by T E Kinsey
Harry laughed, I blushed, and we all settled down for a slap-up nosh.
We had been given our assignments and had each set off on our separate missions. There was one tiny grain of comfort: at least whoever had stood Harry’s watchers down hadn’t replaced them with his own. Unless they were very good indeed – and I sincerely doubted that they were good enough to stay that well hidden for that long without slipping up – I, for one, spent my day entirely unobserved. The obverse of this cheery coin was that it was a good bet that Ehrlichmann/Gerber knew where we were, but even that was something that we intended to take advantage of.
Harry’s task had been the most straightforward, but perhaps the most difficult. He had been dispatched to the Foreign Office to try to find out why the watchers – placed there under his own orders – were now missing and why no one had troubled to consult him on the matter.
My own part in the affair was more pleasurable and after completing the first part of my tasks for the day, I was the first one to return to the flat. I made myself a sandwich and set about rearranging the furniture in the way Lady Hardcastle had described, paying particular attention to the placing of the large armchair and the lamp.
With that done and my sandwich eaten, I left once more to make some more arrangements. We had all managed to convince ourselves that Ehrlichmann would make his move soon and that he would be most likely to wait until after dark. The disappearance of our watchers seemed to indicate that tonight might be the night and so there was some degree of urgency in putting Lady Hardcastle’s plan into action.
It was dusk by the time Lady Hardcastle and I reconvened at the flat and put the finishing touches to her plan. We set everything up together, but once the dummy was in place, she was careful to keep the light between her and the window blinds so that her shadow was not seen.
By now, you’ve probably surmised that Lady Hardcastle’s plan, taken as it was from that particular Sherlock Holmes book, might have involved a waxwork dummy sitting in a chair near a window. And you’d be right. The Adventure of the Empty House had provided the inspiration, and Joan from Madame Tussaud’s had provided an old head that looked very similar to Lady Hardcastle along with a generic body of about the right size. It had been delivered in a large packing crate which two porters from the waxworks had very kindly brought up to the flat.
‘Are you sure this is going to fool him, my lady?’ I said as I put the finishing touches to the dummy’s costume.
‘Fool him? I can’t see why not. Dear old Joan made some hasty adjustments to this old head with her trusty sculptor’s tools and it does bear more than a passing resemblance to yours truly. I should think it will make him believe that I am sitting alone in the flat and lure him into this room where we can spring our trap.’
‘I do hope you’re right, my lady,’ I said. ‘Did you ever imagine it would come to this?’
‘Come to what, dear? Setting traps for murderous assassins? I don’t suppose I did, no.’
‘I meant being pursued by murderous assassins in the first place,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure it crossed my mind when you casually said, “I say, Flo, do you fancy spying for the Queen?” It seemed like a fantastic adventure, but not a dangerous one. When we fled through China, into Burma – oh my goodness, do you remember that terrifying trip down the Irrawaddy? – I thought we were going to die most days. But even then I thought the danger was behind us. We had more than our fair share of run-ins with people who wanted to kill us, but so far none of them managed to get up and pursue us halfway round the world after we had dealt with them.’
‘No, we’ve been quite fortunate that way. Due in no small part to your prodigious skills, dear. For your part, did you ever imagine you could kill a man with your bare hands?’
‘I was quite a scrapper back in the Valleys.’
She laughed. ‘I don’t doubt it. But you see what I mean. We none of us can predict the future.’
‘My Auntie Bronwyn could see the future. Or so she claimed.’
She chuckled again ‘So you said, pet, so you said. But now let us conceal ourselves and prepare to spring our trap. You know your duties?’
‘I do indeed, my lady,’ I said, and set about my own preparations for the final phase while she concealed herself in the shadows in the corner of the drawing room.
It was a long evening. Just as in The Adventure of the Empty House, the Lady Hardcastle dummy had to be surreptitiously moved at regular intervals to simulate the appearance of a real woman spending a quiet evening relaxing with a good book.
Time dragged on.
