by T E Kinsey
Still feeling jumpy and paranoid, I took the precaution of having a quick butcher’s through the curtains before I went out, just to get the lie of the land. London was coming alive, and a coalman’s cart was already clattering along the street. I could see the milkman carrying his cans a few doors down, while a well-dressed man in early middle age, carrying a furled umbrella and briefcase – the sword and shield of our modern age – hurried towards the tube station.
It all seemed perfectly normal and perfectly safe, until the young loafer who had been leaning against the lamppost opposite the building, looked up. And by “looked up”, I actually mean “looked directly at the window I was looking out of”. I had barely cracked the curtains, only enough to take a look at the street, yet he most definitely saw me. He gave an impudent grin and an ironic salute and sauntered off.
I woke Lady Hardcastle.
‘I’m so sorry to wake you, my lady,’ I said as she struggled to wakefulness. ‘We’re being watched.’
‘Watched?’ she mumbled. ‘By whom?’
‘By a young lad in the street. He’s gone now.’
‘Blast and bother,’ she said, finally becoming fully alert. ‘Harry!’ she yelled. ‘Get up!’
There was grumbling and mumbling from the next bedroom, followed by a thud, a crash and an extremely colourful oath. Harry appeared at the bedroom door, tying the cord on his dressing gown.
‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘The flat is being watched, dear,’ said Lady Hardcastle.
Harry sighed. ‘I know.’
‘You know?’
‘Yes, Sis, they’re my men. Or “our” men. I got some security chaps from the FO to keep an eye on the place for us.’
‘Oh,’ said Lady Hardcastle and I together.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought…’
‘No, I’m the one who should be sorry,’ said Harry. ‘I should remember that you two are in the game.’
Lady Hardcastle chuckled. ‘Sometimes I wonder if our lives might be simpler if we were on the game. But do try to keep us informed, Harry dear. Flo might have hurt the poor lad if he’d spooked her.’
‘Little chap?’ said Harry. ‘About five-foot-three in his socks? Tatty cap, cheeky grin?’
‘That’s him,’ I said. ‘You put your best man on the job, then? Someone who could really look after us?’
Harry smiled. ‘You of all people should know better than to judge a chap’s abilities from his size. Yes, Eric is one of our best men. Observant, bright, quick-witted, light on his feet and absolutely terrifying in a close-quarter scuffle. He’s you in breeches, Strong-Arm.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘But he’s not quite the steadfast and true-type. He took one look at me and strolled off.’
Harry let out a little snort of a laugh. ‘Just ringing the changes, I expect. There will be three of them working shifts. Don’t want to spook the natives by having idlers hanging about the street all day.’
‘So I’m safe to go to the baker’s then?’ I said.
‘My dearest Strong-Arm, I suspect you’d be safe walking through the darkest alleys of Limehouse with five-pound notes pinned to your hat.’
‘Don’t do that, dear,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘But do please nip out and fetch us some bread. There’s something about not sleeping that makes me really very hungry indeed. Is there any chance of a cup of tea before you go?’
‘There’s some in the pot, my lady,’ I said.
‘I’ll get it,’ said Harry. ‘You just get the bread and try not to hospitalize any of our men on the way.’
The trip to the baker’s was thoroughly uneventful and I believe I clocked Eric’s replacement reading a newspaper on the street corner. Now I knew that these idlers were on the side of the angels, I felt just that tiny bit safer in Harry’s flat.
Breakfast was as magnificent as breakfast in a bachelor’s flat can be, and we were onto extra toast and a third pot of tea when the doorbell rang. Harry went to answer it and returned a few moments later with a large envelope.
‘What have you got there, brother dear?’ said Lady Hardcastle.
‘Treasure,’ he said.
‘It’s awfully thin treasure, sweetheart. Don’t you have anything more substantial?’
‘This is quite substantial enough, old girl,’ he said, carefully opening the flap. ‘I contacted one of our chaps in Berlin to get the lowdown on Ehrlichmann.’
