Death Order

by Jan Needle

  The parting had been a very painful one, for both of them. It was somehow as if they had found something, discovered something new, and decided, independently and tacitly, that it was important and would need to be examined, thought about, considered. As they had walked down the stairs, Jane had stopped, turned back to face him, looked up into his face.

  ‘I never meant anything like this to happen, ever,’ she said. ‘I felt so lonely, so mind-blastingly lonely, even with other men about the place. And now you’re fucking off. Oh Jesus, Bill.’

  He had sat down on a tread, taken her face in his hands, then put his arms around her neck. They had held each other silently for half a minute.

  ‘I’ll ring you up,’ he said. ‘I promise you. I don’t know how long this will take, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’ll ring you when I can. They’re not going to beat me, Jane.’

  ‘And then? And then? Your wife and child. I wish you’d never thought of me. I wish.’

  Earlier, before Veronica, they had avoided the subject, keeping the shadow of real life from darkening the edges of their night, although it had been there in both their minds. They had paid each other compliments, ridiculous but true, about how uniquely wonderful the sex had been, and was, and had both suffered thoughts, like flickers of black lightning, about the days ahead. But they had talked, when they had talked at all, of other things. She had mocked him for pretending that he knew anything of Rudolf Hess when he so patently did not, and he had almost replied that one’s mind was concentrated excellently when one was asked to murder somebody. He had not, though, he had drawn back from that, because of the other caverns in his mind it might unlock, the dragons that were doubting there, breathing fire to be free.

  ‘It’s a lovely mystery,’ she had said. ‘One ought to think about the poor old victim, I suppose, but it’s a terrific story. It’s not even true, you know, that he never claimed he wasn’t Rudolf Hess, he did, several times. When somebody at Nuremberg came into his cell and asked for Rudolf Hess, he said “there’s no one in this cell who has that name”, or somesuch. He also failed to recognize all Hess’s former friends and colleagues, said he had no memory of them, and if he was bluffing he was bloody brilliant. Hermann Goering asked him in the dock one day when he was going to tell the court his “great secret”, and he wouldn’t agree to see his wife and child – and Hess was crazy about the kid, wild about him – for well over twenty years.’

  ‘But he looked the same, presumably? I mean, even after twenty years, his wife and son would know?’

  ‘The boy was four when Hess flew off from Augsburg. Maybe three, I can’t recall. As for his wife … well, he was certainly very changed. Hess was a big, beefy man, but Prisoner Number Seven was skeletal. The Germans went in a lot for doubles, you know, even more than we did, in the war. One of Hess’s went to Hollywood and became a minor star. Victor Varconi. He played Hess in The Hitler Gang, you could hardly tell them apart. Churchill had them, and Montgomery. Come to think of it, Tommy Steele’s father was a Churchill stand-in, there’s a thought to conjure with! That would have kept the enemy guessing, if he’d spoken, wouldn’t it?’

  They had been in bed, drinking, communing, half making love. Wiley, grinding up the M6 at eighty-five, could see her body now, and groaned. Fuck Hess, fuck Ireland, fuck Tommy Steele, fuck everything.

  He had asked her why the cover-up, even if it had been a stand-in Hess, a doppelgänger, and Jane had outlined, with a certain glee, the Royalty connection. Most people in the know, she said, especially left-wing lunatics like Aunt Erica had been, favoured this one over all the other theories. It involved the so-called Peace Party, the aristos who thought war with Germany was a waste of time and money and that basically the Nazis weren’t far wrong, in aims if not in methods.

  ‘Lord Londonderry, for instance,’ she said. ‘He had secret contacts with SS officers in Ireland just before the flight. And the Duke of Buccleuch, who was put under house arrest just after it, for the rest of the war. The Duke of Westminster apparently held strange meetings in his London house, and Lord Halifax got kicked off to Washington as Ambassador, a strange fate for a Foreign Secretary, eh? Stranger still with Halifax, because he was Churchill’s rival to be PM when Chamberlain stepped down. And he was very thick with Montagu Norman, so the Hess freaks say. President of the Bank of England. The pair of them were reckoned to be plotting to call in Winston’s debts and bring him down, so Montagu was hated, too. Churchill was in tears when he thought they’d bankrupted him in the New York markets, so the story goes, but he got his revenge. He was a terrible spendthrift, Churchill, almost a wastrel. A South African millionaire financed him during the war, he “lent” him a small fortune. Deathly secret, totally irregular, he was a canny old lad.’

