Verity’s report on the picnic with Mary Black’s father had interested him. He had decided he might do a spot of espionage and this seemed as good a time as any.
‘It’s quite a distance,’ Harry demurred. ‘It’ll take us three hours – more probably. We’ll have to go through at least three locks but I’m game if you are. You’re sure you’re up to it?’
‘I think so,’ Edward said bravely. He felt he couldn’t back out now without losing face.
‘What happens when we get there?’
‘I don’t know. If the Amerys are there, we can beg a drink of water.’
‘And if they’re not?’
‘Roam about a bit. You know the house, don’t you?’
‘I’ve been there a few times for a drink before going on somewhere.’
‘But you know the lie of the land?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Harry looked dubious. ‘You’re not suggesting a spot of housebreaking, are you?’
‘Why, does that bother you? I seem to remember you doing some pretty similar stuff in Kenya.’
‘But that was Kenya and I wasn’t planning to steal anything,’ he said defensively.
‘Only a woman’s virtue,’ Edward replied sententiously. ‘Anyway, we’re not going to steal anything.’
‘And if we’re caught?’
‘I don’t know, Harry,’ Edward retorted with some irritation. ‘Pretend it’s a joke or something. I hope you haven’t lost that dash or whatever-you-call-it that got you thrown out of so many places in the Nairobi neighbourhood.’
Stung, Harry said, ‘Come on, then. I thought you were the one who had become so law-abiding.’
Edward laughed. For some reason, he was feeling reckless. What did a bit of burglary matter when the whole world was about to go up in flames? Hitler had been thwarted in his attempt to swallow Czechoslovakia in May by a rare moment of spine-stiffening on the part of the French and British governments. They had threatened – though not promised – to stand by the Czechs if they were attacked. The Czechs, for their part, had gallantly declared that they would resist a German invasion and mobilized their armed forces. Hitler had very publicly ordered a huge increase in Germany’s armed forces and announced his intention of humiliating the Czechs even if this meant going to war before his military chiefs were ready.
It was clear to Edward, as it was to everyone who could read a newspaper, that war was imminent and Britain needed to redouble its efforts to strengthen the Royal Air Force. Gas masks had been manufactured and distributed. Trenches were dug in Hyde Park and sandbags heaped against Whitehall ministries. But it turned out to be another false alarm. Neville Chamberlain – ‘a man of peace to the depths of his soul’, as he put it – had retreated and, in a speech to the House of Commons, almost apologized to Hitler for standing up to him. The French, too, had retreated, saying in effect that they would not go to war if Hitler decided to absorb into the Reich the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. Hitler bared his teeth but whether it was a smile or a snarl no one could say.
With an oar in his hands, Edward felt his blood stir and he determined to show his friend that he was as tough as he was. Harry, too, felt his spirits rise. He loved an escapade and had, he told himself disingenuously, been boringly well behaved since arriving in England to claim his inheritance. He said as much and Edward was amused to find Harry was still the amoral man he had encountered in Kenya and of whose antics he had eventually tired. He and Jack Amery were both rascals in their different ways, he thought, although Jack had even less to recommend him than Harry.
‘That’s it,’ Harry said at last. ‘Next stroke, easy oars.’ Edward was devoutly grateful. He had started gamely and continued out of pride and bloody-minded determination but did not think he could have carried on much longer without collapsing. His lungs were bursting and, at first, he could do no more than sit where he was, panting and sweating.
It had been a lot further than he had reckoned and his hands were blistered and every muscle in his body ached. The thought of rowing all the way back appalled him. They had rested, necessarily, while negotiating the locks and had stopped at Marlow for a drink and a sandwich at a riverside pub. At Boulter’s lock, Edward had decided the expedition was madness and they ought to turn back but, quite suddenly, they were at journey’s end. He saw a white house with a lawn stretching down to the river and a low brick wall against which they secured their craft. They scrambled ashore and walked up to the house. Harry knocked on the back door but there was no reply. They went round to the front door and knocked again but there was still no answer. Edward sighed with relief.
