by John Gardner
“Yes.”
“Which you signed?”
“Yes.” It was Boysie’s turn to feel sheepish. “But they’re destroyed. They each came to me last week. Took their cards, then brought them back the next day. They burned them here.”
“I have come to burn my card.”
“You didn’t have a card. We didn’t …”
Alma held up a plain white card. Her name was typed in the top left hand corner. In the centre was Boysie’s signature and a date.
“I didn’t sign that. I …”
“No. I am a good forger. Wily oriental trick. You see, Boysie, we all thought you were a lovely man and fancied you. You’re a dolly gent. There was an argument so we agreed to have a sweepstake. It came to fifty pounds. It was to go to the one who made you first. Closing date last week. I fancied you like mad but I am very shy.”
“I noticed.”
“So I simply performed forgery. Two days after we started the sweepstake. Last week we all produced our cards and I won the fifty quid.” She smiled. “I am still shy, but my conscience pricks.”
“You want to share the loot?”
“Yes. And give you the pleasure you deserve. It would be very pleasurable for me also.”
“Keep the loot,” smiled Boysie.
Remembering that you never look a gift horse and all that, he picked up the telephone and dialled.
“Hi,” he said when Snowflake answered. “Can you keep dinner warm for me, love, I’ve got something needs doing straight away … Oh, a couple of hours … Good girl.”
If you enjoyed Air Apparent you might be interested in The Secret Generations by John Gardner, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from The Secret Generations by John Gardner
Prologue
All the nurse could see was the fine old head against the white pillow. Her intuition and experience told her the man was very close to death. Had she been blessed with some odd form of second sight, enabling her to read the thoughts and see the images in the dimming brain, she would probably not have understood them…
He felt a terrible weight on his chest, and pains down the left leg, but could not at first tell where he was. Then the roaring noise bore down on him – the dust choking his throat. Hoof beats receding, and the sound of cannon. Now he knew.
He had been hit. Badly. Try to get breath. Gently. There. All would be well; they would take him back to the neat rows of white tents and hutments at Balaclava Harbour. For a second he could see the rocky inlet, cliffs rising around the deep water: a natural harbour for the myriad ships which had brought the soldiers to this place.
But something had gone very wrong after they trotted out, as ordered, then turned – at the sound of the ‘Gallop’ – making straight for the Russian guns. Madness. Had he called out? Madness; particularly as, only the day before, he had gone, with a corporal and three troopers, to reconnoitre. The maps he had made, and brought back, showed the exact position of the Russian guns, and the way in which they were digging in the Turkish cannon, so that the main Russian batteries were protected on both flanks.
The Colonel, Lord George Paget, seemed impressed by the maps, and said he would send them straight to Lord Raglan.
Had nobody heeded his maps? Certainly that seemed to be the case; why else would they have gone straight into the trap once the ‘Charge’ was sounded? Why else would he be lying here in dust and blood?
The weight on him? Of course, it was his poor horse; his beautiful grey. For the life of him, Cornet Railton could not remember his horse’s name.
The nurse, looking at the silent sleeping old man, could never know that his mind had wandered back, vividly, over half a century, in this, his last coma, near to death.
The old man stirred, then opened his eyes. The nurse knew he could not see her, but his voice was clear as he said, ‘Patience’.
So he died. General Sir William Arthur Railton VC KCB DSO, of Redhill Manor, Haversage, in the county of Berkshire, with nobody to know that he had slipped away imagining his near death, so long before, on the battlefield of Balaclava: the day after he had spied out the land for Lord George Paget.
It was the early evening of 1 January 1910, and the whole family had gathered within two days of the death.
Giles Railton, the General’s younger brother, widowed but surrounded by his own kin – his sons, Andrew and Malcolm, with their wives; his daughter Marie, and her French husband; and some of his grandchildren.
The General’s own sons came to the Manor house – John, the MP, and his young second wife, Sara, together with James, the son of his first marriage; then Charles, wastrel of the family, with his wife and daughter.
