On that same Monday, 7 December, Edward VIII confirmed to his brother Albert that he was surrendering the throne. The prime minister, meanwhile, told the House of Commons that he had nothing new to say on the matter. Winston Churchill made an ill-judged attempt to plead once more on the King’s behalf but was shouted down and took his seat utterly humiliated.
The following day, Baldwin bade farewell to the King for the last time. Edward’s mood was lighter and more positive than it had been for some time. In a private moment with his prime minister, he said, ‘I know that you and Mrs Baldwin don’t approve of my action. It is the view of another generation. My generation doesn’t feel that way.’
As he took his leave of his sovereign, Baldwin simply said, ‘Well, sir, I hope that whatever happens, you will be happy.’
Two days later, on Thursday 10 December, at ten o’clock in the morning, Edward signed the Instrument of Abdication. His reign had lasted three hundred and twenty-five days. As the next in line, Albert immediately became King, taking the name George VI.
Later that day, five hundred Blackshirts from the British Union of Fascists protested angrily outside Buckingham Palace. They gave the Nazi salute and demanded that Edward stay on as king. The following day, their leader Oswald Mosley demanded the people of Britain be allowed to decide on who should be monarch by plebiscite. He was ignored.
AFTERMATH
CHAPTER 42
Ten days later, Eaton took Wilde to lunch at his club where they had Dover sole and a good Pouilly Fuissé. ‘You look like a war hero, old boy,’ Eaton said, indicating the bandage around Wilde’s head.
‘I don’t feel like one. Look, Eaton, I think you owe me answers.’
‘Fire away.’
‘You’ve seen the North Sea list, haven’t you?’
Eaton nodded his head slowly.
‘So how did you get it?’
Eaton laughed. ‘Ever been fishing?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘Well, I’ve done a great deal of freshwater fishing and I’ve learned one thing above all others. To catch a pike, you’ve got to think like a pike. So I joined the Anglo-German Fellowship and got as close as I could to Slievedonard. Made myself useful to him.’
Wilde did not mention that he already knew of Eaton’s membership from Jim Vanderberg.
‘A lot of the members of the fellowship simply have a penchant for bratwurst, Wagner, foaming steins of beer and young men in lederhosen. But there are those within the organisation who have darker ideas . . .’
‘And they were the ones recruited for North Sea? You infiltrated them.’
Eaton laughed again. ‘I suggested to Lord Slievedonard that he might like to invite me. Peter Slievedonard was never much of a Nazi. A lot of Jewish gold-dealers are being forced out of Germany. Slievedonard has been buying up their businesses for a song. And if he’s anti-Jew, it’s no big thing in his mind, simply a way of making money. I made him a simple deal – work with me or I’ll bring you down.’
Wilde’s hands were gripped into tight balls. ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?’
‘I wanted to see what you could find on your own. Anyway, it’s my business to discover secrets, not reveal them.’
Wilde lowered his voice. ‘And Sawyer? Why am I not in jail? I killed him.’
‘Self-defence,’ said Eaton. ‘His own knife, I believe. Anyway, that’s all for the birds. Play your part and there will be no charges. I think we’ll say he was lost at sea, something of that ilk.’
‘Play my part?’
‘You don’t say a word about this. To anyone. It dies with you.’
‘Why would you want this kept a secret?’
‘Come on, Wilde, you’re not naive. We don’t want a civil war, that’s why. Hereward’s a former Cambridge master and a former MP. There are others. Think of the North Sea list . . . this is the ruling class we are talking about.’
‘So they’re above the law?’
Eaton sighed. ‘The realm is already shaky. Just think of the new King and his brother – do you imagine it would be healthy to pitch brother against brother? You’re a bloody historian, Tom – it would be like the damned Wars of the Roses all over again.’
‘You English haven’t really moved on much from the Middle Ages, have you?’
‘The world hasn’t, Wilde. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco – they’re medieval warlords.’
‘Don’t forget Stalin.’
‘You can include him if you like.’
