Death Order

by Jan Needle

  ‘Are you bugged?’

  ‘I expect so. They’ve been round. David’s on the point of divorcing me. Every cloud, et cetera.’

  ‘Still have to ring off, just in case. Thanks, Verr. And keep on looking, I’ll ring again.’

  They went to another phone box, five miles away. Bill was thinking hard, biting his lip. He could think of no alternative to his next call. He got straight through.

  To Silversmith.

  ‘It’s Wiley,’ he said. ‘And I won’t be on for long enough to trace the call. What have you done to my fucking family?’

  ‘Bill,’ said Silversmith. ‘I’ve been expecting you. Look, cut to the chase. Your wife’s not well. She’s in a psychiatric ward, she needs you. If she goes too far along this road, they’ll throw away the key, they’ll be forced to. Come back, Bill.’

  ‘No,’ said Bill. ‘I don’t believe you. I’m not doing the job, I’m not coming back. Let her out, think what you’re doing to yourself. You ought to be ashamed.’

  ‘Good lord. What a weird argument. Good heavens. Bill?’

  He did not reply. He was sweating.

  ‘Bill, you’re going to lose him legally, if you’re not quick. Your lovely little Johnnie. He’ll be made a ward of court. He’ll get taken into care, fostered, sole custody to a stranger. Liz could get worse, Bill. Easily. She needs you. Afterwards you can resign, Bill. Honest Injun, you can resign. We’re reasonable men, you know that. But a principle’s a principle. There won’t be any exploding cars, Bill, not like in a TV series, not for you. You can retire to a country cottage. In Donegal, say. And think about things. Honour. Patriotism. Duty. Service. But first, you’re going to do it.’

  Afterwards, in the car, Jane marked his face and did not speak. But after they had driven for more than twenty minutes, she said: ‘How is she? Did you find out?’

  He replied, through waxen lips: ‘She’s fine.’

  Three

  In the evenings, when John had gone to bed with his cassette player and his story tapes, the adults would sit down to a meal and talk of Rudolf Hess. Erica, although not strong or mobile, liked to do the cooking, and there was a good butcher in Alston, three miles away, so they ate well. Edward, who did not flaunt his affectations as he had at Oxford, still liked to make a production of the wine, which was very good. He had cracked, he told Bill, and become a clubbable man, as the war had progressed. White’s, Pratt’s, Reform, even the new Carlton in Pall Mall. He had wanted to survive, he said, as the greyness of austerity crushed down on London. Money could not buy everything on the open market, but there was still privilege.

  Erica worked her mouth. The cleanness of the air at Garrigill eased the pain, as did the summer’s warmth. But she had to struggle to make quick rejoinders. Bill and Johnnie had become used to waiting.

  ‘Black market,’ she said. ‘Not open market. You could buy nothing on the open market, but the clubs didn’t go short. Edward had steaks and claret, Edward did. The stuffed shirts in the Cabinet didn’t eat snoek! The siren suit was noticeably well filled.’

  ‘I take it you didn’t join as well?’ said Jane.

  ‘Men only, dear, men only. Not that I’d have been seen dead.’

  Bill often wondered, during these conversations, if Edward and Erica did it deliberately, rehearsed things like a double-act. Reform Club to dead in one smooth movement. Edward’s eyes were twinkling at him now, as if he expected him to follow up the link. For earlier in the tale, the Reform Club and its basement had been a sticking point, a landmark beyond which Edward could or would not easily go. There was something vital there, that needed teasing out.

  Bill had realized many days ago that Edward’s presentation of himself as a poseur was itself a pose. In Oxford, he had carried himself as a rake, the powder blue scarf draped across his shoulders even at the dinner table, the exaggerated delicacy of his movements.

  But in Cumbria he wore old grey trousers and a holey sweater, and amused himself hauling coal for the fires that were burning constantly for Erica’s arthritis. The house was full of books, certainly, but Edward hardly glanced at them. History, if it ever had been, was no longer his obsession. He brought coal from the garden, he raked and riddled the Raeburn and the fires, he worked slowly and methodically at rebuilding a limestone wall. He seemed older, less concerned to be the academic fellow, and infinitely less frivolous.

