“Just about. He was in hospital for six months. The plastic surgeons did a wonderful job on his face. The only thing they
couldn't put back was the animation.”
“Since you've dug up such a lot of his family history, do I gather that he's in some sort of a spot?”
“He's in a spot all right,” said Mr. Behrens. “He's been spying for the Russians for a long time and we've just tumbled to it.”
“You're sure?”
“I'm afraid there's no doubt about it at all. Fortescue has had him under observation for the last three months.”
“Why hasn't he been put away?”
“The stuff he's passing out is important, but it's not vital. Bessendine isn't a scientist. He's held security and administrative jobs – where a project has run smoothly, or where it got behind time, or flopped. There's nothing the other side likes more than a flop.”
“How does he get the information out?”
“That's exactly what I'm trying to figure out. It's some sort of post–office system, no doubt. When we've sorted that out, we'll pull him in.”
“Has he got any family?”
“A standard pattern Army–type wife. And a rather nice daughter.”
“It's the family who suffer in these cases,” said Mr. Calder. He scratched Rasselas' tufted head, and the big dog yawned. “By the way, we had rather an interesting day, too. We found a body.”
He told Mr. Behrens about this, and Mr. Behrens said, “What are you going to do about it?”
“I've telephoned Fortescue. He was quite interested. He's put me on to a Colonel Crawston, who was in charge of Irregular Forces in this area in 1940. He thinks he might be able to help us.”
Colonel Crawston's room was littered with catalogs, feeding charts, invoices, paid bills and unpaid bills, seed samples, gift calendars, local newspapers, boxes of cartridges, and buff forms from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.
Mr. Calder said, “It's really very good of you to spare the time to talk to me, Colonel. You're a pretty busy man, I can see that.”
“We shall get on famously,” said the old man, “if you'll remember two things. The first is that I'm deaf in my left ear. The second, that I'm no longer a colonel. I stopped being that in 1945.”
“Both points shall be borne in mind,” said Mr. Calder, easing himself round onto his host's right–hand side.
“Fortescue told me you were coming. If that old bandit's involved, I suppose it's Security stuff?”
“I'm not at all sure,” said Mr. Calder. “I'd better tell you about it. ...”
“Interesting,” said the old man, when he had done so. “Fascinating, in fact.”
He went across to a big corner cupboard, dug into its cluttered interior and surfaced with two faded khaki–colored canvas folders, which he laid on the table. From one of them he turned out a thick wad of papers, from the other a set of quarter– and one–inch military maps.
“I kept all this stuff,” he said. “At one time, I was thinking of writing a history of Special Operations during the first two years of the war. I never got round to it, though. Too much like hard work.” He unfolded the maps, and smoothed out the papers with his bent and arthritic fingers.
“Fortescue told me,” said Mr. Calder, “that you were in charge of what he called `Stay–put Parties.`”
“It was really a very sound idea,” said the old man. His frosty blue eyes sparkled for a moment, with the light of unfought battles. “They did the same thing in Burma. When you knew that you might have to retreat, you dug in small resistance groups, with arms and food and wireless sets. They'd let themselves be overrun, you see, and operate behind the enemy lines. We had a couple of dozen posts like that in Kent and Sussex. The one you found would have been – Whitehorse Wood you said? – here it is, Post Six. That was a very good one. They converted an existing dene–hole – you know what a dene–hole is?”
“As far as I can gather,” said Mr. Calder, “the original inhabitants of this part of the country dug them to hide in when they were overrun by the Angles and Saxons and such. A sort of pre–Aryan Stay–put Party.”
“Never thought of it that way.” The old man chuckled. “You're quite right, of course. That's exactly what it was. Now then. Post Six. We had three men in each – an officer and two NCO's.” He ran his gnarled finger up the paper in front of him. “Sergeant Brewer. A fine chap that. Killed in North Africa. Corporal Stubbs. He's dead, too. Killed in a motor crash, a week after VE Day. So your unknown corpse couldn't be either of them.”
There was a splendid inevitability about it all, thought Mr. Calder. It was like the unfolding of a Greek tragedy, or the final chord of a well–built symphony. You waited for it. You knew it was coming. But you were still surprised when it did.
“Bessendine,” said the old man. “Lieutenant Mark Bessendine. Perhaps the most tragic of the lot, really. He was a natural choice for our work. Spoke Spanish, French and German. Young and fit. Front–line experience with the Reds in Spain.”
“What exactly happened to him?”
“It was the first week in November 1940. Our masters in Whitehall had concluded that the invasion wasn't on. I was told to seal up all my posts and send the men back to their units. I remember sending Mark out that afternoon to Post Six – it hadn't been occupied for some weeks – told him to bring back any loose stores. That was the last time I saw him – in the flesh, as you might say. You heard what happened?”
“He got caught in the German blitz on Tilbury and Gravesend.”
“That's right. Must have been actually on his way back to our HQ. The explosion picked him up and pushed him through a plate–glass window. He was damned lucky to be alive at all. Next time I saw him he was swaddled up like a mummy. Couldn't talk or move.”
