he’s got something to hide. You might almost say that Shanklin was trying to help you.’
‘Well, that’s his business. As for French, the clue seems to lie somewhere with that man Rice. Do you know anything about him?’
‘Not much more than you do, laddie. He disappeared from Central America at the end of the war, when the War Crimes Tribunal got on to him in Germany in 1945. As you know, he was a top scientist, as well as a double-agent. But I do have one name that might help you. A certain Hans Dieter Mönch — Herr Doktor, of course. An important administrator in the Ministry of War Production, working on the petro-chemical side. Synthetic fuels. He was a full Party member and the Yanks got him on a number of technical charges. He served altogether two years, then went down to live in Spain. As far as I know he’s still living there.’
He poured more whisky. ‘But there were one or two wee mysteries about Doktor Mönch that were near cleared up. We were getting all kinds of informants and turncoats coming to us at that time with the wildest tales. One was that Mönch had been working for a secret project — so secret that it was kept well away from Nazi top-brass, and that Mönch was answerable only to Himmler direct. The suspicion at the time was that it concerned one of those fancy rocket projects, which would have tied in with Rice. Another was that it was part of the German A-Bomb. The trouble was, we never discovered one damn document relating to Mönch’s activities. Now that was a wee bit bizarre, because the Germans hoard documents like squirrels. Half their war criminals went to the gallows because of the evidence they lef
t behind them. And Mönch was born a professional bureaucrat.’
‘Meaning that Mönch hid these documents?’
‘Mönch, or Rice, perhaps. Rice had disappeared, remember. If you could find Rice, you might get yourself a nice little story.’
‘Do you know where Mönch is supposed to be in Spain?’
‘Last known to be running a little farm in a town called Soria, between Pamplona and Madrid. He’s an old man now — he’s paid for his sins. He might help you. You could but try. But I’m leading you on, laddie. And it’s all speculation. I’d hate to be wasting your time.’
‘Those three cars that followed me here weren’t speculation, Mac. Nor is that missing file at the PRO. And the fact that Shanklin and Frisby were in both Istanbul and Vera Cruz is something I don’t accept as a coincidence. Supposing we assume that those two ports might have been used for clandestine oil shipments from the West to Germany? What do you know about Istanbul in the war, Mac?’
‘Och, I didna’ have the luck to be there during the war — and being a young man brought up in the kirk, maybe it’s as well I wasn’t!’ He advanced on Hawn with the rapidly emptying bottle; Hawn held up his hand. ‘What’s happened to ye, laddie? You used to be quite a promising drinker.’
‘Not when I’m working. We were talking about Istanbul, Mac — during the war.’
‘Bright and dirty, and full of sin. The Turks were sitting on the fence, being wooed by both sides. In the Great War they’d opted for the Germans and paid heavily for it. We were desperate to get them in. So desperate, I even heard a wee tale about Sir Winston wanting to bribe them with gold from our reserves. But the Treasury boys put a quick end to that, so I’m told.’
‘Come to the point, Mac. Did you have any dealing with Turkey during the war — with Istanbul in particular?’
‘Only from a desk in Whitehall. No sin there, laddie. Not even a sniff of it.’
‘I gather the British were pretty thick on the ground in Turkey — as well as the Germans? And a lot of double-dealing went on, just like it did in Lisbon and the Caribbean?’
‘Stands to reason. So you take money from one side and sell to the other. What’s the worst that can happen to you? Maybe one side gets sore enough to put a knife in your back one dark night, but usually it’s up to the Turkish authorities. And what do they care — as long as the nightclubs are full and everyone’s paying in hard cash? I used to hear that information was almost as cheap as the lassies.’
‘Who ran the Turkish operation — from our end?’
‘Cairo, officially, through POE — Political Operations Executive. But of course, they were answerable to London.’
‘Mac, if stuff had been getting to the Germans illegally through Istanbul — say, the odd tanker across to the Danube — would you, in MI14, have heard about it?’
The old man jiggled his pipe and rubbed his knees and stared at the ceiling. ‘Long, long ago I signed a piece of bumf called the Official Secrets Act, and they still haven’t torn it up. But I’m an old man now. I’m not even burdened with the awful responsibility of Fleet Street, and carrying the Gospel every morning to every breakfast table in the land. Yes, Tommy. Stuff got through. Tankers from the Gulf, switching cargoes, false Bills of Lading, putting in for phoney refits before going down to Alex or up to Naples when the “Hanging Garden” fell.’ He grinned: ‘That was the name we gave Italy, because no one ever knew which side she was on.’
‘If you knew, why didn’t you do anything about it?’
‘Without evidence? In a neutral country which was as corrupt as an old cadaver? And if we’d started arresting Turkish nationals, it would have just driven Turkey closer to the Germans.’
‘How do you know some of our people weren’t involved?’
The old man gave him a sly smile along the stem of his pipe. ‘If I did, I can’t prove it. Not then — not now.’
‘You can’t even give me a lead?’
