by Bill Mesce
Harry smiled incredulously. “And you let it go at that? You must be mellowing.”
I poured the last of the pitcher into my glass. “To be perfectly honest, Harry, there didn’t seem much of a story worth pursuing. Giving it thought, one’s thinking goes to a falling-out between allies over a questionable play of cards, or a high-spirited GI paying the consequences for relieving some farmer of one of his prize sows or his daughter’s virtue.”
“Hardly worth your time.” It might have been a criticism.
“Aye.” I patted my pockets. “You wouldn’t happen to have any of those fine American fags about your person, would you?”
He shook his head. “Harry, I can’t believe they brought you all this way over the deceasing of a single wayward GI. Considering the nature of your parting in August, I’m hard put to imagine Colonel Joseph P Ryan issuing a call for Harry Voss.”
“London didn’t ask for me. JAG didn’t ask for me. I’m here with a fellow from the Criminal Investigation Corps in Washington. He asked me to come along. He thought I might be able to help.”
“All the way from Washington? And why would a Washington criminal investigator come to you, Harry? Are your deductive powers so highly regarded amongst the highest circles of your government?”
He reached into his jacket and brought out a small square of paper. This he laid on the table. I turned it round so the photograph faced me.
“Armando Grassi,” he declared.
It is odd how one man’s death can outweigh that of a hundred, if you knew him. Even if you disliked him, a shadow passes over your soul.
“My recollection is that he’d been transferred to Greenland, wasn’t it? Aye, Greenland. In point of fact, his jaw was still —”
“Yes.” Harry scooped the photo up and slipped it inside his jacket.
“That must have been quite a blow you delivered, Mr. Dempsey,” I joshed.
“By all rights Armando Grassi should still be in Greenland annoying the hell out of people.”
“Why isn’t he?”
“Be my friend just now, Eddie. Please.”
For all the bonhomie, we hardly knew each other, Harry and I. Yet he had asked for a friend. I nodded; I needed a friend, just then, as badly as he did.
Briefly, but fully, he told me what he and Woody Kneece had thus far uncovered.
“I agree with you,” I said at his conclusion, “that I doubt it’s some variety of black-market smuggling.”
“John Duff is that well off?”
“Sir John Duff, Harry. I wouldn’t say the man has more money than God, but I’d hate to referee a count. Have you talked to him yet? To Sir Johnnie?”
“I suppose that’s our next thing to do.” There was an odd, sheepish look to him when he said it. Again the lights went on for me.
“That’s the favor! You’re hoping I can provide you with some sort of entree.”
Still sheepish, he nodded.
“As it happens, I have the phone number of Sir Johnnie’s appointments secretary. She is an unbearably officious and snooty-sounding lass with whom you will not enjoy dealing. After several unreturned calls she will find you several minutes to meet with him in his offices, perhaps a week or more hence. At that meeting Sir John will do everything he can to make you feel this is a great imposition, provide you little useful information, and then politely but firmly show you the door.”
Harry smiled suspiciously “But there’s an alternative.”
“Are you going to drink that?” I pointed to his pint. He pushed the glass to me. “He may be blasphemously rich, Harry, and his house a grand one, but it still has a front door and a knocker.”
“Just drop in on him?”
“Take a page from the unfortunate experience of your countrymen at Pearl Harbor. Sometimes one can accomplish so much more when one is uninvited.”
It was not the way Harry Voss did things, afflicted as he was with an almost fatal sense of propriety It took him a few moments to persuade himself. “How can I find him?”
“Sir Johnnie is news. And I am in the news business. He has a place here in London, but he normally weekends at one of his country estates. I can find him.”
“When?”
“By tomorrow. You’ll need to take me with you.”
“I don’t know that Kneece is going to like that.”
“Captain Kneece will not get you past that front door and its fine brass knocker.”
Harry took my glass, poured half of what was left into his glass, then beckoned me to hold it up in toast. We clinked glasses.
“Tomorrow, then,” he said.
