The Suicide Exhibition

by Justin Richards

  The young man had told the Ubermensch his name was Jeff Wood. He was on leave from the army, he said. But the information he provided about his army life was inconsistent and ambivalent. Conclusion: Jeff was not in the army. Conclusion: Jeff was a liar.

  “But if you want to know about women,” Jeff said, putting down his pint, “I can tell you everything you need to know.”

  “I need to know everything,” the Ubermensch replied. For the purposes of this meeting, his identity was Robbie Stone. The real Robbie Stone had been an Air Raid Warden who asked too many questions about the Ubermensch’s life and background, where he lived, who he was. The real Robbie Stone had told him everything.

  Jeff talked his way through another two pints. “Robbie Stone” barely touched his own bitter. But he paid for Jeff’s drinks with money that used to belong to a barmaid, which (he now understood) was ironic.

  “Pilot, was you?” Jeff asked at last. They all asked eventually. They all had different ideas about why he looked the way he did.

  “You think I was burned?”

  “Well, you do look a bit … done over.” Jeff smiled apologetically and slurped more beer. “Had to bail out, did you? I admire you RAF boys, I really do. Though it ain’t easy in the army.”

  The Ubermensch was aware that he still attracted attention. The hat worn low and the turned-up coat collar helped deflect attention. But it was impossible to get this close to someone, close enough to ask questions, without them seeing the sunken eyes, the withered skin. Water helped, rehydrating his body. But it would take months before he could truly pass as normal.

  “You were never in the army,” the Ubermensch said. A simple statement of fact. He stood up.

  “What you saying?” Jeff demanded.

  “You are a liar. You have avoided service, ignored the call-up. You buy and sell on the black market.”

  Jeff started to stand up, but “Robbie” put a hand on his shoulder, forcing him back down onto the bar stool. The wrinkled, skeletal hand should have been weak and ineffectual, but Jeff slumped down under its unexpected strength.

  “All right, so I buy and sell. No harm in it. What are you after? Coupons? You want coupons? I can get you coupons. Fuel, meat, anything.”

  “Tell me how it works. How you get what you want. How you sell it on.”

  Jeff’s eyes narrowed. If he had drunk less he might have decided enough was enough. But instead, he judged that there was no harm now in telling Robbie a little—just a little of what he really did. He spoke, uninterrupted save for the occasional specific question, for an hour.

  “Have you told me everything?”

  “Course I have.”

  Robbie nodded. “Good.” He stood up.

  To anyone watching, it would have looked like a gesture, a flick of the hand in farewell, nothing more. After the man in the hat and the coat with the high collar left, it would have seemed that the young man who’d drunk too much had simply slumped against the wall, resting his head against the paneling.

  CHAPTER 25

  The office was deserted apart from Miss Manners. She peered over the top of her spectacles and her typewriter as Davenport hung his coat on the rack by the door.

  “Everyone on leave?” he asked.

  “Only you, apparently.”

  “I don’t think I get leave, do I?” He smiled. “I’ll gladly take it if I do.”

  Miss Manners returned her attention to the papers on her desk. “Colonel Brinkman is at the War Rooms. Miss Diamond has taken herself off somewhere, and the others are down there.” She nodded at the door leading to the kitchenette and back offices. “So where have you been these last few weeks?”

  “Some of us have a crust to earn. And a reputation to keep up. Though I doubt I’ve been doing that.”

  “Oh?”

  “Propaganda film. Not that they call it that of course. But it will show our exaggeratedly brave soldiers defeating a woefully inept Wehrmacht.”

  Miss Manners sniffed. “How uplifting.”

  “I play the dashing captain of a troop ship off to … I’m not sure actually. Somewhere in Scandinavia, I think.”

  “Is anyone famous in it?”

  Davenport laughed. “Careful, Miss Manners. I think I detected the hint of a smile just then.”

  There was more than a hint as she looked up again. “Unlikely.”

  * * *

  The smaller of the two spare offices was where Davenport found Guy Pentecross and Sergeant Green. The two desks had been pushed up against the walls, which were themselves covered with typed reports, handwritten notes, maps and photographs held in place with drawing pins.

  “We can go over it as many times as you like, sir,” Green was saying as Davenport came in. “But that won’t change what happened.”

  “I’m not trying to change what happened, just interpret it,” Guy said. He nodded at Davenport. “Hello, stranger.”

  “Film,” Davenport told them. “Don’t ask. So, what’s going on here? You having fun?” He singled out one of the photographs, a view over a curving bay with pebbled beaches. Dark gray clouds hung heavily in the air. “Shingle Bay?” he guessed.

  “Trying to work out what was going on there,” Guy told him. “I mean, why there in particular?”

  “Good thought. And you reckon going over what we know, time and again, looking at it in different ways … You think that might throw some light on the German intentions?”

  “It’s the approach Dr. Wiles takes to his code breaking. I thought it might work here.”

  “And does it?”

  “No,” Green said shortly. “If you ask me, we’re wasting our time.”

  “Only if we have better things to do,” Davenport said. “And I for one don’t, it being a bit early for lunch.”

