An American Spy

by An American Spy (retail) (epub)

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Occleshaw.

  ‘Yes, that too,’ said Polly, getting into the act. Throughout the performance Bunter had said nothing and had stood statue-like by the door. Jane thought she saw a very faint smile on his lips, however.

  ‘Look,’ said Dundee, sighing. ‘Everybody in this room has signed your Official Secrets Act, including the Pottingers and even Miss Todd. So either get on with it or get out of it.’

  Occleshaw took out a small, somewhat ragged-looking notebook and the stub of a pencil. He flipped open the notebook and then licked the end of the pencil. Jane was now completely in agreement with Bunter’s assessment. The man had no class at all. He also had mismatched socks, which she noticed for the first time. And the metal tips of his laces needed replacing. She shivered slightly, imagining him licking the tips to a point each morning before he put the shoes on. The shoes themselves were brown, with heavy-looking toes. Cop shoes.

  ‘You are acquainted with one Charles Andrew Danby, a lieutenant colonel in the American First Division.’

  ‘I haven’t seen him in years,’ Dundee answered.

  ‘You went to school with him, I understand.’

  ‘Why?’ Dundee asked.

  ‘Just checking, Major.’

  ‘Check somewhere else.’

  ‘Lieutenant Colonel Danby is an old friend then.’

  ‘I never would have considered him a friend, no. I simply knew him.’

  ‘In what way, sir?’

  ‘As you said, we went to school together for a few years.’

  ‘The Bain Academy.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Were you aware that Lieutenant Colonel Danby had a criminal record?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Theft, assault, car theft, statutory rape on several occasions. Blackmail.’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ said Dundee. ‘He never would have been let into the Army with a record like that, let alone been given a commission as an officer.’

  ‘His run-ins with the law came when he was still a juvenile,’ Occleshaw responded. ‘His record was sealed.’

  ‘That wouldn’t have made any difference to the Army.’

  ‘His father is a very powerful man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As is yours.’

  ‘What does this have to do with anything, Occleshaw?’

  ‘Just getting to it, Major.’ He paused and cleared his throat. He glanced down at his notebook again but Jane was sure he was doing it for effect; he knew all of this from memory. ‘You worked at the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office for some time, is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A Mr Burton Fitts? A man who was eventually disgraced for his actions. Corruption?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why I quit, although I don’t see that it’s any business of yours.’

  ‘During your time at the district attorney’s office you had access to all the files held by the criminal courts in Los Angeles, is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Juvenile files?’

  Jane watched as Dundee’s jaw went rigid with anger. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you know that your friend Danby’s juvenile record was not only sealed but vanished altogether?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know that.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘What are you implying, Occleshaw?’

  The detective held the hand with the pencil stub in it palm up. ‘I’m not implying nothing, Major, nothing at all.’

  ‘Why are you asking these questions?’

  ‘I’m investigating a murder then, aren’t I?’ he said, throwing a look Jane’s way. ‘Just like your friend Black.’

  ‘Whose murder?’ Dundee asked.

  ‘Name’s Collins. Timothy Collins. Dressed up like one of yours, dog tags and all wasn’t he?’

  ‘The man with the gold dust under his fingernails,’ said Jane.

  ‘That’d be him,’ said Occleshaw. ‘Worked at Garrards, the toffs’ jewellers on Bond Street.’

  ‘What does Danby have to do with that?’ asked Dundee.

  ‘It’s your friend that killed him. We already had him but those prints you had sent down from Letchworth prove it beyond a shadow.’

  ‘His prints?’

  ‘Right in one, Major.’

  ‘You didn’t come all the way up from London just to tell me this.’

  ‘No,’ said Occleshaw. ‘I did not.’

  ‘So why then?’

  ‘Because you’re sniffing around the same people for one thing. Because I’m of the opinion, as my superiors are, that Lieutenant Colonel Danby had his accomplices in this black-market ring he was nabbed for, not to mention the death of Mr Collins.’

  ‘And you think I might be one of his accomplices?’ Dundee said, stunned at the idea.

