8
I THINK WE’VE LOST CONTROL OF IT,” SAID PERCIVAL Godliman. Frederick Bloggs nodded agreement, and added, “It’s my fault.”
The man looked weary, Godliman thought. He had had that look for almost a year, ever since the night they had dragged the crushed remains of his wife from underneath the rubble of a bombed house in Hoxton.
“I’m not interested in apportioning blame,” Godliman said. “The fact is that something happened in Leicester Square during the few seconds you lost sight of Blondie.”
“Do you think the contact was made?”
“Possibly.”
“When we picked him up again in Stockwell, I thought he had simply given up for the day.”
“If that were the case he would have made the rendezvous again yesterday and today.” Godliman was making patterns with matchsticks on his desk, a thinking habit he had developed. “Still no movement at the house?”
“Nothing. He’s been in there for forty-eight hours.” Bloggs repeated, “It’s my fault.”
“Don’t be a bore, old chap,” Godliman said. “It was my decision to let him run so that he would lead us to someone else, and I still think it was the right move.”
Bloggs sat motionless, his expression blank, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. “If the contact has been made, we shouldn’t delay picking Blondie up and finding out what his mission was.”
“That way we lose whatever chance we have of following Blondie to somebody more important.”
“Your decision.”
Godliman had made a church with his matches. He stared at it for a moment, then took a halfpenny from his pocket and tossed it. “Tails,” he observed. “Give him another twenty-four hours.”
THE LANDLORD was a middle-aged Irish Republican from Lisdoonvarna, County Clare, who harbored a secret hope that the Germans would win the war and thus free the Emerald Isle from English oppression forever. He limped arthritically around the old house, collecting his weekly rents, thinking how much he would be worth if those rents were allowed to rise to their true market value. He was not a rich man—he owned only two houses, this and the smaller one in which he lived. He was permanently bad-tempered.
On the first floor he tapped on the door of the old man. This tenant was always pleased to see him. He was probably pleased to see anybody. He said, “Hello, Mr. Riley, would you like a cup of tea?”
“No time today.”
“Oh, well.” The old man handed over the money. “I expect you’ve seen the kitchen window.”
“No, I didn’t go in there.”
“Oh! Well, there’s a pane of glass out. I patched it over with blackout curtain, but of course there is a draft.”
“Who smashed it?” the landlord asked.
“Funny thing, it ain’t broke. Just lying there on the grass. I expect the old putty just gave way. I’ll mend it myself, if you can get hold of a bit of putty.”
You old fool, the landlord thought. Aloud he said, “I don’t suppose it occurred to you that you might have been burgled?”
The old man looked astonished. “I never thought of that.”
“Nobody’s missing any valuables?”
“Nobody’s said so to me.”
The landlord went to the door. “All right, I’ll have a look when I go down.”
The old man followed him out. “I don’t think the new bloke is in upstairs,” he said. “I haven’t heard a sound for a couple of days.”
The landlord was sniffing. “Has he been cooking in his room?”
“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Riley.”
The two of them went up the stairs. The old man said, “He’s very quiet, if he is in there.”
“Whatever he’s cooking, he’ll have to stop. It smells bloody awful.”
The landlord knocked on the door. There was no answer. He opened it and went in, and the old man followed him.
“WELL, WELL, WELL,” the old sergeant said heartily. “I think you’ve got a dead one.” He stood in the doorway, surveying the room. “You touched anything, Paddy?”
“No,” the landlord replied. “And the name’s Mr. Riley.”
The policeman ignored this. “Not long dead, though. I’ve smelled worse.” His survey took in the old chest of drawers, the suitcase on the low table, the faded square of carpet, the dirty curtains on the dormer window and the rumpled bed in the corner. There were no signs of a struggle.
He went over to the bed. The young man’s face was peaceful, his hands clasped over his chest. “I’d say heart attack, if he wasn’t so young.” There was no empty sleeping-pill bottle to indicate suicide. He picked up the leather wallet on top of the chest and looked through its contents. There was an identity card and a ration book, and a fairly thick wad of notes. “Papers in order and he ain’t been robbed.”
“He’s only been here a week or so,” the landlord said. “I don’t know much about him at all. He came from North Wales to work in a factory.”
“Well,” the sergeant observed, “if he was as healthy as he looked he’d be in the Army.” He opened the suitcase on the table. “Bloody hell, what’s this lot?”
The landlord and the old man had edged their way into the room now. The landlord said, “It’s a radio” at the same time as the old man said, “He’s bleeding.”
“Don’t touch that body!” the sergeant said.
“He’s had a knife in the guts,” the old man persisted.
