Ames spoke very quietly. “Hello, Agatha,” he said.
LANE WOKE EARLY and hastily wrote and addressed a note to Higgins. She packed enough for several days and then went downstairs. Setting her suitcase down in the hall, she put her head into the kitchen. “I’m away for a couple of days, Mrs. Macdonald. Some friends wanted a quick visit to Paris, so I’m off with them.”
Mrs. Macdonald looked up from where she was frying eggs and bread for her two current houseguests. “That’s lovely, that is!” she said. “You have a good time, and be a good girl!” Here she winked so broadly as to nearly wipe out the impression she had made so forcefully on “her girls” during the war on the subject of men.
On the way into the underground that would carry her to where Dunn said she would be met and taken to Croydon Airport, she stopped at the post office and sent the note off to Higgins. She reckoned he would get it by eleven. She glanced up and down the street opposite the War Office and finally saw a man leaning against a black sedan, smoking. He flicked his ashes onto the sidewalk but did not look around. When Lane approached him, he stood nonchalantly away from the car and, taking her bag, went around onto the street to open the rear passenger door, as if it were his object to have his passenger sit as far away as possible from him.
“There’s an envelope there. You’re to go through it. Any questions, I can try to help. Your flight out is at ten.” As Lane settled onto the seat, the driver took her bag and stowed it in the trunk of the car. The envelope had everything Dunn said it would. She opened the passport. He’d found a photo from three years before when she’d had one taken for a mission that required Belgian papers. She threw this into her handbag and slid out the rest of the paperwork. Where she was to go in Berlin, whom she was to contact. There was a Russian double agent who would get her into the other side, introduce her to people.
She settled back in the seat and watched the city become poorer and more ragged as they drove out toward Croydon. She tried to ascertain what she felt, and realized it was just a cold anger. She did not want to let it go. If she did, it might allow in her fear at being in this car, going on this “mission,” or her fear for Darling, for what might become of them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“HEY, MATEY, THE MOVING VAN is here.” The guard threw open the cell, and Darling got up from the cot, putting his latest potboiler aside.
“What?”
“Look lively. Throw them clothes in this bag. Your valuables will be transported to the new place, so don’t concern yourself about them.”
Darling could scarcely remember what he had of value and so did not concern himself. “But where am I going?”
“How should I know? Are you taking them books?” The guard waved at the pile that had accumulated on the one chair in the room.
“No. They’re all yours.” Darling was tucking in his shirt and slipping on his shoes, feeling . . . not hopeful exactly. More like a kind of relief that he’d get a change of scene. “Do you have any idea why they’re moving me?” He asked.
“Listen, how many times? I’m not your ruddy social secretary.”
Darling took the bag that was being held out to him, folded his sweater and jacket, and placed them in the bag. Then he stopped in front of the guard and held out his hand.
“I’m sorry, I don’t even know your name, but thank you. I’ve appreciated your . . . well, your good cheer, I suppose.”
The guard, surprised, said, “Joe Bean. That’s decent of you,” and gave his hand to Darling. “And if anyone asks, I don’t think you did it. You ain’t the type.”
Darling smiled gloomily. “Perhaps you can come along and be a character witness for me.”
HIGGINS WAS IN an uncharacteristically optimistic mood. His complaints to the Canadian High Commission had borne the initial fruit of getting him a meeting with his client, and now he had received word that Darling was to be brought back into the city and housed at one of the local prisons. Miss Winslow and his friends would certainly be pleased about that. So much for the High Commission not wanting to act on behalf of a Canadian accused of a heinous act of violence. He doubted not that in due course, Miss Winslow would be allowed to visit Darling again—though Higgins was puzzled that she had not visited him when given permission. This tiresome interruption to the preparation of Darling’s case over, Higgins could concentrate on building a defence.
Short of willing fellow airmen to testify to what happened on the day of the crash, Higgins thought that his best course of action would to build up doubt in the minds of the twelve good men and true, that an outstanding and decorated Royal Air Force pilot would go around shooting his own men.
The clerk came in and dropped several letters on his desk. His mind only half on the task, Higgins went through them, tossing them aside one by one, and then he came Lane’s note. He took his letter opener, an ivory and brass affair given him by his grandfather, who had been out in India, and of which he was inordinately proud.
Mr. Higgins,
I find I must be away for the next three or possibly four days. I know that you are working to navigate through the evidence in the hope of engineering the best outcome. I will be in touch as soon as I can.
Yours,
Lane Winslow
The lawyer read through this missive twice and then turned the paper over as if there might be something to explain it. The first thing that came to mind was what an absolutely redundant message to be sending, and the second was, where was she going, suddenly, when things were beginning to look up? He felt a slight deflation; he had been looking forward to producing the news to Miss Winslow—as if he were conjuring a very large rabbit out of a hat—that she might soon be able visit Flight Lieutenant Darling right in London.
He put her note with the other letters and began a note to Lieutenant Dixby-Brown, who had retired to civilian life following an injury during an air raid on the city and was now running the family haberdashery. He asked if the lieutenant could call on him at his earliest possible convenience, and then called the clerk to make sure the note was delivered by hand that very day. Stretching to take the tension out of his shoulders, he took up his pad of paper and fountain pen and began a series of questions he might put to Darling’s immediate superior with a view to ascertaining if he might be a suitable witness as to Darling’s character.