Just after midnight there was a scratching at the lock on the front door as though a drunk were fumbling clumsily to get his key to fit into the impossibly tiny keyhole. Then, with a click, the door opened and stealthy footsteps crept along the short passage to the drawing room door. Slowly that door opened and there, silhouetted in the light that had spilled in from the landing, stood Günther Ehrlichmann (or Karl Gerber as we now knew him). He held a silenced automatic pistol in his hand.
Unexpectedly, he didn’t enter the room.
‘Lady Hardcastle, Miss Armstrong,’ he said from the doorway. ‘Please step into the centre of the room with your arms raised above your heads.’
We didn’t move.
‘Come, ladies, I too have read The Adventure of the Empty House. It is much better in German, I feel. Did you think to fool me with your dummy and your shadow show? Please step from your hiding places now before I lose my patience.’
The plan appeared to be falling apart. If he had stepped into the room we would have jumped him but standing there in the hallway with gun levelled, there was little we could do to break the stalemate. Reluctantly, Lady Hardcastle stepped from the shadows and I stood from my hiding place beside the armchair.
‘That is so much better,’ said Gerber. ‘Now we can talk.’
‘Talk?’ said Lady Hardcastle, incredulously.
‘Of course, talk,’ said Gerber. ‘We are civilized people, we should talk.’
‘Before you kill us,’ she said.
‘Yes, of course you must both die. But first I should like to talk. I have spent a lot of time imagining this moment, and I should hate for it to pass without some… ceremony. Yes, I think there should be ceremony. We should make a moment of it.’
‘Perhaps you should come in, join us in a drink. There’s no need to be so formal if we’re to die anyway,’ said Lady Hardcastle, icily. ‘Let’s at least make our last moments pleasant ones. Come in, do.’
‘I think not, Lady Hardcastle. I have heard much about you in recent months and I do not intend to put myself within reach of your deadly servant. We shall talk as we are.’
‘As you wish, Herr Gerber. You’re the one with the burning desire to talk, so what is it that you wish to say?’
‘I have wondered about this for many years, Lady Hardcastle. When you killed my brother, I wondered what I should say. You killed a part of me and I wanted to kill you, too. You do not have a twin, so you cannot know. But you took my life as surely as you took his. And then the Chinese rebels captured me. Took my freedom as you had taken half my life. I spent nine years in a Chinese gaol. Abandoned by my own government and left to rot. Nine years alone to contemplate just one thing: revenge.’
‘Oh, so you’re completely mad, then?’
‘Have a care, Lady Hardcastle. Remember who has the gun.’
‘Oh, I remember. I remember that your brother had a gun, too. I remember that he used it to kill my husband.’
‘It was our job to kill enemy spies.’
‘Roderick was no spy.’
‘No, that was the mistake of our masters in Berlin. They learned afterwards that you were the spy. But now I have the chance to put everything right. I can complete the job that Jakob and I were given, I can avenge my brother’s death and the theft of nine years of my own life. Two bullets, to give so much satisfaction.’
‘Two bullets? Whatever happened to the famous German efficie
ncy?’
‘One each, Lady Hardcastle. Of course I have to kill you both. You left me alive to seek revenge for the murder of my brother, you do not think that I should be foolish enough to leave someone behind to avenge you.’
‘If you put it like that, it does make sense,’ she said, casually.
‘With you both dead, I shall retire to my family’s home in the Tyrollean mountains, and I do not intend to spend the rest of my days looking over my shoulder. It will be nice there. I dreamed for many years of seeing the sky.’ He seemed momentarily to drift off into a world of his own.
It is at this point that I should reveal a fresh deception of my own. The trap in The Adventure of the Empty House was just the starting point for Lady Hardcastle’s plan and I have glossed over my activities earlier in the day, entirely failing to reveal just exactly what I was up to. I thought it would help to convey Gerber’s sense of frustrated bewilderment at the immediately ensuing events if you, too, were in the dark and believed (with some irritation, I shouldn’t wonder) that she had simply reused Holmes’s plan in its published form.