Later, Giles was to consider that of all those present for the funeral, his deepest love was for his daughter Marie, and his young nephew James; while his contempt remained reserved for Charles. He wondered, now that the General had gone, what lay in store for the Railtons; and what he could do personally to shape their future. It preyed on his mind, causing anxiety, then a sense of resolution, with the iron entering his soul.
By rights, Giles, the eldest member of this great old family, should now take the place of his dead and revered brother. But, by natural lineage, it was John, the politician, who took over the bequeathed lands, the Manor, and most of the money. This was yet another worry for Giles. Having spent a lifetime among plots and counterplots, intrigue and secrets, he saw the family as a microcosm of his own country. His concern for the family was even greater than that for England, and, while all at present appeared set fair, stable and calm, he knew of the political and military storms which could appear so suddenly on a sunny horizon.
He hoped for a future blessed as an era of tranquillity, but knew the truth in the adage, ‘in time of peace prepare for war’. His own duties to his country were thus slanted, so he considered that he must look to his family and take precautions now.
Like a Grand Master at the game of chess, Giles planned his moves – to protect the honour and possessions of his clan; to see that those he loved remained safe; to use the weak to save the strong.
With the death of the old General, the Railton family was entering a new and vital stage in its long history. Giles would play a crucial part in the navigation of the family through the next decade; which is but part of a wider, more complex tale, the fuse of which had already been, unknowingly, lit almost a year before, in a bar near the German Naval Dockyard at Kiel.
Chapter One
When he walked into the place and found it was the roughest, sleaziest, most whore-ridden, drunk-filled and dangerous bar on the Kiel waterfront, Gustav Steinhauer thought he had possibly made a mistake; when the big petty officer started the fight, he knew it.
Steinhauer believed his vocational world to be full of idiots and amateurs, so he held to the axiom that the professional, such as himself, must take heed and never stand out like an extra bridegroom on a honeymoon. Now he had broken this solemn rule.
The petty officer, name of Hans-Helmut Ulhurt, was possibly his last hope, and he had travelled from Berlin to see him. Steinhauer was dressed like any other civil servant, and carried a pigskin document case. The officer of the watch told him that Ulhurt – one of the skeleton crew in the almost-completed dreadnought Nassau – was ashore. Herr Steinhauer would probably find him in the Buffel. It was Petty Officer Ulhurt’s favourite drinking place.
Steinhauer should have known better; should have gone away and returned in the morning, but, to be fair, he was getting desperate and the Kaiser expected results. So he went to the Buffel, where he tried to look inconspicuous, sitting in a corner and peering through the gloom and smoke, trying to size up the petty officer, whom he immediately recognized from the photographs and descriptions already obtained.
From time to time, a whore would come along and offer herself. Steinhauer tried to turn them away with tact, but that made matters worse. The whores were loud and abusive when rejected, and several rather effeminate sailors looked
hopefully in the direction of this oddity who had come amongst them, in his grey coat, gloves, high fur collar and neat cravat. You did not often see a toff like this in the Buffel, but, thank God, Ulhurt was holding court – telling raucous stories and hurling the cheap fiery schnapps down his throat as though he would never get another drink after tonight – which, as it happened, was almost the case.
The petty officer was a big man, but well-proportioned, with shoulders and arms that looked as if they were built by a sculptor, and fashioned out of granite.
Everyone knew the man, and – Steinhauer thought – there was a great deal of sycophancy going his way. He could well be the man who was needed. Certainly he had the background, intelligence and talent. Then the doors opened and the three English sailors arrived, a little drunk and very naive.
They were also petty officers – off HMS Cornwall, Steinhauer guessed, for the Royal Navy had this cadet-training ship in port on a courtesy visit, though they would have to search hard to discover any courtesy among the German naval personnel at Kiel. For everyone knew, in that May of 1909, that the Kaiser was making a bid for ultimate sea power, so that the High Sea Fleet could claim that they, and not the British Navy, dominated the world’s oceans by strength, numbers, armament and design. The Kaiser was very touchy over the constant English claim that Britannia ruled the waves; and, for the past few years, a flurry of activity, building and counter building, had been going on in the great dockyards of Germany and England. The Royal Navy was not really welcomed in German ports, and members of that Service were certainly not considered to be good news in a den like the Buffel.
