The Enemy Within

by Edward Marston

  ‘I fancy that I do, sir.’

  ‘Peter Tillman sounds as if he’s hiding something.’

  ‘That was my estimation of him,’ said Marmion. ‘He was too smooth and too plausible. I don’t think he’s turned his back on political opinions he’s held for many years. He’s just keeping them well hidden.’

  ‘We may be doing him a disservice, of course. The love of a beautiful woman has been known to transform certain men. Look at how many criminals have started to lead more law-abiding lives when they get married or live in sin with a woman.’

  ‘Tillman is not a criminal, sir. He’s a fanatic with strongly held beliefs about the way that Russia should be run. For all his protestations about being a new man, I think he’s still a committed Bolshevik. The revolution in February wasn’t enough to satisfy someone like him. Tillman wants blood running down the streets. In his heart, he still longs for a real revolution in Russia.’

  ‘Then why isn’t he there to take part in it?’

  ‘He has fur coats to sell,’ said Marmion with a grin. ‘As a matter of fact, he tried to sell one to me. I saw the prices on some of the coats in the shop window. They made my eyes pop.’

  ‘Let’s put Tillman aside and turn our minds to Hubbard. I want that man caught and locked away more securely in Pentonville. The governor keeps ringing me up to demand an arrest.’

  ‘Strictly speaking, it’s a rearrest.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll head for Knockaloe?’

  ‘I’m certain of it, sir.’

  ‘Sergeant Keedy will have got my message. He can look out for him.’

  ‘The sergeant will enjoy meeting him again,’ said Marmion. ‘There’s unfinished business between the two of them. He won’t come home until he can drag Hubbard back with him.’

  It was dark when the ferry docked at the Isle of Man. Wally Hubbard looked at the contours of Douglas, silhouetted against the night sky. Somewhere on the island, he reflected, Ben Croft would be sleeping soundly. Hubbard intended to make the slumber permanent. He’d travelled with false papers and in disguise. Though they’d have been warned about the possibility of his arrival, the port officials and the Manx police would never recognise him. The broad Irish accent that he’d perfected would get him past any figures of authority.

  As the passengers began to leave the vessel, Hubbard joined the queue and he soon found his feet on dry land again. He took a deep breath.

  ‘Right, you bastard,’ he said to himself. ‘Where are you?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Knockaloe was vast. When he took a good look at it in the morning light, Keedy was amazed at its size and regimentation. As he’d been told, it was divided into four camps. They were quite separate and the internees were permitted no contact between them. Douglas, the Manx capital, had its own camp but Knockaloe, near Peel, was the main place of detention on the island. Its individual units were daunting fortresses. Keedy went from one to the other in search of Ben Croft. At the first three, he had no success, luring him into the belief that the man he wanted simply had to be in Camp IV. But there was no Croft listed among the internees. Maurice Hemp was in charge of the camp. A former army major in his fifties, he went through the list of names three times.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Your journey was in vain.’

  ‘He must be here,’ insisted Keedy.

  ‘Then he’s using a false name.’

  ‘How can we find out if that’s the case?’

  ‘It will be difficult. We’d have to look individually at thousands of men. And if we couldn’t unmask him here, you’d have to go back to Camps I, II and III.’

  ‘That would take me ages.’

  ‘Croft is not going anywhere – if he’s here, that is.’

  ‘Let me try another name,’ said Keedy. ‘What about David Ackley?’

  ‘Now, he definitely was here,’ Hemp told him, ‘and I don’t need to look up his name. Ackley was one of our rare escapees.’

  Keedy snapped his fingers. ‘That proves it. Croft is in Camp IV somewhere.’

  ‘What gives you that idea?’

  ‘As you must know, Ackley was murdered on the mainland. He was carrying papers that identified him as Ben Croft. Where else could he have got them from but the man himself?’

  ‘Are you saying that he was party to the escape?’

