The First Casualty

by Ben Elton

  ‘When is he coming back?’

  Agnes gulped and steadied herself before replying.

  ‘Darling…You recall what I told you. Daddy has gone to heaven.’

  She was struggling to control her voice, fighting back the tears.

  ‘Yes, I know, Mummy, but when is he coming back?’

  ‘Well, you see, precious, people don’t come back from heaven, I’m afraid. They wait for you to come to them. It’s awfully good fun for them but boring for us to have to wait to see them…’

  ‘I think he will come back.’

  ‘Well, perhaps, darling. Perhaps.’

  ‘I miss him, Mummy.’

  ‘I miss him too…Very, very much.’

  Kingsley thought his heart would burst. Had Shannon and the whole of the Secret Intelligence Service been before him at that point he would happily have shot them all for playing such a cruel trick.

  But even in the midst of his misery he could not help but feel a small thrill.

  She missed him. She missed him very, very much. Having dabbed her eyes and mastered her emotions, Agnes kissed George for a final time.

  ‘Good night, darling. I am sure we will both dream of Daddy tonight.’

  Agnes stepped back from George’s bed but she did not leave the room. Instead she stood watching as the little boy drifted back to sleep, while through the shadowy folds of George’s dress-ups Kingsley watched her.

  Then she spoke once more.

  ‘Oh Douglas.’

  Kingsley almost cried out, so shocked was he. Did she know he was there? Had she been aware all along?

  ‘Oh Douglas, Douglas. How could it come to this?’

  She was speaking to herself.

  ‘You’ve really left me now. Gone. Gone forever.’

  Tears were streaming down her face and Kingsley’s too. It took him every effort of will not to step forward, but what could he have said? A bruised and bearded spectre from the grave who was now the creature of the Secret Service?

  Shannon was a killing gentleman and he had not made his threats lightly.

  Then, still staring at the boy, Agnes began to sing to herself, in a quiet small voice, almost a whisper. A song that she and Kingsley had often sung together, as they strolled on Hampstead Heath with George in his perambulator on summer evenings.

  ‘In the twi twi twilight.

  Out in the beautiful twilight

  We all go out for a walk walk walk

  A quiet old spoon and a talk talk talk

  That’s the time we long for.

  Just before the night

  And many a grand little wedding is planned

  In the twi twilight.’

  Finally she turned away and left the room. Kingsley heard her cross the hallway to what had once been the bedroom they shared. She was weeping, great long sobs of anguish and despair.

  Scarcely able to bear it himself, Kingsley emerged from his hiding place and went to stand before his son’s bed one final time.’

  ‘You’re right, George,’ he whispered. ‘I will return. I promise.

  Then he stole from the window and, having closed it and the curtains behind him, he disappeared into the night.

  THIRTY-ONE

  A protest meeting

  The following morning Kingsley breakfasted indifferently on kippers at his hotel, paid his bill and set out to walk to Whitehall.

  Once more he passed the palace, noting that the Royal Standard flew above it, which meant that the King was at home. A troop of Horse Guards was riding out, much to the delight of the small boys assembled at the gates. The guards were all in khaki, having forsaken their splendid red tunics and breastplates for the duration. They seemed terribly drab to Kingsley’s eye, and the gleaming sabres that they held upright as they rode looked silly set against the dull, functional uniforms of modern war. It was as if the army itself was in mourning, which of course it was.

  The recently erected Victoria Memorial was festooned with American flags and many more hung all along the Mall. This would be in honour of the arrival of General Pershing, the American Commander in Chief, whom Kingsley had noted in the paper over breakfast was that day to have a special audience with the King. He was only a general, not remotely a head of state, but such were the hopes which the exhausted Allies were placing in their new comrades that no honour was deemed too good for them. When the Americans had entered the war many months previously there had been enormous rejoicing, for the majority of people had assumed that a vast army of doughboys would instantly materialize in the trenches. The reality, now fast sinking in, was very different: the USA was entirely unprepared for war, it had no air force at all and only a tiny standing army. Its navy was more formidable but ships were not what was required in the bloodbath of the Western Front. Even a glance at the reports in that morning’s paper of Pershing’s tone and comments so far told Kingsley that the American general saw his current mission as one of dampening hopes rather than fulfilling them, and that the King need expect no glad tidings from the New World. Once more, and for the fourth time, the war would most definitely not be over by Christmas.