  ‘It crossed our minds.’

  ‘Then you’re out of yours,’ snorted Jane. ‘The major’s no murderer or black marketer and you know it.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I’m warning you,’ said Occleshaw and here he glanced at Jane. ‘I’m officially warning you off, so to speak. It’s a wise man or woman who’d steer clear of poor old Charlie Danby these days.’ The thickset policeman smiled, the expression almost reptilian. ‘It might not be good for the health or the career for that matter.’

  ‘You’re threatening, not warning. I wouldn’t have thought that was Scotland Yard’s style.’

  ‘It’s not,’ said Jane quietly. Morris had told her about these thugs. Occleshaw was Special Branch. England’s secret police. Stupid, pig-headed and very powerful.

  ‘These are difficult times,’ said Occleshaw, trying to soften his position. ‘War makes strange bedfellows.’

  ‘I wouldn’t argue that,’ said Dundee, ‘but Danby’s American and whether you like it or not he falls under American military law.’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir. Your friend Danby has almost certainly committed an act of treason against the King of England and I’ll bloody see him hang for it when I catch the bugger.’

  Part Two

  Shepton Mallet

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Occleshaw’s almost definitely Special Branch,’ said Jane, sitting on the far side of the first-class coach. Outside rain was streaking the window glass and the sky was a broken, scudding grey.

  ‘Who are, exactly…?’ said Dundee.

  ‘According to my friend Morris, they’re the domestic wing of MI5. They’re supposedly attached to Scotland Yard so they can arrest people but that’s about the only real connection. A tougher version of the FBI. They’ve been around since the 1800s. They used to be specially trained to deal with the Irish.’

  Dundee smiled at her curiously. ‘You certainly do know a lot about spies and spy catchers for a girl photographer.’ He paused. ‘And just what does this Special Branch have to do with a U.S. military prison in the middle of the English nowhere?’

  The middle of nowhere was fifteen miles south of Bath, a little west of the seaport of Bristol and nestled on the edge of the Mendip Hills in the west of Somerset. Once upon a time Shepton Mallet had been a market town but then the Duke of Monmouth decided to go to war with the king and the people in the town had felt the duke’s wrath as he went around skewering people’s bowels with red-hot pokers and putting their heads up on poles all around the town. The revolution over, Shepton Mallet had become a prison town, the first building built in 1610, slowly but surely growing like a stony grey cancer for the next two hundred and fifty years to accommodate various thieves, rapists and murderers that seemed to crop up everywhere, especially during and after the industrial revolution. By 1939 there were a separate woman’s wing, a laundry for the women to work in and more rats than prisoners. There were also rumours of ghosts, a well-documented case of four prisoners who had suffocated when placed in a cell for one and persistent rumour about a river that flowed under the prison.

  Early in 1942, anticipating the worst, the Judge Advocate General’s office had begun neg
otiations with HM Prisons for a U.S. Army prison in England and Shepton Mallet had been the result. The Americans built an efficient red-brick death house for their gallows that the Brits grumbled wasn’t made out of the proper stonework and the first prisoners started marching in from the train station in their standard fatigue uniforms stenciled with a large white P on the back. They were soon up to their capacity of slightly over four hundred and showed every sign of staying there for the foreseeable future.

  ‘What was Danby doing in the prison?’ asked Jane, lighting a cigarette. The rain outside had increased to a hammering downpour, streaming down the window glass, blurring the view of the rolling hills and patchwork of fields outside.

  Dundee lifted the folder in his lap. ‘According to this he wasn’t. It was a man named Wier. Thomas Wier. Caught for desertion in London six weeks ago.’ He put the file down on the seat beside him and lit a cigarette of his own. ‘Only trouble was Wier is a Negro, or should I say was. He turned up dead in a bombed-out lot three weeks ago with most of his face blown off. Took the police this long to identify him. Turns out Danby took Wier’s place in a transfer from the stockade in London to Shepton Mallet.’

  ‘Danby wanted to get put in jail?’

