Spy’s Honour

by Gavin Lyall

  “One bit of good news is that Mrs Finn’s on her father’s yacht in the harbour and we’re invited to lunch. You’ll probably have to eat with the crew, so d’you want to come?”

  “When else would I be seeing the inside of a boat like one of them?” O’Gilroy asked mournfully.

  “Fine. Now we’d better take a look at these locks.”

  Just then, Lenz came striding out of the Club, touched his hat to Ranklin, gave O’Gilroy a disdainful up-and-down look, and went to a small but well-polished blue tourer that he cranked and drove away himself.

  “Lenz,” Ranklin said. “Their captain of detectives.”

  “I saw him watching from just inside the Club.

  “Assume he’s always around. Get us a cab, please.”

  There were plenty of other cars parked at the quayside, but still none of them taxis. So they ended up in another open horse-drawn four-wheeler, O’Gilroy sitting upright under his bowler, Ranklin slumped under his straw boater (at least he had the right hat) and both far enough from the cabby to talk freely, they hoped.

  Of course, Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t have taken the first nor the second cab on offer (did the man never miss a train thereby?) but there was hardly any secret about this journey. Still, Ranklin hadn’t realised the Holmes stories were so well-known in Germany – unless they were just prescribed reading for Naval Intelligence.

  Watching the harbour jog past, he realised how spoilt he had become by the motor taxis of London and Paris. A few years ago, he would have relaxed, knowing he was going as fast as possible; now, he fidgeted with impatience that slowly dissolved as O’Gilroy reported his night in the Old Town. Ranklin half admired his tenacious depravity, half feared he would have done most of it from choice anyway.

  “You seem to have had a most educational time,” he conceded finally. “And about all I did was count Cross’s socks. Would you know either of the two men again?”

  “Surely.” O’Gilroy smiled nastily. “One’ll be walking bent over and holding himself private-like, and t’other’s got his nose spread right across his face.”

  “Ye-es. I suppose it is more practical to have a description of people after they’ve met you than before. And the woman?”

  “Mebbe. The voice I think I’d know. D’ye want to see the pictures?” He passed them over. “That’s the one the feller said ye’d like best.”

  “And quite right too.” Ranklin quickly covered some square metres of female flesh with the German High Seas Fleet. It was an ordinary postcard showing a salute being fired at some earlier Kiel Week. Perhaps five ships might, to an expert, have been identifiable through the smoke clouds. So saluting guns didn’t use smokeless charges: the Admiralty wasn’t likely to award him a pension for that news.

  “There’s a number on the back,” O’Gilroy said.

  The scrawled figures said 030110. Ranklin looked blankly at them, then blankly at O’Gilroy. “Well? – you bought it.”

  O’Gilroy shrugged. “He just said ye’d like it. Didn’t say there was a couple of hard boys outside wanted it as well.”

  “Just another damned mysterious bit of paper.” He realised he hadn’t read the cablegrams Mr Cross had given him, not wanting to produce them in the Club breakfast room. He took them out, gave one to O’Gilroy, and they both read for a while. The cab turned inland and began to climb through wooded parkland past the Bellevue Hotel.

  Three cablegrams had been sent at two-day intervals during the past week, each from Korsör to Mr Cross Senior at his Essex home. But one was about commodity prices, timber, grain and coal, another gave the results of the early yacht races and the third was about the times of boats and trains for young Cross’s journey home.

  They stared at each other.

  “Code?” O’Gilroy suggested.

  “Yes, except his father couldn’t understand them. Perhaps it was a trial run to see if the cable office accepted such messages.”

  “Lots of numbers in them.”

  “That’s true.” Ranklin began counting. “Exactly twelve figures in each message, not counting times and dates put on by the cable company.”

  “That sounds like something.”

  “Damn it, everything sounds like something – even Dragan el Vipero.”

  “Ye’ve heard of him, too?”

  “Yes – and you? Reimers, their Naval Intelligence, I think, said he was in town.”