‘What precisely was the significance of the list?’
‘I’ve a pretty sound idea. With Baldwin and the Duke of York dead, Slievedonard would have received a telephone call ordering him to go to Fort Belvedere to tell his chum the King that he had to declare a state of emergency and appoint a new prime minister – probably Mosley or Londonderry. Perhaps Edward would have taken the reins of power himself; it’s certainly an idea that has been mooted in some corners. Anyway, the abdication would have been called off, Stalin would have been blamed and the men on the North Sea list would have sealed the coup by securing parliament, the courts and the armed forces. Germany would have kept her best friend on the throne. Perhaps a mutual defence alliance might have followed.’
‘You have proof of this?’
‘Do you have a better theory? Everything – the murders of General Carr and the Langleys, perhaps Nancy too – was about building a tale of Bolshevik terror so that when the big event happened, the killing of the prime minister and the heir, no one would be in any doubt that Stalin was behind it. Stalin might be guilty of many things, but in this instance his hands are entirely clean. This has Hitler’s fingerprints all over it.’
‘So what will happen to those on the North Sea list?’
‘Well, apart from Hereward, they are guilty of nothing. That list is proof of nothing. In Germany, appearing on such a list would be enough for a one-way trip to Dachau, but in England there is no case to answer. Slievedonard would never have carried out his orders anyway – if the call had come through, he’d have been straight onto my man Carstairs at the ministry.’
‘So that’s it. A band of would-be traitors walks free.’
Eaton smiled. ‘Not exactly. They have all been talked to.’
‘Ticked off by the headmaster? And who gave them this telling-off? You?’
‘In some cases. Others too far above my pay grade are receiving friendly summonses from their superiors. In the next few days and weeks some notable men will quietly retire from public service. Parliamentary seats will become vacant, judges will decide they prefer golf to the bench, senior civil servants will go on that transatlantic cruise they have been considering for years, officers will resign their commissions, policemen will retire to their gardens.’
‘Policemen? Bower. Was his name on the list?’
‘No. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t have links to North Sea.’
‘Can I see the list?’
‘No,’ said Eaton shortly.
Wilde thought back to the death and mayhem that night at Royal Lodge. So a nearly successful coup was to be buried beneath a mound of silence. How very British.
There were still questions he wanted answers to. ‘Were those soldiers I followed through the night really White Russians?’
‘Oh, they were Russian, all right. Recruited from the emigrés in Paris. Their leader was a man called Vladimir Rybakov.’
‘How can you know that? I assume they didn’t carry identity cards or passports.’
Eaton lowered his voice. ‘One of them survived. A man named Ivan Chernuk. Says he wants to stay here and fight against the Nazis. We could put him in prison, but, well, we have other plans for him. He’s going back to Paris to keep an eye on the Russian exiles.’
As the meal ended and they were enjoying a glass of Château d’Yquem, Wilde’s eye was caught by two new arrivals being shown to a table. ‘Do you see who that is?’
Sir Norman Hereward and Lord Slievedonard did not look in their direction, bu
t Wilde knew they had spotted them.
‘Perhaps I should wander over and tell Hereward how much assistance his old friend Slievedonard has been giving me,’ Eaton said. ‘That might put the dampers on their meal.’
‘Hereward should be in jail. Or the Tower. It stinks.’
Eaton smiled. ‘Sir Norman has been persuaded that his future lies in foreign fields. Frankly, I don’t care if he drinks himself to death in the gutter. Meanwhile, Baldwin has what he wanted – Edward VIII gone and his biddable brother on the throne. All the prime minister desires now is a period of calm to settle the nation’s nerves. An image of national unity. So no trials, no newspaper stories . . .’
‘What of Kholtov? Where is he and the gold now?’
‘Classified, I’m afraid.’
‘He gave you Hereward’s name, didn’t he?’
Eaton frowned. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘He told me. You see what interests me is this: if you wanted to infiltrate Hereward’s world, why didn’t you use his daughter? You knew enough about her – the trip to Berlin for instance – so why didn’t you introduce yourself to her?’