  Kingsley made his way along the Mall. As he did so, he found himself glancing backwards occasionally. He felt uneasy. He wondered whether he was being followed. If there was a man behind him, he was good at his job because Kingsley could detect nothing in the sparsely populated street to confirm his suspicions. He did not feel unduly worried. Cast adrift as he was with nothing left to lose, he was able to take a fatalistic view of whatever might be in store for him.

  As he approached the end of the Mall, Kingsley heard the sound of a crowd ahead of him, and passing under Admiralty Arch he saw that a demonstration was in progress in Trafalgar Square. Having a little time to kill, he crossed over the road and strolled up past Nelson’s column to investigate. Above a speaking platform on the steps of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, a banner announced ‘the National Labour and Socialist Convention’. A fierce old man with a long beard was congratulating the Russian people on the overthrow of the Tsar.

  ‘The Russian worker has seized the day!’ he shouted hoarsely through the great coned megaphone he held in his hand. ‘He has seized the day!’

  The crowd was pretty evenly divided between those who supported the rally and those who did not. A couple of soldiers on a spree called from the back for the old fellow to bugger off to Russia if he didn’t like good old England or, better still, go to Germany where they knew what to do with traitors. There was some cheering at this, to which one or two serious-looking fellows shouted back that in a Socialist utopia it wouldn’t matter where you lived because everywhere would be equally blessed.

  Kingsley felt a tap on his shoulder. It was a surprise, for he had not felt anybody so close behind him. His body tensed as he turned, ready for whatever might appear. However, he found himself confronted by nothing more dangerous than a fresh-faced schoolgirl, her hair in long plaits. She wore the sailor uniform made so popular by the former Tsar’s beautiful young daughters.

  ‘My father is fighting the Hun,’ she said. ‘Take this.’

  The girl held out to him the familiar white feather.

  ‘I hope no harm befalls him,’ Kingsley replied, letting the feather fall to the ground between them.

  ‘Hope’s no good,’ said the girl. ‘You should get out there and jolly well help him.’

  ‘Young lady, until this madness is finished hope is all we have. ‘You’re a rotten coward!’ the girl snapped. ‘If I was a man I should knock you down.’

  ‘Goodbye, young lady.’

  Kingsley turned away and the girl stamped off, in search of other recipients for her feathers. Up on the platform the writer and philosopher Bertrand Russell was being introduced.

  He took up the loudhailer to speak with admiration of the ‘thousand pacifists who languish currently in prison. Clifford Alan! Stephen Hobhouse! Corder Catchpool, and Douglas Kingsley, of whose sad death we learned yesterday!’ This brought cheers from
the rally’s supporters. Kingsley was shocked to hear his own name, and beset with the most curious sensation of attending his own funeral. ‘Brave men all, not cowards!’ Russell shouted.

  ‘Bloody cowards!’ the Tommies shouted back, and although it was only mid-morning Kingsley suspected that they had been drinking.

  ‘No!’ shouted Russell. ‘Heroes! By their refusal of military service, conscientious objectors have shown that it is possible for the individual to stand against the whole power of the state. This is a great discovery! It enhances the dignity of man!’

  At this point Bertrand Russell’s own dignity was seriously assaulted as a rotten cabbage knocked his hat off. One or two scuffles broke out and the handful of special constables present looked nervous. Kingsley decided the time had come to leave; if the real police were to turn up it was just possible he might be recognized by an ex-colleague. Unlikely with his beard, glasses and shabby clothes, but possible.