‘I thought Sir David was one of your chaps,’ I said. ‘I thought he was researching Ehrlichmann.’
‘He’s Home Office, old thing, different department. He just expressed an interest in your case one day and offered to help. I’m never one to turn down an ally, and it never hurts to make new acquaintances in Whitehall.’
‘It’s all positively Byzantine,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘But what have your chaps found?’
‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’ he said, and began to read the documents he had taken from the envelope. ‘Tum-te-tum…’ he said, as he scanned for items of interest. ‘Ah, here we are. It seems there is no Günther Ehrlichmann on the payroll of German intelligence. He simply doesn’t exist.’
‘No, dear, he doesn’t,’ said Lady Hardcastle, testily. ‘I killed him nine years ago.’
‘No, sorry, I paraphrased badly. I should have said that there never has been a Günther Ehrlichmann. Ever. The man never existed.’
‘Then who...?’
‘Let me have a read, this is fascinating stuff.’ Harry sat down distractedly and began to work his way through the long memorandum. It seemed to be taking him ages so I went and made some more tea.
While I was in the kitchen, the telephone rang and I heard Lady Hardcastle say that she would answer it. It was clearly a brief call, though, because by the time I brought the tea tray through, she was back in her chair.
‘Who was that on the telephone, my lady?’ I said as I set the tray on the small table.
‘Sir David,’ she said quietly, trying not to break Harry’s concentration.
‘What did he want?’ I said.
‘It was very sweet. He just wanted to check that all was well and that we were still comfortable at Harry’s.’
‘How odd,’ I said.
‘A little odd, certainly. But quite charming. Who would have thought that the Home Office had real gentlemen in it?’
I remained unconvinced that Sir David was either charming or a gentleman, but I said nothing. Meanwhile, Harry had finally finished reading.
“Righto, Sis, let’s see if I can get this straight. It seems that the man who killed Roddy and then met his own end in the hallway of your rented house in Shanghai, was called Jakob Gerber. He and his brother Karl – his twin brother Karl, it says here – were, “the German government’s most feared assassins. They carried out their international mischief-making under a shared alias: Günther Ehrlichmann.” Apparently Ehrlichmann’s true double-identity was the best-kept secret in recent memory at least partly because the possibilities it opened up were both lethal and terrifying. He was a killer who could seemingly be in two places at once. He could distract with his left hand and kill with his right.’
‘Well I’ll be blowed,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘And so the man pursuing us now is twin brother Karl.’
‘So it would very much appear,’ said Harry. ‘You only half-killed Günther Ehrlichmann; you left the other half very much alive.’
Lady Hardcastle turned and looked at me. ‘I said I was going to be disappointed. Twins! How terribly ordinary.’
‘Ah, but ordinary goes out the window with the next bit. Our chaps in Berlin have been all of a flap since all this came out and have worked like devils to find out what they can. They couldn’t figure out why he should suddenly come after you now, after all these years. And it’s been puzzling me, too. As much as trying to work out why a dead man should be after you, why now? I know a fair few people capable of holding grudges, but to hold one for nine years without making the slighte
st move… And then when you consider that Karl was alive and well all this time, why did no one see him until early this year? The identity of Ehrlichmann died with his brother, and Karl Gerber hasn’t been seen at all from that day to this.’
‘And do we now know what happened?’
‘Naturally, Sis. There was some amount of chaos in Shanghai at the time of the… incident.’
‘There was a certain degree of local unpleasantness,’ said Lady Hardcastle drily.
‘A few days of spontaneous Boxer activity, yes. Not quite the main event, but enough to make life disagreeable for Westerners and an ideal opportunity for the Chinese to round up undesirables.’
‘Undesirables?’ I said.
‘Anyone they didn’t much like, essentially. One class of person they most especially didn’t like was the European spy. Word had reached them that Ehrlichmann was already targeting Diamond Rook, so they left them both to it and positioned themselves to pick up whoever was left standing. Sorry, Sis. But you know what I mean.’