  “Paddy the barman told me. Said ’twas him killed the King of Greece.”

  “Another?” Brussels had been full of stories-for-sale about that assassination. The shot had been fired by a loony, but that left the question of who hired the loony, then who hired whoever hired the loony … Dragan sounded as if he belonged in such rumours; it seemed the sort of name which, mentioned in a Low Dive, would cause half the customers to slink out white-faced and the other half to knife you.

  O’Gilroy took a more robust view. “Most fellers call themselves names like that’re just piss and wind. Worry about the ones that tear yer arms off without introducing themselves.”

  “I’ll try to remember. Oh, and one other thing.” He hadn’t planned to mention the bearer bond, high finance not being O’Gilroy’s strong point, but if they were sharing paper puzzles … He explained what the bond was, officially.

  O’Gilroy looked it over and grunted: “Pretty picture. Is this where we’re going?”

  “Yes. Mind, all that isn’t built yet.”

  “Tell me something, Captain,” being called that again immediately made Ranklin wary; “are we trying to solve what got him killed?”

  “No, we are not. No matter what his father thinks. And quite apart from what it would do to us, we aren’t in the business of revenge. Cross knew the risks he was running, he knew he was on his own.” But, forced to think about it, he realised he was assuming Cross had been murdered – probably because he assumed that spies on active service didn’t die accidentally. But for that very reason, he had to convince Lenz and Reimers that he accepted it as an accident.

  “I expect the police did it anyways,” O’Gilroy said equably. “And how would ye prove that?”

  “Hold on. The Prussian police have a reputation for thinking with their fists, but they’d rather have the kudos of catching a spy.”

  “They was looking for him, just before he got dead.”

  “So you said. They didn’t say why they were looking?”

  O’Gilroy gave him a pitying look. “Since when did the police say why they was doing anything?” Their different backgrounds had given them very different outlooks on the police – of any country.

  “What happened that night that they should suddenly want Cross?” Ranklin mused. “Or had they been watching him and lost him?”

  “And him in a pink jacket.”

  “That sounds like a Leander Rowing Club blazer.” In Kiel’s Old Town, that would have stood out like a lighthouse on the darkest night.

  Ranklin shook his head and summed up: “I’d like to know what Cross was up to; I want to be sure he didn’t leave any dangerous loose ends – the Bureau’ll expect that much. But we may end up just burning all these papers and catching the next train. Or ship.”

  “I second the motion – if it comes to a vote.”

  24

  Their first sight of the Canal came near the bottom of a long slope down through the village suburb of Wik. On the far side, the red roofs of Holtenau glowed like embers amid the fresh summer greenery, but to the right on this side there was a pall of smoke, dust and steam hanging over the ravaged land that would become the new locks.

  From ground level it was difficult to see any shape to the project, particularly since the work was going down and not up. But as they turned towards it and the road broke up into a wide trail of ruts and sandy dust, a broad pattern emerged. Two gigantic open-ended brick-and-concrete graves lay side by side, each over a thousand feet long and more than fifty deep. At this end, and presumably also at the other, where the locks would open into the harbo
ur, a great basin had been hacked out to the same depth, its sloping banks lined with rough stonework.

  In a few weeks the last bank holding back the waters of the Canal would be blown or chopped through, and the basin and locks would be flooded. But now the excavation floor was still crossed by a light railway track and duckboard walks, and dotted with carts and unrecognisable lumps of machinery.

  “And what more,” O’Gilroy asked softly, “would a man see by getting close enough to fall in?”

  Ranklin shook his head. Any idea he might have had that Cross had planned to sabotage the locks was crushed by their vast simplicity: it would be taking a hat pin to sabotage a steamroller. “We came here to ask questions. We’d better find someone to ask.”

  At that point, the cabbie decided the going had got too rough, so they left him – as yet unpaid – and began walking. The site was far too big and needed too many entrances to be fenced properly, so relied on dozens of those warning notices the Germans do so well. But finally they found a sort of gatekeeper’s hut and Ranklin tried to explain themselves.