  ‘But is it true?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All of it. Any of it? I don’t know.’

  She’d grinned. She’d taken wine.

  ‘Me neither. Some of it, maybe. Churchill certainly hated them, he’d spent a long time being crushed and patronised in the Party. Maybe it suited him to call them fellow-travellers with Adolf and his thugs, it gave him power to humiliate. He called them in, and rapped their knuckles, and issued dire warnings. Toe the line or go to prison was what it boiled down to.’

  ‘And Royalty? You said the Royalty connection. This lot were just aristos.’

  ‘Well yes, it’s all inter-connected, this was Britain before the Fall. Hess worked through the Duke of Hamilton, and Hamilton was pally with the King. The fact that he was friends with Winston too may have been unfortunate, an end they couldn’t tidy up. Hess didn’t want to speak to Churchill though, if you remember, and one theory is that these dirty dukes and earls were going to band together and give the lad an ultimatum. He would step down, probably be replaced by Halifax, and the Peace Party would take charge in the Cabinet. Hitler would cease hostilities in Europe, and probably withdraw from France and the Low Countries. The Duke of Windsor – Edward the Eighth as was, until he abdicated – would be brought back from the Bahamas where we’d made him governor to keep him out of the way, and put back on the throne. With Mrs Simpson, the Yankee divorcee, as his queen!’

  Jane, naked and squeaking with laughter, rolled round the bed with Bill chasing her, demanding sense and explanations. It sounded mad to him, fantastic. Jane drank wine, large mouthfuls, and he licked the spillage off her chin and breast.

  ‘Fantastic, yes,’ she said. ‘But not half as crazy as it sounds. In fact, it may be true. Queen Wallis, though! Can you imagine it! She and Windsor were as thick as thieves with Hitler’s lot, that’s on record. They’d had dinner with the Hesses at least once, and Edward was quite prepared to give the Nazi salute in public. Wallis probably spied for Germany from the Bahamas throughout the war, and she’d apparently once been made pregnant by Mussolini’s right-hand man, Count Ciano. As well as screwing Ribbentrop! She was an awful old tart, by all accounts.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Bill. ‘This wasn’t in the history books I read! I’d’ve got straight As!’

  ‘Precisely. It isn’t in the history books at all, you’ve got to ferret for it. I told you, this isn’t my era, I can’t vouch for it, it’s crumbs from Uncle Edward’s table. But a lot of it makes sense. Let’s face it, there was nobody in Britain who stood to gain financially from the war, and that’s a powerful argument for a peace plot. By 1941 it was bankrupting us. It was bankrupting Hitler, too, and he had Russia looming over him. What better idea than for the English robber barons to link up with the industrial princes of Germany, and turn our joint attentions east? Russia was the real enemy, everybody always knew it. Together we could smash them into pieces. Capitalism versus the Reds! No contest. Churchill wouldn’t play. The British Bulldog stands alone. We’ll fight them on the beaches, and so on.’

  She lay back, as if exhausted, Bill’s fingers tangled in damp fronds of pubic hair. Neither spoke for several seconds.

  ‘It’s a point of view,’ she said.
‘It’s possible. The Royal archives on the subject are locked solid, no one’s saying anything. The Foreign Office files on Hess are closed until 2017, and most of them have been got at anyway, we know that for a fact. Hess might know, but if he does he’s never said so, or it’s never come to light. A few old men might, ditto, Uncle Edward to name but one of them. But honours or no honours, they’re keeping schtumm, lips sealed. Soon they’ll all be dead.’

  Bill stirred. For the old man in the prison it would be very soon. Someone had decided. And someone had to do it. Why?

