‘But what was a captain in the Sicherheitsdienst doing there? The SD were Intelligence. Richter wrote in his diary that the Gestapo were at the château and I’ve been assuming the owner of the place was under arrest. At least I was until I found out Pellisier was a collaborator.’
‘It’s a pity we didn’t know that sooner,’ said Peter.
I finished my second pint and pushed the glass aside. ‘All right. How did it go? After they abandon Caen, Pellisier decides it’s time to clear out but first has to go to the château for some reason.’
‘They were burning papers if we believe Hess. Some sort of evidence of what he’d been doing, I suppose.’
‘Something he doesn’t want our lot to find when they arrive? Something incriminating. Then Kearney and his carrier turns up.’
‘Two live prisoners,’ Peter said.
‘And we know the Hitlerjugend aren’t in the habit of taking prisoners. But are we to believe that on the spur of the moment Pellisier thought about leaving one of them to masquerade as his own body?’
Peter pursed his lips. It was a prissy, sort of old maid habit and one I’d often thought wouldn’t gain him many admirers if he used it in front of a jury. I might have mentioned the fact to him except it wasn’t the sort of thing one man could say to another.
‘Perhaps he’d already considered doing something similar if the war started going against Germany,’ he suggested. ‘Although I would have thought that sort of thing would have been easier to arrange in Caen. After all, he could hardly rely on Kearney and his men turning up. Or that one of them would have the same blood type as his, if that was the idea.’
‘Something we don’t know yet,’ I reminded him. ‘Or how the man buried in the garden died. ‘If he wasn’t shot or bludgeoned, say, or if his blood group isn’t the same as Kearney’s, this hypothesis goes out the window.’
‘Then what did they do with Kearney? We know now Vogel shot Dabs.’
‘It had to be opportunistic, then,’ I agreed. ‘Otherwise how do you explain the business with the identity discs? And the way Hess told it, it does corroborate how they were found.’
Peter still didn’t look entirely convinced, his expression suggesting he would need hard evidence to secure the conviction.
‘Don’t you think it was a bit soon for Pellisier to bail out?’ he asked. ‘For all he knew the Hun might have thrown us back into the sea.’
‘Then nothing lost,’ I said. ‘He could turn up again, alive and well. And resume deporting Jews or whatever he was doing.’
‘But to burn your own house down...?’
‘There is that,’ I agreed. ‘Unless it was just the body they tried to burn; with a small localized fire.’
We batted it back and forth until the train was due and walked down the high street to the station. The afternoon was overcast and cool and a rain shower had darkened the redbrick houses of Brockenhurst and left pools of water on the road. The train was the express from Bournemouth to London and we got back to the office in time to find Stan locking up for the weekend.
‘Colonel G wasn’t best pleased,’ he announced as he saw us coming up the stairs. He unlocked the door again and put the kettle on. ‘Bit my head off as soon as I told him you wouldn’t be back. Wants a report on his desk Monday morning.’
He passed me a note he’d left to that effect on Peter’s desk. I screwed it into a ball and tossed it towards the wastebasket. It hit the side and rolled across the floor, stopping unsatisfactorily in the middle of the room.
‘Anything else?’ I asked.
‘Only that he wants this investigation wound up. We’ve spent too much time on it already in his opinion. And he knows you went to Ireland.’
‘How the hell did he find out about that? I didn’t claim any expenses.’
‘Susie had already put in for the rail warrant, remember?’
‘I told her to say my uncle died,’ I protested. ‘I was going to give her the cash to cover it.’
‘Did you?’ Stan asked.
‘I was going to,’ I said.
‘Cuiusvis hominis est errare——’ Peter began quoting.
‘Meaning?’ I interrupted, only too familiar with his penchant for Latin aphorisms.
‘——nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare,’ he finished regardless. ‘Anyone can err, but only the fool persists in his fault.’
‘Going to Ireland wasn’t an error.’
‘I doubt Colonel G will agree.’