The sergeant gingerly lifted one of the dead hands from the chest to reveal a small trickle of dried blood. “He was bleeding,” he said. “Where’s the nearest phone?”
“Five doors down,” the landlord told him.
“Lock this room and stay out until I get back.”
The sergeant left the house and knocked at the door of the neighbor with the phone. A woman opened it. “Good morning, madam. May I use your telephone?”
“Come in.” She showed him the phone, on a stand in the hall. “What’s happened—anything exciting?”
“A tenant died in a lodging house just up the road,” he told her as he dialed.
“Murdered?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“I leave that to the experts. Hello? Superintendent Jones, please. This is Canter.” He looked at the woman. “Might I ask you just to pop in the kitchen while I talk to my governor?”
She went, disappointed.
“Hello, Super. This body’s got a knife wound and a suitcase radio.”
“What’s the address again, Sarge?”
Sergeant Canter told him.
“Yes, that’s the one they’ve been watching. This is an MI5 job, Sarge. Go to number 42 and tell the surveillance team there what you’ve found. I’ll get on to their chief. Off you go.”
Canter thanked the woman and crossed the road. He was quite thrilled; this was only his second murder in thirty-one years as a Metropolitan Policeman, and it turned out to involve espionage! He might make Inspector yet.
He knocked on the door of number 42. It opened and two men stood there.
Sergeant Canter said: “Are you the secret agents from MI5?”
BLOGGS ARRIVED at the same time as a Special Branch man, Detective-Inspector Harris, whom he had known in his Scotland Yard days. Canter showed them the body.
They stood still for a moment, looking at the peaceful young face with its blond moustache.
Harris said, “Who is he?”
“Codename Blondie,” Bloggs told him. “We think he came in by parachute a couple of weeks ago. We picked up a radio message to another agent arranging a rendezvous. We knew the code, so we were able to watch the rendezvous. We hoped Blondie would lead us to the resident agent, who would be a much more dangerous specimen.”
“So what happened here?”
“Damned if I know.”
Harris looked at the wound in the agent’s chest. “Stiletto?”
“Something like that. A very neat job. Under the ribs and straight up into the heart. Quick. Would you like to see the method of entry?”
He led them downstairs to the kitchen. They looked at the window-frame and the unbroken pane of glass lying on the lawn.
Canter said, “Also, the lock on the bedroom door had been picked.”
They sat down at the kitchen table, and Canter made tea. Bloggs said, “It happened the night after I lost him in Leicester Square. I fouled it all up.”
Harris said, “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
They drank their tea in silence for a while. Harris said, “How are things with you, anyway? You don’t drop in at the Yard.”
“Busy.”
“How’s Christine?”
“Killed in the bombing.”
Harris’s eyes widened. “You poor bastard.”
“You all right?”
“Lost my brother in North Africa. Did you ever meet Johnny?”
“No.”
“He was a lad. Drink? You’ve never seen anything like it. Spent so much on booze, he could never afford to get married—which is just as well, the way things turned out.”
“Most have lost somebody, I guess.”
“If you’re on your own, come round our place for dinner on Sunday.”
“Thanks, I work Sundays now.”
Harris nodded. “Well, whenever you feel like it.”
A detective-constable poked his head around the door and addressed Harris. “Can we start bagging-up the evidence, guv?”
Harris looked at Bloggs.
“I’ve finished,” Bloggs said.
“All right, son, carry on,” Harris told him.
Bloggs said, “Suppose he made contact after I lost him, and arranged for the resident agent to come here. The resident may have suspected a trap—that would explain why he came in through the window and picked the lock.”
“It makes him a devilish suspicious bastard,” Harris observed.
“That might be why we’ve never caught him. Anyway, he gets into Blondie’s room and wakes him up. Now he knows it isn’t a trap, right?”
“Right.”
“So why does he kill Blondie?”
“Maybe they quarreled.”
“There were no signs of a struggle.”
Harris frowned into his empty cup. “Perhaps he realized that Blondie was being watched and he was afraid we’d pick the boy up and make him spill the beans.”
Bloggs said, “That makes him a ruthless bastard.”
“That, too, might be why we’ve never caught him.”
“COME IN. SIT DOWN. I’ve just had a call from MI6. Canaris has been fired.”
Bloggs went in, sat down, and said, “Is that good news or bad?”
“Very bad,” said Godliman. “It’s happened at the worst possible moment.”
“Do I get told why?”
Godliman looked at him intently, then said, “I think you need to know. At this moment we have forty double agents broadcasting to Hamburg false information about Allied plans for the invasion of France.”
Bloggs whistled. “I didn’t know it was quite that big. I suppose the doubles say we’re going in at Cherbourg, but really it will be Calais, or vice versa.”
