by Alex Gerlis
‘Sunday, 17th October.’
‘And you left Cernavodă on… Friday 8th? Nine days, sounds about right.’
Another break was called, another walk in the park despite an incessant drizzle and then a long session on the encounter with the Gestapo in Passau and an even longer session on the journey from Passau to Pilsen.
‘So you crossed into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia where, precisely?’
‘Eisenstein, I think I did mention that before.’
‘You did. Let’s have a look at the map, eh?’
Then the arrival at the Škoda factory at Pilsen. They were very pleased with the photographs of the unloading of the chromium, really first-class stuff apparently. And the documents too, all splendid – and ‘…let’s have another break.’
A difficult session on the Czech resistance: Karel, Jozef, Radek, Pavel and of course Zora, who they seemed to know about and didn’t want to discuss too much. ‘Who exactly took these photographs?’ Prince said he wasn’t sure though he thought maybe Karel, but they pushed it and pushed it until Prince snapped and said did they realise these poor chaps had risked their bloody lives to get the photographs and were now probably fucking dead and perhaps a bit of respect would be in order… at which point Gilbey suggested another walk and Prince replied that he’d prefer a drink.
They all calmed down and everyone agreed what had happened was quite understandable and there were apologies and drinks all round. Then the escape to Prague… Father František… Tomáš in Prague, Rudi… Inge Brunner at the Swiss consulate in Prague, the journey to Munich… Sigrid Schneider… the hotel, the bomb, the flight to Zurich and then to Bern and turning up like that on Thunstrasse.
‘Bet that gave old Basil quite a shock!’
And then the escape through France and across the Pyrenees, though not in so much detail as they knew all about it anyway.
And then they started at the beginning again.
And once more after that.
‘And finally, let’s go back to Tuzla – 6th October wasn’t it?’
When it was all finally over Gilbey said how absolutely delighted he was, told Prince he was an outstanding agent and please could he hang around for a few more days just in case there were any follow-up questions.
‘I really want to start looking for Henry.’
‘Stay in the Service house until Wednesday, and then you can have a nice clear run at it. That’s a promise.’
* * *
There’d been a few follow-up questions – dates, where was he standing when he took such and such a photograph – but nothing too demanding, and it was evident they were thrilled with the outcome of his mission. Tom Gilbey told him the intelligence would now be passed on to ‘the highest levels…’
His first priority was to meet up with Chief Superintendent Newton who reassured him they were working their way through all couples in the country with the surname Brown and especially any with either the names Terence or Margaret. So far they’d drawn a blank, but he remained hopeful. Prince was beginning to feel that Newton’s approach had been rather plodding. It seemed to lack any imagination. As their meeting came to an end Prince had a thought.
‘The address in Croydon that this couple gave – did you check it out?’
‘I asked the local station to do so – it’s a boarding house and they were able to confirm that a Mr and Mrs Brown, first names Terence and Margaret, and their young son did stay there for two nights in early February last year. They left without leaving a forwarding address.’
‘And did you think to visit this boarding house yourself?’
‘No need – as I say, the local station looked into it.’
* * *
Prince took the train down to Croydon that afternoon. The boarding house looked like the raddled kind of place where down-on-their luck commercial travellers might spend the odd night but certainly not the type of place a couple would choose to spend the first night with their new child.
The owner was a helpful woman in her fifties who explained she’d only bought the place two months previously. She had plans to completely redecorate, she told Prince: new carpets, new mattresses – everything, especially the new mattresses. The previous owners had rather let it run to seed.
He’d shown her his police warrant card and explained he needed to check some guests who’d stayed there in early February 1943.
‘Before my time, then? That’s no problem, then, sir. All their records are stored in the garage.’
The records were stuffed in shoe boxes, one for each three-month period, and it didn’t take him long to find February 1943 and a single sheet of yellowed paper recording the stay of Terence and Margaret Brown and child, no other address, no other details other than two handwritten lines:
Paid: cash – 2 nights
St Anthony’s Birmingham ref.
Did the new owner know what that last line referred to?
‘I do, as it happens, because I’d noticed this on a few forms but the owners said it was some kind of an agency in Birmingham they used to get business from but that arrangement had ended and I wasn’t to worry about it.’
On the short train journey from Croydon back to Victoria station he experienced a surge of optimism. It was a possible breakthrough, the turning point one always felt on a successful investigation. But now he was on his own and knew he needed to behave as if he was an intelligence agent in hostile territory rather than a police officer enforcing the law.
He might even need to break it.
He went back to the Service house and rang Gilbey to tell him he was fine and was heading back to Lincoln, where he would be taking a few days off before resuming the hunt for Henry. He needed to gather his thoughts, he said.
He left the safe house by foot and once he was satisfied he wasn’t being followed – just in case Gilbey had become suspicious – took a bus to Euston station and from there a train to Birmingham. It was late morning when he arrived and he allowed himself an hour to walk round until he was satisfied once more that no one was following him. Inside a crowded post office he found five St Anthony’s in the telephone directory: two churches, a primary school, an old people’s home and a Roman Catholic adoption agency with an address nearby in the centre of the city.