*
At Rosewood Court, Woody Kneece was absent, leaving behind a litter of balled-up paper and his typewriter. Propped on Harry’s blankets was the text of a radio message addressed to Harry from Israel Blume:
PER YOUR INQUIRY BUPERS WASHINGTON REPORTS KIN A GRASSI NOTIFIED 12-8 STOP BODY SHIPPED HOME VIA OB CONVOY 12-8 ARRIVING
NY 12-23 STOP ARRIVE CHICAGO BY TRAIN 12-25 STOP HAVE SENT GRASSI EFFECTS STATESIDE THIS DATE END MESSAGE
Harry balled the message up in his hand and let it drop to the floor among Woody Kneece’s literary mistakes. He lay back on his bunk and stared up at the exposed timbers of the cellar roof.
“Merry Christmas, Mr. and Mrs. Grassi,” he murmured, then closed his eyes and hoped for sleep.
*
“Sir John Duff maintains a number of residences,” I explained, shifting round in the front seat of the Army sedan to face Harry and Peter Ricks. “His corporate headquarters is in London, and he has major factories in Birmingham and Sheffield, so he keeps flats in those cities. There’s another in Cardiff for when he’s administering his coal holdings in Wales, another in Southampton where he does most of his shipping, and on his rare holiday, he summers at a cottage in Brighton.” Woody Kneece whistled. “This guy’s like Esso. He’s got a station in every town.”
“Captain Kneece, not to criticize, but I’d much appreciate it if you’d drive on the proper side of the road, which, in this country, happens to be the left.”
“I’m on the left. This mule path is so skinny this tank takes up both sides.”
Indeed, the country lanes of the Kent Downs, crowded by overhanging trees and hedgerows, provided an ill fit for the blocky American Chevrolet.
“Providing the captain doesn’t put us into a farm wagon, we’re heading for the Duff family estate of Belleville outside Canterbury,” I continued. “When Sir Johnnie is attending to his London affairs, he usually weekends there. Finally, he has one additional residence I think you’ll find of particular interest. He has a hunting lodge on the coast of Solway Firth in Galloway — the west coast, facing the Irish Sea.”
“What’s a firth?” Kneece asked.
“Like an inlet,” Harry said.
“In geologic point of fact, an estuary,” I said. “It’s rather rustic up there. Hills, forests. A bonnie empty stretch of coast. No near neighbors.”
“Nice and private,” Ricks noted.
“Aye, and here’s something else of note.”
Like any good newspaper, my rag kept obituary files on the socially prominent, constantly updating them so they could be drawn on posthaste upon any sudden loss among the ruling class. By token of his title and ungodly wealth, Sir Johnnie qualified for membership in the obit club. I extracted a photograph from his file and held it up for Woody Kneece to take a quick glance before I handed it over to Harry and Ricks for study.
“It’s a couple of boats,” Kneece said.
“Big boats,” Ricks amplified.
The photograph was a stem-on shot of two vessels, side by side. Behind them one could see the curve of the hotel-lined white beach of Cannes. The larger ship was the Nahlin, the 230-foot yacht upon which Windsor had squired Wallis Simpson round the Mediterranean during his ill-advised 1936 cruise. Alongside was a smaller vessel, a cabin cruiser a quarter the size of the Nahlin, yet no less impressive with its polished teakwood deck and sparkling
brass fixtures. Small, festive parties clustered on the afterdeck of each craft. Although the photo was taken from some distance, it was easy to pick out the lean form of the duke on the larger ship, quite dashing and fit in white ducks and white open-necked shirt. The dark female form at his side, turned in conversation to someone in the crowd, one presumed to be Wallis Simpson. Windsor was waving at the camera with one hand, and with the other holding a paper streamer, the sort one sees stretched from ship to shore during dockside bon voyage festivities. This particular streamer stretched down to the hand of a strapping, white-haired fellow on the smaller vessel.
Close by him, also smiling, stood a man with owlish dark-rimmed glasses and a high forehead. Across the stem of the craft was the word Rascal.
“The Nahlin,” I explained, “is Windsor’s yacht.”
“The Duke of Windsor?”