I muttered while Stan made the tea. Peter said he’d get his notes written up over the weekend so I had little option but to promise to rewrite the report to Jekyll and append Hess’s statement on Monday. There didn’t seem much else to discuss. I saw little for it but to take the report round to Jekyll on Monday morning and expect a bollocking for my trouble. Winding up the investigation wasn’t the problem; as far as I could see we couldn’t take it any further since we had found out——at least to our own satisfaction——what had happened to Kearney and that Vogel had shot Dabs. Even if nothing could be done about it.
Pellisier was another matter. If he was still alive he was the United Nation War Crimes Commission and Tuchman’s problem. Or Coveney’s. Not ours and not even Jekyll’s. True, having Penny find out about him would be awkward but she could hardly blame me for having a fabricated uncle who committed war crimes.
When we’d finished our tea I thanked Peter and Stan and told them to call it a day. I picked up the ball of paper on the floor and binned it, then went into my office and found another note, this one from Jack, saying Abel Bryce had phoned again and left a number to call back. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to Coveney’s secretary tell me how awkward it might be for his boss if his brother-in-law was found to have committed nefarious acts, so I binned that note, too. Then I sat down and started writing the report for Jekyll.
*
It was well into the evening before I was finished. The dull weather promised an early twilight and I had one more cigarette while staring out of our window at leaden cloud. I wasn’t particularly happy with the report——too many ifs and buts with only a likelihood to hang our premise upon. Worst of all was my attempt to justify the Irish trip, particularly as it had turned out to be a cul-de-sac. And, although tempted, I could hardly use the excuse that at the time Jekyll was in Scotland and therefore unavailable for consultation; my decision to go had been made almost as soon as the office door had closed behind him. Besides, it would have read as if I was expecting to be accorded equal latitude of action with a full colonel, a prospect as unlikely as Joe Stalin voluntarily giving back his half of Europe. The very suggestion would have been taken by Jekyll as kindly as a bull takes to being prodded by a sharp stick.
But I wasn’t going to sit up half the night polishing nuanced phrases in the hope he wouldn’t notice the bones beneath. Maybe it was the exasperation I felt, but for some reason I was hungry again, despite the pigeon pie I’d eaten at lunch.
I had no food in the flat and at that time of evening the shops with whom I was registered for my coupons were shut anyway. Besides, I didn’t have my ration book with me. So I took the tube back to Clerkenwell and tried a new Italian restaurant that had opened recently. The menu was pasted onto the window, offering two kinds of pasta, garnished with a narrow choice of sauce.
It was a small place, squeezed between a milliner who had gone out of business and the butcher with whom I was registered for my meat ration. There were half a dozen tables inside, bedecked with the inevitable red and white check tablecloths and some old wine bottles with half-burned candles protruding from their necks. On the counter stood a wine rack and a few bottles, to give the place an Italian feel I supposed. A wiry Italian and his even stringier wife stood behind it, looking at me hopefully as I stuck my head round the door. I thought if they’d been able to bottle poverty and ruin they’d have better caught the flavour of the Italy I remembered.
I sat at a table and the wiry Italian came over, grey moustache on a
sallow face and fingers like a claw-hammer. He had wine, he said, if I would care for a bottle and scurried off to fetch it. I dithered between the round spaghetti and the flat linguini until the wine arrived. Its dusty bottle and torn label weren’t too encouraging but my appreciation of wine has never been enhanced by any knowledge of provenance. I asked for the linguini while he opened it and suggested he take a glass with me. Surprised, he shouted my order to his wife in Italian then drew out a chair and sat down.
His name was Mario Rossellino, he said, and assured me he had never supported Mussolini.
‘Ten years before the war I am in London but we are interned like all the others.’
Some trace of his indignation still remained and I offered my sympathies.
He shrugged. ‘The food they give us was lousy. Forgive me but the English, they cannot cook.’
‘We prefer to eat,’ I said.
‘Italians do both.’
We shared a glass of wine and in a while his wife brought my linguini. Her name was Maria, which together with her husband I thought contributed to a pleasant euphonic symmetry. I was the only customer so I asked her to take a glass with us too as long as she didn’t mind watching me eat.
