Kitabı oxu: «The Second Midnight»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

I: Pre-War 1939

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

II: War 1939–45

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

III: Postwar 1945–46

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

IV: Cold War 1955–56

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Epilogue

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

I

Prologue

George Farrar had his first inkling that something was wrong when he collected his room key from reception.

The manager himself was behind the desk. He was a plump Viennese, almost as small as Farrar himself, and he always wore a flower in the lapel of his black coat. He was also a compulsive talker.

Tonight, however, he produced the key as soon as Farrar reached the desk and slapped it down on the counter between them. Immediately afterwards he bent his head over the register, as if the pressure of work prevented him from exchanging pleasantries with his guests.

‘Any messages?’ Farrar said. He was hoping that William McQueen might have telephoned.

The manager didn’t raise his head. ‘No, Herr Farrar.’

Farrar noticed that the white carnation was beginning to wilt. He also noticed that the manager’s face was shiny with sweat. Still, it was uncomfortably warm in the foyer.

He said goodnight and took the lift up to his floor. A tall man wearing a camelhair overcoat came up with him. He was smoking a cigar and had small, sad eyes.

They both wanted the same floor. The tall man gave a polite little bow when they reached it, indicating that Farrar should leave the lift first. Farrar smiled his thanks.

The long corridor was empty. Farrar walked quickly to his door; behind him he could hear the soft, slow pad of the other man’s footsteps. He unlocked the door and opened it; his hand brushed against the light switch.

Everything happened very suddenly. A hand slammed into the small of his back, propelling him into the room. Simultaneously, he saw that the carpet was strewn with his belongings. Another man was lying on the bed, with his hands behind his head. He was smiling. When Farrar tripped over his own upturned suitcase, the smile became a chuckle.

Behind him, Farrar heard a click as the tall man locked the door.

The man on the bed stopped chuckling. Farrar’s stomach lurched as he recognized the Bavarian he had met last night.

The Bavarian raised his heavy black eyebrows. ‘And how is our lovely Gretl this evening?’

Farrar groped for his glasses, which had slid to the foot of the bed. Camelhair brushed his cheek. A large brown shoe stamped on the glasses and twisted them into the carpet.

The tall man sucked in his breath. ‘Ach,’ he said. ‘I am so clumsy.’

‘What a pity,’ said the man on the bed. ‘Still, accidents happen.’

Farrar got slowly to his feet; his muscles tightened, ready to receive a blow from the tall man. He moved more slowly than he needed, pretending the fall had winded him. His own stupidity angered him: last night he had assumed that the man on the bed was nothing more than a tourist who had had too much to drink; he should have known better. He remembered the manager’s behaviour and realized that his visitors must be police of some sort: German, not Austrian. He was a fool to have run any unnecessary risks before he had seen William McQueen.

‘Gretl,’ the man on the bed said conversationally, ‘won’t be lovely for much longer.’ Without any change of tone he added, ‘This room is a pigsty. Tidy it up, Farrar.’

Did they know? Had they found it?

Farrar had the answer to the second question as soon as he picked up the suitcase: it was appreciably lighter than it should have been. He scooped up a pile of shirts and threw them into the case.

Sweet Jesus, he thought. Please not the Gestapo.

‘Neatly, Farrar. You get so much more in if you pack neatly, don’t you?’

‘Look, I’m sorry about last night,’ Farrar said quickly. His German was fast and fluent, and he had a salesman’s confidence in the power of his own voice. ‘I’d had a bit to drink and the girl—’

The tall man slapped him. ‘Silence, please,’ he said politely.

Farrar picked himself up again. Some clothes went in the suitcase, others in the wardrobe and the chest of drawers. Meanwhile, the man on the bed leafed through Farrar’s order book. Farrar noticed that the thieving bastards had even been at his brandy: the bottle, nearly empty, was on the bedside table; beside it was a tumbler with a couple of inches of brandy still in it.

The man on the bed looked up. ‘Business has not been good lately?’

Farrar nodded. There wasn’t much demand for boxed sets of British Grenadiers in the Third Reich. That was one reason why he had taken the other job when they offered it to him.

‘I expect you find it hard to make ends meet.’

Again, Farrar nodded. It seemed safer to agree. Besides, the man on the bed was quite right. He wondered whether they were going to beat him up before they arrested him, or wait until they had him in custody.

Escape was out of the question. His captors’ combined weight was three or four times his own; and both men would be armed. The door was locked. Even if he could open the window and dive through, he doubted if he would survive the drop of fifty or sixty feet to the street below. Shouting for help would be useless, for it was obvious that they had the cooperation of the manager.

But they wouldn’t kill him – he was sure of that. A murdered British citizen would lead to awkward questions, even in Vienna. They would interrogate him, of course, and if he was dead he couldn’t tell them anything. But the worst he had to fear was a jail sentence and perhaps a little preliminary suffering. They might not realize the significance of what they had found.

The man on the bed tore a blank page from the order book and wrote something on it with a silver pencil.

Farrar bundled a pair of shoes into the bottom of the wardrobe. At last the room was clear.

The man in the camelhair coat patted his shoulder. ‘Gut,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Sehr gut.’

‘Have a drink,’ said the man on the bed. He beckoned Farrar closer and jerked his head towards the tumbler. ‘Go on, drink,’ he said irritably. ‘It may be your last chance for some time.’

Farrar picked up the glass. The probable consequences of throwing its contents into the Bavarian’s face chased through his mind.

The Bavarian shook his head. ‘Don’t be silly, Farrar. There are two of us.’

‘Hurry, please,’ the man in the camelhair coat said. He looked ostentatiously at his watch.

Farrar shrugged. He picked up the glass and had his last drink.

George Farrar died on Wednesday 15 February 1939.

The fact that he had died was more important than how and why, at least to Michael. But, much later, Michael became curious about all aspects of the little man’s death. This was because he came to see the murder of Farrar as the starting point for what came afterwards. He realized that this was an arbitrary choice – equally logically, he might have chosen Farrar’s birth, or the Anschluss, or even (to stretch a point) the Great War.