The agency was based in a red-brick Victorian building, occupying half of the top floor, sharing the building with various legal and accountancy firms.
It was early on the Friday afternoon when he strolled into the building, carefully checking the layout on the ground floor before making a note of the accountants who shared the upper floor with the agency. He climbed to the top floor where the front door of the agency was open but to get beyond that he had to press a bell. A stern-looking woman opened the door just wide enough to allow her to see who it was.
What did he want?
Prince gave the name of the accountants and said he had an appointment with them. ‘You’ve come to the wrong place,’ she said. ‘They’re across the corridor – it’s clearly marked…’ – all delivered in a tone that made it apparent this was by no means the first time this had happened. She shut the door and locked it and Prince saw the outer door had three serious-looking locks, even managing to make a mental note of the manufacturer and serial number.
As a police officer Prince had had dealings with adoption agencies and none of them had been easy. They guarded their information for dear life and were extremely reluctant to hand anything over to the police. In his experience it would require at the very least a letter from a chief constable, and failing that a warrant from a magistrate. The process would provide them with ample opportunity to destroy any documentation which could cause them problems.
It was out of the question.
Prince had a good look round the outside of the building before leaving Birmingham and catching a train across country to Lincoln, the first time he’d been home in months. The next day he took a bus to the city centre, walking from there to a street of terraced h
ouses by St Mark’s railway station. There was evidence of considerable bomb damage in the area but the street he was looking for was intact and the front door of the house he was after was open. The old man in the armchair in the front room looked as if he’d seen a ghost.
‘Detective Superintendent Prince! Well I never… the last I’d heard was that you’d been conscripted and were fighting in North Africa or somewhere!’
Prince sat down on the sofa, though only after moving the detritus on it to one side. A black cat stirred and snarled.
‘Well, now I’m back, Cedric. Are you alone in the house?’
Cedric said he was and assured Prince he had an alibi for every moment of the past week, indeed for as far back as he could remember. ‘Anyway, you know I’ve retired.’
Prince looked at the man sitting opposite him: Cedric Woods, the best burglar in Lincolnshire, possibly across a much wider area too. There wasn’t a lock or a safe he couldn’t break into. And he was clever, too careful to be caught – the only times he had been was many years before when he’d made the mistake of working with others.
But Prince had once shown him a kindness: early in his career he’d taken him in for questioning and Cedric had pleaded to be released as his daughter was seriously ill in hospital and about to have an operation. Prince allowed him to visit her and when Cedric was released – there being no evidence against him of course – he told Prince he wouldn’t forget his kindness.
Now Prince had come to remind him of it.
* * *
They travelled to Birmingham the next night, the Sunday, which according to Cedric was the best night to break into an office building. Before leaving Birmingham on the Friday, Prince had spotted a side door in a quiet alley and Cedric took less than a minute to pick that lock. The building was in utter darkness, not a sound coming from anywhere. They climbed to the fifth floor where the two doors that led to the adoption agency took fifteen minutes each to open – five minutes per lock, Cedric said. Prince told Cedric to keep guard by the door. He put on his gloves and, using his torch, started to search for the files. They were arranged by month and year and Cedric easily opened the drawer covering the first six months of 1943.
The file was marked ‘Brown: Terence/Margaret – now Summers: Colin/Jean’ and for a minute or two Prince stared at the cover in disbelief, afraid of what its contents might tell him.
The boy, a patient at St Christopher’s hospital, London … Jean Summers desperate, Colin Summers less so but does what his wife says … Matron as obliging as ever … usual fees paid … advised to stay at (Croydon) boarding house and then move on … boy now called Neville…
There was an address in Southcote in Reading and a handwritten note dated September 1943 stating that the matron had been in touch to say that the police had contacted them and it transpired the boy was in fact almost certainly a Henry Prince, son of a Richard Prince from Lincoln. However, they had made no connection with the agency but Mr and Mrs Summers’ had nonetheless been advised to be particularly cautious.
Prince’s hands were shaking as he carefully copied out in his notebook every word from the file, regretting he’d disposed of the Minox.
And the Beretta.
Chapter 29
Cairo and England
March 1944
It had been some ten months since Sir Roland Pearson had met Mehmet Demir in Cairo, and to say that meeting hadn’t gone well from the Englishman’s point of view was putting it mildly. Pearson had been comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the head of Turkish intelligence. When Pearson had accused Turkey of compromising its neutrality by exporting chromium to Germany Demir had put up a convincing display of ignorance. It wasn’t his job to know what Turkey did and didn’t export – ‘…what about the export of dates, for instance?’
And the meeting had concluded with the Turk demanding evidence.
‘I’ll tell you what, Monsieur Pearson, when you have evidence of these exports come back to me and then we can discuss the matter. Until then it is hypothetical.’
