Lancing continued to climb, gazing down all the while at his prey. Was this how Clarissa had felt when she pushed Tobin to her doom? He thought not. He had seen the elation in her eyes that day. He, by contrast, felt only overwhelming sadness. This had broken his heart.
He leant forward and to the side and vomited into the cockpit beside his knee. He took deep breaths, then wiped his sleeve across his mouth and was surprised to see that he still had the Luger in his hand. He threw it out of the cockpit and watched it hurtling down until it hit the water and disappeared. Looking around, he tried to spot any trace of the Hornet Moth or her passengers, but they had vanished, down into the depths beyond the Goodwin Sands.
*
The black Ford stopped at a little petrol station on the outskirts of Royston. The attendant, in oily blue overalls, slouched towards the car. Wilde had pulled up on the roadside and watched as Fanny Winch wound down her window and told the man what she wanted. He nodded and made his way unhurriedly to the pump.
Wilde hitched the Rudge up on to its stand and walked to her open window. He bent down, raising his goggles onto his forehead.
‘Mrs Winch.’
Shock registered momentarily and then she smiled. ‘It’s Mr Wilde, isn’t it?’
‘There are three children in your car. I presume they’re yours. We don’t want them to get hurt, do we?’
She took her hands off the wheel and held them up, palms towards him. ‘You’re right.’
‘Then just step out of the car.’
She nodded. Her hands went down and for a moment he thought she was either reaching for a weapon or was about to drive off with the petrol cap open. His own right hand clutched the Walther in his pocket even tighter, but his grip loosened as she removed the key from the ignition, then pulled down the door handle. She turned to the children. ‘You lot stay in the car. Ma’s got to talk to this gentleman.’
The elder boy had recognised him. ‘That’s the one that took Bertie!’
‘Just stay there and do as you’re told.’
As she climbed nimbly from the car, she removed her spectacles. ‘They’re plain glass anyway – didn’t do a lot of good, did they? Now then, how do we proceed from here? You know you’re on the wrong side, don’t you, Mr Wilde?’
‘You have no idea what side I’m on.’
‘Oh, I know a lot about you, sir. By rights, you should be my outrider, escorting me to freedom. But you’re not going to do that, are you?’
‘You shot Henty O’Gara.’
‘He was a traitor. You know, Mr Wilde, they can put me away, like they did my man, but there are thousands more to come after us.’
The pump attendant ignored them. He didn’t seem to have any interest in the world. Wilde signalled to him. ‘Do you have a telephone? I need to call the police.’ He pulled a florin from his pocket. ‘Two shillings do you?’
Wilde inclined his head. Fanny Winch shrugged and followed him into the little office at the corner of the covered area. A mechanic was working under a car raised at a precarious angle on a pair of jacks.
She was a small, insignificant woman. Good-looking, but nothing more. Nothing in her appearance to warrant a terrifying name like the Scavenger. But if these past few days had taught him anything, it was that appearances can be deceptive.
‘I’d never have hurt the little fellow, you know.’
The irony was not lost on him; or her, perhaps. She had held a child hostage to force Eva Haas to do the dirty work of others; now her own children were held hostage. She wasn’t going to pull a gun on Wilde with them so close at hand. Nor was she going to endanger them with a car chase.
‘I don’t suppose you would have, Mrs Winch,’ he said. ‘But you’d have killed a great many people at the Cavendish Laboratory.’
‘That’s war, Mr Wilde.’
‘It may be – but yours is over.’
CHAPTER 42
Tom Wilde attended two funerals that June of 1939.
The first was a bleak little affair at a Roman Catholic church in Cambridge, attended only by Wilde, Lydia, a priest and a reporter from the Cambridge Evening News. Philip Eaton had said he would have come, but he had not yet risen from his hospital bed.
Henty O’Gara was laid into the ground with a minimum of fuss. No one from MI5 turned up to honour him, even though he had died in its service. And in the next day’s paper a short report said only that the IRA bomber responsible for the attack on the Thompson’s Lane power station had been buried. It was believed by the security services that he had been killed by one of his own. Wilde had told Detective Chief Inspector Northgate that Fanny Winch had all but confessed to him that she was the killer, but she refused to sign a confession. There was plenty of evidence against her for her other crimes, but not for O’Gara’s murder. Case closed.