  As he spoke, he walked slowly round the small room, inspecting the papers, maps and pictures. “The conclusion at the time,” he said at last, “was that … Ah yes, here we are.” He had found the short report he was looking for—pinned between a photograph of the church on top of the cliffs above the bay and a requisition order for two fuel tanker trucks.

  “We thought they were after the RADAR station at Bawsey Manor,” Green said. “A raid, possibly to recover equipment.”

  “There you are, then.”

  “Except that it doesn’t make sense,” Guy said.

  All three of them were standing by the Ordnance Survey map for the area. Davenport located Bawsey with his index finger. He put another finger on Shingle Bay. “They are fairly close, so it seems a reasonable assumption. There’s nothing else nearby of any note.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Guy agreed. “But then it occurred to me that we’re looking at this backward.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He means,” Green said, “that we’re looking at where the raid came ashore and trying to guess where they were going.”

  “But if we put ourselves in the enemy’s shoes,” Pentecross said, “and try to think how we’d plan the raid in the first place…”

  “Yes,” Davenport said, nodding quickly. “That’s good. That’s very good. Worthy of Stanislavski.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re assuming that was a compliment,” Davenport told him. “But let’s follow this through. Green—how would you plan a raid on Bawsey Manor?”

  “Well, Major Pentecross is right. From Shingle Bay, the only sensible target is the RADAR station. But if I was planning to get a raiding party to the RADAR station, I wouldn’t choose Shingle Bay as my landing zone.”

  “Hoping for the element of surprise, perhaps?”

  “I’d have to hope for that anyway. And it didn’t exactly work. But I’d put ashore here, or even here,” Green pointed at two other small coves on the map, “before I considered Shingle Bay. We’ve been over it several times, and the tides are better, the water is shallower, this cove is further from any military units though they might not know that…”

  “There’s another
thing,” Guy said. “Why head for Bawsey Manor at all?

  “A reconnaissance mission, to find out about the RADAR, possibly take back components and equipment. That was the assumption,” Davenport said.

  Guy smiled. “All right, but take things back another step. If that was the objective, then you wouldn’t choose Bawsey as your target. There are other RADAR stations, which we can assume the Germans know about, that are more isolated and vulnerable to a raid. If that was what they were up to they’d never have come to Bawsey, which is right in the middle of an army training area, at all. Never mind Shingle Bay, they’d have targeted a different installation entirely.”

  They talked round the problem again, checking the maps and documents.

  “Well, I can’t fault your conclusions,” Davenport said at last. “But it doesn’t help if we still don’t know what their objective really was.”

  “And we won’t find that out by talking about it,” Green complained. “We know less now than we thought we did when we started.”

  “We need more information,” Guy admitted. “But I have no idea where we’ll get it.”

  * * *

  New information arrived that afternoon with the return of Sarah Diamond. There wasn’t room in the small office, so they moved into the conference room next door. Brinkman was still out at meetings, but Miss Manners left her telephone and typewriter to join them.

  Sarah had a large envelope which she laid on the table. “I have no idea if these will help, but it occurred to me that there must be a lot going on in that area that isn’t shown on the map.”

  “Such as?” Green asked.

  “Well, we only know that Bawsey Manor is a RADAR station because we have a list of all the RADAR stations. There’s nothing on the map to say that it’s of importance. The map doesn’t show temporary structures, or anything much to do with the war effort.”

  “That’s true,” Guy said. “But whatever they were after, the Germans would have to know about it somehow.”

  “Exactly, so I asked myself how they might find out.”

  “Spies,” Green said.

  “They don’t have any spies,” Davenport said. “Oh they think they do, but…” He smiled. “Forget I said that. Just take it from me that the Germans aren’t getting any useful or significant information from agents in this country.”

  Guy was smiling. “Air reconnaissance. They send planes over, sometimes in among the bombers but often on their own to photograph the landscape. They’re looking for RADAR installations, airfields, checking what damage they’ve done.” He glanced at the envelope, then at Sarah. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  In reply, she tipped out the contents of the envelope. Photographs spilled across the table.

  “The ATA regularly fly over the area on ferry flights, delivering planes. I asked one of the men if he could take some pictures. He was happy to oblige.”

  “I bet,” Guy murmured, leafing through the pictures.

  Sarah colored slightly. “It’s not very sophisticated. I think he just leaned out of the cockpit with a camera.”

  “These are very good,” Miss Manners said, showing real interest for the first time. “And actually, that’s pretty much how we take reconnaissance photographs of the continent. It’s a rather ramshackle operation in that respect. The secret is in interpreting the results.”

  “They’re just pictures,” Green said. “Should be easy enough.”

  “Oh there’s an art to it,” Miss Manners told him. “Mainly to do with scale. Do we know from what height these were taken? Or what lens was on the camera? No? Then we have to work out the scale some other way.”

  “There’s a church on this one,” Davenport said as they spread out the photographs. There were about thirty of them. “Bit of a jigsaw, isn’t it?”