Witness was given to this by the way a silence fell across the smoke-filled air as soon as the three Royal Navy men came in. It was a different kind of silence from that which had greeted Steinhauer when he had entered. Then, the seamen and their women had merely shown amused interest; now, an aggressive tension filled the air. It had the same feel to it as the atmosphere which precedes a tropical storm.
The foreigners were almost certainly instructors from Cornwall, for they were men who had obviously seen long service. They also appeared quite unperturbed by the sense of aggression in the bar, walking straight in and ordering schnapps in a mixture of sign language and a few words of badly-learned German.
Steinhauer noticed, in a flitting second, that everyone had looked to the big, fair-haired Ulhurt, and he remembered the man’s reputation for violence.
Even the proprietor turned, as though seeking the petty officer’s permission to serve the foreign sailors.
Steinhauer was to recall that moment many times in the years to come: the brown, stained walls and ceiling, the rough wooden benches and tables, the bar with its bottles and barrels, the men with sailors’ faces, beaten by wind and spray, and the girls whose eyes moved like those of snakes. Most of all, he remembered Ulhurt, whose look became bland and open, half-amused but laced with something deadly.
‘So, the Royal Navy has taken to murdering the German language now.’ Ulhurt spoke a perfect English – which surprised and pleased Steinhauer – with no trace of the guttural accent which so often prevents the Germans from mastering the other tongue. As he spoke, Ulhurt pushed back his chair by placing the sole of his large boot on the corner of his table. He seemed relaxed, though Steinhauer had seen men like this on many occasions. The petty officer was poised, ready and willing to beat the living daylights out of the three Englanders.
‘What you talking about, Kraut?’ The tallest, most muscular of the English sailors took a pace forward.
‘Kraut?’ Ulhurt still appeared amused. ‘What is Kraut, Englishman?’
‘Cabbage face,’ one of the other naval men said loudly.
‘You know what…?’ Ulhurt began, ‘The Royal Navy is shit,’ and with the final word, he launched himself at the biggest Englishman, butting him in the stomach, his great arms delivering blows like axe thuds into the man’s solar plexus.
There was a brief lull, before the whole bar erupted in violence, and it was during the pause that one of the other Englishmen hit Ulhurt with a chair. Steinhauer saw, quite clearly, that these three men were but an advance guard, for suddenly the whole bar was full of English sailors, swinging fists, and even – to his horror – knives.
Steinhauer made a dive towards the exit, was thrown to one side like a discarded doll, and viewed most of what followed through a haze.
He saw one of the girls sail across the room, as though possessed by the power of levitation; an English sailor bury a knife to the hilt in the ribs of a young German; a German seaman deliver two hammer-blows, left and right, which connected with the jaws of two British seamen; he heard the crack of bone quite clearly, and was fascinated by the odd angle at which the mouths hung just after being hit.
He was aware of the terrible noise; the screams of agony; the screeching from the women; the grunts of pain and exertion from men of both sides as they fought with no holds barred; and he saw the small concerted rush of six English ratings, smashing their way through to the bar, vaulting it and grabbing at the bottles which immediately became weapons.
Most of all, Steinhauer watched Petty Officer Ulhurt. For a big man Ulhurt was exceptionally nimble, and very strong – a street fighter, an experienced bar-brawler, who appeared to deal, almost perfunctorily, with his enemy: a pile-driving punch which lifted one man literally off his feet, sending him a dozen yards through the battering throng; a chop to his right, disposing of another who tried to get close. He fought with hands, head, elbows, knees and boots, rarely leaving himself open to attack, always ready for the enemy coming at him from behind.
But Ulhurt was gradually driven back, to make a stand. Not against the wall but the bar. It was his undoing.