Lane’s note lay open next to his hand. Frowning, he put down his pen without capping it and took up the letter again. Why would a seemingly intelligent woman, who had been, let’s face it, all “go” to clear up Darling’s name, suddenly disappear like that? And why write this inane note? He reread it and something struck him. She was intelligent, and she had not done a single thing since he’d met her that was not to purpose on this business. This note had to fit what he had come to know about her. He read it out loud and got only as far as the word “navigate” when he thought he understood. He read on and stopped at “engineer.” Of course. She was signalling to him that he needed to talk to the navigator, that was Watson, and the engineer, Anthony. Even her last words, “as soon as I can,” suddenly read to him as, “as soon as you can.”
He took up the envelope, and where he had only glanced at her name on the corner of the envelope, he now saw that the return address was on the Bromley Road. He smiled briefly and shook his head. He knew her rooming house was in the centre of town, near Covent Garden. Wondering at the need for such secrecy and obfuscation, and hoping that he would find both Watson and Anthony at the address she’d provided, Higgins pulled on his jacket and took his hat off the hat stand, and went out into the clerk’s office.
“I’m off to the Bromley Road.”
“A spot of football, sir?”
“Very funny. I expect to be back in a couple of hours.”
LANE DISEMBARKED, STEPPING out into a sunny afternoon. I’m breathing the air of Germany, she thought. Two short years ago this was the air of our fiercest enemy, and now we are to be friends again. She walked across the tarmac, thinking
of Luftwaffe planes flying from this aerodrome to bomb London or Portsmouth, and bombers dispatched to Hamburg and Dresden by the British. Inside, she was directed to passport control and handed over what had been made up for her. She wondered why she wasn’t able to use her own passport. They certainly hadn’t bothered to change her name. The agent took her passport and leafed through it, stamped it loudly and then asked, “Is this the first time you travel to our country, Miss Winslow?” in a soft German accent.
She smiled and said, “Yes, it is.”
“Purpose of your visit?”
“I am here to meet a friend I was at university with before . . . in 1937. This is the address.”
“Her name?”
“Inga Meyer.”
He looked up at her and, at last, smiled. “Have a good holiday, Miss Winslow.”
Trying to control the relief in her breathing, Lane stood waiting for a taxi. When one came, she gave an address very different from the one she had given at passport control.
London, April 1947
“I’VE BEEN SEEN.”
“Bloody hell. How? By whom?”
Jones sighed and looked at the back of his hand, as if assessing a manicure. “One of the crew of the Lancaster. A fellow named Salford. Came right up to me in Paris, asking if I was Jones. I pretended not to hear him at first, and then not to know him. I don’t know if he was convinced. I’m not sure I would have been, under the circumstances, but there you are. I thought it was more urgent to let you know this than continue on to Berlin.”
The director paced, stopping to look out the window, a prey to dark thoughts. He turned. “It’s not the only problem we’ve got,” he said. “A bloody hysteric called Neville Anthony came to report a wartime crime. He came to report he’d seen you shoot Evans. Said he just remembered, hasn’t been able to sleep. He said he was sure you had died, but he couldn’t rest. It was referred to me almost immediately. We’re having him back in. Well, we’ll have to now, won’t we? More the problem is, what is Salford likely to do? And before you suggest it, we are not going to “neutralize” them. That would raise the alarm like nothing else. We need to be more subtle. What do you know about either of them?”
DUNN STOOD GRIMLY at his window looking out at the bustle of Whitehall. He checked his watch and shoved his hand back into his pocket. He should have been here by now. He’d made it perfectly clear what was to happen, and yet there was already one dead body. The possibility that his agent had gone rogue began to take hold, and with it the fear of what might happen next. Had he been following Lane? Was he following her now? He went to his desk and barked into the phone. “I need to send a wire!”
AMES WAITED, STILLER than he ever remembered being. Finally the woman looked up.
“I tried to make a run for it. Thought I’d go back and take up my old life. Ridiculous, really, when I thought about it. I imagined it would be like it had been. The three of us again. But I destroyed all that. I suppose you’ll want to arrest me.”
“I do, yes. When I do, I’ll put handcuffs on you and take you into town where another policeman and I will interview you. I think you should pack a bag. Change of clothes, toothbrush, that sort of thing.”
“Haven’t got much, but all right.” Agatha Browning pushed herself out of her chair and stretched her back, causing Ames to think that that sort of chair did no one any good.
“How did you know it was me?”
“Your sister couldn’t drive. I talked to a policeman called Fripps in your hometown.”
Agatha stood in the doorway, surveying the cabin. “This has been my home for longer than that ‘hometown,’ as you so quaintly call it, was my home.” She moved to a trunk near her bed and pulled out a nightdress, and then by the sink she found her toothbrush and tooth powder and pushed them all into a cloth bag hanging on the wall, out of which she dumped an onion onto the rough wooden counter by the sink.