“Did you see him again?”
“I was posted abroad in the spring. Spent the rest of the war in Africa and Italy. ... Now you happen to mention it, though, I thought I did bump into him once – at the big reception center at Calais. I went through there on my way home in 1945.”
“Did he recognize you?”
“It was a long time ago. I can't really remember.” The old man looked up sharply.
“Is it important?”
“It might be,” said Mr. Calder.
“If you're selling anything,” said the old lady to Mr. Behrens, “you're out of luck.”
“I am neither selling nor buying,” said Mr. Behrens.
“And if you're the new curate, I'd better warn you that I'm a Baptist.”
“I'm a practicing agnostic.”
The old lady looked at him curiously, and then said, “Whatever it is you want to talk about, we shall be more comfortable inside, shan't we?”
She led the way across the hall, narrow and bare as a coffin, into a surprisingly bright and cheerful sitting room.
“You don't look to me,” she said, “like the sort of man who knocks old ladies on the head and grabs their life's savings. I keep mine in the bank, such as they are.”
“I must confess to you,” said Mr. Behrens, “that I'm probably wasting your time. I'm in Tilbury on a sentimental errand. I spent a year of the war in the Air Force prison camp in Germany. One of my greatest friends there was Jeremy Bessendine. He was a lot younger than I was, of course, but we had a common interest in bees.”
“I don't know what you were doing up in an airplane, at your time of life. I expect you dyed your hair. People used to do that in the 1914 war. I'm sorry, I interrupted you. Mr. ...”
“Behrens.”
“My name's Galloway. You said Jeremy Bessendine.”
“Yes. Did you know him?”
“I knew all the Bessendines. Father and mother, and all three sons. The mother was the sweetest thing, from the bogs of Ireland. The father, well, let's be charitable and say he was old–fashioned. Their house was on the other side of the road to mine. There's nothing left of it now. Can you see? Not a stick nor a stone.”
Mr. Behrens looked out of the window. The opposite side of the road was an open space containing one row of prefabricated huts.
“Terrible things,” said Mrs. Galloway.
“They put them up after the war as a temporary measure. Temporary!”
“So that's where the Bessendines' house was,” said Mr. Behrens, sadly. “Jeremy often described it to me. He was so looking forward to living in it again when the war was over.”
“Jeremy was my favorite,” said Mrs. Galloway. “I'll admit I cried when I heard he'd been killed. Trying to escape, they said.”
She looked back twenty–five years, and sighed at what she saw. “If we're going to be sentimental,” she said, “we shall do it better over a cup of tea. The kettle's on the boil.”
She went out into the kitchen but left the door open, so that she could continue to talk.
“John, the eldest, I never knew well. He went straight into the Army. He was killed early on. The youngest was Mark. He was a wild character, if you like.”
“Wild? In what way?” said Mr. Behrens.
Mrs. Galloway arranged the teapot, cups, and milk jug on a tray and collected her thoughts. Then she said, “He was a rebel. Strong or weak?”
“Just as it comes,” said Mr. Behrens.
“First two brothers, they accepted the discipline at home. Mark didn't. Jeremy told me that when Mark ran away from school – the second time – and his father tried to send him back, they had a real set–to, the father shouting, the boy screaming. That was when he went off to Spain to fight for the Reds. Milk and sugar?”
“Both,” said Mr. Behrens. He thought of Mark Bessendine as he had seen him two days before. An ultracorrect, poker–backed, poker–faced regular soldier. How deep had the rebel been buried?
“He's quite a different sort of person now,” he said.
“Of course, he would be,” said Mrs. Galloway. “You can't be blown to bits and put together again and still be the same person, can you?”
“Why, no,” said Mr. Behrens. “I suppose you can't.”
“I felt very strange myself for a week or so, after it happened. And I was only blown across the kitchen and cracked my head on the stove.”
“You remember that raid, then?”
“I most certainly do. It must have been about five o'clock. Just getting dark, and a bit misty. They came in low, and the next moment – crump, bump – we were right in the middle of it. It was the first raid we'd had – and the worst. You could hear the bombs coming closer and closer. I thought, I wish I'd stayed in Saffron Walden – where I'd been evacuated, you see – I'm for it now, I thought. And it's all my own fault for coming back like the posters told me not to. And the next moment I was lying on the floor, with my head against the stove, and a lot of warm red stuff running over my face. It was tomato soup.”
“And that was the bomb that destroyed the Bessendines' house – and killed old Mr. and Mrs. Bessendine?”
“That's right. And it was the same raid that nearly killed Mark. My goodness!”
The last exclamation was nothing to do with what had gone before. Mrs. Galloway was staring at Mr. Behrens. Her face had gone pale. She said, “Jeremy! I've just remembered! When it happened they sent him home, on compassionate leave. He knew his house had been blown up. Why would he tell you he was looking forward to living in it after the war – when he must have known it wasn't there?”