  ‘Looks that way.’ The fact that Danby had been held and had since escaped from Shepton Mallet was the only other fact revealed by Occleshaw on his visit to Swan Hill.

  ‘But why? What could possibly be in it for him?’

  ‘Maybe we’ll find out in Shepton Mallet.’

  Jane tapped her cigarette into the ashtray built into the side of her seat. ‘Or maybe that’s what Occleshaw wants you to think,’ she said thoughtfully.

  The roundabout hundred-mile trip from Swan Hill to London, then west to Shepton Mallet, had taken the better part of half a day. When they arrived at their destination it was mid-afternoon. A jeep was waiting for them at the side of the grey stone station, complete with a blond-haired military police captain named Selkirk carrying an umbrella. Diplomatically he tried to cover both Jane and Dundee but by the time they got under the canvas roof of the jeep, Dundee was soaked. Selkirk ratcheted the vehicle into gear. With the hard rain pounding loudly on the roof over their heads they headed off down the narrow, twisting streets of the ancient town.

  ‘So what’s this place like?’ asked Jane from the backseat, leaning forward and raising her voice over the sound of the rain. All around her the buildings were crowding in, the pavements only wide enough for one, the buildings made of the same grey stone, the roofs slick wet slate.

  ‘Well, ma’am, basically it stinks. Cigarettes and…’ He paused and Jane could almost see his ears redden.

  ‘Farts,’ said Dundee, turning to look back at her.

  ‘Farts?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Selkirk.

  ‘It’s a glasshouse,’ said Dundee. ‘They’re the same wherever you go. Bad food, cigarettes and gas.’

  Without warning a row of houses jammed together in a jumbled row gave way to a tall grey wall pierced by a single ancient gate made of roughly sheared planks that looked almost as old as the stone. Selkirk gave three honks on the jeep’s horn and a few seconds later the gate swung ponderously open. The prison seemed to be in the middle of town with nothing separating it from the surrounding population.

  They drove across a cobbled yard to a small doorway. All around them were high walls with cross-barred windows looking blindly down on them. Like everywhere else in the town, the roofs of the buildings were grey slate. They climbed out of the jeep, ducked into the doorway and entered the prison.

  ‘Major DuMuth’s office is on the top floor,’ said Selkirk, leading the way. The major was the warden of the prison and had been from the beginning of the Americans’ arrival.

  Jane thought briefly of taking some pictures with the small Leica she carried in the pocket of her trench coat but she saw almost immediately that there wasn’t nearly enough light. She was standing in a barred sally port that was manned by a fat military policeman reading Stars and Stripes under a weak lamp that dangled from the ceiling. The interior of the prison beyond was barely visible but Selkirk had it right – the whole place smelled of stale cigarettes and staler farts. It was also noisy; echoing shouts, hoots of laughter and whistles mixing into a single roaring madhouse barrage that reminded Jane of the asylum her sister had lived in on Welfare Island in the East River until her blessed death the previous year.

  ‘That being done for our benefit?’ asked Dundee.

  ‘Some maybe. They know something’s up,’ said Selkirk. He nodded to the fat guard, who groaned and got to his feet. Pulling a heavy ring of keys away from his belt he opened the inside door of the sally port and let them through.

  ‘This way,’ said Selkirk and led them forward into the main hall of the men’s wing of Shepton Mallet prison.

  The men’s wing was three tiers high and 140 feet long, built of the same monotonous grey stone that comprised nearly everything in the prison and the town. The floors were broad, stained planks as old as the prison, worn down in front of each cell, the doors also wood, sheathed in steel and bound in wrought iron.

  As they walked beneath the cells, Jane and Dundee became aware of the booming sound above them taking on a rhythmic, chanting sound and Jane felt a shiver run down her spine. This was no place for a woman. These were men, already trained in the savagery of professional soldiering, who had gone one step further into darkness. ‘What rough beast is this…’ she whispered softly as she walked quickly over the old, heavy planks, wondering to herself how much blood they’d soaked up in the last three hundred and fifty years. ‘You sure this is a good idea?’ she muttered to Dundee, her eyes scanning the noisy tiers.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s the only way to find out what the hell is going on.’ Occleshaw had refused to divulge any information and had tried to block their access to the part of the prison still maintained by the British authorities, but Dundee had pressured Hedrick at JAG headquarters in Cheltenham, and eventually they’d been granted access. Even so, the access had clearly been grudging.

