Over and Out

by Michael Gilbert

  ‘Which makes it doubly important,’ said Luke, ‘to show that the Germans are responsible, equally with their own families, for supplying money to our would-be deserters.’

  ‘Agreed. So how do we do it?’

  ‘It’s no good asking me how, because I still don’t know. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking. Sometimes I find myself lying awake at night doing nothing else. I visualise the desertion route as a long thin line, straggling across the map. It starts on the outskirts of Béthune or Arras. I’m pretty sure of that. All the men on that list were from 42nd or 61st Division. And if you look at the district they occupied—the XIX Corps Area—where their camps were when they weren’t in action, you can see that these were the only two towns large enough to operate as leave centres and—more important—large enough for the sisterhood to perform in. They wouldn’t hang around in villages. From there the line goes north and hits the coast somewhere around Bray-Dunes—there are at least ten little fishing villages that would serve. And somewhere along that line the thugs of Der Zirkel, who are in the game solely for cash, meet them, collect the money they have brought with them and shepherd them across the line, knowing they can pick up an equal amount from the Germans for each deserter they deliver.’

  ‘An excellent summary,’ said Bernardin drily. ‘But bear in mind that the towns you have mentioned are both large places. Béthune has eight separate divisions and Arras, twelve. In other words your line could start from any one of, shall we say, twenty places, and terminate at any one of ten points on the coast. Which, by my mathematics, offers you two hundred different routes, all of which we could not possibly block, or watch. Not with the resources available to us.’

  ‘But if we could find precisely where the line started, we could reduce the routes to no more than half a dozen, which could be watched.’

  ‘Then let us lose no time in finding it. The last occasion on which I met your Colonel Fleming he looked as though the hounds of hell were on his track.’

  ‘No wonder,’ said Luke. ‘He collects regular rockets from Macdonogh. And Charteris, no doubt, is hanging about in the wings, telling everyone how much better Intelligence performed when he was in charge of things.’

  The following days were spent by Johnnie Hanover, who had recrossed the line using one of his private back doors, in visiting and encouraging the observation posts on the lines east and west of Hirson and others which he was trying to get remanned. Volunteers were hard to come by. Luke borrowed a bicycle and started to pedal around the battle-scarred area behind Ypres without finding anything to allay an increasing budget of worries. Tom Braham sat at his tidy desk in the École Militaire at Montreuil, studied maps and made a number of indecipherable notes.

  Joe Narrabone had disappeared.

  Chapter Eight

  The doomed assault across the marsh called Passchendaele was called off, at last, with a gain of four and a half miles of water-logged ground at a cost of 62,000 dead and 154,000 wounded. This was on 10 November. On the last day of the month, Tom received a fetter from Hickory.

  It thanked him for the photographs and said that accurate measurement which was now possible – particularly on the enlargements – had produced two points which they might find useful.

  When you write down a series of numbers – some of one digit, others of two, for example 7821, you will, subconsciously, crowd the 2 and the 1 more closely than the 7 and the 8. In other words what you are writing is 7-8-21, Bearing this in mind, the numbers you have submitted can now quite clearly be read as ten groups: 16-9-8-7-17-10-8-26-9-4. From this a further point follows. Since all the numbers are under 26 there is a strong presumption that we have here a simple type of number/letter transposition. It is difficult to be precise about a matter like that with a message of only ten groups. Could you not obtain a rather larger one?

  ‘Ungrateful bugger,’ said Luke. ‘We’re bloody lucky to have this one.’ ‘Read on,’ said Braham.