The second funeral was, in fact, two funerals. Paul Birbach and Torsten Hellquist were laid side by side. Hellquist’s body had been found in the woodland, less than a mile from Boldbourne airfield. He hadn’t been afforded even a shallow grave by his killers, just dumped and left for the wild animals to pick at.
This double funeral brought out most of the scientists and research assistants from the Cavendish, as well as many dons from both their colleges. Arnold Lindberg was there, too, though he wouldn’t be in England for long; word had reached him that he had been found a temporary position at Princeton in New Jersey by his old friend Leo Szilard.
In burying Birbach and Hellquist, Cambridge said goodbye to two of its finest minds. In truth, though, few among the mourners could really say they knew them. Geoff Lancing stood beside Eva, both their heads bowed. She had found her son a place in one of the town’s best prep schools and was hoping for a place in the Cavendish. Geoff had confided in Wilde, however, that that wasn’t going to happen; she wouldn’t be accepted there. For whatever duress she had been under, she had knowingly colluded in torture and murder. Some might be prepared to let her behaviour pass; the Cavendish would not be so forgiving. Her presence among so many young men and women who had known the victims could not be forgotten. Perhaps Oxford or Birmingham or Manchester might be a better option? Wilde got the distinct impression that Geoff Lancing’s interest in her was cooling.
Bobby had asked if he could go to the funeral. He had known Dr Birbach as well as anyone.
‘Of course you must come,’ Wilde said.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘No, thank you, Bobby. You have helped me immeasurably in all this. Your head . . .’
Bobby touched the large bruise gingerly. ‘Nothing to it, sir. Just like falling off a horse.’
*
As well as two funerals, Tom Wilde spent some hours at two bedsides.
Horace Dill was somehow defying the prognosis of his doctors. Every day Wilde called on him he expected to find him dead, yet somehow he struggled on. ‘You’re a shower,’ he told Wilde. ‘Ridiculous scrapes you get yourself into. Bloody shame you’re not fighting for the cause.’
‘Bollocks to you, too, Horace.’
Dill laughed until his lungs gave way and he started gasping for breath. He had wanted to visit his protégé Eaton, but Dill’s doctor doubted he would survive the journey.
‘Give him my love, Tom,’ Dill said. ‘He’s a good man, better than you’ll ever know. Bring him here as soon as he’s up.’
Philip Eaton, meanwhile, was surprisingly cheerful given that he had lost his left arm and his left leg was in plaster. Both wounds were healing without complications thus far.
‘Well, at least the military won’t want me when the balloon goes up,’ Eaton said to Wilde when the last of his visitors had gone.
‘No, I suppose not,’ Wilde said.
‘Mind you, it’ll do bugger all for my golf.’
Wilde managed a smile. So did Eaton. Stoical to the last.
‘I did have one question for you, Eaton. How did you know to be in Switzerland waiting for Dr Haas and Dr Lindberg when they escaped across the Alps?’
>
‘That’s a good one. Yes, I’m afraid I rather fell for it. An agent I thought was one of ours alerted me. Now I suspect the German secret services were calling the shots.’
‘Baumgarten? The man who helped Lydia?’
Eaton raised his right hand in a gesture of uncertainty. ‘It’s possible there were two German agents involved. What is certain is that at least part of our German operation is compromised. But that’s my problem, Wilde, not yours.’
‘Is that the best you can do?’
‘I’m sorry, Wilde, but I can tell you that you did some good work in Cambridge.’
‘Did I?’
‘The attack on the Cavendish was authorised at the very top in Germany. Hitler wants to ensure that if an atom bomb is possible, he’ll have it first. We’re going to have to beat him to it. This incident has brought the subject to the fore. There may be other attempted attacks, but the big labs in France and the US will be on high alert. We won’t be caught off guard again.’
‘And what about my poor cousin?’