  Kingsley drifted away and, having still a little time to kill, went to order coffee and a fruit scone with margarine in a Lyons Corner House at the west end of the Strand. The girl who served him reminded him of Violet, the waitress from the Folkestone hotel whom he had saved from Shannon. Young, pretty and forced to grow up fast in a world that was changing beyond all recognition. Kingsley hoped that Violet had not been too deeply upset by her experience. Shannon’s tone, or what Kingsley had heard of it as he had hurried forward across the sand, had been fearful in its violence and cold contempt. Kingsley imagined that a young girl would find such a voice difficult to expel from her nightmares.

  If ever a man had been corrupted by the horrors of this terrible war, it was Captain Shannon. He appeared to believe that what he had endured gave him the right to visit pain upon others. For men like Shannon, humanity was no longer worthy of respect; the war had taught them that weakness was contemptible and only strength mattered. Kingsley imagined that there might be quite a few like Shannon left knocking about Europe when the war was finally done with.

  He glanced at his watch: the time had come to make his way to his meeting. He drained his coffee and left the café to search for the address he had been given.

  He passed Downing Street, where a single policeman stood guard outside the most famous door in Britain. Glancing towards the house, Kingsley imagined Lloyd George inside with the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of the General Staff, all wearily facing another day in their so far fruitless search for a way out of the deadlock in which Europe was mired.

  Just then Winston Churchill, the new Minister of Munitions, bustled past him, deep in conversation with Admiral Jellicoe. They were no doubt on their way to see the PM and were most animated in their talk, Churchill gesticulating fulsomely as he spoke. Kingsley knew, as all the country knew, that Churchill had just returned from months of active service in France. Having found himself out of office after the Dardanelles debacle, he had elected to go into the trenches. He seemed, however, to have got over his fall from grace and thrown himself back into public affairs with his usual energy. Kingsley was always surprised at how openly British government continued to be conducted, with generals and ministers wandering freely around Westminster and even the Prime Minister, on fine days, walking to the House of Commons. Considering that the war had begun with an assassination, Kingsley’s policeman’s instincts could not help but question the wisdom of this casual attitude to the safety of great men. On the other hand, it was certainly an attractive feature of an open society.

  When he had walked another quarter-mile down to the shabby end of Whitehall, Kingsley’s search took him into a small mews that still seemed to carry the faint smell of the horses who had vacated it a decade or so before. Here he was to meet Sir Mansfield Cumming, head of the foreign section of the Department of Military Intelligence, known as MI1c.

  As he turned into the mews he noticed Shannon leaning languidly against a railing, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Good morning, Inspector, ‘ Shannon said, managing even in so few innocent words to give an impression of amused superiority.

  ‘Good morning, Captain. Rape anybody last night?’

  ‘Oh, come now, Kingsley. Do let’s not harp on little Violet, eh?

  Most girls are delighted to make my acquaintance. Perhaps even Violet might have come round to it in the end if you’d given me the chance to knock the cobwebs off her. They like it rough, you know, these girls, although they always say they don’t.’

  Kingsley stared at Shannon for a moment but he did not comment further, walking past him into the mews.

  ‘You dropped this, by the way,’ Shannon said. He held out a white feather. ‘I promised that little girl I’d see you got it.’

  Still Kingsley did not reply, but he was forced inwardly to acknowledge that Shannon must be an expert tail for he had been unable to catch sight of him.

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve been with you since you paid for your kippers,’ he sneered. ‘Anyways, I’ve already been in and told the boss you’re coming so I’ll leave you to it,’ and with that Shannon strolled back out into Whitehall, while Kingsley approached the door of the little ex-stable to which he had been directed.

  THIRTY-TWO

  At the heart of the SIS

  The building was extremely shabby, which did not surprise Kingsley overmuch; long experience had taught him how penny-pinching the British government could be when it came to the working conditions of its employees. The waiting room into which he was shown boasted one or two goodish pictures and the furniture, what there was of it, was either Georgian or excellent reproductions, but it was cramped, the carpet threadbare and the walls in need of new paper and paint. Kingsley was to discover that the whole department consisted of little more than the reception area in which he sat, Cumming’s office, a map room and a small library. That this should represent the heart of the British Empire’s overseas intelligence and espionage network surprised even Kingsley, a man well versed in the often amateurish, public-school manner in which the affairs of a great nation were conducted. It was so ridiculously inadequate to the needs of the modern world, Kingsley half expected a bookcase suddenly to slide back and reveal a stairway leading to a vast subterranean nerve centre bustling with telegraph operators, code-breakers and photographic laboratories.