  He did, however, make tests and traps for Bill, and was constantly fascinated at how few of them he picked up. He dropped dates, and war events, famous battles and the like, often deliberately getting major details wrong. Jane acted as Bill’s monitor, and chided her uncle from time to time, but he said he did it for good reasons. He supposed, he said, Bill was a typical product of modern education, but Jane pointed out that so was she, and younger. Edward said he could not understand why somebody who knew so little should have let himself get involved in such momentous events of history. Had he heard of Nikita Khrushchev? Did he know that Khrushchev had referred to the Hess affair as the last great secret of the war? Had he heard of Allen Dulles, the chief of OSS in Europe, which later became the CIA. How could Bill expect to understand if he knew nothing?

  ‘But what did Dulles say?’ said Erica, painfully. ‘At Nuremberg. Tell them, Teddy. Don’t be too unfair.’

  ‘He said the British bumped off Hess in 1941,’ said Edward. He sipped port. ‘Also, I believe, he was instrumental in turning down an MI6 request to murder Adolf Galland for us.’

  Something clicked in Bill’s memory.

  ‘I know Adolf Galland,’ he said. ‘I think. Went to America after the war, didn’t he? A fighter ace. Had a girlfriend called Catherine.’

  Carrington was looking at him curiously.

  ‘You have the advantage of me there,’ he said. ‘Serves me right for getting at you. All I know is that Galland was part of it, somehow. He was scrambled with a man called Stahl to shoot down Hess. Or maybe not to, maybe as a blind, Goering gave the order. Is there anything else?’

  ‘No,’ said Bill. ‘It’s very hazy. Some insider story I was told. No details.’

  Except for an orgasm up a lamp-post, and a girl of twelve years old. He left that unsaid.

  ‘Well,’ said Edward, ‘Dulles wasn’t having it, in any case. We told him Galland was a war criminal apparently, but to them he was a valuable asset, he’d piloted some of the earliest jet fighters, in ’45. Dulles also thought we were indulging the British passion for covering up things that might embarrass us. The Reform Club syndrome. Maybe he was right.’

  When he had reached the Reform Club in his narrative the night before, Edward had stopped. A silence had descended on the room, in which the sound of summer rain pattering on the window panes had been audible. His thin, handsome face had flushed slightly, as if with remembered anger. Or pity, Jane had wondered? Shame?

  Now Jane said: ‘But was he right about the bumping off of Hess? Who did he tell at Nuremberg? Surely not in evidence?’

  ‘Of course not. Secret service gossip. He told Airey Neave, I think. Remember him? Blown up outside Parliament, the Irish got the blame. Whether Dulles was right or not, Neave seemed to believe him. He campaigned for years to get the prisoner out of Spandau. His brick wall was the government, they said the Russians wouldn’t play; damned lies, of course, hypocrisy. The individual powers have absolute discretion when they’re in control. They can do anything they like.’

  Erica said: ‘For instance, Stalin flew him into East Germany, didn’t he? Was it 1952, Teddy?’

  ‘March 17. The idea was to offer him his freedom if he’d live in Dresden and reconcile all the old Hitlerites to the Communists. Stalin wanted to reunify Germany as a neutral state, but the western part was crawling with ex-Nazis, naturally.’

  Jane was almost squeaking.

  ‘Stalin wanted to reunify Germany! In 1952? That can’t be right!’

  Edward smiled.

  ‘A child of Western propaganda speaks,’ he said. ‘It’s unbelievable because you’ve b
een programmed. In fact Stalin told the Western allies and Konrad Adenauer on March 10 that he wanted to reunify. Khrushchev tried it later in the fifties. He even offered to let the Germans decide themselves if they wanted Communism or Capitalism to run the place. It didn’t suit the West.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Come up with a theory. The Cold War’s a minefield, no one really knows who started it, or how, or why. I might venture that it was invented to keep Germany divided, Russia bankrupt through the arms race, and the dangerous parts of Europe either subjugated or in fear. But I’m not the sort of historian, any longer, who pretends I know the truth.’

  ‘But you know Hess went to East Germany,’ said Bill. ‘And nothing came of it. Are you going to tell us why?’