She wiped her hands on her apron and sat next to her husband.
‘I like to see people eat,’ Maria said.
I could see she had been a good-looking girl when younger although now her face was lined and in repose held a hardness between the bones and the skin. A residue of whatever had happened to them while interned, perhaps.
I said I hoped that things would soon get back to normal now the war was over. ‘Everyone needs to eat.’
Mario had reservations. ‘It is not easy to get ingredients.’
I assured them it tasted all right to me and told Maria she was a good cook. She smiled and the hardness in her face fled.
A young couple came in and they both stood up. I poured myself some more wine and finished my meal. Mario brought me a glass of some fierce liqueur which, on top of the wine, left me light-headed. I paid, thanked them both and walked a little unsteadily back to Cowcross Street.
My building was in darkness and when I switched on the stair light nothing happened of course. I began feeling my way up the stairs holding the banister rail, still under the effects of the wine and Mario’s liqueur and wondering if all those years of knowing my limit were behind me.
Mind distracted, I put the key in the lock, pushed open the door and was reaching for the light switch before becoming aware of some small alteration in the atmosphere. My senses started twitching...something familiar... But too late. I had turned on the light.
Even then it was a moment before my sluggish brain told me I was looking down the snout of a .38 automatic.
*
The nose of the gun lifted slightly, as if pleased to see me.
‘You’ve been keepin’ us waiting.’
I didn’t know the voice but it had an Irish accent and even the innumerate, drunk or not, can usually put two and two together.
My first impression was that he looked like a boxer. Not the sportsman but the breed of dog. Then I remembered what Ida had said and she’d been right, he better resembled a pug. His face was squat and ugly with a snout that rivalled the .38’s.
Rose was standing behind him, looking even better by comparison, and with an amused smile playing on her red lips.
‘Major Hendrix,’ I said conversationally.
I was pleased by my self-control, although the effect was spoilt somewhat by my inability to think of anything further to add. Not that it mattered. I soon discovered that Diamaid Caomhánach preferred the sound of his own voice to mine.
‘Sit down, Captain,’ he ordered, waving the gun at me like it was the Irish tricolour on St Patrick’s Day. He jerked his chin at Rose who came round behind me as I sat on one of the kitchen chairs. She ran her hands over my chest to my waist, bending over my shoulder so I could smell her scent, that change in the atmosphere I had been so slow to place. Her mouth was close to my ear and I could feel her breath hot against my face.
‘He’s not carrying a gun, Diamaid,’ she said and I thought of how good intentions were shorter-lived than New Year’s resolutions. My revolver was back hanging in my cupboard, clean now but just as useless.
I lifted my hands slowly. ‘Do you mind if I take my tunic off and hang it up?’ I asked. ‘I’m suddenly very warm.’
Caomhánach shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, Captain. Keep your hands still. We won’t be detaining you long, will we Rose?’
Rose glanced at the gun then at me and I could tell they didn’t mean to leave me sitting comfortably by my kitchen table when they left.
‘O’Connell’s dead, you know,’ I told him. ‘The SS shot him in 1944.’
‘So you say.’
I raised my hands. The automatic jerked nervously.
‘It’s a long story,’ I said. ‘They passed O’Connell’s body off as a French collaborator who needed to disappear. I’ve no evidence but I’ve no reason to lie to you either.’
‘When’s an Englishman needed a reason to lie to an Irishman?’ Caomhánach sneered.
But Rose needed to know. ‘How’d they managed that? Passing Billy’s body off as someone else?’
‘Sorry Rose but they burned his body.’
Some last hope died in her eyes. I glanced at Caomhánach but there was nothing there to move his pug’s face.
‘What made them think it was the Frenchman?’ Rose asked.
‘The body was in the Frenchman’s house. They’d dressed him in his clothes and we’re pretty sure they shared the same blood group. Maybe there was more...I don’t know. Anyway, his brother-in-law identified him. Said he recognized a birthmark but I think——’
‘Birthmark?’ Caomhánach stiffened. ‘Where was it?’