“As I told Harry here, he and Sir Johnnie are friends. The other —”
“Sir Johnnie has a boat,” Ricks said, stating the obvious. “A big boat,” I said. “And this lodge of his in Scotland has its own boat slip.”
“How far is it to Orkney Mainland from his place in Galloway?”
“I would guess some four hundred fifty miles or so. Sir Johnnies yacht could easily make the trip in a day or two.”
“That’s Duff on his boat? The guy with the white hair? Who’s that with him? He looks kind of familiar.”
“That’s the then recently appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James: Joseph P Kennedy. Notice how he and the duke are studiously trying not to look in each other’s direction. I told you they weren’t taken with each other. This was at Cannes, the first summer after Kennedy arrived in’38. Windsor had already abdicated and resituated himself in France. Sir Johnnie offered the excursion to Mr. Kennedy, with the approval of Chamberlain’s government, as a token of Britain’s appreciation for Kennedy’s efforts on behalf of ‘peace in our time.’ It also gave Sir Johnnie ample time to ingratiate himself with the ambassador.”
Following my briefing, Ricks announced he had located Second Lieutenant Andrew Charles Coster.
“You were right, Major,” he told Harry. “The G-l clerks remembered him immediately. Coster showed up with no record package, no written orders, just the clothes on his back. But there were orders waiting for him, by cable straight from Washington, highest priority, expedite.”
“To where did they expedite him?”
“Italy. Right up on the line. Attached to a battalion in the sector next to where my battalion was disposed. The assignment is under the guise that he’s a Forward Observer coordinating close air support.”
“They sure got him hidden away as far as they could,” Kneece said.
“I don’t think they’re trying to hide him,” Ricks said. “Put this guy up on the line with no background in FO operations, no infantry orientation? I think they’re trying to find a clean way to get the poor bastard killed. Coster’s on the line almost two weeks — he’s probably dead already.”
We rode silently thereafter. It had been some time since I’d escaped the confines of London. There was a sense of clean breath to the barren fields that purged the stale atmosphere of the Rose & Crown from one’s lungs. It made it all the more a shame to say that even here were the makings of war.
Kneece had to force the staff car up a hedgerow to make way for some farmer on a dog cart, then round a bend in the road, make way again for a convoy of Army lorries. Out on the downs, a flock of sheep would slide down the side of a hillock like a foaming wave, then the next mile or so would find the grasslands covered with a blanket of tents, or an RAF or American aerodrome.
“Now there’s a view!” Kneece pulled the car to a halt, climbed out, and scampered up a hillock for better vantage. Just a few miles distant were the roofs of Canterbury, the spires of the cathedral standing over them like sentinels. Beyond them, a squadron of black crosses glided across the sky: American B-17’s returning from a morning mission. They were coming out of the east, and more than one ship was trailing smoke.
“I can’t believe I still haven’t gotten myself a camera!” we heard young Kneece exclaim.
Peter Ricks looked up at the B-17’s and their streams of oily black smoke, his flask in his hand again. “‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” He leaned back against the seat, drew his garrison cap down over his eyes, and took a pull from his flask.
*
The manse at Belleville was a humble digs by the standards of the peerage. Still, at thirty rooms or so, it was comfortable enough.
Woody Kneece steered the Army sedan past gateposts wound with strands of Yuletide evergreen, down a gravel drive lined with ancient elm trees. He shook his head at the fields rolling away on either side of the drive. “Who does he get to cut the grass?”
“Five thousand acres’ worth,” I said.
“What’s that?” Halfway up the drive, Kneece pulled the car to the side. Perhaps a quarter-mile off, the heather had been turned over in a scar of dark earth, the furrow ending in the fire-blackened hulk of a crumpled B-17. It was a weathered wreck, old. “Back home we just put a birdbath and a statue of a colored jockey on the lawn.”
“Let’s do this,” Peter Ricks said.
At the end of the drive, Kneece killed the engine. “You know,” he said, “we haven’t talked about how we’re going to do this.”
“Whatever I say from here on,” I instructed, “don’t contradict me. Let me have first innings. You’ll hear your cues.”
Peter Ricks shrugged. “Well, that’s more of a plan than I’ve got,” and he stepped out onto the drive.