As far as Gerber was aware, I was standing in the drawing room beside my mistress. And I have deceitfully written this narrative to make it appear so to you, too. But that is not precisely what happened. The first of my tasks that day had been to travel to the other side of London to visit the Royal Artillery barracks at Woolwich where Staff Sergeant Daffidd Evans was stationed with his wife, Gwenith. It had been my job to enlist the help of my sister in our risky undertaking.
And so it turned out that the woman standing in the middle of the drawing room with her arms raised, dressed in a maid’s uniform, was not me at all, but Gwenith, my dear twin sister. We thought it would add an extra dimension to the Sherlock Holmes trap and give us a safeguard against Gerber seeing through the clumsy ruse. I would also, we thought, add a pleasing symmetry to the whole twin-filled affair.
While Gwenith had been “me” in the drawing room, I had been in the kitchen, and as Gerber drifted off into his Tyrollean daydream, assuring Lady Hardcastle that he had no intention of spending his remaining days looking over his shoulder, I was tiptoeing up behind him in stockinged feet, hoping with all my heart that he had started as he meant to go on and didn’t plan to look over his shoulder now.
What a foolish and empty thing it is to hope. As I positioned myself to strike, something, some movement of mine, perhaps, some tiny sound I made, caused Gerber to turn his head. He spotted me.
Things weren’t going at all the way I’d imagined them, but I did notice that some good had come of it all. As he turned his head in surprise at my approach, his body turned as well, shifting his aim away from Gwenith and Lady Hardcastle. While the clockwork in his brain was still whirring, I struck out at his gun hand, knocking the pistol from his grasp and sending it skittering across the floor. I should have been growing used to it, but I can’t deny that I was beginning to get more than a little fed up with people pointing guns at me.
I shifted my weight slightly, readying myself for another blow but was forced instead to block a terrifyingly fast counterattack from the white-haired German.
‘I wasn’t entirely idle during my nine years in China,’ he said, aiming a shatteringly painful kick at my knee. ‘My captors encouraged me to keep active and learn some new skills.’ I managed to partially deflect a blow to my face but he still caught the side of my head and left my ears ringing.
He easily caught my next two strikes and was positioning himself for another attack when both our attentions were caught by an oddly quiet and polite cough from the drawing room.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt while you seem to be having so much fun,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘But I thought I ought to point out that I now have this rather handsome pistol.’ She waggled the gun which was now aimed steadily at Gerber. ‘A Luger, isn’t it? It’s rather striking, don’t you think? Very modern looking.’
Rather unexpectedly, Gerber placidly raised his hands in surrender and allowed me to limp past him into the drawing room.
Gwenith helped me to the sofa where I gratefully sat down. It had been a while since I’d been bested in a fair fight and my knee was going to be reminding me of my near defeat for quite a while.
‘Right then, Herr Gerber,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Now that I have the gun, perhaps we can get things back on track. Would you be good enough to lie on your front with your hands behind your back, please?’
He meekly complied, the hint of a smirk on his scarred face.
‘And Gwenith, dear, if you would be a poppet and secure his wrists with the cord as I showed you, that would be grand.’
Gwenith took a length of cord from the bookcase and went over to the supine Gerber. There was a knock, and a voice called through the still-open front door.
‘I say, is there anyone at home?’ It was Sir David Alderman.
‘In here, Sir David,’ called Lady Hardcastle. ‘Thank goodness you’ve arrived. I find myself a little short-handed what with… Oh, I say, how dismaying.’
Sir David stood in the drawing room doorway with a revolver levelled at Lady Hardcastle.
‘Get up, Gerber, you idiot,’ he said. ‘I should have known you’d botch this.’
Gerber stood.
‘Give him his gun back, Lady Hardcastle, there’s a good girl.’
Lady Hardcastle handed the pistol back to Gerber who moved to stand beside Sir David, covering Gwenith with it as she moved to sit beside me on the sofa.
‘I wondered who had stood Harry’s men down,’ said Lady Hardcastle, calmly. ‘I thought it might have been you but I really hoped it wasn’t.’
