Max took a drag of his cigarette. It was an intentional pause, designed to make his next statement more dramatic. He exhaled the smoke and said, “But Crawford didn’t turn up because he was dead. I think we can assume that Ralph Hall was discovered to be an informant and put under watch. He was killed. Then Crawford was murdered and disposed of in Enfield Lock. I suggested yesterday to the inspector that the police dredge the lock.”
“We’re doing that, sir. We expect to find Hall’s body soon.”
“After these murders, the killers were in possession of Crawford’s notes, and the details of the meeting in Peterborough with Burton and Rice. Then it was simply a matter of despatching men to keep those two under surveillance.
“Meanwhile, Burton and Rice were very anxious about Crawford’s failure to appear. They realised how urgent the situation had now become, so the next day, Friday, they travelled to London. On reaching King’s Cross Station, they bought a late edition of the Standard – which was found in Burton’s coat pocket – and read about the discovery of a body at Enfield Lock, close to where Crawford was last known to be. A body submerged by weights would bloat with gas, and might resurface a couple of days later. This was the case with Crawford. I would imagine that it was at this point Burton and Rice decided to write down as much as they could regarding the general subject of Crawford’s investigation.”
Max flicked the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray on the bar counter. “From now on, Burton and Rice knew they were in danger, and that their testimony was, perhaps, the last piece of evidence. So they did two things: first, they placed their signed testimonies in a safe place – the left luggage at King’s Cross. Then Burton, possibly on his own initiative, came to find me. He might’ve done so to warn me – which would’ve been ironic since he actually put me in danger. He might’ve come to ask me to file a story with the newspaper, just in case something happened to them. I have no doubt that Rice was intending to go to Scotland Yard to speak to someone in Special Branch, but he was killed in his hotel room before he had that chance.
“Now we get to the evening of Friday last. I’m ashamed to say that on that night, in this very room, I was drunk. The whole Rhineland thing had hit me hard, and I could only see that we were heading again for war. Many in this room know what that means, and it seemed to me on Friday that the indescribable horrors we’d all hoped had been banished for ever were crawling towards us again.”
“Quite right,” Churchill said.
“That’s when I saw Dan Burton for the first time since the war. He’d tried to find me, no doubt, at home and then at the Chronicle. He eventually found me here in the pub.
“So there’s Dan Burton trying to tell me something and I’m too drunk to take in what he was saying and too stupid to realise how important it is. Martha and I came here a couple of days ago and spoke to Jack. And I asked him what he could remember of that evening. He recalled one thing. Jack?”
“I told you that he was trying to get you to remember something. He said, ‘Do you remember, Max?’”
“Right,” Max said. “Then Burton left hurriedly, not even paying what he owed Jack here. But that only shows how urgent his actions were, right, Lilly?”
“Yes, sir,” Lilly said. “It must’ve been very urgent if he didn’t pay Mr Connor. He was always very honest.”
“Yes, I know he was. And the urgency was due to the fact that he saw two men enter the pub. These men weren’t interested in drinking or chatting. They were here to kill Burton, and to take something from him. And when Burton saw them, he knew he was in danger, and that whatever he was carrying on him had to be disposed of quickly. He left the pub and was murdered by these two men.”
“Who were they, sir?” Lilly Burton said. “The men what killed Dan. Who were they?”
“They were very dangerous men, Lilly. Martha and I met them, as did Eric and Flora.”
“They tried to take Flora,” Eric said.
“Yes,” Max said doubtfully. “Eric discovered them trying to break in to our flat and fought them off, bravely. Lindsey, would you tell Lilly who these men were?”
“Glad to. The two men in question worked for a man called Edward Hart, who was the chief Nazi agent in Britain. The first man was a German, Wilhelm Klopfer of the Geheime Staatspolizei. Gestapo, for short.”
There was a gasp from Lilly Burton, and General Monroe half rose from his chair. “Gestapo?” he said. “In England? My God.”
“Yes, sir. Gestapo, to be sure.”
“Did you know this, Frost?”
“I’m afraid we at the FO are the last to hear from the intelligence services.”
Ignoring this, Lindsey continued. “The other man was English, fellow called Arthur Boyd, a thief, suspected murderer, a member of the Blackshirts and a man who has a record of… uh… assaulting women. Eric certainly did save young Flora.”
Upon saying this, Lindsey gave Eric a little salute and Churchill said, “Excellently done, sir.”
Even Monroe and Connor were nodding their agreement.
Eric almost burst into tears, such was the welling of emotion. Flora moved ever closer.
“Those,” Max said, “are, essentially, the facts behind Rice and Burton coming down to London to see me, and what happened to them.”
“But what does that tell us?” Sergeant Pierce said. “I mean, we don’t know why they wanted to see you. What would they have wanted to tell you?”
“Ah,” Max said dramatically. “That’s the real heart of this story. To explain it, I have to go back a little. Mrs Rice, do you remember a book on your sideboard?”
“Yes,” Mrs Rice said, shortly, as if she were not yet convinced that Max was innocent of her husband’s death.
“Could you tell us which book it is?”
“It’s an edition of the Official History of the Grenadier Guards during the war. It was a birthday present from me, as a matter of fact.”