But, being an artist of sorts, he considered that human beings had a fundamental need to create patterns from the chaos of history and from their own messy lives. A pattern had to start somewhere: even the author of Genesis had had to face up to this problem: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

So Michael’s pattern began with Farrar’s death. If Farrar had reached London the following weekend, a World War might have taken a slightly different course; his death sent ripples even further into the future; it touched, perhaps marginally, on the rise and fall of empires.

In the final analysis, however, Michael was more concerned with the effects of Farrar’s death on himself and on people he was later to know. That was where it mattered. Michael took things personally, which was why he was never particularly successful at his job. Uncle Claude never made that mistake.

Despite the fact that Michael had never met Farrar, he came to feel an almost proprietorial interest in him. In the years to come, he collected information about him.

At the time of his death, Farrar was thirty-five. He was five feet two and reputed to be hot-tempered. He had a widowed mother who lived in Worthing. Some time afterwards, Michael checked to see if His Majesty’s Government had seen fit to grant Mrs Farrar a pension. He was not surprised to find that it hadn’t. HMG, probably in the person of Uncle Claude, had used a Gestapo lie to avoid spending a few hundred pounds on an old lady who could give nothing in return. That was typical.

Farrar had worked as a travelling salesman on the Continent since 1936. He was employed by a struggling British toy firm which had built its reputation on the manufacture of toy soldiers. Z Organization had recruited him as a courier in Zurich on 8 December 1938.

Those were the salient facts about Farrar’s life. The facts about the manner of his death were more difficult to establish. Michael had access to Z Organization’s files; but these were sketchy at the best of times and they were particularly bad for Vienna after the Nazis took over. Later he was able to use the SIS Registry, but here the facts were even thinner on the ground. It was true that the Vienna Station had more or less recovered from the disruption of the Anschluss by this time. The problem was that no one there had any interest in Farrar; they had no reason to disbelieve the official story, and hence no reason to investigate it. In 1939, few people in the service were aware that SIS was operating in tandem with a changeling half-brother called Z.

Eventually Michael was able to consult the Vienna police file, though that was useful more for what it omitted than for what it included. According to the civil police, George Farrar died around midnight in room 47 of the Hotel Franz Josef on the Plosslgasse. The body was found the following morning by the chambermaid. Farrar was fully dressed and lying supine on his bed; there were cherry-pink patches on his skin. The gas was on but unlit, and the cracks around the door and the window had been clumsily sealed with newspapers and towels. The chambermaid turned off the gas and fetched the manager; the manager called the police.

The police found the remains of a bottle of brandy, an empty glass, the room key and a scrap of paper on the bedside table. Four English words had been scrawled in pencil on the paper: I can’t go on. There was no reason to doubt that they had been written by the dead man, though the only standards of comparison were a few notes in Farrar’s order book and his entry in the hotel register.

Further investigation showed that Farrar’s financial affairs were in a bad way. The manager and the chambermaid testified that Herr Farrar had seemed distraught and depressed. Another witness came forward – a public-spirited Bavarian tourist, who claimed to have met Farrar in a café on the Ringstrasse a few hours before he died. According to the obliging Bavarian, Farrar had been drunk and talking of suicide; he blamed his problems on the international Jewish conspiracy.

Michael didn’t dispute the evidence in the police file, except perhaps the testimonies about Farrar’s state of mind. Of course it was curious that no one had thought to test the body for traces of cyanide – for cyanide, like carbon monoxide, left patches of lividity on a corpse. It was curious but not necessarily significant. The Viennese police sent Farrar’s belongings to the British Embassy, which transmitted them to Worthing. They were itemized with Teutonic thoroughness on the file – right down to Handkerchiefs, 6, Pair of Glasses (Broken) and Book Entitled The Black Gang by Sapper.

But someone had been careless: there was no mention of a pencil.

Z Organization had a man in Vienna – indeed, William McQueen had intended to contact Farrar on the Thursday to pick up the gold. McQueen’s cover was at risk, but he made cautious enquiries after Farrar’s death. He found a waiter from the Franz Josef who admitted, when suitably primed with alcohol, that something odd had gone on that night. The manager had taken over the receptionist’s evening shift. There was a rumour among the staff that two men from the Hotel Metropole had been seen in the Franz Josef on Wednesday night.

The Hotel Metropole was the Vienna headquarters of the Gestapo.

The gold was no longer among Farrar’s belongings, but that was only to be expected. Uncle Claude and everyone else drew the obvious inference: the Gestapo had somehow identified Farrar as a courier; they had killed him and taken the gold. The fact that they had killed him – rather than used him as bait – suggested that they already knew for whom the gold was intended. Perhaps Farrar had talked before he died. As a result, Uncle Claude decided his resources were better used elsewhere: McQueen was transferred to Basel, and the Z network in Vienna never amounted to much.

The real irony only became apparent years later, when Michael was interrogating a Gestapo officer who had made something of a name for himself in wartime Holland. Knowing that his prisoner had previously served in Vienna, Michael threw in a question about the Farrar affair.

The officer, who was in the talkative, confiding phase of his interrogation, remembered it well, because of the gold. Farrar, it seemed, had been a womanizer whose bravado was in inverse proportion to his height. On the Tuesday night he had quarrelled with a man he believed to be a German tourist. The cause of the dispute was the favours of a prostitute; and the scene of it was that bar on the Ringstrasse. Farrar had won.

The following evening, the plainclothes man and a colleague had paid a visit to the Franz Josef, intending merely to teach Farrar a lesson. Farrar was out, but the manager gave them a passkey to his room. While they were waiting, they discovered the gold concealed in his suitcase. The presence of undeclared gold marks worth nearly a thousand pounds sterling didn’t suggest to the two policemen that Farrar was engaged in espionage. Why should it have done? In those days, plenty of people were trying to move hard currency out of Austria for the most personal of reasons, and foreigners, with their relative freedom to cross the frontiers of the Reich, were often used for the purpose.

On balance, it was safer to kill Farrar if they wanted to take the gold. The manager of the Franz Josef was persuaded to cooperate; he didn’t want to lose his job and possibly his liberty. The officers had to give Michael’s captive a percentage of the proceeds, because his authority was needed to ensure that the civil police drew the right conclusions.

The police did as they were told. It was, they were informed, a political matter which concerned the security of the Reich. And there was the irony: the lie was perfectly true.