  ‘Bill,’ responded Edward. ‘Hess did not go to East Germany, Hess died in the Reform Club. Hess was interrogated, then he died. Hess never went to Germany again.’

  Edward rose abruptly and left the room. The others looked at each other, Bill and Jane uncomfortable. Aunt Erica’s jaw clicked.

  ‘Some of it’s still very painful,’ she said. ‘Even after all these years. He was devastated when you first told him about killing Number Seven, Bill, he was horrified. He pretends to be robust, but it still hurts. He was betrayed over the Reform Club, dreadfully betrayed. He’d had to give his word, of course. To Hess, to make him come. He went quite mad, really; joining the Establishment, joining all those clubs. He got the death wish, tried to get abroad, into the thick of things, it was quite common then. Foley saved him in the end, he told him things, he made him face realities. Foley had his own hell, but he survived. He stayed in Mytchett Place with “Z” for months and months while he was tortured, in a minor, English way. He had to build a personality for him, give him Hess’s history, write letters to his wife as Hess, rewrite his maunderings, suggest things to him under drugs. In the end, “Z” didn’t know who he was, Hess, Horn, the Man in the Moon. There were tears in Foley’s eyes when he left, possibly for what he’d done. The man had tried to kill himself early in the process, the brain washing, he threw himself over a balcony but only broke his thigh, poor chap. He said they were making him insane, and he’d rather be dead than be insane in Britain.’

  Erica’s face had paled with the pain of talking for so long. She touched her mouth.

  ‘Foley’s personality was enormous,’ she added, quietly. ‘He survived. But for a long while, I think, poor Edward went quite mad.’

  ‘But you stayed with him,’ said Jane. ‘Didn’t you marry in the war? How did that happen?’

  The old lady smiled.

  ‘Hannele was dead,’ she said. ‘She lived in Dresden, did you know that? It was bombed. We were lovers, me and Teddy, friends. I loved him, in a way. I had to save his life.’

  ‘What you have to remember,’ said Edward later, ‘is that everybody wanted peace. In the two months before the Hess flight, even Joseph Goebbels had secretly suggested terms through intermediaries. A month before Hess came Himmler had a go. They were winning, then, hands down. They weren’t pleading out of weakness, they knew what was happening in Europe, they’d released the genie from the bottle. But Winston had his own ideas, as always, and he had a dream. Have you ever heard of Mr Churchill’s Private War?’

  Bill and Jane exchanged glances. They had not. Aunt Erica, suffering, had gone to bed.

  ‘Winston Churchill hated Bolsheviks,’ said Edward. ‘He hated them historically, and it was almost pathological. He was from the ruling classes you must remember, he went to Harrow, Sandhurst, he was a descendant of a line of soldiers revered by people of his type. Despite the history of Russia pre-1917, despite the atrocity of the war in Europe that his own sort were conducting, he saw the revolutionaries as barbarians, scarcely human, as hopping, capering baboons. He hated the Germans too, inevitably, but not so much because we were at war with them as for their part in the revolution. Ludendorff had financed it to start with, because he didn’t want to fight on two fronts – the perennial German fear – and he wanted the czar kicked out and a government installed that he could make a peace with. It seemed a simple plan to him; but then he was a general! The revolution duly happened, March 1917, or February by the Russian calendar of the time, but inevitably the wrong faction got control and wouldn’t end the war. Solution? Ludendorff poured in more German gold – to Lenin this time – and repatriated him from Switzerland in the famous train. I needn’t tell you the rest, need I? But Churchill knew, and he did not forgive. First the Russian Royal house collapsed, then others. A year after the war, three of the five dynasties left in Europe were on the point of extinction, and he could see it spreading to the House of Windsor. And Winston Churchill was in love with Royalty.’

  ‘He didn’t seriously believe it, though?’ said Bill. ‘Not a revolution here?’

  Jane said: ‘Not so crazy, Bill. By the end of the war the Army was teetering on the brink, and the workers weren’t so far behind them. Would you believe soviets set up in Glasgow and Belfast? The town hall at Luton burnt down by rioters? We were on the edge.’

  ‘But I did history at school,’ Bill began. He caught Edward’s eye, pale blue and sardonic. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me. History’s bunk.’