  Eventually they reached the end of the gauntlet below the tiers and followed Selkirk through yet another barred sally port. Going through a heavy steel door they found themselves at the bottom of a circular stone staircase that looked as though it belonged in some storybook castle. Jane expected a lady in a long dress or a knight in rusty armour to come clanking into view at any second. Selkirk trotted upward and they followed.

  They eventually reached the top floor, the roofline of the ancient building creating sloping walls fitted with heavy beams at least a foot thick. A grilled platform looked down on the tiers of the prison, giving anyone looking down a view of the entire prison. Opposite was an open office door. Selkirk stood aside to let them enter then promptly disappeared.

  Major Donald L. DuMuth was every inch a prison warden: bullet head, close-shaved steel grey hair, massive shoulders and a build like a Pier Nine stevedore on the East River docks. He wore a holstered .45 calibre automatic on his hip and there was a sawed-off shotgun lying casually on one side of a worn and scratched wooden office desk. Seated off to one side was a small, round-faced man in horn-rims and a toothbrush moustache that made him look rather like Hitler as an office clerk.

  ‘Major DuMuth.’ Dundee held out his hand but the warden ignored it. They were the same rank so there was no need to salute.

  Two straight chairs had been set in front of the desk. DuMuth waved them to sit. ‘This is Mr Johnson from the Public Records Office.’

  Mr Johnson nodded from his seat but remained silent.

  ‘We understand Charles Danby managed to get himself into your prison,’ said Dundee.

  ‘That he did,’ said DuMuth. ‘And out again for that matter.’

  ‘What we’d like to know is, why?’ said Jane.

  DuMuth turned his attention towards her, eyeing her uniform. ‘I take it you’re the war correspondent, Todd?’

  ‘Call me Jane if you’d rather.’<
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  ‘I’d rather not,’ the man said icily.

  Jane shrugged lightly. ‘Suit yourself.’

  The warden made a face as though he’d just smelled something bad. ‘I’m given to understand by the powers that be that you have some very high security clearance. Maybe I’d like to know why.’

  ‘Friends in high places,’ said Jane, smiling pleasantly.

  ‘I’ll bet,’ the warden muttered.

  ‘Danby,’ Dundee reminded.

  ‘He came in on a forged transfer requisition. Easy enough to get for a man in his position. The man he was impersonating was in his own unit.’

  ‘Doesn’t really answer the question,’ said Dundee.

  ‘We’re pretty sure he came in to steal something.’

  ‘What do you steal that has any value in a place like this?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Mr Johnson?’ said the warden.

  Johnson released a tight little smile and sat up straight in his chair like a schoolboy reciting his lessons. ‘My title at the PRO is officially Keeper of Special Acquisitions. At the outbreak of hostilities it was decided to remove some of the nation’s more valuable historic documents to a place of safekeeping. Shepton Mallet was empty at the time and out of range of any known German bombers so the documents were brought here.’

  ‘A lot?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Some ten thousand boxes.’

  ‘Jesus,’ blurted Dundee.

  ‘Quite,’ said Johnson.

  ‘Danby came to steal documents?’ asked Jane. Valuable or not, documents didn’t sound like the kind of thing that would interest the man Dundee had described.

  ‘No,’ said Johnson. ‘We think not.’ He paused, turning to the warden. ‘Perhaps we should show them.’

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ said DuMuth.

  They left DuMuth’s office, this time with the little man from Public Records leading the way. They went down a level, veered away from the triple-tiered cell block and went down a narrow corridor into another, smaller wing of the prison. Jane was now thoroughly lost and had no idea where she was in relation to the way they’d come. Useful if you wanted to keep prisoners from escaping but it hadn’t stopped Danby.