George Farrar was murdered in Vienna on the 15 February 1939: that was the beginning of Michael’s pattern.

It was an arbitrary choice, yes: but at least it made the whole affair seem personal – and therefore easier to bear. It showed that affairs of state were ultimately dependent on the motives and actions of apparently insignificant individuals. What happened after Farrar’s death was made somehow more intelligible by the idea that it could be traced back to the greed of two secret policemen, the whim of a Viennese whore and the libido of a commercial traveller in toys.

One

The ivory ruler snapped in two as it hit the top of the desk. Three inches of it ricocheted off the polished oak and landed on Hugh’s shoe. He jumped backward. The remaining nine inches stayed in Alfred Kendall’s hand.

His father’s knuckles, Hugh noticed, were the same colour as the ruler.

Alfred Kendall turned slowly in his chair. He was still dressed in his City clothes, which lent an odd formality to the proceedings.

‘Do you mean to tell me that the headmaster is lying?’

‘No, Father.’ Hugh’s hands clenched behind his back. His body was treacherously determined to tremble. ‘Mr Jervis was mistaken. I—’

‘Don’t lie to me, boy. I’ve known Mr Jervis for a good ten years. He isn’t a fool.’ Kendall tapped the letter in front of him. ‘Nor is he the sort of man to fling around wild accusations.’

Hugh’s vision blurred. ‘I didn’t do it.’

The words came out more loudly than he had intended. For a moment his father stared contemptuously at him. Hugh tried to look away. It was almost with relief that he saw his father begin to gnaw his lower lip with a long, yellow tooth. This was almost invariably a preliminary to speech.

‘Never did I think I should read such a letter about a son of mine.’ Kendall’s voice hardened. ‘You don’t seem to realize that you’ve brought shame on the entire family.’

Hugh shrugged. It was a gesture of discomfort, not insolence, but his father interpreted it otherwise. Kendall’s slap caught Hugh unawares: he reeled back against the table.

‘That,’ his father said slowly, ‘is just a foretaste of what you should expect. Don’t snivel. Listen to what Mr Jervis has to say about you. “Dear Captain Kendall, It is with deep regret that I have been forced to expel your son Hugh from the school, with immediate effect. One of his classmates had foolishly brought a ten-shilling note to school. Just before luncheon, the boy reported it had been stolen. It was subsequently found in the pocket of Hugh’s overcoat. Hugh, I am afraid, made matters worse by trying to dissemble his guilt. For the sake of the other boys in my charge, I cannot permit a pupil who has proved to be both a thief and a liar to remain for a moment longer than necessary. I will forward the termly account at a later date.”

‘The termly account, you note. In the circumstances, Mr Jervis is quite within his rights to charge for the entire Lent term. Have you any idea what the fees are like for a first-rate prep school like Thameside College? Your brother used his time there to win a scholarship. But you have wantonly wasted your opportunities from the first. I scrimp and save to give you the finest education available in England – and this is how you repay me. Do you think that’s fair? Do you think that’s reasonable? Answer me, boy.’

Hugh’s eyes were heavy with tears. Humiliation bred anger, which in turn created a brief and desperate courage. ‘I … I thought—’

‘Don’t mumble at me. And don’t you know that tears are unmanly?’

‘I thought Aunt Vida was paying my fees.’

Purple blotches appeared on Kendall’s face. He jerked himself out of his chair and towered over Hugh.

‘You impudent little wretch,’ he said softly. ‘You will regret that, I promise you.’

Hugh’s courage evaporated. He had been stupid to mention Aunt Vida. None of the children was supposed to know that she paid their school fees. But Stephen had found out years ago from their aunt’s housekeeper.

This time the blow was a back-hander. The edge of Kendall’s wedding ring cut into the skin over Hugh’s cheekbone. He cannoned into the table and fell to the ground.

‘Get up. And don’t you dare bleed on the carpet.’

Hugh got slowly to his feet. He touched his cheek and looked at the smear of blood on his fingers.

‘Handkerchief.’

Hugh pulled out the grubby ball of linen from his trouser pocket. He dabbed his face, conscious that his father was still looming over him. Adults were so unfairly large.

‘You despicable little animal,’ Kendall whispered.

Hugh held back a sob with difficulty. He knew he would cry sooner or later, but he was determined to put it off for as long as possible. What was happening to him was unjust; yet for some reason that didn’t seem important beside the fact that he disgusted his father. He was bitterly ashamed of himself. He wished he were dead.

‘Bring me the cane. The thinner one.’

The two canes were kept in the corner between the wall and the end of the bookcase. Hugh sometimes daydreamed of burning them. The thicker one, curiously enough, was less painful. The thin one was longer and more supple; it hissed in the air, gathering venom as it swung.

He handed it to his father. It was part of the ritual that the victim should present the means of punishment to the executioner.

Alfred Kendall tapped the cane against one pin-striped trouser leg. ‘You know what to do. Waiting won’t make it easier. I can promise you that.’

Hugh turned away and unhooked the S-shaped metal snake that held up his trousers. His fingers groped at the buttons. When the last one was undone, the trousers fell to his ankles. He shuffled across the room to the low armchair where his mother sat in the evenings. He could feel a draught from somewhere on the back of his knees.

The chair had a low back. Hugh stretched over it, extending his arms along the chair’s arms for support. His mother’s knitting bag was on the seat of the chair. He could see the purple wool of the jersey she was knitting for Stephen.

His father’s heavy footsteps advanced towards him and then retreated. This, too, was part of the ritual: Alfred Kendall was a man who liked to take measurements. Hugh knew there were four paces between the desk and the chair. To be precise, there were three paces and a little jump. After the jump, his father would grunt like someone straining on a lavatory. Then would come the pain.

The footsteps returned and Hugh held his breath. The first blow caught him by surprise, as it always did. In the interim between beatings, you forgot that it hurt so much.

The cane wrapped around his buttocks. It felt like a branding iron. Despite himself, Hugh yelped. He pressed himself forward against the back of the chair. His hands dug into the arms.

The footsteps slowly retreated. Once again, they advanced.

The cane seemed to land on precisely the same spot. This time, Hugh cried out. His father said nothing, though his breathing was more laboured than usual; he never spoke when administering punishment.