By this time there was blood everywhere, and they were not merely throwing the bottles but breaking them, to use the sharded, jagged ends as weapons. Ulhurt, back against the corner of the bar, had done this, and now jabbed a shattered bottle at any Englishman who came near. He did not think, or expect, the two young sailors behind the bar to have the muscle it took to lift a full cask of beer.
But they did lift it – a great cask containing something like a hundred litres, a considerable weight. Not only did they lift it, but, as though engaged in tossing a bag of potato peelings into the sea, they hurled it towards Ulhurt, who had no exit, no escape.
He saw it coming, too late, and leaped to one side, but the full weight of the cask caught him on the right thigh, and he fell, badly, trapped against the wall, his right leg outstretched, taking the force of the cask. Steinhauer watched as the man’s mouth opened in a noiseless scream of agony. Later, he maintained that he actually heard the terrible crunch of bone as the leg was crushed – broken in twenty-eight places, the surgeon said.
Oh, shit, thought Steinhauer. His last hope. Ulhurt who knew the sea, was familiar with dockyards, violence, wireless telegraphy, and spoke five languages well, had been the ideal. Now Steinhauer’s search had shattered with Ulhurt’s leg. Ulhurt was ‘Possibility Number Twelve’. The last. Oh, shit! shit! shit!
Then the dockyard police arrived, and the British naval shore patrol. Men were arrested and taken away. Others were loaded into wagons and moved to the nearby Naval Hospital.
On the pavement outside, Steinhauer showed his credentials to a German naval police officer, who then treated him with great respect and left him alone, wrapped in a misery he could share with nobody.
‘You want to make a good time?’ a whore asked him.
In his anguish, Steinhauer looked at her and saw she was young and attractive. Probably not in the business very long. What the hell, he thought, and went back to her room, which was none too clean.
In the night, between the bouts of purchased sex, Gustav Steinhauer thought again, and wondered. Was it just possible? Could Ulhurt’s accident be a blessing in disguise?
In the morning he went to the hospital to discover that the petty officer’s leg had been amputated at the thigh. It was touch a
nd go, but the surgeon considered it was probably go, because the man had the constitution of an ox.
Gustav Steinhauer returned to Berlin. Two weeks later the now one-legged petty officer Hans-Helmut Ulhurt was moved, much to his consternation, to a private clinic in the Berlin suburb of Neuweissensee. He did not know it then, but his secret war was about to begin.
Chapter Two
The market town of Haversage, nestling in an almost private strategic hollow at the foot of the Berkshire Downs, had known many moments of triumph and sadness in its long history. Here Alfred the Great came to recruit men to fight his bloody battles against the Danes; the Doomsday Book shows taxes collected from both bondmen and free – whose main occupation was with the land and cattle – all living in the vicinity of Halfting, which eventually became Haversage.
In the tenth century, Benedictines arrived at what was, by then, a thriving settlement, its people living off the good growing and grazing ground of the area. Work began on the Abbey – little of which remains; though the major part of the Parish Church of SS Peter & Paul dates from those early builders, with additions constructed in the 1780s.
The church itself is a monument, not only to the glory of God, but also to the men who went out from Haversage to do battle throughout the world, and at home in England. There are the tombs of four crusaders within its walls, and at least three other noted soldiers lie under the main aisle.
The Benedictines were, naturally, ousted by Henry VIII’s Commissioners, and, like so many other monasteries, the Abbey was sacked and burned when the King reformed the Church, splitting from the Papal authority of Rome. In place of the peace-loving monks, a new landowner arrived – Richard de Railton, descendant of that Norman knight, Pierre de Royalton, who had distinguished himself at Hastings with Duke William in 1066.
Within eighty years the family had dropped the ‘de’, to become plain Railton, having built the great manor house at the top of Red Hill – a vantage point, which probably derived its name from bitter skirmishes, and the shedding of blood, centuries before. They then set about creating a pattern for other landowners by organizing their farming, and extending a building programme.