  ‘Yes, we don’t put on much of a show, do we?’ said Sir Mansfield, when Kingsley was ushered into his office. ‘Budget, you see. Always budget. I swear if I want to feed a carrier pigeon I must first draw up a special seed requisition order, in triplicate, copy it to the War Office and the Foreign Office and then await authorization from both! By which time of course the poor bird has died from hunger.’

  Kingsley nodded sympathetically but said nothing. His host was a man of whom he had heard much during his time with Special Branch but about whom he knew little of any substance. He imagined Sir Mansfield took trouble to keep things that way. The foreign intelligence supremo was, Kingsley judged, in latish middle age but still looked very active. His grey hair was cut short and he was clean-shaven. He wore naval uniform and sported a monocle, which gave him a slightly flippant appearance. Kingsley felt quite certain there was little else that could be considered flippant about Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming.

  ‘The Cabinet doesn’t like spies, you see,’ Cumming went on. ‘The Civil Service like us even less. Don’t think it’s the done thing, think it’s something that foreigners get up to, which is of course precisely the point. They do. Which is why we have to. Do you know, I’m supposed to run an overseas intelligence operation and yet our own bloody ambassadors won’t have us in their embassies! They don’t think it’s British to spy on your host. Where else are we to stay? Can’t afford hotels, not on our allocation. Need whatever we’ve got to bribe the locals. Anyway, enough of that, not your problem, eh? Expect you had similar constraints at Scotland Yard. No bore like a budget bore, eh? Tea?’

  Kingsley accepted the offer and was only slightly surprised when Cumming went to a little gas ring set up in the corner of th
e office and started to make the tea himself.

  ‘They would give me a girl, I suppose, but I’ve neither the time nor the resources to vet one. It’d be a poor lookout if my tea lady turned out to be a Boche Brünnhilde who sneaked all our secrets back to Germany in hollowed-out biscuits, wouldn’t it? Less trouble to make the tea myself. Condensed milk all right?’

  ‘That would be fine. Thank you.’

  Cumming opened a can using a little multi-tooled scouting knife which he produced from his pocket.

  ‘No sugar, I’m afraid, but this stuff’s tooth-rottingly sweet anyway…I’ve got Camp coffee if you’d prefer it?’

  ‘No, thank you. Tea is fine.’

  ‘I rather like Camp — only the British could have invented it. Tried it on Marshal Foch’s liaison chap last week, the fellow thought I was trying to poison him! Of course coffee’s a positive fetish for the French, which isn’t healthy in my view. Took me ages to explain that we British simply do not set the same store by the stuff. Tea’s the thing, eh?’

  Kingsley was in fact one of those Englishmen who did take his coffee seriously, roasting and grinding his own beans, which he bought wholesale from an Italian café owner in Wardour Street. But that had been in another life and he had not come to Whitehall to discuss refreshments.

  ‘Tea is fine,’ he repeated.

  ‘Good. Excellent.’ Sir Mansfield carefully warmed the pot, emptying the spent water into a dead aspidistra. ‘First and foremost I must apologize for the unorthodox manner in which you have been brought to us — although from what I hear it’s lucky we did get you out. Apparently you had been beaten almost to death?’

  ‘Things are never going to be comfortable for a policeman in prison.’ Kingsley shrugged, not wishing to appear in any way in the debt of people who might have saved his life but who had done so by abducting him and certainly not as a favour. ‘Why have I been brought to you?’

  ‘Ah-ha. The rub…Well, no doubt Captain Shannon has explained that it has to do with the death of Viscount Abercrombie.’