  The gatekeeper’s suspicious stare turned to: “Ach, die Engländer,” which told them that Reimers had telephoned ahead. They were then led up to the lockside and handed over to a man with a complicated title that boiled down to overseer: a muscular body crammed into a black suit, a large moustache on a wind-rouged face topped with a black bowler. If he wasn’t delighted to see them, he was at least resigned.

  He spoke loudly and carefully against the cross-rhythms of half a dozen pieces of pumping, digging and hauling equipment. It seemed that the other Engländer had fallen over there – from the far side, up towards the harbour end. So they walked along the paved lockside studded with great iron bollards and electric-light poles, past a new and obviously temporary wooden viewing stand, and stared solemnly and pointlessly at the Fatal Spot.

  There was still a shallow pool of water on the lock floor, covered with a film of oil that moved in colourful art nouveau swirls as a pump tried to guzzle it up. The far lockside from which Cross had fallen was in effect a free-standing wall dividing the two locks, and Ranklin couldn’t see how he could have got there. It wasn’t until the overseer explained that Ranklin understood how the lock gates worked.

  Instead of swinging on hinges, as with smaller locks, these gates were massive slabs of metal that slid across the lock on rails from deep slots in the walls. And there were three of them, one at each end and one not quite in the middle – presumably so that the lock could be used as a smaller, quicker one when handling only a few small ships. At the moment all the gates on both locks were open – slid back into their slots – but over the weekend the central gate of the far lock and the harbour-end gate of this lock had been closed. Cross must have come across the walkway atop that centre gate, then turned towards the harbour-end gate to cross that to where they now stood. But coming from and going to where?

  From somewhere not too far off came the boom of a single cannon, and several workmen ran past them towards the harbour end. The overseer gave a half-exasperated smile and began to explain, but Ranklin was already looking: in the middle of the harbour four big yachts, sharp-edged clouds of bulging white sail, were heeling to starboard and heading north in an irregular pack. The day’s big race was on.

  The overseer named each one: the Kaiser’s Meteor, the Hamburg II, Germania, and some Englishman’s Margherita. Ranklin recalled his coastal gunner’s experience and estimated them as a mile off – no, 2,000 yards, and only then grasped how big they were. Their simplicity had made them seem no more than models on the Round Pond.

  “One hundred and fifty-foot masts on them,” O’Gilroy commented, and he should know: yacht racing had virtually been invented in Cork bay. But for all their size, they were just toy boats, Ranklin thought.

  The overseer listened to the workers’ loyal “Hochs!” with mixed feelings. As he explained, he could hardly stop them cheering the Kaiser’s yacht, but he would rather they got on with preparing for the Kaiser’s visit here the day after tomorrow, along with the King and Queen of Italy. Hence the viewing stand, the new duckboarding being laid below, bunting being strung from light poles.

  (In the midst of yacht-racing we are in diplomacy, Ranklin noted: Italy, the lukewarm ally, is to be impressed with the seriousness of the German Naval programme).

  The workmen finally drifted back to work and the overseer to the events of early Sunday morning. Yes, one of the night watchmen had seen the body and telephoned both the Wik police and himself at the workers’ lodging house. He had –

  O’Gilroy had been taking notes from Ranklin’s interpretations as an excuse for a valet being in on the conversation. Now he muttered: “And why did the watchman know to look down into the lock?”

  Ach, that was simple: they had been pumping throughout the night and every hour he went around topping up the pump engines with petrol and looking down to see that they weren’t sucking dry.

  O’Gilroy gave a faint nod, satisfied.

  So, the overseer arrived to find the body had been brought up and searched but no identification found. So he himself had telephoned the Kiel police to say they had found the body of a seaman, so if any were reported missing …

  “But, mein Herr,” Ranklin interrupted, “what made you think it was the body of a seaman?”

  The way he was dressed, naturally.

  “But the pink blazer?”

  He saw no pink blazer.