‘What do we do now?’ Harry asked.
‘There’s a window open on the first floor. Why doesn’t one of us shin up the creeper and have a look inside?’
Harry looked at him with interest and shook his head in ironic disbelief. ‘And I thought you were so respectable. What if we’re caught?’
‘We’ll think of something,’ Edward replied airily. He wasn’t quite sure why but he had an overwhelming desire to search Amery’s house. He had no idea what he expected to find – something linking him to the Nazis perhaps? He wondered if the bag Amery had given Mr Black was money he had brought back from Germany to fund the British Union of Fascists. It would be something to report to Major Ferguson if he could find some proof.
‘Who’s doing the shinning?’ Harry queried.
‘Well, it’s very much up your street, isn’t it – climbing trees, lamp-posts, drainpipes and so on?’
‘I don’t know why you say that.’ Harry sounded put out to be so remembered. ‘However, give me a lift up and I’ll see what I can do.’
Edward clasped his hands together to make a stirrup into which Harry put his foot. Grunting with the effort, he lifted him as high as he could. Harry scrambled up the creeper without too much trouble and put his head through the open window.
Looking about him to see if they were observed, Edward called, ‘Can you see anything?’
Harry turned. ‘It’s their bedroom, I think. Wait there a minute. I’ll climb in and come down and let you in.’
Edward was about to tell him not to but Harry had already scrambled over the sill. His enthusiasm for burglary had seeped away and it now hit him that what they were doing could land them in a police cell. He heard the bolt on the door being drawn back and Harry appeared, looking rather dishevelled with leaves in his hair.
‘Come on! There’s no one here. We can look over the place at our leisure.’
‘I don’t know – perhaps we shouldn’t . . .’
‘Look here, old chap. I’ve climbed up some pretty unpleasant creeper and torn my trousers getting through a window so the least you can do is take advantage of my efforts.’
Edward entered and found himself in the kitchen. It didn’t look as though a great deal of cooking was done there or much cleaning either. Dirty breakfast plates lay soaking in mud-coloured water in the Belfast sink. The store was an ancient cast-iron affair with a large kettle sitting on the hotplate. He touched it and found it was still warm.
‘They can’t have been gone long,’ he said.
‘Well, let’s be quick then. What are we looking for?’
‘I’m not sure – documents – anything that might tell us what Amery’s up to. Look, you go upstairs and I’ll do down here.’
Harry ran up the steep wooden staircase. Edward heard him walking overhead and the sound of drawers opening and furniture being moved around. He went through into what seemed to be the sitting-room. A substantial wireless set dominated the room – a wooden cabinet through which, Edward thought drily, only the BBC was worthy to broadcast. However, when he looked more closely, he saw that the needle was set to Hamburg rather than London. There were magazines scattered all over the place – the Quarterly Review, the Tablet, the Listener and, somewhat surprisingly, New Verse. Newspapers, including The Times and the Mail, lay in piles on the floor but there was nothing suspicious, nothing overt
ly political and no German publications.
He was particularly interested to see that Amery read the Tablet. This was in effect the official organ of the Roman Catholic Church in England and was edited by a snobbish, fat man called Douglas Woodruff whom he had met once at the Hassels’ and thoroughly disliked. He was a strong supporter of Franco and welcomed his rebellion against the virulently anti-Catholic ‘Popular Front’. Edward picked the magazine up and saw an advertisement for an article by Graham Greene on the cover – an author whose novels he had rather enjoyed.
Tossing it back on a table, he looked round. The house was little more than a cottage but there seemed to be a small study across the passage from the sitting-room. His heart missed a beat. If there was anything to find, it would surely be in there. A battered-looking typewriter sat on an even more battered desk. Beside it were two or three photographs including one of Amery’s father, Edward was pleased to see. He noticed a neat pile of journals and pamphlets including Blackshirt – the paper of the British Union of Fascists – and General Fuller’s What the British Union has to offer Britain as well as a noisome leaflet entitled What shall we do with the Lion of Judah?.