‘Ah, that’s something of a mystery. Henty O’Gara was controlled by an MI5 man, name of Captain Hyde, presently missing. It’s rather feared the IRA must have got him.’ Eaton shrugged. ‘That’s all I know.’
‘I don’t like the way Henty’s being written out of history,’ said Wilde. ‘He hated the deal some of the IRA were willing to do with the Nazis. He was trying to stop them launching a major attack in which innocent people would have been slaughtered. Henty was a hero – a flawed hero, maybe, but he put his own life on the line. Many more people are going to have to do that, Eaton. How can we set the record straight? The newspaper report just writes him off as an IRA bomber.’
‘Realpolitik, old boy,’ Eaton said with a weary sigh. ‘Just another unknown warrior, joining a pantheon of millions going back to the dawn of civilisation.’ He nodded at his bandaged stump. ‘And there will be more.’
*
The rain beat against Lydia’s bedroom window. It was mid-afternoon and the sheets were bundled across her floor. They lay naked and spent, their breathing subsiding. Wilde thought he heard her heart beat in time with the pattering of the rain drops. He had asked her to marry him, but she had laughed.
‘Let’s set a date,’ he said.
‘War’s coming, Tom. Gas bombs are going to rain down on us. What’s the point in getting married?’
He chuckled. For as long as he’d known her she had told him she wasn’t the marrying kind. But he no longer believed her. ‘Well, I’m going to set a date. Middle of August. If you turn up, we’ll be married.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘We can still share a bed. But if we get married, we can go to France on honeymoon. I want to see it properly. Paris . . .’
‘Paris is dead in August.’
‘The Riviera, Chamonix for some walking, perhaps the Pyrenees and Gascony? We’ll make a month of it and travel around. A round tour, hugging the edges.’
‘Then you’ll have to get a car, because I’m not riding bloody pillion on the Rudge for two thousand miles.’
‘Does that mean you agree to it?’
‘I agree to the holiday.’
‘Honeymoon.’
‘You call it what you want; I’ll call it what I want.’
The rain was growing heavier. The green of the ash tree outside her window dappled grey light on her walls and its leaves seemed more fresh and intense than he ever remembered. He was not a religious man but a line from school Bible classes would not leave his head. Hath the rain a father? A reminder, perhaps, of the smallness and insignificance of man in a time of iron armies and vain leaders? Let the world carry on; he would not be cowed by the gas bombs. Let them all rain down.
They had talked at length about her time in Germany. She was still puzzled by the question of the man she knew as Bloch, but who seemed also to be known as ‘Baumgarten’. Who was he? If he was responsible for the abduction of Albert and the blackmailing of Eva, why had he helped Lydia escape Germany?
‘Perhaps they just wanted you out of the way without any fuss,’ Wilde said. He raised an eyebrow. ‘You can be a bloody nuisance, you know . . .’
She elbowed him sharply.
It was a week since the attempted massacre in the Cavendish. Analysis had shown that the bottles contained the liquid form of a new gas that had not been seen in Britain before. From what Lydia had learned in Berlin, it seemed almost certain it was a new weapon devised by chemists at IG Farben. Frank Foley, the MI6 man in Berlin, had confirmed it to Guy Rowlands: the name of the new poison was sarin, named after its inventors, Schrader, Ambros, Ritter and von der Linde. It was designed as a pesticide but now it was in military hands and was about to go into large-scale production.
‘Mustard gas was one thing,’ Rowlands had said over drinks one evening. ‘This is a poison of an altogether different order. Animal tests show it to be pretty devastating. It attacks the nervous system.’
‘If only I could have found out more in Berlin,’ Lydia said.
‘Your information might yet prove invaluable, Miss Morris,’ Rowlands continued. ‘Through diplomatic channels, we are letting the German regime know two things – one, that we are aware of this gas and two, that if it is used against us we have the technology to respond in kind. They need to know that.’