Mr. Behrens could think of nothing to say.
“You've been lying, haven't you? Who are you? What's it all about?”
Mr. Behrens put down his teacup, and said, gently, “I'm sorry I had to tell you a lot of lies, Mrs. Galloway. Please don't worry about it too much. I promise you that nothing you told me is going to hurt anyone.”
The old lady gulped down her own tea. The color came back slowly to her cheeks. She said, “Whatever it is, I don't want to know about it.” She stared out of the window at the place where a big house had once stood, inhabited by a bullying father and a sweet Irish mother, and three boys. She said, “It's all dead and done with, anyway.”
As Mr. Behrens drove home in the dusk, his tires on the road hummed the words back at him. Dead and done with. Mr. Fortescue, who was the manager of the Westminster branch of the London and Home Counties Bank, and a number of other things besides, glared across his broad mahogany desk at Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens and said, “I have never encountered such an irritating and frustrating case.”
He made it sound as if they, and not the facts, were the cause of his irritation.
Mr. Behrens said, “I don't think people quite realize how heavily the scales are weighted in favor of a spy who's learned his job and keeps his head. All the stuff that Colonel Bessendine is passing out is stuff he's officially entitled to know. Progress of existing work, projects for new work, personnel to be employed, Security arrangements. It all comes into his field. Suppose he does keep notes of it. Suppose we searched his house, found those notes in his safe. Would it prove anything?”
“Of course it wouldn't,” said Mr. Fortescue, sourly. “That's why you've got to catch him actually handing it over. I've had three men – apart from you – watching him for months. He behaves normally – goes up to town once or twice a week, goes to the cinema with his family, goes to local drink parties, has his friends in to dinner. All absolutely above suspicion.”
“Quite so,” said Mr. Behrens. “He goes up to London in the morning rush hour. He gets into a crowded Underground train. Your man can't get too close to him. Bessendine's wedged up against another man who happens to be carrying a briefcase identical with his own.”
“Do you think that's how it's done?”
“I've no idea,” said Mr. Behrens. “But I wager I could invent half a dozen other methods just as simple and just as impossible to detect.”
Mr. Calder said, “When exactly did Mark Bessendine start betraying his country's secrets to the Russians?”
“We can't be absolutely certain. But it's been going on for a very long time. Back to the Cold War which nearly turned into a hot war – 1947, perhaps.”
“Not before that?”
“Perhaps you had forgotten,” said Mr. Fortescue, “that until 1945 the Russians were on our side.”
“I wondered,” said Mr. Calder, “if before that he might have been spying for the Germans. Have you looked at the `Hessel` file lately?”
Both Mr. Fortescue and Mr. Behrens stared at Mr. Calder, who looked blandly back at them.
Mr. Behrens said, “We never found out who Hessel was, did we? He was just a code name to us.”
“But the Russians found out,” said Mr. Calder. “The first thing they did when they got to Berlin was to grab all Admiral Canaris' records. If they found the Hessel dossier there – if they found out that he had been posing successfully for more than four years as an officer in the Royal Marines –”
“Posing?” said Mr. Fortescue, sharply.
“It occurred to me as a possibility.”
“If Hessel is posing as Bessendine, where's Bessendine?” said Mr. Fortescue.
“At the bottom of a pre–Aryan chalk pit in Whitehorse Wood, above Lamperdown,” said Mr. Calder, “with a bullet through his head.”
Mr. Fortescue looked at Mr. Behrens, who said, “Yes, it's possible. I had thought of that.”
“Lieutenant Mark Bessendine,” said Mr. Calder, slowly, as if he was seeing it all as he spoke, “set off alone one November afternoon, with orders to close down and seal up Post Six. He'd have been in battle dress and carrying his Army pay book and identity papers with him, because in 1940 everyone did that. As he was climbing out of the post, he heard, or saw, a strange figure. A civilian, lurking in the woods, where no civilian should have been. He challenged him. And the answer was a bullet, from Hessel's gun. Hessel had landed that day, or the day before, on the South Coast, from a submarine. Most of the spies who were landed that autumn lasted less than a week. Right?”
“They were a poor bunch,” said Mr. Fortesc
ue. “Badly equipped, and with the feeblest cover stories. I sometimes wondered if they were people Canaris wanted to get rid of.”
“Exactly,” said Mr. Calder. “But Hessel was a tougher proposition. He spoke excellent English – his mother was English, and he'd been to an English public school. And here was a God–sent chance to improve his equipment and cover. Bessendine was the same size and build. All he had to do was to change clothes and instead of being a phoney civilian, liable to be questioned by the first constable he met, he was a properly dressed, fully documented Army officer.
Provided he kept on the move, he could go anywhere in England. No one would question him. It wasn't the sort of cover that would last forever. But it didn't matter. His pickup was probably fixed for four weeks ahead – in the next no–moon period. So he put on Bessendine's uniform, and started out for Gravesend. Not, I need hardly say, with any
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