“Something like that. Apparently I don’t need to know the details. Anyway they haven’t told me. However, the whole thing is in danger. We knew Canaris; we knew we had him fooled; we felt we could have gone on fooling him. A new broom may mistrust his predecessor’s agents. There’s more—we’ve had some defections from the other side, people who could have betrayed the Abwehr’s people over here if they hadn’t been betrayed already. It’s another reason for the Germans to begin to suspect our doubles.
“Then there’s the possibility of a leak. Literally thousands of people now know about the double-cross system. There are doubles in Iceland, Canada, and Ceylon. We ran a double-cross in the Middle East.
“And we made a bad mistake last year by repatriating a German called Erich Carl. We later learned he was an Abwehr agent—a real one—and that while he was in internment on the Isle of Man he may have learned about two doubles, Mutt and Jeff, and possibly a third called Tate.
“So we’re on thin ice. If one decent Abwehr agent in Britain gets to know about Fortitude—that’s the code name for the deception plan—the whole strategy will be endangered. Not to mince words, we could lose the fucking war.”
Bloggs suppressed a smile—he could remember a time when Professor Godliman did not know the meaning of such words.
The professor went on, “The Twenty Committee has made it quite clear that they expect me to make sure there aren’t any decent Abwehr agents in Britain.”
“Last week we would have been quite confident that there weren’t,” Bloggs said.
“Now we know there’s at least one.”
“And we let him slip through our fingers.”
“So now we have to find him again.”
“I don’t know,” Bloggs said gloomily. “We don’t know what part of the country he’s operating from, we haven’t the faintest idea what he looks like. He’s too crafty to be pinpointed by triangulation while he’s transmitting—otherwise we would have nabbed him long ago. We don’t even know his code name. So where do we start?”
“Unsolved crimes,” said Godliman. “Look—a spy is bound to break the law. He forges papers, he steals petrol and ammunition, he evades checkpoints, he enters restricted areas, he takes photographs, and when people rumble him he kills them. The police are bound to get to know of some of these crimes if the spy has been operating for any length of time. If we go through the unsolved crimes files since the war, we’ll find traces.”
“Don’t you realize that most crimes are unsolved?” Bloggs said incredulously. “The files would fill the Albert Hall!”
Godliman shrugged. “So, we narrow it down to London, and we start with murders.”
THEY FOUND what they were looking for on the very first day of their search. It happened to be Godliman who came across it, and at first he did not realize its significance.
It was the file on the murder of a Mrs. Una Garden in High-gate in 1940. Her throat had been cut and she had been sexually molested, although not raped. She had been found in the bedroom of her lodger, with considerable alcohol in her bloodstream. The picture was fairly clear: she had had a tryst with the lodger, he had wanted to go farther than she was prepared to let him, they had quarreled, he had killed her, and the murder had neutralized his libido. But the police had never found the lodger.
Godliman had been about to pass over the file—spies did not get involved in sexual assaults. But he was a meticulous man with records, so he read every word, and consequently discovered that the unfortunate Mrs. Garden had received stiletto wounds in her back as well as the fatal wound to her throat.
Godliman and Bloggs were on opposite sides of a wooden table in the records room at Old Scotland Yard. Godliman tossed the file across the table and said, “I think this is it.”
Bloggs glanced through it and said, “The stiletto.”
They signed for the file and walked the short distance to the War Office. When they returned to Godliman’s room, there was a decoded signal on his desk. He read it casually, then thumped the table in excitement. “It’s him!”
Bloggs read: “Orders received. Regards to Willi.”
“Remember him?” Godliman said. “Die Nadel?”
“Yes,” Bloggs said hesitantly. “The Needle. But there’s not much information here.”
“Think, think! A stiletto is like a needle. It’s the same man: the murder of Mrs. Garden, all those signals in 1940 that we couldn’t trace, the rendezvous with Blondie…”
“Possibly.” Bloggs looked thoughtful.
“I can prove it,” Godliman said. “Remember the transmission about Finland that you showed me the first day I came here? The one that was interrupted?”
“Yes.” Bloggs went to the file to find it.
“If my memory serves me well, the date of that transmission is the same as the date of this murder…and I’ll bet the time of death coincides with the interruption.”
Bloggs looked at the signal in the file. “Right both times.”
“There!”
“He’s been operating in London for at least five years, and it’s taken us until now to get on to him,” Bloggs reflected. “He won’t be easy to catch.”
Godliman suddenly looked wolfish. “He may be clever, but he’s not as clever as me,” he said tightly. “I am going to nail him to the fucking wall.”
Bloggs laughed out loud. “My God, you’ve changed, Professor.”
Godliman said, “Do you realize that’s the first time you’ve laughed for a year?”