“Why, that’s grand,” said Luke. “Terrific. Now we’ve got him.”
“It takes us halfway there,” said Kell.
“But surely, sir, his papers – in the name of Richards – they must be forgeries. And calling himself a major—”
“If we had all the time in the world,” said Kell, and Luke could have sworn he saw him looking at his watch as he said it, “then I’d agree with you. Unfortunately, time isn’t on our side. Colonel Upjohn gave me a very enlightening character sketch of the two men involved. Sir John Smedley is obstinate, narrow-minded, and proud. Marcher is a tolerably honest policeman, but a weak man. If he was on his own, in the face of this new evidence, I’m sure that he would act promptly and in the way we want. As it is, he will almost certainly find some excuse for postponing action until the chief constable returns. In a way, this simplifies the problem. Smedley must be dealt with”
And that was all he would say.
After he had left them, Joe said, with unconcealed relish, “I’ve always understood that when it comes to the point, these secret service people don’t bother too much about rules and regulations. They go straight for the throat. I wonder what he’s planning to do. One of those phony ‘accidents,’ do you think? Or straight assassination?”
“Something subtler than that, I hope,” said Luke.
This was on Tuesday, July 21. The Third Fleet, having completed its test mobilisation, had been given a warning order to disperse, an order that Churchill countermanded before it could be put into effect.
On Wednesday night, Luke was in observation. He saw the Zeppelins, three of them this time, swinging up out of the night sky to the east. Though the guiding light in the attic was shining steadily, the fact that the port was dark seemed to disconcert them. After approaching the port they had, unusually, swung away to the north, on a course that took them over the built-up area of Southsea.
Luke watched them with hatred and impotence. He had not bothered to read the message that was flashed up at them. However many messages he read, no one was going to do a blind thing about it. Feeble, feeble, feeble. They were going to lose the war. They deserved to lose it. The fleet would be destroyed before the army could reach the Continent. Serve them all right if we became a vassal state and the Kaiser took over Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.
Having arrived at this point, he managed to laugh at himself, climbed down, went home, and went to bed.
On the following morning, having some trouble with the cook, Lady Smedley, who was usually down first, arrived at the breakfast table ten minutes after her husband. He did not seem to have eaten anything. A helping of bacon and eggs was congealing on his plate, and he was staring out of the window.
When she said, “What’s happened?” he pushed the letter across. It was headed, “The Office of the Lord Lieutenant of the County” and said, after a customary civility, “It is, as I am sure you know, one of my duties as Lord Lieutenant to recommend, from time to time, to the Magistrates Courts Committee, the names of nominees as lay magistrates. More rarely, and unhappily, it is equally my duty to recommend to the committee that a magistrate be removed. Recent circumstances have forced me, in the national interest, to take such a step. I have, therefore, to inform you that as from the date of this letter, the Lord Chancellor’s Office has withdrawn your commission as a justice of the peace. Please acknowledge.”
Quick as a dagger or a bullet and more effective.
Nine wives out of ten would have said, “I did warn you.” Joan Smedley was the tenth. Seeing the look on her husband’s face, she said, “I think the best course will be to tell everyone that you have resigned, because you have found it impossible to work with Superintendent Marcher.”
When Kell called on Marcher and gave him the news, the superintendent, once he had gotten over the shock, expressed his willingness to cooperate in every way. Kell said, “I have to go back to London. I’ve been away too long already. My assistant, Hubert Daines, will give you any help you need, but I am quite happy to leave it in your hands. I suggest you adhere, for now, to the specific matters mentioned in Judge Rosenberg’s letter, which I’ll leave with you. There will, of course, be other charges later.”
The preparations for taking Major Richards were worked out between Marcher and Daines, Luke keeping tactfully in the background. Late on Thursday evening six policemen, led by the superintendent, closed on Fairford Manor. The drive gate was chained, but anticipating this they had brought the necessary apparatus with them. Once in the garden, Marcher spread his men in a semicircle to cover all ways in and out of the house, advanced with one sergeant, and rang the doorbell.
When this produced no answer, he executed a brisk rat-tat on the doorknob. After a further delay, footsteps were heard approaching, and the door was opened by a middle-aged woman wearing a dressing gown. She seemed reassured by the sight of the police uniforms, switched on the porch light, removed the chain, and opened the door.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” said Marcher, “but we’ve come for a word with Major Richards.”
“That I’m afraid you can’t have,” said the lady. “Tuesday evening it was. Him and that creature of his, both left. Good riddance, if you ask me.”
“Left? How, when, where to?”
“As I understand it, they caught that German-American boat. The one that calls in here every week.”
“For God’s sake,” said Luke, when he heard the news. “Why couldn’t we stop him?”
“Can’t blame the police,” said Daines. “Their papers, as far as anyone knew, were in order. He seems to have made an open booking for both of them some weeks ago. It was one he could use whenever the Norddeutscher boat from New York called in here on its way to Bremen. He must have gotten wind of the order cancelling the dispersal of the Third Fleet and seen the red light. He was too quick for us, that’s all.”