  ‘No, I don’t think that for a moment.’

  ‘Then how did Ackley get hold of the papers?’

  ‘He must have stolen them.’

  ‘Or paid for them,’ suggested Hemp. ‘If you have money in here, you can buy almost anything – except the means of getting out, that is.’

  ‘What sort of man would sell his identity?’

  ‘A desperate one – we’ve no shortage of those in here.’

  ‘Croft had no reason to be desperate.’

  ‘Then your first guess may be right. The papers were stolen.’

  ‘How did Ackley manage to escape?’

  ‘He disappeared one night, Sergeant. Somehow he got hold of some wire cutters and created a private exit for himself. The patrol found it too late. We had a team at the quayside, making sure that he didn’t catch the ferry. Since there was no sighting of him,’ concluded Hemp, ‘we can only assume he bribed a fisherman to take him across to the mainland. He was obviously a resourceful man.’

  ‘Not that resourceful,’ Keedy observed. ‘He got himself murdered. We’re still on the trail of his killer.’

  ‘Have you any idea who it might be?’

  ‘We have theories,’ replied Keedy. ‘That’s all I can say.’

  With Hemp’s permission, he looked through the lists of internees for himself. They were grouped into nationalities. Germans far outnumbered all the other foreigners in the camp. As he went through an interminable list of German names, Keedy suddenly had an idea.

  ‘Supposing that Croft changed his name legally, so to speak?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Well, he was christened Benjamin Dieter Croft but altered his middle name to David. What if he changed it back to Dieter and translated his surname into German? That would be enough to get him in here, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Nobody would actually seek to come to Knockaloe, surely?’

  ‘Croft might have done. Unfortunately, I don’t know a word of the language or I might be able to find his alternative name in one of your lists.’

  ‘It’s an interesting idea,’ said Hemp, ‘but I don’t think it holds water.’

  ‘Do you speak German, by any chance?’

  ‘I have a smattering, that’s all.’

  ‘What about your staff?’

  ‘Oh, we have lots of German-speakers amongst them so that we know what the internees are saying to each other. Give me a moment and I’ll put your idea to the test.’

  Hemp went out of the room, leaving Keedy to peruse the lists again and to wonder why Ben Croft might choose to belong to them. Even on his brief acquaintance with it, he could see that Knockaloe was a bleak and joyless place in which to be penned. It would not take long for anyone’s spirits to be dampened there. After a couple of minutes, Hemp reappeared.

  ‘His middle name was Dieter, you say?’

  ‘That’s right – what’s German for “Croft”?’

  ‘Bauernkate,’ said Hemp. ‘It’s the word for a small farm, like those in Scotland. Search once again, Sergeant. And look for Dieter Bauernkate this time.’

  Keedy snatched up the lists with excitement.

  The binoculars had been a good investment. They gave Wally Hubbard excellent long-distance vision and they bolstered his claim that he’d come to the island to do some birdwatching. The elderly couple who allowed him to rent a room in their cottage didn’t question him. They found him pleasant and undemanding. The old lady was captivated by his Irish brogue. The cottage was outside Peel but it was relatively easy to get into the town. On his way there, Hubbard had his first view of the sprawling internment camps and realised the sc
ale of his task. Finding his target among so many men would be almost impossible. Fortunately, he had an ally to do the work for him. Keedy would, he hoped, bring Ben Croft within range of the binoculars.

  Marmion took instant action. Troubled by his meeting with Peter Tillman, he made a point of checking certain details. It did not take him long to establish that Tillman’s father had indeed been taken to hospital after a heart attack and was, in fact, still there. His son had promptly stepped into the breach to take charge of the business. Marmion asked one of his detective constables to find out more about his domestic life. The man came back with the information of where and when Tillman had been married and who his lovely bride had been. All the dates seemed to fit. Everything that Marmion had been told at the furrier’s shop was confirmed. There had been a decisive break with David Ackley and the group in which they’d both flourished, then Tillman’s life was monopolised by courtship and marriage. Having sifted through every word exchanged at the furrier’s on the previous day, Marmion recalled something that Mrs Tillman had told him. It was only a phrase, used with unashamed contempt, yet it somehow haunted the inspector. When he called on his brother at the hostel, he was still thinking about it.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Harvey,’ said Raymond, shaking his hand.