She waved his concern aside.
‘They saw Karl Gerber later, walking healthy and free, and they and recognized him at once as being Ehrlichmann. They presumed he had eliminated Diamond Rook, and so they seized him. Ehrlichmann had taken care of one of the key European spies and now they had the other. Obviously they missed the fact that you were Diamond Rook, and that they only had half of Ehrlichmann, but it gave them something to play with. And play with him they did. Even after they worked out the truth of what had happened and you were long gone, they held on to Gerber. The Germans had disavowed him, and with his brother dead, there was no one to come looking for him. He disappeared into a Chinese gaol in 1899 and was never seen again. Until earlier this year.’
‘And what happened then?’ asked Lady Hardcastle.
‘No one is quite certain exactly what happened, nor how, but one day an older, thinner Gerber turned up in Berlin and asked to be taken back into the fold.’
‘And did they? Take him back, I mean.’
‘That’s all a bit hazy,’ said Harry, thoughtfully. He leafed through the memorandum again, but didn’t seem to find anything helpful. ‘I can’t believe they would find themselves able to trust an operative who had been under the control of a foreign power for almost nine years, but they do seem to have found a mutually beneficial purpose for him: they let him loose on you.’
‘It does make a little more sense now,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Even just knowing that he’s not a ghost. And revenge is understandable, especially if the thought was what was keeping him going in that Chinese gaol.’
‘But what are we going to do now?’ I said.
‘That, my dear Florence, is a very good question,’ she said, and lapsed into silence.
We got nowhere the previous evening after the revelations from Harry’s contacts in Berlin. It was obvious that Lady Hardcastle was rattled and was just putting on a brave face, and the anxiety was blunting her usually sharp mind. The conversation just went round and round in circles and I’m ashamed to admit that I got a little testy with it all and went to bed early.
The principal consequence of that little outburst of petulance was that I was also awake bright and early. I had persuaded Harry to have his grocer deliver more provisions and I was all set to make a lavish breakfast to atone for my peevishness. All that was required was a fresh loaf, so I set off once more for the baker’s round the corner.
London in the early morning is unlike anywhere I’ve ever been. The city never seems to come to complete rest, but there’s still a feeling just after dawn of momentum building again. The clatter of the delivery carts, the first omnibuses taking the early-starters to their work, the dustmen and street sweepers making everything fresh again. And then there are the smells. The harsh, oddly dirty smell of bricks and paving stones damp with dew, the hundreds of fires lit by bleary-eyed servants, and of course the bread.
The woman behind the counter at the bakery recognized me and chattered cheerfully as she made up what had already become my “regular” order.
‘And look, love, he’s just brought out some lovely Chelsea buns. They’ll go lovely with a cup of tea, they will. You’ll be well and truly in your mistress’s good books if you serves her one of them.’
I should have liked to have made my own (I make a wickedly good Chelsea bun, if I do say so myself) but the facilities at Harry’s flat can be most charitably described as “rudimentary” and so I allowed myself to be persuaded to buy three. And some rolls for lunch.
Something nagged at me on the short walk back, but I couldn’t for the life of me put my finger on what it was. Was there something I had forgotten to do? Somewhere I should have gone? I knew there was something, but try as I might I couldn’t work out what. I tried to put it out of my mind in the hope that I might sidle up on it unawares in a little while and trap the errant thought.
I met the milkman as he struggled up the steps to the entrance to Harry’s building and offered to take Mr Featherstonhaugh’s milk up to the third floor. He was most grateful and flirted half-heartedly as I took the can from him. His heart wasn’t really in it but I laughed appreciatively and we each felt that we’d played our parts.
I met no one else on my way up to Harry’s flat and mused on the fact that I had left and then returned entirely unobserved.
Entirely unobserved. That was what had been niggling me. Where were our watchers? Unless they had grown a great deal more adept in the past twenty-four hours, and had managed to remain completely concealed as they kept us safe from harm, there were no longer any of Harry’s Foreign Office agents outside the flat.