  ‘History’s what you make it,’ said Edward. ‘Especially perhaps for men like Winston Churchill. A month after he became Lloyd George’s Minister of War, three thousand British soldiers mutinied at Victoria Station. They were due to go back to France, and instead they marched on Buckingham Palace. Churchill watched from Whitehall. The Guards and the Household Cavalry faced them off. February 8, 1919. Churchill went to see the Prime Minister. He insisted that Britain throw money, men and arms into the Russian struggle, on the White Russians’ side. There was a civil war on, you know that, I suppose? Churchill thought we had to beat the Reds, or lose our King and Empire.’

  ‘It was some Empire we were talking about in those days,’ said Jane. ‘It had a bigger population than China, it was three times bigger than Russia or the USA, you could go from Cairo to Capetown on a train and spit on British territory every inch along the track. You can understand old Winston being paranoid.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Edward. ‘It was huge, enormous, and it was deadly vulnerable. All held in thrall from London with a few tens of thousand soldiers, a navy, and an attitude of mind. Self-confidence. The certainty of rectitude. Superiority. And these “baboons” were threatening to infect it with the plague. By teaching the subject nations – and worse, the soldiers keeping them in check – that there was another way. Can you stand a quote? “Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy”. After Russia – the British Empire. He insisted that we had to go to war.’

  ‘And what happened? We didn’t, did we?’

  Edward shook his head.

  ‘Not officially. Lloyd George was not a fantasist, he was a realist, he said no. But Churchill wouldn’t drop the idea, that’s where the Private War came in, that’s what the London newspapers called it, his grand obsession. He went to Versailles and tried to persuade the Yanks, then he snookered Lloyd George with some well-timed leaks and other embarrassments. Within a year he had twenty thousand men helping the Whites. They were led by a man called Ironside, six feet four of muscle and bone, most of it between his ears. He caused Chamberlain and his Cabinet untold problems as a negotiator in Germany, twenty years on, but Winston believed in him implicitly. By March 1920 everything was in ruins, and the Great Man switched to his next tactic, blaming everybody else and claiming unique foresight in issuing warnings no one took any notice of. That becomes a depressingly familiar device when you read his collected written works, his least attractive feature: all victories are due to him, all defeats are because people ignored his advice or disobeyed his wishes.’

  Bill could not suppress a smile.

  ‘You
’re not a fan,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the message.’

  ‘But I was,’ Edward replied. ‘Oh I was, Bill. Erica opened my eyes first, probably, then Frank Foley, then my war. Poor Rudolf Hess, even. I should have known but I was young, remember, twenty-five when war broke out. Churchill was a phrase-maker, an image-builder, a great self-publicist. He turned guns on striking miners in South Wales, he killed tens of thousands at Gallipoli, he backed defence cuts to the hilt at first, then claimed, quite falsely, to have been the only politician to see Hitler’s war a’coming. By 1941 he’d lost every battle, almost everything, and he’d trudged misty-eyed through the ruins of the cities that he’d known beforehand were going to be bombed and refused to warn in case the Germans wondered where he got his information from. And he’d become a saint. Lloyd George knew his skills and Lloyd George was terrified of him. He tried to end the Private War in the March of 1920 when Churchill went on holiday to France. He withdrew all support from the White Russians, he cut the lot. But by July Winston was at it again, demanding that we send a force to throw back the communists who’d now moved across the border into Poland. The British workers weren’t having any. They made it very plain indeed that if Britain wanted any further form of action against Russia, up to and including war, there’d be a general strike. There were soviets again – the British called them “councils of action”. Three hundred and fifty of them, from Lands End to John o’ Groats, formed in two weeks in the middle of August. Churchill was so determined that he was even prepared to talk to Germany about a deal to fight the dreaded Bolsheviks, there’s a thought for historians who believe in peace plots, isn’t there? He was even prepared to talk to Ludendorff, the man who funded them and made it possible! Ludendorff, incidentally, predicted that if no one aided Germany, Germany would find an iron man, a dictator, to solve her problems. Churchill did not notice that one, did he? In 1920, all his bogeymen were on the left.’