“Or we were too slow for him,” said Luke bitterly.
That was not quite the close of the Portsmouth episode.
By the end of August, England had been at war with Germany for three weeks. Luke and Joe were in London, having taken rooms alongside Hubert’s flat. The first casualty lists from the retreat and the engagement at Le Cateau were starting to come in, and there was no room in the papers for civilian casualties. It was from Bob, in Southampton, that Luke got the news.
He said that the Zeppelins, on their first raid, seemed to have missed the port altogether, perhaps on account of its efficient blackout. They swung inland and dropped most of their bombs on the Southsea suburb. “You will be very sorry to hear,” he added, “that Stokes, his wife, and their daughter, Doll, were all killed.”
So, with sad finality, did the curtain come down on Act One.
Part Two
LONDON
Chapter Eight
“If,” said Luke to himself, “I suffered from claustrophobia, I’d be mad or dead by now.”
Lately he had found himself indulging in one-sided conversation, because there was no one else to talk to. Joe had established himself in his old stamping ground, the dockland area of Southeast London. He said that he was cultivating a new contact. Whether this contact wore trousers or skirts had not been revealed.
“It was very thoughtful of Kell,” he continued, trying to be fair, “to bring me into his own office. A compliment, no doubt. And I appreciate that with the rapid growth of his staff – one man and a boy, didn’t he tell us, when he started? – now fourteen full-time operatives. Most of them stolen from other departments and with numbers growing almost daily – of course, he’s short of space. I appreciate that. But he might have found me something a bit bigger. It’s not much more than a cupboard, really.”
This was unfair. There was room in it for a table and a chair. Just. There were also rows of shelves along two of the walls. These, like the table, were overflowing with documents. Some were in folders of the dark blue colour that Kell affected, possibly to demonstrate his connection with the Metropolitan P
olice. Some held in elastic bands, some loose. Luke had read all of them at least once; some more than once.
They dealt, among other things, with the cases of the seven spies that Kell had located and the Special Branch had arrested for him in the period between the formation of MO5 in 1909 and the outbreak of war: Lieutenant Siegfried Helm; Dr. Max Schultz; Heinrich Grosse (a.k.a. Grant); Armgaard Karl Graves; George Parrott, the only Englishman; Wilhelm Klauer (a.k.a. Clare); and Frederick Adolphus Schroeder (a.k.a. Gould). But this clutch of birds brought down by his guns faded into insignificance beside the coup that had finally established the reputation of MO5: the rounding up, on the day that war was declared, of almost the whole of the German spy network then in Great Britain.
This had been the result of identifying the barber, Karl Gustav Ernst, whose shop on Caledonian Road had been the post office for letters to and from agents in Great Britain. Armed with a list of their names and addresses, Kell had sat in his office – had slept there during the first few days of August – surrounded by telephones and waiting for the striking of H hour, when a coded message could go out to his allies in the police stations concerned.
“Very good work,” Luke agreed. “In a way, too good. It’s rather as though someone had invited you to go out fishing and had then calmly announced that there would be no fish available, because he had caught them all!”
Luke laughed bitterly.
“Glad to find you in good spirits,” said Kell, who had made a typically silent entry. “Because I’ve got a job for you and it’s one that really needs your attention. You can forget all this stuff”—with a wave of his hand he abolished about a hundred pounds of documents—“though I’m glad you’ve read it. It’ll give you a good idea of what we’ve been up to. But that’s all past. What matters now is not the past, but the future.”
This sounded so promising that Luke hitched his chair forward. Kell squatted on the edge of the table. Kell was a man of moods, and Luke could tell, from his voice and from the expression on his face, that this time it was his expansive mood, a mood in which he could do anything, from sending you to interrogate the archbishop of Canterbury to dispatching you, at a moment’s notice, to the Outer Hebrides.
He said, “No doubt you realise that if our lords and masters had moved just a little bit quicker, and you had had Aunt Dora with you in Portsmouth, that dangerous ruffian Krieger would not have succeeded in slipping away. Mind you, though I accuse them of being slow, when they gave their minds to it they did hustle the old lady past the winning post in the course of a single afternoon.”
Noting, and enjoying, the look of bewilderment on Luke’s face, he said, “I expect you’ve been too busy to keep an eye on the proceedings of the Mother of Parliaments. I was referring to the Defence of the Realm Act, a very useful omnium gatherum that has sharpened our claws wonderfully. If someone is found now on a forbidden site, or behaving suspiciously anywhere, he has got to prove that he wasn’t indulging in espionage or similar activities. The boot’s on the other foot. You could have had Krieger inside in a brace of shakes, Smedley or no Smedley. In fact, under the new act, you could probably have clapped old Smedley under hatches for lending help and assistance to the enemy.”
“A lovely thought,” said Luke. He was still feeling bitter.