  Mystified, Ranklin protested: “But surely you must have known it was the body of a gentleman?” He knew he was sounding pompous, but this final humiliation in Cross’s damp and undignified death riled him.

  The overseer’s voice easily drowned out any construction noise. The corpse was just a muddy, bloody, oily wreck and all it had in its pockets were some money, a watch, cigarettes, a restaurant bill and a meaningless bit of radical writing. Any seaman could be carrying such things and so he told the Kiel police he’d found the body of a seaman, that was all. And he was a busy man with a lock both to build and keep clean enough to be inspected by the All-Highest on Thursday, so …

  They parted with feathers ruffled on both sides. When they were almost back to the cab, O’Gilroy asked: “So what did we learn?”

  “That Cross wasn’t wearing his blazer, and that he probably came from the Holtenau side. So I suppose we go over there.”

  To reach Holtenau they had to go back nearly a mile along the Canal and cross by the new high-level bridge, higher than the masts of the newest warships. From up there they could see the layout of the locks plainly, the old smaller ones nestled up against Holtenau village and separated from the new locks by what would become a man-made island once the water was released through the locks themselves.

  Going from Holtenau, Cross must have passed through the clutter of constructors’ huts, dumps of building material and half-built structures of the “island”. But why? To look at – or sabotage – the one finished building, the power station needed to shunt those great gates to and fro?

  Far behind, an old car with its hood up against the sun and moving no faster than their cab, turned onto the bridge behind them. It was still behind and only reaching the crest of the bridge when they turned right into Holtenau and Ranklin told the cabbie to drive them through the village along the Canal side.

  Here, the solid old houses and equally solid trees were a calm contrast to the racket and rawness of the site they had left on the other side. The old locks were busy, but nobody can rush a lock. Cargo steamers, schooners, barges and their tugs all oozed gently in and out with no more fuss than a few hoots and commands and some deft rope-handling.

  “A big business,” O’Gilroy commented. “Must cost a mint.”

  “They must charge tolls,” Ranklin said, “but the Canal was really built for the Navy. Probably they could shift the whole fleet from the Baltic to the North Sea in twenty-four hours. In two days, a dreadnought could go from harbour here to bombarding London – our Navy permitting
.”

  Abruptly, they were past the locks, through the village and with the wide inlet of Kiel harbour ahead. The land ended in a slight knoll topped by a stubby lighthouse and a statue of Wilhelm I, just as shown in the engraving on the bearer bond. Ranklin also remembered the two-storey mock-medieval building alongside, which turned out to be a café-restaurant. The cabbie had assumed that was where they were heading, and since it was never too early for O’Gilroy …

  They ordered coffee – perhaps O’Gilroy was still recovering from last night – and sat on a sunny terrace overlooking the inlet. Around them, a small crowd of expensively dressed race-watchers stared through binoculars at the four big racing yachts, now slow-weaving white triangles on the northern horizon.

  “Ye know,” O’Gilroy said softly, “if’n I was a spy, which thank God I’m not, I’d mebbe set here and watch everything that happened with the German Navy.”

  He had a point: without moving more than his head, Ranklin could see every ship that came in and out of Kiel harbour and of the Canal as well – and as far as Britain was concerned, it was the Canal that mattered; a fleet ignoring the Canal and sailing out into the Baltic would only be bad news for the Russians. But you could watch the Canal itself more easily and less conspicuously from elsewhere along its 60-mile length: perhaps rent a room in Rendsburg, just a few miles inland, right on the Canal bank.

  He nodded and asked: “But how would you get the information out? By letter? In wartime when it mattered?”

  “The old problem,” O’Gilroy agreed.

  “Of course,” Ranklin remembered, “Cross was a signals specialist in the Navy, his father said.”

  O’Gilroy raised his eyebrows. “Was he, now? Wireless?”

  For once, Ranklin had some technical knowledge that O’Gilroy hadn’t picked up. “Somebody told me that most ships can’t send wireless signals for more than a hundred and fifty miles. I doubt you could have secret equipment for sending over twice that range.”