  If this assumption is correct, then clearly the next thing to do is to try out different possibilities, starting with a straightforward alphabet, A = 1, B = 2, C = 3 etc. Then you might reverse the alphabet, Z = 1, Y = 2 and so on. But since, as you will Find, the first produces a message reading PIHGQJHZID and the second KRSTJQSARW, it must be agreed that neither seem to suggest a name and address. There are, however, some simple variations which might turn out better. For instance, you could read the first half of the alphabet A-M forward, and the second half N-Z backwards, or vice versa. Certainly try out arrangements of this sort, but I must add a rider which will not, I hope, discourage you. It would be possible to adopt an absolutely arbitrary disposition of the letters and numbers. The letters A to Z would then be set out with numbers allotted to them haphazardly. The recipient would, of course, have his own copy of this arrangement and would be able to apply it to any message without difficulty. The drawback, from the point of view of a decoder, is that the possible permutations and combinations of twenty-six letters with twenty-six numbers must run into several million. I could calculate the exact number for you, but I do not imagine that it would assist you. I will let you have further thoughts as they occur to me.

  ‘Amazingly helpful,’ said Luke.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Braham. ‘It doesn’t give us the answer, but it does suggest a number of possible lines of approach. I must give some thought to it.’

  It was the sort of puzzle he enjoyed.

  ‘I hope you can see the black circles under my eyes,’ said Joe.

  ‘Not really,’ said Luke.

  ‘Then you’re not looking hard enough. If you did, you couldn’t help but see, printed on my youthful face, the signs of the long sleepless nights which I suffered uncomplaining seeing as how the work I was doing was so valuable to our cause.’

  ‘If you could bear to stop patting yourself on the back, just for a moment, maybe you could tell me what you’ve actually done.’

  ‘What I’ve been and done is what I told you I’d do. I’ve been cultivating a little girl called Minette. Or that’s her trade name. And she’d been turned down by the tarts’ trade union – laugh at this – because she was thought to be indiscreet. Which,’ added Joe with satisfaction, ‘she certainly was. Some of the things she told me about the Sisters of Care and Whatsit, and their habits in bed, would’ve made your hair curl, really it would.’

  Luke refrained from further interruption. He had known Joe for a very long time and was familiar with every nuance in his voice. He knew that he had got on to something useful.

  ‘All right, then. That list you showed me. Fourteen soldiers in it, wasn’t there? Well, it seems that six of them—that’s nearly half, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nearly,’ said Luke patiently.

  ‘Six of them had been what you might call intimate with the same girl. Now wasn’t that worth waiting for?’

  ‘It’s suggestive, certainly,’ said Luke.

  ‘Suggestive. It’s a clincher, innit?’

  ‘Who was the girl?’

  ‘Trade name, Marianne. To start with that was all I could get. You know how these girls hide their private lives away. They hire a room in some seedy hotel and use it for their operations. But that’s not where they live. No sir. Generally they’ve got a respectable little apartment in a respectable part of the town and their only visitor is the local clergyman. Howsomever, in this case, after a lot of careful work, I extracted her real name and after that it wasn’t too difficult. Marianne Klotz, 15 rue Ste-Cécile. That’s a turning off the rue des Archives.’

  Tom Braham, who had been sitting silent, moved in his chair. It seemed he was about to say something, but nothing came out.

  Luke who, for his own purposes, had recently been making a close study of the northern fringes of Arras and Béthune said, ‘Yes. I know it. It’s in the Pont des Dames suburb of Béthune, south east of the Étang de Saint-Pierre.’

  ‘Right. That’s the respectable half of her life. I thought I’d better keep well clear of it.’r />
  ‘Very wise,’ said Luke. ‘If that girl’s going to be any use to us—if she’s going to be watched and followed—it will have to be done quietly and cleverly.’

  ‘Cleverly’s right. Give her five minutes’ start and I guess she’d disappear into the undergrowth like a scared rabbit.’

  ‘Scared?’

  ‘Scared stiff. Of a pair of dirty great Belgian thugs who are meant to be protecting her which means that they collect half her hard-earned and do hick all to justify it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Luke. ‘The police are already interested in a man called Rudi Naroch and his unpleasant employees.’ He thought about the next step. It was an important decision, with well-balanced chances of triumph and tragedy. ‘I suppose I’ve got to pass this on to the colonel. He’s been going round lately like a dog kept on short rations. This will give him something to chew.’