‘Where? What, you mean――’
‘Where on his body, man? The birthmark, whereabouts on the body was it?’
‘His backside,’ I said. ‘His right buttock.’
Caomhánach’s features were as still as a china figurine. ‘What did it looked like?’
‘Like an inverted triangle, they said. Except one side wasn’t straight. “Serpentine” was the word used.’
The Irishman’s face, no longer frozen, was growing red. Beyond a blush, some inchoate rage was rising within him.
Rose looked at me but it was Caomhánach she spoke to.
‘Like old Ériu’s harp, eh Diamaid?’
I had heard the line before. I hadn’t understood it then, in the pub in Ballydrum when Dónol Casey had recited a verse of Caomhánach’s poem. Bad poetry, Dónol and Rose had called it. But just because the poetry was bad didn’t mean it hadn’t been heartfelt.
‘Shaped like a harp?’ I said, some of Dónol’s words inexplicably coming back to me: ‘On mounds divine and heaven blessed...isn’t that how it went?’
‘Shut your mouth!’ Caomhánach yelled. He jumped up, pointing the gun at me.
‘He’s dead,’ I said again, realizing I’d already said too much. ‘Isn’t that the evidence you wanted? Killing me won’t do any good. They’ll know it was you. The police know you’re in London.’
But Caomhánach wasn’t listening. He came around the table and jammed the muzzle of the .38 against my forehead. I jerked my head back, feeling blood begin to trickle down my face. Rose began to rummage in her bag. I wondered if she was going to give me a last cigarette.
Caomhánach didn’t seem in any mood to waste time on pleasantries for the condemned, though.
‘That bastard Dónol told you, didn’t he?’ He pressed the gun harder against my skull. ‘I’ll kill the swine, I will. If I’m too late for O’Connell then I’ll shoot that other damn bastard when I get back. You too, you English——’
And I heard the shot.
I sat there for an instant, mouth open...eyes closed. Then he was on top of me, a dead weight that knocked me backwards in the chair, Caomhánach falling on top o
f me.
Beneath him on the floor unable to move, it was a moment before I realized he wasn’t fighting. He lay, sprawled like a sack of potatoes on my chest. I heaved him aside and struggled to my feet.
Rose hadn’t moved. But it was no cigarette from her bag in her hand. Instead she held a gun.
‘I told you he meant to kill you,’ she said.
‘You shot him,’ I gasped, incredulous and unable to stop myself from stating the obvious.
‘Do you think I was going to let him kill Billy if he’d found him? It’s why I came along.’ Then she smiled and the spark came back into her eyes. ‘But there’s no need to thank me, Captain. For saving your life, I mean. You were going to thank me, weren’t you?’
My wits returning, I moved to her side and took the gun from her hand. She didn’t resist. She felt around in her bag again and this time came out with a packet of cigarettes. Her hand was shaking as she tried to take one from the pack. I put the gun on the table, reached for the cigarettes, took two and lit them.
She breathed the smoke in deeply, releasing it with a sigh. Her eyes met mine.
‘I do like one now and again,’ she explained. She took another drag. ‘So the blabbing publican told you about the poem, did he?’ She gazed down at Diamaid’s body. ‘The poor sod was only a schoolboy when he wrote it. Their schoolmaster got it published in a Dublin paper. Once Billy realized what it was about he told me he used to tease Diamaid when they’d had a few too many. “An Ode to an Arse”, Billy called it.’
I dragged on my own cigarette, eyes following hers to where Caomhánach lay. I was wondering if anyone had heard the shot; if anyone had called the police. They would have to know sooner or later. One way or another.
I picked up her gun again. It was a .22 calibre Beretta automatic――what the Americans disparagingly call a “pocket pistol”. A dainty little thing, I’d seen enough of them in Italy to know they’re only effective if the user knows what they are doing. Or happens to get lucky. Caomhánach was lying dead on the floor, his luck running true to form. Whether Rose knew what she was doing or had got lucky, I didn’t know. But it had been lucky for me and I thought the least Rose deserved was another throw of the dice.
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