I let myself in and found Harry already up and about. I took off my hat and gloves and put on my pinnie and resumed my breakfast making. Harry hovered, trying to be useful, but it wasn’t long before I pressed a cup of tea into his hands and asked him ever so nicely to please sit down and get out of the way.
‘You do make me laugh, Flo,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I’ve never met a servant quite like you.’
‘I’m a one of a kind.’
‘That you are. I’ve never really had a chance to thank you for taking care of my little sister, you know.’
‘It’s just my job, sir.’
‘Harry,’ he said. ‘After all that you’ve done for her, I think you really can call me Harry.’
‘I’ll try, sir, but it doesn’t come naturally.’
‘No, no, I’ve noticed that. But I mean it. If it weren’t for you, I think Emily would have gone doolally tap years ago.’
‘Or strangled herself with her corsets,’ I said.
He chuckled. ‘Or that, certainly. Not the most practical girl, my sister. But you keep body and soul together and I really don’t know what she’d do without you.’
‘Thank you, sir. You’re very kind. I don’t know what I’d do without her, either. Have you ordered our watchers to stand down, sir?’ I asked.
Harry laughed again. ‘That was quite a change of subject,’ he said. ‘There was I trying to be all gracious and offer you my heartfelt thanks and appreciation for your years of hard work…’
‘And I’m touched, sir, really I am. But it’s been bothering me.’
‘No, Flo, they’re not stood down.’
‘Where are they, then?’
‘Outside on the street,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘Take a look, please, sir. There’s no one there. There was no one there when I went to the baker’s and no one there when I came back.’
‘Well I’ll be blowed,’ he said, getting up to take a look for himself. ‘You’re right you, know,’ he called from the drawing room. ‘Not a soul in sight.’ He came back to the kitchen. ‘And you’re sure you saw no one? Of course you are. You’d know how to spot a tail.’
‘I have a little experience in that area, sir. That’s why I was so annoyed that it took me so long to work out what was wrong.’
‘How do you mean?’ he said, puzzled.
‘Just now, on the w
ay back from the shop. I knew there was something missing but I didn’t know what. Fat lot of good I am as a protector of people’s little sisters.’
‘And whose little sister are you supposed to be protecting?’ asked Lady Hardcastle, emerging from her bedroom, tying up her silk dressing gown.
‘Mine, Sis,’ said Harry. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Not badly, certainly. Is anything the matter? You two seem to be in conspiratorial mood.’
‘Your tiny protector has noticed that my men are missing.’
‘Missing, dear?’ she said, yawning.
‘Vanished. Scarpered. Done a bunk. The old moonlight flit. In short… they’re gone.’
‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Well perhaps that’s all to the good. It does rather precipitate things, doesn’t it. I should be most intrigued to know exactly why they have, as you say, “done a moonlight”, but by leaving us exposed they rather force us to action, do they not? It was terribly easy just to sit here waiting for Ehrlichmann–’
‘Gerber,’ I interrupted.
‘Yes, dear, sorry… waiting for Gerber to turn up and be arrested, but now we have something of an incentive to take matters into our own hands.’
‘Do you have a plan?’ asked Harry.
‘As a matter of fact, I believe I do.’ She produced a book from her pocket. ‘Your library is a little limited, dear thing, but you do at least have some taste.’ She showed him the book.
‘The Return of Sherlock Holmes,’ he said. ‘And this has given you your plan?’
‘Well, quite,’ she said, yawning again. ‘Little point in thinking up one’s own plans when Conan Doyle has already done all the hard work.’
‘And what do we do?’ I asked.
‘I have assignments for both of you,’ she said. ‘But first, breakfast. Harry, darling, you’re a wonderful host, but your cooking is woeful. Thank goodness for Flo. I don’t know what I’d have done without her all these years. I’d have gone doolally. Or starved to death. Or strangled myself with my corsets.’