Hence Prince’s mission which, to Pearson’s surprise, had yielded remarkable results. Photographs, dates, names – everything one could have wished for. He now had the evidence Mehmet Demir had demanded and Winston had been delighted.
‘Well, you’d better go and confront the Turks with this, hadn’t you, Roly? Wave it under their bloody noses!’
The British embassy in Ankara had gone through the usual channels and made it very clear: it was most certainly in Turkey’s interests for Mr Demir to be prevailed upon, if not instructed, to meet with his very good friend Sir Roland as soon as possible. Turkey realised it was hardly in a position to say no. The Allies now had victory very much in sight and Turkey couldn’t be seen to antagonise the likely victors.
Which was why he was now back in Cairo.
* * *
Sir Roland Pearson was staying in an eye-wateringly expensive suite in Shepheard’s Hotel, with sweeping views from its many windows of the Garden City and the Nile beyond it. He’d taken three security officers with him from London which Tom Gilbey had suggested was excessive, especially as they had security chaps at the embassy, but Sir Roland insisted. He’d also brought five copies of a dossier, folio size and neatly bound with a smart hard cover.
Mehmet Demir arrived at the hotel on time and was accompanied by two of his own bodyguards but it was made clear to him that neither would be allowed into the suite. To compound Demir’s humiliation he was frisked as he entered, particularly galling for a man who’d been a prisoner of the British for five years.
And now the two men were sitting opposite each other in the suite’s opulent lounge, a marble coffee table between them with a jug of iced water on it and the pile of dossiers. Sir Roland tapped the pile of dossiers, keeping them close to him for the time being.
‘You’ll remember that when we met in this very hotel last year, Mehmet, I enquired about Turkey exporting chromium to the Germans for them to use in armaments’ production? You denied all knowledge of such exports and demanded evidence.’
Sir Roland paused to allow Demir to think about that sentence. He made sure to allow ten seconds to pass.
‘I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that in this dossier is all the evidence you asked for.’
The head of Turkish intelligence didn’t react. Sir Roland knew he’d be thinking it was possible the British were bluffing and didn’t actually have any evidence. In those circumstances it wasn’t wise to try and help them. Sir Roland made sure he waited another ten seconds before opening one of the dossiers.
‘In here you will find a very detailed account of the export of a large cargo of chromium last October, from leaving the port of Tuzla to its arrival at the Škoda factory in Pilsen. And to help you, Mehmet, we’ve gone to the considerable trouble and not a little danger of taking photographs at every stage of the journey, all neatly reproduced in here. And to further assist you we’ve taken the trouble to have the text of the document and the captions to the photographs translated into fewer than four languages: Turkish of course, English, French and German – just in case you care to share this information with any of your erstwhile… trading partners.’
Sir Roland sipped from his glass of iced water, not taking his eyes off Mehmet Demir. The Turk was trying hard not to react but not entirely succeeding. His nostrils slightly flared, his eyebrows moved up and down and an angry twitch developed around his lips. He wiped his forehead and loosened his tie.
‘May I?’ He was pointing at the dossiers.
‘Of course, of course… here, take all of these, I’m sure they’ll be in some demand in Ankara, eh?’
* * *
They’d driven back to Lincoln in the early hours of the Monday morning and Prince dropped Cedric near his house. Prince returned home, parking his car around the corner and slipping in through the back so no one would have cause to suspect he’d not been there all night. He was finding it hard to shake off old habits. His first instinct on f
inding an address for his son had been to drive straight to Reading but he realised that would be a mistake. He needed to be certain this was the correct address for Henry and he also needed some kind of official sanction to ensure his visit there was legal.
So he grabbed a few hours’ sleep, went into Henry’s room to straighten it out, had a bath and took the train to London, arriving there on the Monday afternoon and taking a taxi to Tom Gilbey’s office.
‘And you’re certain this is the address where Henry is?’ Gilbey had listened incredulously to Prince’s announcement that he’d somehow come across the address where his son was living.
‘I’m pretty certain, sir, but until one goes there one cannot be absolutely certain.’
‘And you’re not going to tell me how you obtained this information?’
Not a word or movement from Prince.
‘Very well, perhaps it’s best I don’t know, eh? So all this time we’ve been searching the country for a Mr and Mrs Brown and you say in fact their name is Summers…’
‘Yes, sir, Colin and Jean.’
Tom Gilbey nodded and returned to his desk. ‘Very well, then, I’ll do a letter now to the local chief constable requesting every possible assistance and expecting no awkward questions. For the sake of this letter how should I say you came upon this information?’
‘Perhaps say it was a tip-off, sir.’
* * *
A dispatch rider had taken the letter to the chief constable in Reading that afternoon. The local police responded the following morning asking for a day to keep watch on the house and to verify who was there and observe their movements. Would it be possible for the operation to be on the Wednesday?
‘That address is a rented property – the current tenants are a Colin and Jean Summers who’ve been there since early March last year with their son, Neville, whom you have reason to believe is your son, Henry. Mr Summers works at the Department of Transport in London and leaves the house at six o’clock every morning to walk to Reading West railway station.’