  ‘I’d like to say that we’ve solved the murder and that Paul has come home like the prodigal son but neither of those things is true.’

  ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘I’d like to talk something through with you, Raymond. Being here at the scene of the crime might somehow help.’

  ‘Talk away.’

  ‘The reason that the killer was able to walk in here, commit murder and walk right out again is that he caught you all completely off guard. You had no cause to fear an attack on what you saw as a lonely man who’d fallen on hard times.’

  ‘I didn’t. For a start, nobody knew that Ackley was here.’

  ‘Someone must have done.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He came here by invitation,’ said Marmion. ‘I believe that Ackley wrote to a friend for money or shelter or both. He told him the precise time when he’d be alone in the dormitory because he knew that the others would all charge off to breakfast.’

  ‘I can see what you mean,’ said his brother, smiling at the revelation. ‘He had to get to Ackley when nobody else was around. It seemed a fluke to me that he struck at the ideal time. You’ve just explained how he did it.’

  ‘Let me finish. I’m working through it in my mind.’

  ‘And you’re doing so very well.’

  ‘What did the killer take?’

  ‘It was something in the briefcase.’

  ‘We know that there was a notebook in there. One of the other men saw Ackley writing in it when he surprised him in the bathroom. What was in that notebook? It must have contained very sensitive information.’

  ‘Then again, it might just have been a diary.’

  ‘The two are not mutually exclusive, Raymond. Ackley might have been keeping a day-to-day record of his meetings with the Communist cell he’d been leading. It would have had names, dates, addresses and policy objectives. It might also have revealed how the group was funded.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been confiscated when he was interned?’

  ‘Special Branch would have loved to have got their hands on it,’ said Marmion, ‘but Ackley was a canny customer. He wouldn’t walk around with anything as important as his diary on his person. It would have been hidden away somewhere – with that briefcase, probably. When he escaped from Knockaloe, I believe that he retrieved the items then held on to them as if he’d just stolen the Crown Jewels.’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed the other. ‘He slept with that briefcase beside him.’

  ‘What was he most in need of when you found him, Raymond?’

  ‘Decent food, I’d say. He gobbled it down when he got here.’

  ‘Ackley was on the run. He couldn’t dodge Special Branch indefinitely unless he had a safe place to hide. This hostel was a useful temporary refuge but he needed somewhere more permanent.’

  ‘So he wrote to a friend – and the friend betrayed him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marmion, ‘that’s one version of what happened. It may be hopelessly wrong, of course. But it does explain why someone knew when and where to strike.’

  ‘Ackley was expecting help and he got a rope around his neck instead.’

  ‘The killer couldn’t just walk in here because he’d have been seen by all of you. He used the bandsman’s uniform as his cloak of invisibility. It had the double advantage of fooling you and deceiving Ackley himself. He was waiting for a friend, not for a cornet player bent on murder.’

  ‘Why was Ackley betrayed?’

  ‘The answer might lie in that diary of his.’

  ‘You’ve worked it all out, Harvey.’

  ‘Let’s call it a hopeful shot at the truth.’

  ‘What’s the next step?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ said Marmion with a mirthless laugh. ‘It might turn out to be a resort to prayer. Can you give me any pointers?’

  Wally Hubbard had excellent hearing. By drinking at a pub not far from Knockaloe, he overheard off-duty guards talking about their work there. Having picked up a large amount of useful information, he wormed his way cleverly into the conversation and harvested much more.

  ‘What sorts of hours do you good fellows work?’ he asked.