Hugh tried to concentrate on counting. You never knew in advance how many strokes you were going to get. Four was probably the average, at least for himself and Stephen, though it was at least a year since Stephen had been beaten; Meg usually had three, but then she was a girl. Five was by no means unknown. Stephen boasted that he had been given six on two occasions.

Five – Six. Hugh stirred, but even the slightest movement made the pain worse. His arms and legs were trembling. To his horror, he realized that the footsteps were again coming towards him.

Seven.

Eight.

Hugh’s legs buckled. He was crying now – the pain was so great that he no longer cared. His tears glistened on the purple wool.

‘Stand up,’ snapped his father. ‘Can’t you even take your punishment like a man?’

There was a clatter as his father returned the cane to its corner. Metal and flint rasped together and the smell of tobacco filled the air.

Hugh levered himself into an upright position. For a few seconds he stared stupidly at the trousers which shackled his ankles. He bent down with difficulty and tugged them up to his waist. The pain was no longer blindingly acute; it had softened, if that was the right word, to a dull, angry throb. Every movement made it worse.

Alfred Kendall was leaning on the desk; he held the Gold Flake in his left hand. His thumb and forefinger were stained yellow, like the ragged fringe of his military moustache.

He exhaled a lungful of smoke in the direction of his son. ‘Well?’

Hugh had missed his cue. The ritual demanded that the victim should thank the executioner. It was an exquisite refinement: you thanked someone for inflicting pain on you, thereby implying you deserved or even desired it. It suddenly became very important to Hugh that he should not make the required response.

‘I am waiting, Hugh.’

His father walked slowly towards him. With him he brought his characteristic smell – a compound of stale tobacco, hair oil and a musty, sooty odour which Hugh associated with suburban trains. Without warning, Kendall nipped the lobe of Hugh’s ear between finger and thumb and twisted it through ninety degrees.

Hugh gasped and tried to pull his head away.

‘You always were a weakling,’ his father observed. His grip tightened on the lobe. ‘A real boy of your background would have learned to stand punishment years ago. I’m still waiting.’

It was at this moment that Hugh decided never to forgive his father in any circumstance. Aloud he said: ‘Thank you, sir.’

Alfred Kendall released the ear and nodded towards the door. Hugh, who was expert at interpreting his father’s nods, opened the door and stood aside to allow his father to pass through first. Kendall set great store by the courtesy that men owed to women and the young to their elders and betters. It was a sign, he often remarked, of good breeding.

His father flung open the kitchen door and motioned to Hugh to stand beside him in the doorway.

They were all in there. The opening of the door had cut off both their conversation and their movements, leaving a strained, still silence. Hugh’s mother was standing by the gas cooker, stirring the contents of a saucepan; the rich smell of mutton stew made his mouth water. Meg, still in her school uniform, was at the kitchen table doing her homework. Stephen sat opposite her; he had changed since he returned from the bank, and the Star was spread open in front of him. Hugh was sure that they had been talking about him. He knew from experience that the sound of a caning was clearly audible from the hall.

Kendall sucked on his cigarette. ‘Hugh will go straight to bed. He will have nothing to eat tonight and no one will visit him. Do I make myself clear?’

Mrs Kendall covered the saucepan with its lid. ‘Alfred, perhaps I should—’

‘I’ve made up my mind, Muriel. The boy’s enough of a namby-pamby as it is, without you trying to make it worse. We’ll have dinner at the usual time.’

He laid a heavy hand on Hugh’s shoulder, turned him around and pushed him towards the stairs.

The stairs were a form of torture. Hugh climbed slowly, clinging to the banister; his body protested at every step. He heard his father go back into the dining room and close the door.

From the landing another flight of stairs wound upward to the attic where Meg slept. Hugh could just remember the time when the room had belonged to a maid. On the right was the big bedroom at the front, where his parents slept; Stephen had the room opposite. Hugh’s was farther down the landing towards the back of the house, next to the bathroom over the scullery.

His room was small and cold, but at least it was his alone. He shut the door behind him and closed the curtains. He was crying again now no one could see him – softly and wearily. His body ached. As he shrugged himself out of his jacket, his teeth began to chatter.

Usually his mother gave him a hot-water bottle when he came to bed; such luxuries were out of the question tonight. His pyjamas felt clammy. He pulled them on and rolled gingerly into bed.

It was obviously impossible to lie on his back. He discovered that lying on his side was almost as bad. The problem with lying on his front was that it brought the weight of the bedclothes on to his back. On the other hand, without the blankets he stood no chance whatsoever of warming up.

Hugh had forgotten to switch out the light, but for the moment he lacked the energy to get out of bed again. There was a line of lead soldiers deployed on the mantelpiece. Soldiers were a little babyish, but he still enjoyed playing with them in private. Major Hugh Kendall (VC and bar) was leading a daring patrol through no man’s land, attended by his faithful batman, Hiawatha the Red Indian. Hiawatha was Hugh’s oldest soldier; most of his paint was gone and his costume looked a little incongruous beside the Great War uniforms of the rest of the patrol. But Hiawatha always had to be included. Perhaps he was working as a secret agent and was therefore in disguise; Major Kendall’s job was to infiltrate him through the enemy lines.

Hugh tried to make the story continue in his mind, but it was no use. Instead he found himself thinking about the war his father had said was coming. With luck his father might get killed. He hugged the thought guiltily to himself.

The hours slipped slowly by. Every quarter of an hour, chimes from the clock in the drawing room filled the house. His mother spent hours cleaning that clock. It was in the form of a black marble triumphal arch, upon which two modestly attired cupids were frolicking; it had been a wedding present to his parents.

There were other sounds that signified the passage of time. Hugh’s room was directly over the kitchen. He could hear the clatter of pans and plates as the meal was prepared; and occasionally the scrape of a chair and the murmur of conversation. From half-past seven onwards, there was nearly half an hour of silence: everyone was in the dining room. Suddenly he felt very hungry.

Food would have warmed him, as well as satisfied his hunger. The cold seemed to be seeping into his bones. His muscles were stiffening up. With immense effort he wriggled out of bed, knowing that to leave his light on was to risk another beating. Before getting back into bed, he picked up Hiawatha. As he lay there shivering, the little lead figure grew warm in his hand.