We stood at the foot of the front steps as the Americans took in the tall windows, the ivy-clad walls, the gilded dome that topped the house. The double doors were garlanded with fir branches and large red bows were fixed to each door. I grabbed the bell pull and tugged, then firmly rapped the brass knocker for good measure.
An aged waistcoated butler answered the door.
“For Sir John Duff, there’s the good fellow,” I announced.
The butler blinked twice through his thick glasses at the row of uniforms gathered behind me. “Excuse me?”
“I say we’re here for Sir John, man. Would he be about?”
“Um, actually, no, sir. If you’d like to leave a message —”
“I wouldn’t like to leave a message, thank you. Is there anyone else we could talk to? It’s terribly important.”
He glanced again at the row of uniforms. “Well, perhaps Mr. Fordyce —”
“Fordyce is here?”
“Mr Fordyce, yes —”
I held up a finger to silence him, drew out my notepad. “Pass that to Mr Fordyce, mate. He’ll speak with us.”
My assurance seemed to irritate him. He took the note I’d scribbled and closed the door in my face.
“Mr. Owen,” Woody Kneece said. “I’m just a poor, mis-educated country boy so maybe I didn’t savvy it right. Did you tell Major Voss you could get us in the door? Or just to the door?”
A moment later, the door swung open. “Gordon Fordyce. I’m Sir John’s confidential secretary.” He looked from the bit of paper in his hand — my note — to me, and his eyes unhappily narrowed.
I touched a finger to my chin and pushed my face upward as if modeling it. “Hard to forget such Olympian beauty, eh, Mr. Fordyce?”
“Oh, I remember the face.” He spoke with a bored intolerance. “But I don’t believe there was opportunity for formal introduction at the time.”
“My exit was a bit rushed, as you might recall.”
Fordyce was good at his game; he betrayed no emotion (other than his obvious wish that I was not on his doorstep), not even curiosity.
“I had always understood Sir Johnnie’s house to be a hospitable one,” I said.
“And so it is.”
“Then why are visitors left to freeze in the winter’s cold on the front steps?”
His eyes moved among us, then he stood back from the d
oor. As I passed by him, he handed me back my note, then rubbed his fingertips together as if my scrap of paper had left some greasy residue behind.
Despite his patrician coolness and pinched upper-house speech, Gordon Fordyce had begun life the son of a working-class Birmingham couple living in a soot-streaked walk-up. Fordyce would possibly have ended his days in similar circumstances had he not caught the eye of Sir John soon after taking work in one of the laird’s factories. Perhaps the attraction had been Fordyce’s fierce aspiration to make something of himself — an ambition with which the self-made Sir John could surely empathize. Or, as one tale went, the older man saw something in Fordyce that brought to mind the men his sons might have become had they survived the Great War. Sir John must have had an extraordinarily discerning eye to see such traits, because to most, Gordon Fordyce displayed none of the charm and athletic looks that Sir John’s sons were remembered for.
Soft, pale, his shoulders hunched, his outsized head marked by a weak chin and small eyes, in his tweeds he called to mind nothing as much as Mr. Carroll’s White Rabbit. The carefully cultivated pronunciations, the fastidiousness in his pomaded hair, parted with geometrical precision, and the mustache trimmed so narrowly it clung precariously to the edge of his lip, indicated someone making a great effort to distance himself from humble beginnings. The common perception in my trade was that Fordyce, like so many other apparatchiks the world over, being a moon incapable of producing its own heat and light, had found a satisfying orbit about Sir John, officiously wielding the reflected power and authority of his master.
Fordyce requested we take care to wipe our feet on the entrance mat lest we sully the parquet inlay floor of the vestibule.
“I understand Sir John’s out and about,” I said.
“He’s still at Sunday service.”
“Then he should be back shortly, eh?”
“Is this something Sir John really needs to be bothered with?”
“Oh, I should think, aye. I’m writing a particular story and it looks to mention Sir John in possible connection. It’s about a jolly ghastly murder up round the good sir’s Orkney patch.”
“Ah. The soldier.”