  ‘If he’s all that short of biscuits, I could throw him another one.

  According to Minette, who keeps her pretty little ear close to the ground, Marianne’s latest steady is a British soldier, called Britain.’

  ‘Briton or Britten or Brittain?’

  ‘Search me. These girls don’t go in for spelling. What I can tell you, he’s a lance-sergeant in the Bedfords.’

  ‘That should make him easy enough to identify. OK, I’ll let the colonel have that as well.’

  When he thought about it, it occurred to him that it might be a matter of some delicacy – passing on to his senior officer the two nuggets of information that Joe had secured, but coupling with it a warning that he must use them with discretion. Would that not rank as impertinence?

  He put it to Tom Braham, who said, ‘I think you must pass it on. Tactfully. The colonel has got the machinery to deal with it, we haven’t. But what I can’t see, at the moment, is this. If he did decide to pull in Marianne, what’s he going to charge her with? Doing her job so well that she has a waiting list of half the British Army?’

  ‘Then you think it’s merely a coincidence that so many of the recent deserters happened to have been her clients?’

  ‘No. I don’t believe in coincidences like that. But even if you’re right, it’s still only a matter of suspicion. It doesn’t amount to a criminal charge.’

  Luke said, ‘I’ve got a feeling that the colonel’s reached a point where legality doesn’t count for a lot. What he wants is action, and blood. German blood.’

  ‘A dangerous frame of mind for a senior policeman,’ said Braham primly.

  Whilst Colonel Fleming was worrying about this problem, a new one surfaced which drove it, temporarily, out of his mind.

  This was the arrival of a high-level sponsored group, composed of Members of Parliament from both of the major parties, newspaper proprietors and prominent trades unionists. The instruction, which came from the prime minister himself, was that they were to be allowed to address organised meetings of soldiers, but were not to be allowed to conduct personal, off-the-record talks with individuals. The group, which had been carefully selected, was considered to be eighty per cent well disposed towards the military and the conduct of the war. The dissident twenty per cent would have to be handled with great care. Their opinions might not be palatable, but the TUC members were men of great and increasing influence.

  ‘So what are we expected to do,’ said his side kick, Inspector Routley, ‘wine them and dine them and kiss them on both cheeks?’

  The inspector was a member of the Intelligence Police. When the Intelligence Corps had been set up in 1914, this sub-corps had been attached to it, composed of members seconded from the British Special Branch; those with a grasp of European languages in particular.

  ‘If you enjoy kissing bearded weirdies,’ said Fleming, ‘by all means do so. What we shall have to arrange are one or two well-publicised meetings, open to all ranks. Meetings that can be discreetly overlooked and overheard; I’ve no doubt there are suitable places.’

  ‘The Co-operative Hall in Béthune would be best. It’s got one large meeting-room, and it wouldn’t be difficult to fix up an arrangement for our men to listen in without being spotted.’

  ‘Splendid. The last thing we want is for the trades unionists to complain that they were spied on by the army.’

  Routley said, ‘It’s the other bit that puzzles me, sir. We’re to keep an eye on these men’s movements outside the hall. Without appearing to do so. Operation impossible, I’d call it.’

  ‘We’ll have to do our best,’ said Fleming. He was beginning to get worried about Macdonogh’s reactions. Clearly, what the DMI wanted was something dramatic enough to appease the higher-ups. For the moment, all he could do was to keep an eye on the meetings and see what transpired.

  When, at the end of the visit, he submitted his report, Macdonogh found it so interesting that he had a number of copies made, one of which went to the foreign secretary, and through him to the head of the Secret Intelligence Service.