  The fish dock at Whitehaven was busy when he walked down from the town. He had parked the BMW in a side street, a street of dark and sleeping houses, as close as possible to three or four other expensive-looking cars. There was nothing that could link his name with it, and he would ring Colin later to tell him what was going on. Colin’s cars often went missing for days, abandoned by the feckless rich ruled by the Iron Whim, so Bill did not think he would mind much. He’d probably be more upset by the night of mystery phone calls, and the thought that Bill and Jane had presumably been screwing once again. Never mind.

  The quayside was a mass of fishermen, dealers, lorries. Bill stood in the background for a while, until he had isolated his targets. There were five boats from Ireland in, two of them from Portavogie. They often made the trip across if conditions suited them, to get a better price in England than in Ulster. Bill knew Portavogie well, he had had dealings there. It was a stronghold of black Protestantism, clinging to the bitter coast. He climbed on board a boat and found the skipper, showing him the Browning automatic and mentioning some names. Fifty pounds on top of that, and he had his trip. Even patriotism had its price.

  By midday, Wiley was on the quay at Portavogie. He moved fast, up into the tiny town, and out at an angle along a track. From there he cut across some fields to approach a farmhouse, a low, modern bungalow in the Ulster style. Twenty minutes after that, having drunk a cup of tea and eaten bread and cheese, he was on his way in a borrowed car, heading west. Outside Derry, at another farm, he would drop the car and disappear. An uncle, or a cousin, or ‘your man’ would bring it back to Portavogie, silence guaranteed.

  The weather, as he had driven up the coast of Cumbria in the rising sun, had been wonderful. Even given his exhaustion, the wine he’d drunk, the constant thoughts and worries chasing round his head, the Lakeland fells and estuaries, the sparkling, wakening sea, had soothed him. The sea trip had been quiet and unruffled, and he had dozed alongside the black-haired, silent skipper at the wheel. Now, in Northern Ireland, the sky was darkening, with a threat of rain in the west, as there so often was. Bill Wiley, with the philosophical tendency of the exhausted, wondered why anybody fought for it. It was a blasted country, full of pain and bigotry. Even the green beauty of the land beside his road was spoiled. He passed big houses, shrouded in the trees, with stone eagles on the gate-posts and flagpoles at their corners, flying the Union Flag, defiant, medieval, pathological. On the smaller, meaner farms he imagined young bitter men, their minds twisted in the opposite direction, stowing Semtex in milk churns for burial, oiling AK47s and RPGs, their hearts wedded to eight hundred years of tragedy, their brains prepared to face eight hundred more. He had had enough of Ireland, he had had a stomachful. He would take his son away.

  And his wife?

  He used a public telephone quite near the border, and crossed into Donegal on foot. That was easy, although he knew that people on the mainland imagined miles of barbed wire with machine-gun towers and checkpoints, as in films of central Europe. Veronica had answered on the first ring, and they had made their rendezvous for half an hour, outside a ruined roadhouse they both knew, a mile inside. His new leather shoes were pinching him, possibly not designed for actual walking, but his spirits were high. He wanted to see John again, and he was going to.

  What did he expect? Johnnie to spring out of the Polo, a glad cry in his throat, a smile splitting his face? Probably he did, but sanity returned as the small yellow car drew into the overgrown parking area in front of the ruin. Bill saw his son through the windscreen, and he was crying. Veronica’s face was pale, also, pale and strained, with dark patches underneath her eyes. She pulled round in an arc beside him, so that the passenger door was next to him, but she did not get out or stop the engine. John, in the back seat, twisted his body away, hunched himself into the seat-back. Bill, the smile dead on his lips, opened the door.

  ‘Verr,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to say. Thanks.’

  She did not answer, but shoved the gear-stick into bottom as he got in, and moved off. There was a broken bottle on the ground and she had to stop, reverse, to avoid it. Her face was dark.

  ‘Johnnie,’ said Bill. He tried to reach his son but the boy squirmed away from him, his face hidden. The car bumped back onto the road, with Wiley half across the seat, almost grabbing.

  Veronica said testily: ‘I’m trying to drive this car. What about your seat-belt? For Christ’s sake, Bill. How did you suppose he’d be?’

  ‘John,’ said Bill. ‘Johnnie. Everything’ll be all right, I promise you. John. Look at me.’