As for Mrs Fanny Winch, she was languishing in Holloway women’s prison awaiting trial for abduction of a child and attempted murder. Although there was suspicion of her involvement in the deaths of Birbach, Hellquist and O’Gara, there was no direct evidence. A pity, but the offences for which there was firm evidence were serious enough. She had been asked about the black car with the two men that supposedly took Paul Birbach from her house. She laughed at that. ‘Kept you all busy that, didn’t it?’
Her children had already been escorted across the sea to Ireland to be brought up by their father’s family. The Hardimans, likewise, had been to sea, crossing the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary and arriving in New York a few days later. The FBI was waiting for them and they had been taken in for questioning over the deaths of Birbach and Hellquist. There was evidence against them – a mustard gas canister with Hardiman’s fingerprints on it, and the testimony of Eva Haas. But Milt Hardiman had expensive lawyers and was out of custody and the couple were back at their large estates in Old Westbury, Long Island, before the sun set.
The university of Cambridge, meanwhile, had closed down for the long vacation. The May Balls were over; picnicking by the Cam was now the preserve of town rather than gown. And in this rain, no one really cared.
The shadow of the recent events still hung over them like a pall. In particular, the fate of Clarissa Lancing. Wilde had not been able to get a straight answer out of Geoff.
‘You couldn’t have spotted the Hornet Moth, Geoff. What happened? Did you just fly on a bit and then turn back?’
‘Think what you like, Tom.’
Wilde had been taken aback by the shortness of the response. He tried prodding him. ‘I know bloody well the Spit wasn’t armed, Geoff. So Flood and your sister must be in Germany by now, sipping glasses of schnapps with Adolf at his Bavarian mountain retreat. We’ll probably spot them applauding him at Nuremberg in the September newsreels.’
‘I rather doubt that. I think it’s fair to assume that the Nazis have learned nothing from the Cavendish.’
And with that, Geoff Lancing made it clear that the conversation was over.
The following day Wilde had spotted a small paragraph on page 11 of The Times. AEROPLANE SPOTTED IN DISTRESS, the headline said. Apparently an elderly couple standing at the rear of the Calais-bound ferry had spotted a biplane falling from the sky in a tailspin, before plunging into the sea. The lifeboat had been sent out, but no sign of the plane was found, nor any debris or bodies. The report, Wilde noted, made no mention of any other aircraft being in the vicinity. Perhaps it was all a coincidence.
That afternoon, he encountered Geoff in Free Schoo
l Lane, gazing at a snarling Staffordshire bull terrier that a boy was struggling to restrain. At first Lancing hadn’t noticed Wilde, but then he looked up.
‘Oh, hello, Tom, didn’t see you there.’
‘That dog looks dangerous.’
‘I’d have it put down, wouldn’t you?’
Yes, Wilde had thought. Yes I probably would. If I had a gun, I would shoot it. He wondered what had happened to the pistol he gave Lancing. ‘That Luger, Geoff. What have you done with it?’
‘Oh, I’ve got it somewhere, I think. Don’t need it, do you, Tom?’
Something told him he’d never see the weapon again.
Now here, in this cool bedroom, Wilde’s thoughts shifted back to gentler matters. His eyes were on the ceiling, the reflected light of a mirror playing games, weaving patterns that were never still for a moment.
‘Who would you have as best man?’ she asked, her voice husky and forgiving.
‘Jim Vanderberg.’
‘Of course.’
‘Are we on then?’
She rolled over and stretched her slender body alongside his. Her right hand traced a line down his sternum to his belly. ‘What if someone better comes along?’
‘Then I’ll just have to sack you, won’t I?’
She beat her small fist on his chest. ‘I meant for me, you swine! Bastard, you knew that’s what I meant!’
‘Come on, Lydia, do you really think there’s someone better than me out there?’
She hit him again, then fell across his body and convulsed into gasping sobs. Tears fell like the drip-drip of the rain onto his chest.
‘I hated being away from you,’ he said softly. It was true. The voyage to America, the book tour, his mother’s disappointment at not meeting her, the voyage home, all time wasted without Lydia by his side. And most of all, he had wanted to take her to Charlotte’s graveside, to introduce them, for he knew that Charlotte would have approved.
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