Their eyes met, searching. This, thought Wilde, was the man Kholtov had said was the devil.
‘I didn’t need to,’ Eaton said with an easy smile. ‘Slievedonard was easily turned.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Come on, Wilde, drink up. Some of us have work to do.’
*
A little way along Pall Mall, in another gentlemen’s club, three friends in their mid-forties sat in their habitual armchairs beside the high windows, looking out over a bleak, grey day.
‘These modern men, they don’t get it,’ the Foreign Office mandarin said. ‘How can anyone in England complain about Signor Mussolini’s ambitions in Albania or Abyssinia when we have already colonised a quarter of the globe? Italy looks at us and of course she’s going to want a little empire. Same with Germany. If Adolf gazes covetously at the Sudetenland and Poland as potential colonies, are we really in a position to condemn him when we have our own?’
‘Damn shame about Sawyer,’ the general said. ‘I served with him in Mesopotamia.’
The landowner poured port from a decanter for all three of them. ‘All is not lost. We can still forge a peace with Germany. Chamberlain will be in Number Ten soon and he won’t want war. I think he’ll get his way.’
‘One can only hope.’ The civil servant sipped his port.
‘Since when was hoping enough?’ The general growled. ‘We’ll have to make sure of it, won’t we?’
*
Later, in his cab back to King’s Cross station, Wilde thought of the long lunch and their parting. As they stepped out into the bustle of Pall Mall, Eaton had said, ‘I hope I’ve answered most of your questions. There are things I shouldn’t tell you, old boy. And things I can’t tell you. You’ll have to be content with that, I’m afraid.’
Wilde had nodded, but he was far from content. And there was still one overriding question. The one that had first drawn him into this web of death. Who had killed Nancy Hereward?
*
At the start of Lent term, a memorial service was held for Eugene Felsted and Roger Maxwell in the ancient college chapel. The place was full, of course, and the choir’s singing touched the soul. Light streamed in through the high, south-facing stained-glass windows. There were tears and a fine tribute from the master of the college. He spoke with regret of lives cut brutally short, of the need to bring their killers to justice. It was widely supposed that the young men’s murders were linked somehow to the deaths of Mr and Mrs Langley and General Carr, but these also remained unsolved. The trail had gone cold. ‘We must believe that justice will prevail. The killers, whoever they are, will face judgement in this world or the next.’
He spoke, too, about another loss the college had recently suffered: Dr Duncan Sawyer, killed in a tragic yachting accident. A man of fine qualities, he would be sorely missed by all who knew him.
Afterwards, the fellows and guests proceeded to the Combination Room. On this sombre day it was a place of unusual abstinence. Wilde was there to pay his respects to Maxwell and Felsted. He thought of the terror of their last disbelieving moments. And he thought about Sawyer, about the way the blood had spurted from his throat, and the way it had drenched his face and hands and clothes.
Outside, the bells of the town chimed the hour. In the dark-panelled room, dimly lit by yellow electric light, they were muted, a distant accompaniment to the murmuring voices and grave faces of the fellows in their gowns, and their guests, as they sipped their modest glasses of sherry.
The parents of both Felsted and Maxwell were standing together, beside the table, stiff and awkward, grief lines etched into their faces. Wilde introduced himself. Their eyes, inevitably, went to the scar gouged in the side of his head. They knew who he was and what had happened from the police reports and the inquest.
‘They were fine young men,’ he said. ‘Their deaths are not only a tragic loss to you, but to the college, to Great Britain and to the wider world. I am sure they would both have done great things. They will certainly be remembered with fondness and admiration by all who knew them at Cambridge.’
They thanked him, inquired after his own health and said their sons had both spoken highly of him in their letters home. Then they asked him whether he had any theories to offer about their sons’ murders.