  The knotted body grew tighter, and Bill forced himself to sit back properly. He put his belt on, glanced at Veronica.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It must have been appalling. For you as well. How’s Liz?’

  She hissed at him, furious.

  ‘Shut your mouth, why don’t you? Have you no sense? No sense at all?’

  They drove fast along the main road, then down twisting lanes that finally turned to tracks. The sky was darkening when they saw the sea, not from evening, but from cloud. The sea looked forbidding, but still sun-dappled, beautiful, with Atlantic rollers crashing onto the strand. Bill remembered his nightmare on the train, and shivered. He had his hand on Johnnie now, and Johnnie no longer twisted himself away, although his face was hidden still. When they reached Veronica’s house, a tiny limewash cottage beside a copse of trees, she switched off the engine and they sat, not talking. From over a grassy hummock they could hear the breakers, crashing on the sand. She got out and hauled her seat forward. John, after a moment, crawled after her, his eyes averted from his father’s. Bill climbed out, too. The wind was strong, with a raw edge to it.

  ‘John,’ he said. ‘Johnnie. Look at me, old lad. Please. Things will be all right.’

  For an instant, John raised his face. His eyes were black with hurt and misery.

  ‘We’ve left my mum,’ he said. ‘Why have we left my mum?’

  Next day, there were phone calls to be made, things to ascertain, bridges to be built. Veronica had told him, before driving back to Belfast, that she would check on Liz, see what the situation was around the house, ring him up. Bill had vetoed it, because of the security aspect. They might have already checked her car, the married quarters were under observation, however inefficient, and once they knew she was connected they would find out about her ‘secret’ seaside cottage, tap the phones, flush him out. He knew about these things, it was his bread and butter.

  ‘But what will you do, then? Without me, you’re completely isolated. What if they do something terrible to her?’

  They were in the kitchen, drinking tea, at eight o’clock at night. Johnnie, uncharacteristically, was sleeping on the sofa in front of the TV. Outside it was blowing hard, and raining.

  ‘Now we’ve spirited him away they’ll probably let her alone. They know enough about me to know they’ve lost their bait. If nothing else, she’ll have told them that.’

  Veronica lit a cigarette. She had been smoking almost constantly, he noticed. Bill did not smoke.

  ‘If nothing else,’ Veronica responded, ‘she’ll be on Valium for real, now. Morphine, anything. You don’t know what you’ve done, do you? You really are a selfish, heartless, shit.’

  ‘I do. You don’t know what’s going on, Verr, why all this has happened. I promise you I had to do it. For Liz’s good as well, in the long run.’

  She flicked ash, mo
rosely.

  ‘I should lose my temper, maybe. Ach, Bill, it’s an awful messy one. That poor wee boy has been excoriated. Can’t you tell me why?’

  ‘Not yet. Can you hang around tomorrow morning? I’ll ring you before twelve. I’ll use a public phone. I’ll go long walks with Johnnie, try to sort him out, poor little sod. Shit. These shoes.’

  She smiled, wanly.

  ‘Rubber boots of all sizes in the outhouse. David is the perfect host, and this is Ireland, where you go on holiday to get rusty. I’ll be in. Who’s this Jane?’

  ‘Like you told me on the phone. A crazy. Verr, go. It’s a long drive back.’

  They kissed, chastely, like old friends, and Veronica went. Bill covered his son up with a blanket, and got a sleeping bag out of a bedroom for himself. He lay down on the rug beside the boy and thought for many hours. Around midnight, Johnnie awoke, and cried in Bill’s arms. Then they went upstairs into a big, saggy double bed and slept until gone nine o’clock, like babies.

  Boswell, on the phone next morning, tried to keep him talking, to get the call traced. He said Liz was very ill, was in hospital, and would be going into a psychiatric ward. She had had a mental breakdown, and he should return immediately to her side. Bill said he was in England with his son, and that he must place his trust for Liz with doctors, and with honour. Boswell said unless the boy was given up, legal moves might have to be put in train, wardships of court and so on. Bill disbelieved him. Bill said he would not do the German job, under any circumstances, he had decided. Once Boswell had accepted that, he would resign.

  ‘And starve?’ snapped Boswell. ‘No job, wife in a lunatic asylum, on the run?’