‘Well —’ he was fiddling with his pipe again, spilling tobacco from his pouch and picking it off his bony knees — ‘I might be able to give you a name. Man called Salak. Imin Salak. He’ll be getting on now — if someone hasn’t already knifed him and tossed him in the Bosporus. But he was a young man then, very bright, very highly thought of by our side. He was a wrestler by profession — last I heard, he still was. Runs a chemist shop in the Kumkapi District — apparently used to be one of the most picturesque parts of Istanbul, but also pretty seedy, o’ course.
‘Sounds as though you still keep in touch with him?’
‘Only gossip at the club. He still draws a pension from us. Though the mandarins aren’t too happy about it, as he’s supposed to be tied up in the rackets. Drugs.’ He pulled a face: ‘Nasty stuff.’
‘What was his exact function during the war?’
‘Officially, a middle man for the Istanbul Port Authority. His job was to vet the masters’ credentials and check on the cargoes. He’s supposed to have had amazing contacts, both above board and in the underworld. He was also entrusted to recruit agents and spies among the local dock people. If there was any funny business going on, Salak was your man. He shouldn’t be too difficult to track down. Wrestling’s one of the most popular sports in Turkey, and wrestlers stick together like an old boys’ fraternity.’
There was a pause. The room had become thick with Mac’s pipe smoke, and with the smell of malt.
‘Let’s go back to the Caribbean for a moment,’ Hawn said. ‘It was that man Robak who put the idea forward. Supposing someone — Rice, for instance, and others — fixed up a deal by which a few tankers crossed the Atlantic, lost the convoy, and made it round to the north of Norway, then down the German-controlled coast to Sweden? Would it have been possible?’
‘Aye, I guess it would.’
‘What about the Royal Navy?’
‘The Senior Service, you mean? That magic phrase.’ He stroked the edge of his jaw. ‘The Navy lads had their hands full — what with trying to protect our lifeline across the Atlantic, and hunting down U-boats. They didn’t have the time to stop every stray ship they didn’t like the look of, including the odd tanker. Besides, even if they did, there wasn’t a lot they could do — providing the Bills of Lading appeared to be in order.’
‘They must have had some instructions from the Admiralty? Supposing they spotted a tanker round Iceland, obviously heading for Norwegian and Swedish waters? They boarded her and found she had papers made out to some dubious Swiss bank dealing with someone in Sweden? What did they do? Sink the tanker?’
‘Laddie boy, even a captain in the Royal Navy doesn’t go round sinking unarmed neutral vessels just because he doesn’t like the look of their papers.’
‘The captains still must have had some degree of discretion. How subtle would you say the average Royal Navy captain is?’
‘Not too subtle — especially where paperwork’s concerned, and that’s all in a foreign language. You must remember that as neutral countries, places like Sweden and Switzerland were perfectly entitled to import oil, and anything else they wanted, for their own domestic consumption.’
‘How did the Swiss manage it? Directly through Germany?’
‘Officially they used the pipeline up from Genoa — the first of its kind ever built. The Swedes, of course, imported directly from the States — although the American authorities were not at all happy about the arrangement.’
‘What was the position with U-boats?’ said Hawn. ‘How did they know how to distinguish a rogue tanker from just another ship which had lost its convoy?’
MacIntyre got up and put a log on the fire. ‘Well, that’s where the skulduggery would have come in. If your theory is correct — and I’m not saying it either is or is not — the Nazis would have had agents in the Caribbean, probably working inside the oil companies, notifying the German Admiralty, who in turn would have passed the information on to the U-boat commanders.’ He paused, busy packing his pipe; this time he took five matches to get it alight.
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br /> He went on: ‘Forget the Caribbean angle for the moment, laddie. If you’ve come to me for advice, I’m telling you to look to Turkey. It’s nearer and cheaper to get to. Besides, the Caribbean’s sewn up — the Yanks have seen to that. If there were any dirty traces left after the war, you can be sure they’ve been kicked over by now. But Turkey’s another story. It’s a wild country — always has been. Talk to Salak. Only if he decides to tell you anything, he’ll want to be paid. And from what I’ve heard of him, he’s expensive.
‘But first, why don’t you try Doktor Mönch? Still nearer, and he’s probably much cheaper. As I told you, Mönch was tied up in some very hush-hush business with Nazi war production. He may not be prepared to give you details — for fear of reprisals — but he might provide you with a useful overall picture.’
He poured them each the last of the malt. ‘And one last thing, Tommy. A piece of advice you haven’t asked for. Advice from an old man. You’re stepping into dark waters. You’ve almost certainly stepped already on some mighty sensitive toes. These multi-national oil companies have a great deal of money, a great deal of power. They make most crime syndicates look like corner sweet shops.’
‘Mac, are you trying to warn me off?’
‘No, just trying to salve my conscience. I wouldn’t like you to get into any kind of trouble, Tom — not on my account.’
‘You think if I go through with this, I might be putting myself in some danger?’
Mac said, ‘A few years ago a couple o’ lads in Italy tried to pull a fast one on ABCO. They chartered a tanker full of high-grade crude and made a swap in mid-ocean for low-grade stuff. Then they tried to cash in on the difference. I say “tried”, because they’d hardly started negotiations when their car was in a head-on collision with a road tanker outside Rome. Both were killed outright. And the funny part of it was, the tanker belonged to one of the rival companies. You can draw whatever moral you choose from that.’
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