At a quarter-past nine, he heard footsteps shuffling down the landing. It was Meg’s bedtime and she was coming to use the bathroom. There were familiar sounds – the running of water, the flushing of the cistern and the small explosion as she drew back the bolt.

Her steps paused outside his door. Hugh heard the faint creak of the door knob rotating. Meg came into the room and closed the door behind her with great care. She tiptoed slowly across the floor to the bed. Hugh tensed and then relaxed. He began to cry again, this time with relief: at least someone cared enough about him to come and see him.

The springs groaned as Meg sat on the edge of the bed. She bent down and her long dark hair brushed his cheek. Hugh stretched out his hand and felt the thick flannel of her dressing gown. Her breath was fresh with toothpaste.

‘Are you all right?’ she whispered. ‘How many did you get?’

‘Eight.’ Hugh felt a certain pride in this. ‘It hurts all over. And I’m starving.’

‘I managed to save you a bit of bread.’

He crammed the bread into his mouth. It tasted delicious. He also ate some fluff which the bread must have picked up from Meg’s pocket. He swallowed the last mouthful with regret.

‘Where are they?’ he asked.

‘Father and Mother are in the dining room. Stephen’s gone out, the lucky devil. We haven’t been allowed to mention your name all evening.’

‘What’s going to happen to me?’

‘How should I know?’ Meg’s weight shifted on the mattress. ‘Can I come into bed with you? I’m freezing.’

Hugh made room for her. She slid into bed beside him. He felt embarrassed, which was odd because they had often cuddled up together to keep each other warm; but for some reason they hadn’t done it as much in the last couple of years. Meg used to want to play Mothers and Fathers, which he thought was a girlish game.

His sister gurgled with laughter. ‘Your feet are like ice. Here, put them against my legs.’ As she spoke, she put an arm around him. He felt the warmth spreading from her body to his.

‘It’s all right for Stephen,’ Meg said. ‘He can get away from it. He said he was going to the pictures, but I bet he’s going drinking. Father would kill him if he knew what Stephen gets up to. I wish I was a boy.’

Hugh sniffed. ‘It’s not much fun.’

‘Not like you, silly. Like Stephen. Did you know he started smoking? He buys those Turkish cigarettes, the oval ones. And since he started work at the bank he’s hardly ever at home. In the evening he usually goes out.’

‘Where does he go?’ Hugh didn’t really want to know, but it was comfortable to have Meg whispering in his ear. He didn’t want to give her an excuse for going.

‘I’m sure he goes to parties and shows and restaurants.’ Meg’s voice was bitter. ‘I know he sees a lot of people he knew at school. Especially Paul Bennet: you know the one – his father’s filthy rich and they’ve got a Rolls-Royce. The friends Stephen chooses always have pots of money – have you noticed that?’

Hugh snuggled closer to his sister. His shoulder was against her breasts. He was beginning to feel drowsy. When she spoke again, her whisper was so low he could hardly catch what she was saying.

‘You know Mary? She’s awfully nice – she’s in my form at school and we do everything together. She saw Stephen and Paul on Sunday, in Richmond Park. They were with girls. Mary said they had their arms around their waists. She said the girls looked terribly common and – you know – flashy.’

Hugh wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but he grunted encouragingly. Meg sounded strangely breathless, as if she found the subject absolutely fascinating. He forced himself to find a question to keep the conversation going.

‘Are you going to go out with chaps when you grow up?’

Meg wriggled beside him. ‘Of course I am. They’ll be rich, too – perhaps they’ll have titles. They’ll take me to nightclubs, you know, and we’ll drink champagne and dance very close to one another.’ She made a sound which was halfway between a sob and a sigh. ‘The trouble is, I never get a chance to meet anyone. Father keeps us cooped up like prisoners. He never lets us invite anyone home. Mary’s people are always having parties. And her brothers bring their friends. They had a tennis tournament last summer and Mark (that’s her elder brother) brought a friend from Oxford. He was called Gerald and looked like Robert Donat. He kissed Mary, in the summer-house. And it was a proper kiss, too, not just a peck on the cheek.’

Hugh wondered what a proper kiss was: presumably it was a peck on the mouth.

‘Sometimes,’ Meg hissed in his ear, ‘I feel so jealous of Mary I could burst. She knows such a lot about men already.’ Her arm tightened around Hugh. ‘I say,’ she said casually. ‘Eight must have hurt an awful lot. Can I see it?’

‘It’s dark,’ Hugh protested sleepily. ‘We can’t put the light on again. Besides—’

He stopped, aware he couldn’t put his other objection into words, even to himself. In any case, he didn’t want to offend Meg.

She seemed to understand what was in his mind. ‘Don’t be an idiot. You’re my little brother – I used to help bath you. Anyway if it’s dark, I wouldn’t see anything. I could just touch.’

‘If you like.’ Hugh tried to make himself sound indifferent. ‘But be careful: it’s jolly painful.’

Meg’s free hand moved slowly down his spine. She hesitated when she came to the top of his pyjama trousers. He had left the cord untied in the hope that it would be less painful. Her hand slipped underneath.

Hugh winced as her fingers gently touched the line of welts. His father’s aim had been good: most of the strokes had fallen on the same spot. She touched one of the scabs and sucked in her breath sharply.

‘It bled quite a lot,’ Hugh said proudly.

‘You poor darling.’

Meg’s hand moved on. It cupped one of his buttocks for an instant, and then stroked the top of his thighs. Where she touched the welts, it was painful; but elsewhere it made Hugh tingle. He felt a warmth growing inside him. Her hand slipped down between his legs.

Suddenly they both heard footsteps coming along the landing.

Hugh and Meg held their breath. They knew it must be their mother – she walked slowly and lightly, while their father’s step was brisk and heavy. As his mother reached the door of his room, Hugh clutched Hiawatha so tightly that one of the Indian’s arms bent beneath the strain.

But the footsteps passed on to the bathroom. As soon as the bolt shot across, Meg began to wriggle out of bed. In her haste she scraped a fingernail across one of the scabs; Hugh nearly cried out. A long, bare leg rubbed against Hugh’s arm. Meg put on her slippers and bent down to Hugh.