Feeling rather ashamed of himself, he opened the desk drawers but there was nothing of interest except a cheque book. He flicked through it but Amery was one of those feckless people who could not be bothered to fill in the stubs. He was just putting it back in the drawer when he noticed a sheet of paper which had been pushed right to the back. He looked it over and whistled. It was a bank draft for twenty thousand pounds made out to Amery and signed by someone whose name he could not decipher. However, on the back it bore the official stamp of the German Embassy in London. To his amazement, the stamp authorizing the payment was signed by the ambassador himself, Herbert von Dirksen. It was the absolute proof he sought of Amery’s dealings with the Nazis.
He turned to call to Harry to come and see what he had discovered and found himself looking into the muzzle of a revolver.
‘Major Stille!’
Stille was dressed like any English holidaymaker in shorts and an open-necked shirt, though perhaps his hair was cut a little too short and his eyes were too hard and narrow for comfort.
‘Lord Edward Corinth,’ he said with a sneer. ‘The amateur private eye.’ His accent had a faint American twang and there was something not entirely English about the way he pronounced his ‘r’s. ‘The busybody – der Wichtigtuer, der Schnüffler. What are you looking for?’
‘What are you doing in Mr Amery’s house?’ Edward thought he would try sounding superior.
‘What am I doing . . .?’ Stille laughed. ‘What are you doing – or are you going to tell me he invited you to look through his desk? Give me that, please,’ he added sharply.
Edward was attempting to put the sheet of paper in his trouser pocket. ‘This . . .?’ he said in as innocent a voice as he could manage. ‘I can’t give it to you because it doesn’t belong to you. It is a bank draft made out to Mr Amery. I found it on the floor and was going to return it to him.’
‘Please do not joke with me.’ Stille waved his gun threateningly. ‘I think I am going to kill you but not here. I do not wish to cause my friend embarrassment. I think we will go to the river where I see your boat and there I will kill you. But first give me that paper.’
He held out his hand and, reluctantly, Edward took the bank draft out of his pocket. To distract him, he tossed it on the floor and Stille bent down to pick it up. As he did so, Harry came up behind him and hit him hard over the head with an iron poker.
‘I’ve always wanted to do something like that,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Is he dead?’
Edward knelt down beside the unconscious German. He touched his head and saw blood oozing. ‘What disgusting hair lotion the man uses,’ he exclaimed, drawing back. ‘Thank you, Harry. No, he’s not dead but you certainly hit very hard.’
‘No point in taking chances. He was going to kill you, no doubt about it.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Edward said grimly. ‘My heart was in my mouth. I thought he must have heard you coming down the stairs.’
‘I was as quiet as possible.’ Harry looked pained.
‘You did well, thank you again.’
It occurred to Edward that Harry could commit murder without too much soul-searching.
‘Who is he?’ Harry asked.
‘Major Horst Stille of the SS. He is in charge of German agents in this country. He is based at the German Embassy where he’s called an Assistant Secretary or some such but, from what I hear, he works for Himmler and is quite independent of the ambassador.’
‘You seem to know a lot about him.’
‘Our paths have crossed before,’ Edward said lightly.
‘I believe you work for . . .’
‘No one employs me,’ Edward interrupted. ‘I do have connections with Special Branch,’ he added, seeing Harry’s look of disbelief, ‘but I’m not a policeman.’
Harry shrugged. ‘So what do we do with the body?’
‘Leave it for Amery, I think. He can bandage up his head.’
‘You think he’s a friend of Amery’s?’
‘I think Amery works for him,’ Edward said flatly. ‘In effect, he’s Stille’s agent in the BUF.’
‘Jack passes German money to Mosley?’
‘Yes, and this bank draft pretty well proves it. Why else would the German Embassy be transferring twenty thousand pounds to him?’
Harry looked at the piece of paper and whistled. ‘What now?’
‘We get out of here.’
‘Will Stille tell Amery who knocked him out?’
‘He never saw you although I suppose – given that I’m staying in your house – it won’t take him long to work out who gave him such a headache. It doesn’t matter if Amery knows I have my eye on him. I would much rather he stopped doing what he’s doing than he ends up in prison or worse.’