  The report opened by mentioning that it had only been possible to arrange this single meeting in the Co-operative Hall (‘owing to the sticky attitude of the army command who appear to be opposed to the whole idea’) and continued:

  Most of the speakers, in particular the Members of Parliament, had strung together a number of inoffensive platitudes whilst the journalists reproduced, almost verbatim, leading articles from their own papers. The audience barely troubled to listen. Many of them spent the time chatting with their friends whilst the politicians aired their stale views. When Trench got up to speak the difference was remarkable. The men stopped talking to each other, and leaned forward to concentrate on listening. It was clear that he was a man they could respect. He had been through the same mill as them, and knew what it was all about. We did not trouble to take down more than a brief summary of the preceding speakers, but in the case of Trench, since his hearers seemed so interested, we tried to get down his actual words. Fortunately he spoke slowly and deliberately enough for this to be done.

  ‘This war will only finish when we have defeated the Germans decisively. May that day arrive sooner rather than later. But when it does come, I must give you this warning. You will not find life easy. Far from it. The ensuing depression will be widespread. Businesses that have thrived on arms and equipment will fold up. Jobs will be scarce. So, using such influence as I may have as a member of the Metal Workers’ Union, and on their behalf, I have undertaken to fight for two things. That jobs will be shared out equally. And that demobilisation, when it comes, will be carried out sensibly, with the double objective of letting married men get back to their wives as quickly as possible, but also of seeing that long and faithful service, at the front, not at the rear, is properly rewarded. These are the aims to which we have pledged ourselves on your behalf.’

  When he sat down the applause nearly raised the roof.

  At the end of his report, Fleming wrote:

  Well aware that we had to be particularly careful not to harass left-wingers, but feeling that you must, after such evidence of his popularity, be interested in Trench and in any private conversation he might have, I organised a team of four men and two women, all experts in unobtrusive surveillance, to keep an eye on him. They reported to me daily during the week that the deputation was with us, and it was only on the Saturday, the last day of their visit, that Trench deviated in any way from the rest of the party. It seems that many of them had decided to do a little shopping before they went home, although, in view of the general shortages, it is difficult to see what they hoped to acquire. Trench went with them, and it was when the party was in Béthune, in the Grand Marché Universal in the rue de la Paix that they lost sight of him. The GMU, as you know, is a warren of a building, on several floors, and Trench might easily have slipped out of one of the side or back doors without being noticed, and without any intention of throwing off the watchers, if in fact he had noticed that he was under observation. He was back at the hotel with the rest of the party by six o’clock.

  Macdonogh was not
as happy about this as the writer of the report. He had penned a note in his copy of the report:

  The missing three hours could be important. Find out if anyone noticed where he went.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘And do you consider,’ said Colonel Fleming, ‘that this man Narrabone is reliable?’

  ‘That depends,’ said Luke, ‘on what you mean by reliable. If you mean does he attend closely to instructions from his superior officers, and behave in a routine manner over all aspects of procedure and discipline, then I would have to say no. He usually prefers to strike out on a line of his own.’

  ‘Even if he knows that the line is disapproved of by his superiors?’

  ‘If he knew that, I’m afraid it would only provoke him to further individual efforts. But, please bear in mind, I’ve known him for a great many years, and I’m pretty certain that he’d always play fair by me. And he’s not an amateur. He served for some years in the Metropolitan Police, and only lost his job when he lost his leg.’

  Fleming listened carefully to this. He said, ‘I was not questioning Narrabone’s loyalty, only his reliability. He has produced for us two lines that we can follow. Two most important lines. The woman Marianne Klotz and her latest boy-friend, Lance-Sergeant Britain, whom, incidentally, we have located. He’s in the Third Bedfords, in 61 Division. And you may be interested to know that he departed yesterday on a fortnight’s leave in England. These are our two most important lines—indeed almost our only lines. So you see how essential it is that we should be on sound ground in pursuing them.’

  ‘I do see that, sir, but have you not a third line in the soldier’s tunic which came to light recently? Braham has been following that up. It seems quite certain, now, that it once belonged to Lance-Corporal Mungeam. And it has arrived, somehow, into the hands of the so-called Sisters of Care and Sympathy. If we could get a definite line on which member of the sisterhood actually handed it over for sale, surely that would suffice for proceedings against the woman concerned?’