“No good crying over spilled milk. What we’ve got to do now is work out what our old friend Steinhauer in Berlin will think up next. Something artful and unpleasant, no doubt. Particularly now that he’s got Krieger alongside, prompting him.”
Luke said, “He can’t be best pleased at having lost the whole of his organisation in this country.”
“If it is the whole of it.”
“I noticed that you had twenty-two names on your list and pulled in only twenty-one. Is that the missing one?”
“No, no! Number twenty-two was Willie Kay. A totally insignificant character. He happened to be in Berlin when the net closed. No doubt he was running some errand for one of the bigger boys, so he slipped through, and good luck to him. No. The missing man – the one we must lay hands on—is der Vetter.”
“The cousin? Whose cousin?”
“No one’s in particular. That’s just a name he’s been given. He crops up more than once in the correspondence we intercepted. And there’s one thing we noticed about him: whenever his bosses wanted to get in touch with him – to send him instructions, or ask for information – the message was always a verbal one. Someone, not specified, was to speak to der Vetter and ask him to write to “the usual address”. So, not very helpful. But since those careful precautions were taken, in his case only, it’s easy to see that he was an important man. We’d heard whispers about him before. They said that he’d been here a long time. Five or ten years, maybe more.”
“If he’s buried as deeply as that,” said Luke, “he won’t be easy to dig out.”
“Nil desperandum. You unearthed the Richt Kannonier for us. I’m sure you’ll find him.”
“Can you give me any idea? Any lead?”
“Certainly.” Kell removed the files from the table by sweeping them onto the floor. He replaced them with a long, double sheet of paper he had brought in with him. “His name’s on this list – somewhere.”
Luke gazed in horror at the double column of names that occupied, as he saw when he turned them over, both sides of the four large pages.
“What are these people?” he said, trying to keep the note of apprehension out of his voice.
“It’s part of my national register of aliens, which I compiled by circularising all chief constables, asking them for the names of anyone they thought might be likely to indulge in espionage or other conduct harmful to the state. They responded enthusiastically.”
“They did indeed,” said Luke. He was starting to count.
“Don’t bother,” said Kell. “I can tell you the answer. This is the return for London and the home counties. You’ll find 949 names on it.”
“What are those letters against the names?”
Kell’s half smile showed for a moment. He said, “That’s our private classification system. You may find it helpful. Let’s start at the top. ‘AA’ stands for ‘absolutely Anglicised’. They’re the real white-headed boys. ‘A’ is simply ‘Anglicised’. Nothing known for or against them. ‘AB’ is ‘Anglo Boche’. I’d call them doubtful. The next lot are ‘B’, which means simply ‘Boche’. Not necessarily German, you understand, but definitely hostile. A lot of Irishmen in that category. Then, at the bottom of the ladder, ‘BB’.
“Bad Boche. Bloody Boche. Boche bastards?”
“Whatever you fancy. Definitely, maybe actively, hostile. Just not enough evidence to run them in.”
“Even if they can’t be charged, couldn’t they be interned?”
“In the end, I imagine, public pressure – or public panic – may drive us to intern the lot, ‘AA’ to ‘BB’ inclusive. But me, I’d rather let them run, so that we can find out what they’re up to – if any of them are up to anything, which, in the majority of cases, I’m beginning to doubt. After all, we’ve got fairly wide powers now. We make them all register with the police. And we can keep them out of certain prohibited areas. Anything else worrying you?”
“What’s worrying me,” said Luke, “is that this man Vetter could be in any of those categories. In fact, most likely, in the top one, ‘AA’, if he’s buried himself so deeply.”
“Very possibly,” said Kell blandly. “So get out your little spade and start digging. Oh, yes—one other thing: your friend Joe”—it was one of Kell’s most endearing habits that he referred to everyone, however junior, by their given name—“has proposed a new recruit for us. A man called Ben Lefroy. Do you know him?”
“I know about him. He was security officer to the Portsmouth and Southampton Chemical Works. It was well below his ceiling, so he chucked it and came up to London.”
“Below his ceiling?”
“He had a degree in chemistry and physics from London University
. He got the sort of research job he wanted, at the Silvertown Chemical Works. Joe had kept in touch with him and found him lodgings – with a spare room, when needed, for himself. He seems”—Luke tried to suppress his resentment—“to spend most of his time down there nowadays.”
Kell looked at him thoughtfully for a few moments and then said, “All right. I’ll have a word with Ben. Now—is there anything you want to help you in your Vetter hunt?”
Luke said, “I did think of one thing. You mentioned the letters you intercepted. Were copies of them made before they were sent on?”
“They were photographed if they seemed important. In other cases, only the relevant information – names, addresses, and so on – were extracted.”
“Could you give me authority to take over the copies that were made?”
“Certainly. They’re already complaining at Mount Pleasant that the work is swamping them. They’ll be glad to get rid of the old stuff. I’ll give you a letter to the head man, and you can go along and collect them. You’d better take two large suitcases with you.”
Into Battle Page 9