‘Don’t make a sound. I’ll wait behind the door until she’s gone back downstairs.’

Next door, the lavatory flushed. His mother’s footsteps paused outside Hugh’s door, but moved on after a few seconds. Hugh didn’t know whether to be relieved or hurt: his mother’s fear of his father was greater than her desire to comfort him.

Meg waited a moment and then left without even saying goodnight. Hugh half-wished she would come back to bed, despite the risks. Her visit had made him both warmer and happier. He stirred in the bed; he was suddenly conscious of his body as something outside himself. He realized that other people could give it pleasure as well as pain.

‘We’ll survive, old fellow,’ he whispered to Hiawatha. ‘The enemy may have won the battle, but he hasn’t won the war.’

There would be a respectful grin on the usually impassive face of his batman. ‘Yes, sir. The men are all in good spirits. Permission to kip down?’

‘Granted,’ Hugh said. He laid Hiawatha beneath the pillow, but kept his hand on top of him.

Hiawatha may have gone to sleep at once, but it took Hugh much longer. His drowsiness seemed to have gone. He heard his parents come to bed just after eleven. Neither of them came in to see him.

The last thing he was aware of was the clock downstairs striking midnight.

Alfred Kendall always went into the office on Saturday mornings. The journey by train and bus from Twickenham to the City marked the transition from the problems of home to the problems of work. Sometimes he could distract himself from them with a newspaper or a thriller, but not today.

Kendall and Son occupied two rooms of a building in Sweetmeat Court; in palmier days they had rented the entire first floor. Miss Leaming, the angular secretary whom Kendall had inherited from his father, was in the outer office. She was the firm’s last employee: Kendall kept her on solely because a younger and more efficient secretary would have required a higher salary.

Miss Leaming fussed ineffectually over his wet overcoat.

‘I hope you’ve done the post,’ Kendall said.

She avoided his eyes. ‘Yes, sir. It’s on your desk.’

Kendall turned down the gas fire. ‘We’re not made of money, you know,’ he said over his shoulder as he went into the inner office.

The letters he found on his blotter soured his mood still further. The new director of the Nuranyo glass works at Pilsen announced that he was unable to fulfil some foreign orders, including Kendall’s, owing to a change in company policy. Kendall snorted: a lot of Czech companies had altered their policy since Hitler annexed the Sudetenland, the strip of Bohemia adjoining Germany, last September.

Kendall’s bank manager had written to remind him that the firm’s overdraft now stood at £343 6s 9d; he drew Mr Kendall’s attention to the fact that the original overdraft facility had been for £250, to be repaid at the end of January, nearly three weeks ago. A letter from Kendall’s solicitor discussed the bankruptcy of Kendall’s one important debtor; it looked as though Kendall and Son would be lucky to get three shillings in the pound.

Kendall and Son. Even the name of the firm was a reminder of failure. Kendall had always imagined that Stephen would follow him into the business one day. But one didn’t take passengers on board a sinking ship. Stephen was better off at the bank: at least his job was secure and he had prospects.

There was one more letter. As its envelope was marked Private and Confidential, Miss Leaming had not opened it. Kendall frowned when he saw the address at the head of the paper: his correspondent was a member of White’s.

Kendall would have given a great deal to be able to use that stationery himself. Every time he passed through St James’s Street he looked up at the club’s great bow window and yearned to be on the other side of the glass.

He glanced at the signature and tugged his moustache uneasily. He knew Sir Basil Cohen by repute, of course, and had met him briefly at one of the annual dinners of the British Glass Association. Sir Basil was Jewish, but Kendall was forced to admit that an unfortunate – well, ungentlemanly – racial background counted for little in comparison with the man’s immense wealth and influence. Cohen was not only chairman of Amalgamated British Glass: his business interests ranged from films to diamonds and extended over four continents.

The letter was short, but it took Kendall several minutes to decipher Cohen’s ornate but nearly illegible hand.

Dear Kendall,

You may recall that we met at the BGA dinner in ’37. I wonder if you could spare the time to see an acquaintance of mine, Michael Stanhope-Smith. He is looking for a man with your qualifications to undertake a small commission for him. His work is of national importance; and I fancy that he is in a position to offer some sort of honorarium, should you accept his proposition.

I understand that he intends to telephone you at your office on Saturday or Monday.

Yours sincerely,

Basil Cohen

Kendall’s hand trembled slightly as he lit a cigarette. He was in the grip of an unfamiliar emotion: it took him a moment to realize that it was hope.

Two

After church on Sundays, the Kendalls called on Aunt Vida. Stephen said it was just like their father to pay his respects to God and Mammon on the same morning.

Aunt Vida lived in Richmond. The Kendalls went there by train from Twickenham. Mr and Mrs Kendall walked together from the station, together but never arm in arm. The children trailed behind. Hugh always walked the short distance to Richmond Green with his head held unnaturally high. This was because his mother considered that a clean Eton collar was pleasing in the sight of the Lord and Aunt Vida; it chafed his neck mercilessly until it wilted.

Wilmot House was in a small street near Maid of Honour Row. Prim black railings and a narrow strip of flowerbed separated the pavement from the redbrick Georgian façade. A brass knocker shaped like a mermaid twinkled incongruously on the chaste, olive-green front door.

Hugh always enjoyed the change of atmosphere when he stepped into the house. Outside, everything was bright and regular; but the interior was dark and full of secrets. The hall was nearly a foot below ground level outside. It was stone-flagged and panelled in dark oak. The glass in the fanlight was green with age, which gave the hall the appearance of being under water.

Mrs Bunnings, the housekeeper, answered Alfred Kendall’s knock. She gave a nod and held the door open as the family trooped into the hall.

Mrs Kendall said, with an apologetic twitter, ‘And how is Mrs Lane today?’

‘As well as can be expected, madam,’ Mrs Bunnings said grimly. ‘The mistress is in the drawing room.’

She disposed of the Kendalls’ hats and coats and announced them ceremoniously. In the unimaginably far-off days of her youth, Mrs Bunnings had been a parlour maid in the household of a baronet; an Edwardian stateliness still distinguished her public manner.