‘That buffoon Featherstonhaugh thought so, too,’ he said, taking a couple of steps into the room, Gerber moving faithfully with him. ‘He came sniffing around me this morning all please-and-thank-you and three-bags-full-sir, trying to get some information out of me. Your family really are the living end. I sent him on a fool’s errand on the other side of town so he won’t be bothering us if that’s what you were hoping for.’
‘Ah well,’ she said. ‘We’ll just have to make do as best we can without him.’
‘Don’t worry, you won’t have to cope for too long. We’ll soon put you out of my misery.’
‘Your misery, Sir David?’ she said, showing surprise for the first time. ‘What have I ever done to you?’
‘You have been a thorn in my government’s side for a very long time, Lady Hardcastle.’
‘Your government?’ she said, still perplexed. ‘Oh, I see.’ The penny had dropped. ‘Well I never. Fancy there being a German spy in the heart of the Home Office. How about that, eh, girls?’
Gwenith and I just looked at each other.
‘But why now, Sir David? Why blow your cover now?’
‘My cover won’t be blown, Lady Hardcastle. Herr Gerber here will kill the three of you and then he shall disappear into the night like an avenging angel. My office will be called, of course, and Featherstonhaugh’s, but really, I’m so sorry, there was nothing I could do to stop him.’ He chuckled. ‘As for the timing… let us just say that you saw some things in Tsingtao which we should rather you hadn’t seen. Your report was quite useful to the British all those years ago, and you set us back a little, but there still might be details deep within your memory which you didn’t include at the time, some little titbit about the submarine or its pen. We would really rather there was no one left around who has seen even the early prototypes of our submarines before we start sea trials of the latest version. Surprise is everything in warfare, dear lady.’
‘Warfare? There’s no war.’
‘Oh, give it time. War shall come sooner or later. And when it does, Imperial Germany shall be very much the side to back.’
‘When did you decide to betray your country?’ asked Lady Hardcastle.
‘Betray my country, my lady? But I’ve been serving my country all along. My family name is Haltermann, not Alderman, we are originally from Hannover. My parents m
oved to England when I was very young. A little change of spelling, a white lie or two about my ancestry… gaining access to the British establishment was all very easy. And no one looked terribly hard once they heard I was a Cambridge man. Being the “right sort” opens so many doors, don’t you find? But of course you do. You were at Girton yourself.’
‘I was, it’s true. Ah well. It’s a shame it all has to end like this. I rather imagined myself growing old and irascible, surrounded by irritated relatives and dying in a comfortable bed after saying something profoundly witty.’
‘You’re breaking my heart,’ said Sir David, coldly. ‘Well, I’ve had my fun. Gerber, do what you do and let’s get out of here.’
I’ve always been terribly fond of Harry Featherstonhaugh, but at that moment I could have kissed the fellow. Sir David’s last words were almost drowned out by the sound of three more pistols being cocked in the doorway behind him and there stood Harry and two uniformed soldiers.
‘Hello, Sis,’ said Harry. ‘Sorry I’m late. I was halfway to the other side of town when I realized I probably ought to be here instead. Luckily I found a couple of chaps milling about nearby who were able to come and help.’
‘Hello, love,’ said the soldier with three stripes and a crown on his sleeve. ‘You all right?’
Gwenith nodded.
‘Guns down, hands on heads,’ said Harry to Gerber and Sir David. ‘Captain, if you could do the honours with the handcuffs, the staff sergeant here can go and see to his wife. Looks like she’s hurt her knee.’
‘That’s Florence with the damaged knee, you dolt,’ said Lady Hardcastle.
‘Is it, by crikey,’ he said. ‘Well I never. You two do look awfully alike, you know.’
‘It’s being twins that does it, sir,’ I said.
‘Harry, darling,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘it’s a relief to see you all. Where did you find our new friends?’
‘Long story, Sis, but the short version is that when Flo went over to the barracks this morning to fetch her sister, Staff Sergeant Evans didn’t want her to go alone. He enlisted the help of his captain and they came looking for us. I found them near the tube station.’