Ames handcuffed Agatha’s hands in front of her and, taking her arm, walked her down the hill, holding her sparse belongings in the bag. A car came along the road from the ferry and slowed down marginally to take a look, but Ames did not recognize the man driving it. Perhaps it was someone visiting a local. When he glanced at Agatha, he saw that she was gazing up at the tops of the trees.
“IT’S A QUESTION of loyalty, really, when you get right down to it, isn’t it?” Watson opined primly. He, Belton, and Anthony had all gathered at the house on the Bromley Road. Higgins sat with them. He’d thought of bringing Sims along, but not knowing what would come out of this meeting, had decided against it. If it in any way exonerated Darling, he could bring Sims in later.
“I’d prefer this didn’t get out,” Anthony said to Higgins. “I just want to set the record straight. For the skipper,” he added, glancing at Watson.
“Look, if you are about to tell me something that in anyway removes the suspicion from Flight Lieutenant Darling, I shall need you as witnesses. I don’t see how I can avoid that.”
“Can you not find another way to, say, get at the same information? We’ve all been . . . well, threatened, I suppose. I don’t think that’s too strong a word,” Belton said. “They told me they could force me to close my shop. Well, my dad’s shop. They said it was official secrets. I didn’t think anything of it, really, until I heard this rubbish about the skipper. But the point is, I don’t suppose it’s true, but I don’t want my dad’s shop closed either. And if it’s true about poor Salford . . .”
Of the three, Higgins thought, Belton looked the most carefree. He was tall and muscular with a mass of waving black hair and a moustache, under which he chewed on the end of an unlit pipe. “Well, I’d better hear what it is you have to say. We’ll see how we go from there, shall we?”
A nervous silence followed this, and then Anthony spoke. “I suppose I’d better go first. I feel like I started it. I began having nightmares about a year and a half ago.” He looked at Watson. “I suppose you hear about that sort of thing after a crash and whatnot. But mine kept going over and over this one moment when I was crawling out of the plane. I should have gone out with Darling, at the front, but I went through to the back. I . . .” He stopped. “I wanted to make sure everyone was out. And so I had to make my escape following Evans and Jones. And one night I realized what it was I was seeing over and over. It was Jones with a gun out and running in the opposite direction from the rest of us. Skip and I found Evans and dragged him away from the plane. I thought he’d been injured in the crash, but then I saw a clean wound where he’d obviously been shot.”
Higgins interrupted. “Excuse me, but what part of what you are telling me is dream, and what part is memory?”
Anthony shook his head, as if to clear the cobwebs. “That’s the thing, really. I had no memory of this until the nightmares started. It’s like it had been wiped out. But once I started having the dreams, I began to put it back together. Does that make sense?”
Higgins, who didn’t believe in the hocus pocus of modern Freudian thought, and liked to have facts about him when he stood up in a courtroom, shrugged. “It might. We shall have to see. Go on.”
“Well, it clicked one night a couple of months ago,” continued Anthony. “I knew that I’d seen Jones actually shoot Evans. When the plane exploded, I just felt like my brain had been blown apart. I went into a kind of shock, and I could only focus on getting out of there. I suppose that’s why I didn’t remember it.”
“What I don’t understand is why you suffered in silence all this time and didn’t tell me!” Watson said.
“I don’t know. I think I just thought it was mad, that I was going bonkers.”
“Then what happened?” asked Higgins. “How did this go from you thinking Jones shot Evans, to Darling shooting him?”
“I really felt I was beginning to lose my mind, and I thought . . . I don’t know . . . I think I thought that if I could talk to someone, that they could deny it. I thought maybe someone at the War Office already knew about this, had filed it somewhere
and dealt with it. I thought someone would say, ‘Oh, that. Not to worry. We know about that.’ After all, Jones is dead. Well, that was me living in a dream world. I went there, I was shown in to someone who took notes and kept saying ‘I see’ in a way that made me feel like they thought I was lying.”
“Well,” said Watson, “if you burbled on about dreaming it, I’m not surprised.”
“But I didn’t, you see. By then I was pretty clear in my mind. And when he asked me why it took this long to come forward, I just told him I had blocked it out. Once that was done, I did feel better. I got it off my conscience and I started to sleep a little better. The nightmares stopped. But then after a week or two, someone delivered an official looking envelope to me at work, and I was asked to come back. It scared me half to death.” Anthony stopped and took a drink.
“And there’s been a little too much of that, lately, as well,” Watson said, nodding at Anthony’s glass.
“Listen, if you’d been in that room, you’d be drinking too!”
“What was the substance of this second interview?” Higgins asked, hoping to curtail a domestic fracas.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“DID YOU HAVE A GOOD flight, Miss Winslow?” The woman talking to her appeared to be in her late thirties and had a kind of dark Russian attractiveness though her face was very thin and lined in a way that made her look older. Her nearly jet-black hair was cut short, practical, but becoming. She was wearing a dull brown suit, the jacket of which she’d taken off and hung on the back of a chair, revealing a tired beige, short-sleeved nylon blouse. She had wiry and muscular arms. She walked to the window and looked down toward the street, scrutinizing the nearby buildings.
It Begins in Betrayal Page 21