Aunt Vida awoke with a start as they filed into the drawing room. As usual, she was wearing a shapeless grey dress beneath a thick grey cardigan. Around her neck were three gold lockets, each with its own chain. Each contained a photograph and a lock of hair: one was a shrine to the late Mr Lane, the others to their sons, George and Harry, both of whom had been killed at Passchendaele.

Alfred Kendall shook her hand and mumbled a vague enquiry about her health into his moustache. She didn’t bother to reply. The rest of the family kissed her cheek; it smelled of lavender water and felt like tissue paper.

‘Run along to the kitchen,’ Aunt Vida said to Hugh and Meg. ‘Give them a glass of milk, Bunnings, and then you can bring in the sherry.’

Meg and Hugh followed Mrs Bunnings out of the room. Until last year, Stephen would have gone with them. But when he left school, Mrs Bunnings started to call him Mr Stephen rather than Master Stephen; she made it quite plain that he was now too grown-up to have the freedom of her kitchen.

In her own domain, Mrs Bunnings became a different person. She told jokes; she gossiped; she pried indefatigably into their lives. She also gave the children scones, which was contrary to Mr Kendall’s strict instructions that their appetites should not be spoiled.

She left them for a moment to take the sherry and biscuits into the parlour. When she got back, she tapped Hugh on the shoulder.

‘What’s all this, young man? I heard your dad saying you’d been expelled from that school of yours.’

Hugh flushed. ‘I have. Someone stole some money and they thought it was me. But it wasn’t – I promise.’

Meg dabbed at the rim of milk around her lips with a handkerchief. ‘Father gave him eight of the best,’ she said ghoulishly. ‘He had nothing to eat on Friday night and he was only allowed bread and water yesterday.’

Mrs Bunnings snorted. ‘I know who I’d beat if I had half a chance. Have another scone, you poor lamb.’

When alone with the children, the housekeeper never made any secret of her dislike of their father. Miss Muriel, Mrs Lane’s niece, had been as happy as the day was long before she married him: and look at her now. Their father only bothered with these weekly visits because he wanted to get his hands on Mrs Lane’s money. Mrs Bunnings didn’t know why he troubled to come since, when he got here, he just sat there and grunted.

‘What will he do with you now? Has he found you another school?’

‘I don’t know.’ Hugh avoided Mrs Bunnings’s eyes. His fingers traced the reassuring shape of Hiawatha in his trouser pocket.

‘Father says that if Hugh was a few years older he’d pack him off to Australia and have done with him.’ Under the table, Meg put her hand on Hugh’s knee; it made him shiver. ‘He really means it.’

Hugh shifted uneasily. Sitting down was still uncomfortable and he wished Meg would remove her hand. Mrs Bunnings might see. The long, low kitchen was like a hothouse; Mrs Bunnings had insisted on keeping the old-fashioned range. The heat, the food and even the sympathy combined to make him feel drowsy.

A bell jangled over the door. It was precisely twenty minutes after they had entered the house. Mr Kendall always timed their visits with meticulous care. At the end of the twenty minutes, he would stand up and announce they had to be going, usually when his wife was in mid-sentence.

Mrs Bunnings escorted the children back to the drawing room to say goodbye. Mr Kendall was waiting impatiently by the door. Hugh had often wondered why his father seemed always to be in a hurry to be somewhere else; when he reached the somewhere else, he was always in a hurry to leave there as well.

For once, Aunt Vida seemed reluctant to let them go. She made Mr Kendall make up the fire for her. She suddenly remembered that she wanted her niece to get her some wool; the commission involved a great deal of explanation, during which Mr Kendall jabbed angrily at the fire with the poker. He consulted his watch.

‘We shall miss the train if we don’t hurry.’

‘Off you go then.’ Aunt Vida paused. ‘Hugh, come over here. I want a word with you.’

Alfred Kendall turned in the doorway.

‘Hugh can run after you,’ Aunt Vida said firmly, before he could protest. ‘Please close the door behind you.’

Kendall gnawed his lower lip but said nothing. He shut the door behind him; with a little more force, it would have been a slam.

Aunt Vida beckoned Hugh towards her. ‘I hear you’ve been in hot water again.’

Hugh nodded. There was nothing he could say.

‘Bring me my handbag. It’s on the bureau.’

Like his father, Aunt Vida was always giving orders; Hugh found it odd that he wasn’t afraid of her. His parents and Meg were afraid of her – even Stephen was wary of what he said and did in her company. He fetched her the battered black bag and stood patiently while she rummaged in it. He watched her face with fascination: her skin was a maze of wrinkles; there were more cracks than surface.

Suddenly she glanced up at him. ‘Don’t you know it’s rude to stare at a lady? Hey?’

Hugh grinned. He heard the front door closing with a bang; Mrs Bunnings was glad to see the back of her visitors.

Aunt Vida nodded in the direction of the sound. ‘Don’t let it get on top of you,’ she said gruffly. ‘These things pass. Worse things happen at sea, not that that’s much consolation. When your father asks why I kept you, say I was telling you to be a better boy in future. Here, hold out your hand.’

Hugh looked down. On his palm was a half-crown.

‘Kendall?’ Colonel Dansey stared with distaste at his plate; it was difficult to tell whether it was the omelette or the name of Kendall that was responsible for the irritation in his voice. ‘Who the devil’s he?’

‘He’s a glass importer, sir.’ Michael Stanhope-Smith sipped his burgundy appreciatively. Early in their acquaintance, he had learned that it was a mistake to deluge Uncle Claude with information; Dansey himself never made that mistake and he expected those who worked for him to be equally sparing.

Michael glanced over his shoulder to make sure that no one was in earshot of their table. The dining room at the Savoy was still moderately crowded, but it had definitely passed the Sunday lunchtime peak.

Dansey arranged his knife and fork neatly on his empty plate. He adjusted the dark-rimmed pebble glasses on his large, curved nose. ‘You know that I don’t encourage people to indulge in recruiting off their own bat. Recruit in haste and repent at leisure.’

Michael flushed. He was twenty-five; he was two stone heavier and six inches taller; but Uncle Claude could still make him feel like a schoolboy who hadn’t washed behind the ears.

‘I haven’t actually interviewed him yet. I telephoned him yesterday; we’ve arranged to meet tomorrow.’