‘You think he will stop?’
‘Probably not. He strikes me as almost mad but you know him better than I do. By the way, you’d better keep a lookout from now on. I’m afraid your name will be added to Major Stille’s list of people he would rather have dead than alive. If it’s any comfort, mine and Verity’s have headed that list for three or more years and we’re still here.’
‘Touch wood!’ Harry said. ‘What shall I do with the poker? Throw it in the river?’
‘No point in that. You never know, Amery might need it. Wipe it clean of your fingerprints and leave it here. We’ll not add theft of household implements to our misdemeanours. By the way, I never asked, did you find anything of interest upstairs?’
‘Only this,’ Harry replied, passing him a photograph.
10
‘Call me Bill,’ Bruce-Dick said, ushering Edward into a small hallway.
The secretary of Phyllis Court was very correct with a straight back and a firm handshake. He was clean-shaven and balding, his grey hair swept back to reveal a fine intellectual forehead. His shirt cuffs were showing the regulation half-inch beyond the sleeves of his pin-stripe suit. A white handkerchief peeped out of his breast pocket and his tie – a sober red and green – was secured by a gold pin. Edward had no doubt that such a neat man was also a meticulous administrator. Mrs Bruce-Dick came forward and he introduced Harry.
‘My friend, Lord Lestern. We were at school together and then Kenya.’
‘Yes indeed,’ Bruce-Dick said as though he was about to add that he knew the colony well. ‘I was in oil. No oil in Kenya.’
Edward chuckled but Harry’s attention had strayed to a young woman dressed in white standing in the background.
‘My daughter, Sybil,’ Bruce-Dick said as if explaining a puzzling phenomenon, and Sybil was indeed very different from her mother and father. She was beautiful for one thing. There was no other word for it and she knew it. She smiled and the twinkle in her eye captivated Harry.
‘Alberta, show our guests into the drawing-room.’
Theirs was
a large flat on the Phyllis Court estate but Bruce-Dick was quick to tell Edward that they also owned a London flat in Elm Park Gardens. A mob-capped maid served them canapés and Edward had the impression that they were waiting for some other guests. As the minutes passed, he could see Bruce-Dick was getting increasingly anxious. He had a habit of twitching his trousers at the knees, presumably to ensure they did not lose their knife-edge crease. Twice he took surreptitious glances at his watch, and when at last the bell jangled his face cleared. He was on his feet calling to the maid that he would open the door before anyone else had moved. He left with mumbled excuses and they could hear him welcoming someone in the hall. Edward had rather expected that the guests would include a woman to even the numbers but, when the drawing-room door opened, they were joined by a father and son.
Edward and Harry rose to greet them. ‘I don’t think you know Roderick Black, Lord Edward, but I believe he has met your friend, Miss Browne. And this is his son Guy. Roderick, Guy . . . Lord Edward Corinth and Lord Lestern.’
The introductions complete, it was made immediately clear that Guy was Sybil’s acknowledged suitor. He went over to her and held her hand for a moment longer than was necessary before turning to her mother. He was a dark, good-looking boy of about twenty-five with a fine moustache with which he had obviously taken some trouble. He had wide, frank eyes but his chin, Edward thought rather unkindly, was distinctly weak. Harry was put out to find that Sybil was already spoken for and did not hesitate to show it. If he was to be done out of a pleasant evening of flirting, he would make Guy pay for it. Instinctively, the two men began preening their feathers in front of Sybil who merely looked amused.
Roderick Black came over to Edward and said how glad he was that his daughter had found a friend in Verity. ‘Mary tells me that you are engaged.’
Edward blushed. He was pleased but embarrassed that Verity had confided their secret to her room-mate. He had no idea how to deal with his new status. Somehow, it felt rather ridiculous to be engaged. It was something that happened to young people – like Guy and Sybil – not to middle-aged men. Black, seeing his confusion, added, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Have I been indiscreet? I didn’t realize it was a secret.’
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