“And did you bring it with you, as Mr Lindsey asked?”
Mrs Rice answered by reaching down to her handbag and pulling out the book. She handed it to Lindsey, who flicked through it, stopping at the dog-eared page.
“There’s a note here,” Lindsey said. “Margin of page three hundred and nineteen. Is this your husband’s writing, Mrs Rice?”
Mrs Rice glanced at the note and nodded. Lindsey then handed the book to Max and resumed his seat.
“This history was commissioned in 1922 and completed two years later. An official history like this is composed of regimental and divisional reports, front line despatches, eyewitness interviews, that sort of thing. I saw this book in Major Rice’s house. The thing that caught my attention was that the book was open, the spine cracked, a page dog-eared and a note written in the margin. Major Rice was a long-time army officer. I knew him to be fastidious, and his house confirmed that; all his books were in perfect order. Except this one. So, I wandered over and looked at the page he’d dog-eared. There was an account on that page of my attempt to rescue Captain Palgrave…” Max said.
“You didn’t rescue him,” the general said. “Because you wanted him dead. And you got away with it. With murder.”
“I said, ‘my attempt to rescue’. But, as you say, I didn’t rescue him. And I did want him dead, for a moment. And I’ll suffer the guilt of that for the rest of my life. Next to this account in Rice’s book he had written one word. That word is ‘Lies’.”
“Exactly,” the general said. “I knew Rice, and I’d known Palgrave too. And Rice felt, as I did, that your citation was a mockery.”
Martha sprang to her feet and faced Monroe directly, sticking an accusing finger out at him. “Don’t you dare say that. Max is the bravest, most honourable man I’ve ever known. I know you’re some important soldier, but I don’t care if you’re the King himself, you will not talk about my husband in that way.”
When she’d
finished, there was a long period of silence.
Then Flora said, “Too bloody right.”
Martha turned and saw Max looking at her, a very small smile on his lips and something bright in his eyes.
“Well,” Martha said, suddenly very self-conscious, “I just wanted to make that point.”
She sat down again.
Max cleared his throat. “I want to tell you all something that I’ve only ever told to one person – that being my wife, and, even then, only a few days ago. When I was in that shell hole with Palgrave, I was badly concussed, and Palgrave had a serious wound. I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at him. He tried to speak a few times, but the words didn’t reach me. When, finally, I understood what he was saying, it was as if I’d been wounded as badly as he, as if I too were dying. I can still see his face, ghostlike, and I can still hear that one word: ‘Traitor’.”
He looked directly at the general, as if challenging him. But the general, his face fierce, to be sure, said nothing.
“When I read the word ‘Lies’, I felt certain that, as the general just said, Major Rice blamed me for his friend’s death, and that all of this must have had something to do with that event, in a shell hole in a muddy swamp in 1917. Passchendaele. But that wouldn’t account for Hart and his men. So I dug out my own copy of the Guards’ History. I found the same page, and read from the start of the chapter. It detailed preparations along the line ahead of the push on the next day, which was when Palgrave was killed.”
Max opened the book to page three hundred and nineteen. “I’m going to read from the same page, but from the first paragraph: ‘Along the line, in the early hours of the 19th of October, preparations were made for a consolidating push, by which it was hoped to straighten out the somewhat ragged line, and frustrate German attempts to find a weakness. Consequently, many patrols were sent to raid the enemy trenches, and to mark, as well as possible, the positions of wire, machine guns, pillboxes and other strongpoints. In this particular instance, the trench raids up and down the line achieved no success and merely served to alert the Germans of the impending attack.’”
Max closed the book.
“For those of you unfamiliar with battle tactics, I’m going to explain it in lay terms. On the 19th of October, several divisions, including the Guards Division, were intended to push forward according to a detailed plan. The idea was to straighten the line, which had become disorganised in the previous fighting. In other words, to consolidate the gains made. A ragged line can result in salient points, which are bulges, if you like. They can be useful, but in this case they were weak points, allowing the enemy to attack on three sides. This was a large, coordinated push, and, as often happens in these instances, on the previous night patrols were sent to raid the enemy trenches in the hope of obtaining some kind of intelligence that would aid the attack. Palgrave often selected Burton’s section for patrol duty. He did so this night. I was, as often happened, also on that patrol.
“After I read the entry highlighted in Major Rice’s book,” Max explained, now addressing the room, “I realised something. And I came back yesterday and asked Jack a question. Jack?”
“You asked me if Mr Burton might have been saying ‘Don’t you remember, Max?’, and when you put it like that, I agreed. That’s what he was saying, that’s what he kept saying, over and over until he was almost shouting it. ‘Don’t you remember?’”
“And can you recall what I was saying, more or less?”
“Yes, Mr Dalton. You were saying ‘No, it wasn’t me’.”
“Thanks, Jack,” Max said.
He was quiet for a while, and the whole room was silent with him, as if in some sad remembrance of things past.
Then Sergeant Pierce cleared his throat and said, “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t understand the difference.”