  ‘The shifts are long and tiring,’ replied one of the men.

  ‘Is it easy to get a job in Knockaloe?’

  ‘Who’s asking?’

  ‘My name is Seamus O’Neill. I was a prison officer in Dublin before the Easter Rising. I was appalled by it, so I was. There’ll be worse to come one day, so I’m looking for work outside Ireland.’

  ‘What sort of an education have you had?’

  ‘I can read and write,’ said Hubbard, holding up both hands, ‘and I can count up to ten as well as any man. Will that do?’

  The others laughed. He was engaging company. They gave him the advice he was after, inadvertently acting as cheerful accessories in an attempted murder.

  Even though he knew that Croft was there, it took Keedy a long time to find him as he toured Camp IV. He eventually ran him to ground, talking in German to a group of fellow internees. The sergeant detached him from the group and took him aside. Croft was astounded to see Keedy again.

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘I didn’t. I was acting largely on instinct.’

  ‘Nobody told you I was here?’

  ‘No, Mr Croft. Some people have been annoyingly uncooperative.’

  ‘I know why you came,’ said Croft. ‘You want to tell me that Hubbard is lurking back on the mainland, waiting to slit my throat.’

  ‘Oh, I think he has a more elaborate death in mind than that. What I bring is bad news. Owing to an unfortunate mistake, Hubbard is aware that you’re here.’

  Croft was panic-stricken. ‘He knows?’

  ‘He’s probably on the island already.’

  ‘Why didn’t you warn me?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m doing now, sir. I’m here to protect you.’

  ‘Hubbard is a madman. He burnt down my house.’

  ‘My job is to catch him before he can reach you,’ said Keedy, ‘but, if I’m going to save your life, I expect some honesty on your part.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Croft, indignantly.

  He was a good-looking man in his thirties with a natural arrogance that Keedy had disliked the first time they’d met. The sergeant could see why Croft had been successful as a philanderer. He was tall, slim, sleek, had a seedy charm about him and looked years younger than he really was. Keedy gazed around.

  ‘This must be the worst place in the world for someone like you,’ he said.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘You prefer the company of women, don’t you?’

  Cr
oft sniggered. ‘I’m like any other man, Sergeant.’

  ‘You flatter yourself. But when I demanded honesty, I was warning you not to try to palm me off with lies. There’s more than the threat of an angry father like Wally Hubbard involved here. We have a murder to solve. The victim was someone you knew – David Ackley. What can you tell me about him?’

  ‘I can tell you very little.’

  Keedy sniffed. ‘I think I can smell the first lie.’

  ‘I only spoke to him once or twice.’

  ‘Tell the truth. He ingratiated himself with you so that he could become your friend. You might call yourself by a German name but he discovered that you were really Ben Croft. That means you liked him enough to confide in him.’

  ‘I did,’ confessed the other, ‘and what did he do in return for my friendship?’

  ‘He stole your papers and fled from the camp.’

  ‘I didn’t shed any tears when I read that he’d been killed.’

  ‘Did he tell you if he had any enemies?’

  ‘According to him, the whole British system of government was his enemy. He railed against it. When he talked politics, I never took him seriously.’

  ‘I want names, Mr Croft. Someone killed him. I wondered if he’d mentioned people who hated him enough to want him dead.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t. We were never that close.’

  ‘Did you have any idea that he was planning an escape?’

  ‘No,’ said Croft, angrily, ‘he was a two-faced little bugger.’

  Keedy changed tack. ‘Do you have any regrets about what happened to Hubbard’s daughter?’

  ‘Of course, I do. What sort of man do you take me for?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve worked that bit out. You were sorry that she died, I’m sure, because it meant that you suddenly had her father baying at your heels. Did it never strike you that, if you hadn’t seduced the girl, she might still be alive?’

  ‘That’s none of your business,’ snarled Croft.

  ‘You’re making my job very difficult, you know.’

  ‘Why?’