Wilde bowed his head. What could he say to these good people? He cleared his throat. ‘Clearly the man Braithwaite was involved in some way, but your sons and I were attacked by two men after Braithwaite’s death. Who they were or what they were trying to do is yet to be discovered. I rather think we were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
Like every family in the country, the Maxwells and the Felsteds had suffered enough in the war to understand the fickle nature of life and death. There was nothing to be done but endure and carry on. Wilde shook their hands and moved away.
Horace Dill sidled up to him.
He pointed at Wilde’s head. ‘It was that fucking Nazi Dorfen who shot you, wasn’t it?’
‘I didn’t see their faces, they were masked.’
‘What happened to him? Where did he go from here?’
Wilde shrugged.
‘Well, what was it all about, Tom? Those two poor boys, the general and the Langleys? What was going on?’
‘Keep your voice down, Horace. We’ll probably never know – except that the deaths were clearly all linked.’
‘It must have been Dorfen. He always was a dirty piece of work. His father was a pal of Hitler.’
‘Well, then, you know as much as I do, Horace.’
‘As for that weasel Braithwaite, I knew he was a bad ’un as soon as I saw him at Lydia’s place.’ Dill drew deeply on his fat cigar. ‘Ah,’ he said as he exhaled. ‘The pleasures of life. This is a Romeo Y Julieta, I’ll have you know, a gift from Comrade Stalin himself. Sent me a box of fifty of the things. Damned fine of him.’
‘For services rendered, I suppose, sending young men to their deaths on his behalf.’
‘Uncalled for, Wilde. I loved him like a son.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’ Wilde bowed his head. Word had recently arrived that John Cornford, the young Cambridge poet who had gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War, had been killed.
Dill perked up. ‘Not quite so fond of Duncan Sawyer, however. Nasty way to go, drowning. Damned foolish of him to go sailing in rough weather in the middle of winter.’ Dill raised an eyebrow. ‘Have they found his body yet?’
‘No,’ said Wilde. ‘And I doubt they ever will. Went down in the North Sea, somewhere east of Great Yarmouth.’
‘So it’s said. Well, he won’t be here to see the scholarship he fought so hard for come to pass. Perhaps now Slievedonard has agreed that his name doesn’t have to go on the fucking thing, they could call it the Duncan Sawyer Scholarship.’ Dill grinned slyly.
Wilde had been surprised by the way the vote was going; evidentl
y the bursar would get his way. ‘I thought you would be worried about the college accepting the fat capitalist’s money.’
Dill stabbed the butt of the smouldering cigar in the vague direction of Wilde’s face. ‘I wasn’t worried a bit. Not a buggering bit. I don’t happen to believe that money has a conscience. If they’re ill-gotten gains, then why not put them to virtuous use? Thc cleansing power of charity. Anyway, the college will have complete control over who benefits.’
The bell clanged to summon them to Hall.
‘Will you be joining us at High Table, Professor Wilde?’
‘You know, Professor Dill, tonight I think I will.’
‘Well, glory fucking be.’
*
Margot arrived home a week later. Hart had died heroically on a secret mission behind the lines in Spain, she had been told. The Führer had sent his condolences on the loss of a fine man and regretted he would not be available to meet Miss Langley personally. It was important, he had said, that she return to England, to be among her own people. Margot knew enough about the new Germany to realise that it was futile to try to argue.
‘Yes,’ Frau Dorfen had said. ‘Go home. There is nothing for you here.’
It was only at Croydon Aerodrome, where she was told the terrible truth about the murder of her parents, that she discovered there was nothing for her in England, either.
CHAPTER 43
Lent term wore on. Wilde was busy with lectures, with marking essays and with supervisions. He was making good progress with his biography of Sir Robert Cecil.
The winter chill had taken a firm hold. The countryside was coated with ice and snow and there was even skating on the Fens, just outside town. Wilde spent long hours in the college library and in his rooms, huddled over papers and books, the fire and his other needs tended throughout the day by Bobby, who kept the outside world at bay.
Early in February Wilde got a telephone call from Jim Vanderberg.
‘How you doing, old friend? Been worried about you.’
‘Trying to get back to some sort of normality, Jim.’
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