Max nodded. “It’s a subtle difference, I’ll agree. But there is a difference. ‘Do you remember?’ could mean something indefinite, unidentified. For example, I could ask Martha, ‘Do you remember what we had for dinner last Sunday?’ and she might remember, or she might not. However, if I were to ask her, ‘Don’t you remember what we had for dinner last Sunday?’, it would imply that I expected her to recall it. Do you see? The difference is in the assumption of the enquirer. Burton was expecting me to remember something, and he was becoming frustrated when I couldn’t.”
“I still don’t follow, sir,” Pierce said.
“The reason I kept telling Burton that it wasn’t me was simply because it wasn’t. I hadn’t been there. As a result of the explosion that threw me into Palgrave’s shell hole, I was concussed. When I got back to our position, I was sent behind the lines for a couple of days to recover.”
Here, Max hesitated and became thoughtful. He had to explain the next part clearly, especially to those who were unfamiliar with military terminology, such as Lilly Burton. “In normal circumstances, any intelligence gleaned by our patrol would be reviewed by Palgrave as my CO, and anything of note would be sent immediately to Battalion where it might be sent on to Division or, if it was clearly important, straight to GHQ. Now, when Palgrave died, I became the de facto company commander and it would’ve fallen on me, as the most senior surviving officer in his company, to collect his papers, assemble his affairs, pass on reports etc. But I hadn’t been there. I’d been evacuated because of my head injury.”
Max looked around the room, trying to see whether anyone was confused. But the silence and stillness told him that every word he said was being absorbed, even if the effects of those words differed between the people in that pub. “Yesterday,” he continued, “as I was beginning to understand what was going on, I asked Mr Bacon here to see what he could discover of the fate of other members of my old company. After all, if Burton and Rice were linked to me, so were others.”
Max glanced at Harold Bacon and said, “Would you tell us about William Halford?”
“Certainly, Mr Dalton. William Halford died of a heart attack in Swindon, approximately one month ago.”
“My God,” said Frost.
“Yes, indeed,” Max said. “Klopfer and Boyd – a Gestapo agent and a known Blackshirt – are taken to Swindon by Ralph Hall – Crawford’s informant – approximately one month ago. At the same time and in the same place, one of my platoon dies. Inspector, Sergeant, if you learned this, what would you think?”
“Can’t be coincidence,” Sergeant Pierce said.
“I’d investigate thoroughly,” Longford said.
“My former company seem to be mostly alive,” Max said, “in work and in good health. There were one or two deaths along the way, but nothing of particular note. However…” Here he paused again, for effect, Martha knew, even though she was rapt by his words, as were all the others. Even General Monroe had nothing to say.
“However, when I ignored the company as a whole and looked solely at the men in my platoon, the death rate rose sharply. And when I looked solely at Burton’s section, something terrifying became apparent.”
He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out a small photograph. “I took this picture in August 1917 when my battalion was in the rear. It’s Burton’s section.”
He handed it to Martha, who looked at it then passed it to Mr Bacon. It passed down the line. When it got to Lilly Burton, she began to weep. Mrs Rice put her hand on Lilly’s.
The photograph was handed back to Max, who looked at it for a while. From a tiny moment, almost twenty years previously, nine men sat in the sun, smiling, smoking, glad to have just a moment’s respite. “Of the nine in that photograph, six survived the war. Of those six, I discovered that four have died in the last few months, including Dan Burton. Yesterday, I asked Inspector Longford to urgently find the remaining two men and to take them into the protection of police custody. Inspector?”
“Yes, sir. I despatched men as soon as we located the man. He’s in our p
rotection, sir.”
“Just one?” Max said.
“Yes, sir. Walter Kiffin. The other man, Andrew Poole, was killed by a motor car in January of this year.”
Martha gasped. “Oh, no,” she said.
Flora was sniffling, with Eric patting her on the back, trying his best still to protect her.
Lindsey shook his head sadly, while Churchill mopped his forehead with a handkerchief and General Monroe glared at the floor.
The news hit Max hard and he cursed himself for being drunk that night. “You see,” he said eventually, “after Crawford spoke to Hall, he had to interview Rice and Burton immediately, and put them into protection. They were rapidly becoming the only witnesses left who would be able to provide a testimony.”
“A testimony of what?” Inspector Longford said.
“The trench raid,” Max said.
“What?” Frost said.
“What are you talking about, man?” General Monroe said.
“I’ll explain shortly, sir.”
“What about you, Mr Dalton?” Churchill said. “You were also present on this raid.”
“Yes, sir. Martha made that same point to me the other day. She asked me why nobody had tried to kill me, given that the others were being systematically murdered. How did you put it, darling?”
“I said that perhaps it wasn’t an accident that you hadn’t been targeted. I said that perhaps you weren’t on the list.”
“That’s right. And I asked you which list you meant. And you said, ‘the death list’.”
“Yes.”
“In answer to your question, sir,” Max said to Churchill, “it was common for a trench raid to be commanded by a sergeant or corporal, but very rare for an officer. It was Palgrave’s practice, for personal reasons, to send me out with Burton. The next day, after Palgrave had been killed, his notes would’ve been sent up the line to Battalion HQ by whichever officer was present to do so. As I mentioned earlier, this would normally have been me, but I was wounded.
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