  “If we know which church it is, that will help,” Miss Manners said. “We need something, some landmark, to give us a size. If you look at the church tower, for example, from this angle there’s no way of knowing how high it is. An expert would look at the angle of the shadow, take into account the time of day and position of the sun, that sort of thing. We need to try to relate these images to the map and see how they fit together.”

  “Here’s Shingle Bay,” Sarah said, pulling out one of the photographs. “You said it was like a jigsaw, Leo—well, let’s see if we can piece together the area.”

  Miss Manners took charge of organizing the photographs. Although some photographs showed overlapping views of the same area, the task was complicated by the fact that there were also gaps. But with constant reference back to the maps, eventually they had a patchwork photographic picture of the area.

  “Now for the hard part,” Guy said. “Spotting what the Germans might have spotted. They probably have similar photographs, so what did they see?”

  “If anything,” Green said.

  “You still think we’re wasting our time?” Guy asked. “Still think there’s no reason for them coming to Shingle Bay?”

  “Oh there was a reason all right, and I’d love to know what it is.” Green gestured at the photographs spread across the table. “But I’m not convinced that we’ll ever find out what it was. I’ll be more than happy if you can prove me wrong, sir.”

  * * *

  “You need to reduce the size of the problem,” Brinkman told them the next day.

  Guy was frustrated, wondering if Green was right and they were wasting their time. Davenport had a stack of books and papers he was reading through, occasionally wandering round the table and peering at the photographs. Miss Manners and Green had returned to the main office, leaving Sarah to mark up the map with notes of anything visible in the photographs.

  They had made a lot of notes, but little progress.

  Brinkman tapped the photograph of Shingle Bay. “This is the key, fairly obviously. Start from here. You’ve looked for possible targets for the raid, and you’ve found reasons why a raid on potential targets wouldn’t start from here. So turn it round again.”

  “How do you mean?” Pentecross asked.

  “Don’t look for a target at all. Instead, look for a location. Don’t worry about what’s there on the map or the photographs.”

  “Because it might not be visible?” Sarah said.

  “Or it might have gone,” Brinkman told them. “You’re looking at a landscape over a year after the raid took place.”

  Davenport frowned, putting down his book and joining them at the table. “But if they were after, I don’t know, a person—someone driving along this road near the headland—then there’s no way we could find out about it now.”

  “True. But a person is unlikely as they’d have to know precisely that person’s movements in advance.”

  “But you’re saying we can look for things we can’t actually see,” Pentecross said. “Or something like that.”

  “Something like that. Work out where they were heading. Then worry about what was there, what they were after.” Brinkman straightened up. “Just a suggestion. Give it another day, but I don’t think it warrants more than that.”

  They ringed the areas on the map that seemed prime target locations. From that they moved back to the photographs. Miss Manners sent for the troop and supply movement orders for the area for the week either side of the incident, warning that there would be a lot of information and that it wouldn’t give them the complete picture.

  “There’s a wooded area,” Sarah said, checking one of the circled areas against the corresponding photo. “Maybe there’s something hidden by the trees.”

  Davenport looked over her shoulder. “What’s that in the middle of the trees? A clearing?”

  “Just raised ground, I think. Small hill.”

  He grunted and moved round Sarah to peer closer at the image.

  “Important?” Guy asked.

  “Looks familiar, that’s all. The shape, I mean … It reminds me of something.” He peered at the map. “Anything on the map?”

  Guy checked. “
Something’s marked. It just says ‘Tumulus.’ What’s that mean?”

  Sarah shook her head. “Haven’t a clue.”

  But Davenport was staring at them, his mouth open in surprise. “Tumulus? Are you sure?”

  “You know what it means?”

  “It means we’ve found what they were after.” He stared back at the map. “Of course. That’s why I recognize the shape of the mound. Looks a bit different from above, of course, but even so…”

  Guy looked at Sarah, but she shrugged.

  “A tumulus,” Davenport said at last, “is an ancient burial mound. Like the one Streicher and his men were excavating in France. Like the one where they found the other Ubermensch. And here’s a very similar-looking mound right next to Shingle Bay. I’ll bet you Threadneedle Street to an orange that is what they came for.”

  * * *

  There were some things he remembered from before the great darkness, the long sleeping in the tomb. Pain was one of them—what it felt like, and how to deliver it.

  But it took time with books on anatomy to understand how pain worked, and a long session with a doctor he waited for outside a hospital to learn how best to inflict it. Pain as a tool was unparalleled. Pain could unlock information from any of the people he sought out. Pain was his friend.

  “Have you told me everything?” he would ask. And pain helped him to know when they had. When they were of no further use to him.

  He didn’t think of it as home—he had no home. But he returned through habit and convenience to Dorothy Keeling in her shattered house near Blackfriars. He sat and listened as she related more of her life history, more of what her friends had told her over the years. He learned something else from her too—that information given willingly was less concise but often more useful, more insightful, more reliable than information taken under duress.

  “I lost my brother Tom in the Great War,” she said as she fumbled to find the table for his cup of tea. “Did I tell you that?”

  “You did.”

  She shuffled back toward the doorway, relating for the third time exactly how she thought Tom had died. The Ubermensch stood up, walking slowly after her, ignoring the steaming tea.