‘I see. And why this unseemly haste, may I ask?’

‘You haven’t heard? Farrar’s dead. Apparently he killed himself – sealed the draughts and turned on the gas in his hotel room. The signal came in from Vienna on Friday night.’

Dansey said nothing. He appeared to be concentrating on adjusting the red carnation in the buttonhole of his dark blue suit.

Michael swallowed. ‘William McQueen talked to a waiter at the hotel. He said that Farrar might have had a couple of visitors in his room the evening before he died. Probably Gestapo, though we’ve had no confirmation of that. You know how difficult it is to get hard information out of Austria these days.’

Dansey gave a scarcely perceptible shrug. ‘It’s immaterial. Farrar couldn’t have told them anything. He hadn’t been briefed.’

In the pause which followed, Michael sipped his wine to cover his confusion. It was brutally obvious to him that Dansey didn’t care that Farrar had in all likelihood been killed. It was at most an inconvenience. A newly-recruited courier was of little weight in Uncle Claude’s professional scale of values. If this was professionalism, Michael thought bitterly, he wished he was an amateur.

‘Do go on,’ Dansey suggested. ‘You were about to explain why you found it necessary to circumvent the standard recruitment procedure.’

‘Farrar was due to return to London and then go on to Prague at the end of the week. You said the Prague trip was vital, sir. I would have contacted you, but you were on a train somewhere between Zurich and London. I thought I’d better act on my own initiative.’

‘And how did your initiative lead you to this man Kendall?’

‘We need someone with a bona fide reason to go to Prague – preferably a commercial one. I thought Prague – Bohemia – glass; and then I remembered Sir Basil Cohen.’

‘You know Basil?’ Dansey said sharply. ‘How did that come about?’

‘I was at Cambridge with his younger son. I stayed with his people down in Gloucestershire once or twice.’

‘I see.’ For once Dansey sounded almost amiable.

Michael’s mind immediately made a connection. Cohen had been very helpful, right from the start. Dansey had been cultivating the friendship of the wealthy and the powerful for nearly half a century. Many of them were now unobtrusively helping Dansey’s Z Organization in a variety of ways. It was not inconceivable that Cohen was among them. In that case, Sir Basil must have derived a great deal of private amusement from Michael’s claim that he was working for the Foreign Office trade section.

A muscle twitched in Dansey’s cheek. In a lesser man, it might have been a grin.

‘I telephoned him – luckily he was in town. He was dining at White’s, but he said he could spare me a few minutes there after dinner.’ Michael glanced quickly at Dansey and hurriedly continued: ‘I – well – implied I had some sort of FO connection. I said we needed an unofficial trade representative in Prague – someone who made regular trips there and could combine his own work with a little confidential work for us. Sir Basil asked a few questions, of course, but I was as discreet as possible.’

A waiter moved tentatively towards the table. Dansey waved him away. ‘What do you know about Kendall?’

‘He works from an office in the City. He buys mainly from Czechoslovakia. His main customers in this country are provincial department stores. It’s an old-fashioned firm, run on pre-war lines. Apparently Kendall’s in a bad way financially – Sir Basil reckons he must be on his last legs.’

‘Does Basil know him personally?’

‘They’ve met, sir, but that’s about all. I rather gathered that Kendall isn’t quite …’ Michael’s voice trailed away. He believed that all men were equal but had long since discovered that most of his friends and colleagues paid only lip-service to the notion. He despised snobbery; but he was intelligent enough to realize that it couldn’t be ignored.

Dansey nodded understandingly. ‘Any war record?’

‘Yes, sir; I checked with the War Office. Enlisted in the Pay Corps in 1915 as a private. Commissioned in 1918. He ended the war as an acting captain, after four years behind a desk in Whitehall.’ Michael made his voice as neutral as possible. ‘It seems that he likes to be called Captain Kendall.’

Dansey’s eyebrows rose. ‘Despite the fact he never held a regular commission?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The eyebrows fell back into place. Dansey poured out the last of the burgundy and signalled to the waiter to bring their coffee. He was not in the mood for pudding or cheese and he assumed, correctly, that Michael would be content to follow his lead. By now they were almost alone in the big dining room, except for tail-coated waiters who swooped like swallows among the empty tables, clearing them with deft, darting movements. Michael could feel the hard edges of his sketchbook in the pocket of his jacket. He had a sudden urge to draw what he could see, to record an instant in the life of the Savoy in black and white. He would use lots of heavy shading and soften the outlines as much as possible.

He grinned into his burgundy at the thought of what Dansey would say if he started to draw. It was well known that Dansey considered that the chief purpose of art was to be a tool of espionage: it was a convenient means of creating a visual record of enemy installations. The old man knew that Michael had once wanted to be an artist. What he didn’t know was that Michael still did.

The waiter brought their coffee and withdrew. Dansey produced a cigarette case and offered it to Michael. As Michael lit their cigarettes, he noticed that Dansey’s hand was speckled with brown liver spots and trembled slightly. The hand reminded him that Dansey had already reached the age when most men were thinking of retirement.

‘I’m dining with your godfather tonight,’ Dansey said abruptly.

It was not a social observation. Michael’s godfather, Admiral Sinclair, was head of SIS, the sponsor of Z Organization. If it hadn’t been for Sinclair, it was unlikely that Michael would now be at the Savoy with a decent suit on his back. In all probability he would have been teaching history, art and games at some godforsaken little prep school. Sometimes Michael wished he was.

‘Do give him my regards,’ Michael said.

As always, Dansey’s words had at least two layers of meaning. He was hinting that he would take the opportunity to protect himself in the event of something going wrong with Kendall: Michael was the precooked scapegoat, ready for eating if the need should arise. But there was another implication: Dansey was tacitly accepting what Michael had done; it was the first time that Michael had been allowed to make an independent decision; and that, he supposed, might be construed as progress.

‘You’re meeting Kendall tomorrow?’

‘Yes, sir – for lunch.’

‘If you do decide to take him on, you are to act as his sole control. I want him to have no contact with anyone else in London. He’s not to be given the emergency addresses in Vienna or Budapest or Zurich – is that clear? You can offer him his expenses plus fifty pounds; he can have fifteen pounds now and the rest when he returns. And get receipts.’