by John Gardner
‘Stop there, I think,’ flashing his eyes at Kenneth Craig, then at Ron. ‘Almost lunchtime. You’ve been a good lad, Ken.’ Craig nodding, grinning, bouncing up and down, like a bloody monkey on a stick. As he reached the door Craig said, ‘Oh, and there was little Roddy Holbrooke. Surprised at that. I was really surprised, cos I always thought little Roddy was a poof. Minced a lot, you know, poofy walk, like he was swaying along on wheels, arm out from his side an’ the hand poofed out like a bloody manichean.’
For manichean read mannequin, Tommy thought. The Manichean heresy, he smiled to himself. That’s what Roddy Holbrooke had got: bloody Manichean Heresy.
One of the DCs was just outside the door. ‘There’s a WDI Mountford on the blower, sir, wanting to talk to you urgently.’
* * *
‘Tommy, darling,’ she said, breathy, the words used to signal she was alone, sitting in the Novice Mistress’s office.
‘Suzie, heart,’ he said, matter-of-fact, to signal Lord knew what.
‘How’s it going, Tom?’
‘Just got another taker, heart. Bloody copper in this nick. I could scream. Really upset.’ Calm as a summer pond.
‘Tommy, I need help.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘Well, not help exactly. More advice.’
‘About what?’
‘Our friend Lees-Duncan. John Reginald Palmer Lees-Duncan.’
‘I told you, talk to Woolly.’
‘I talked to Woolly. He sent me a little billet-doux.’
‘You want to watch that, heart. Billets-doux from a Special Branch super. Dodgy. Marked SWALK was it, or NORWICH?’
‘Norwich?’
‘Heart, Knickers Off Ready When I Come Home. Norwich.’
‘Tommy,’ mock exasperation, slap-on-the-wrist. ‘It was a précis of information on Lees-Duncan, the billet-doux. I just need one or two things clarified.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘BUF?’ She gave the initials slowly.
‘What about them?’
‘Well, British Union of Fascists? That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Mosley’s lot, yes. Finally closed down in ’40.’
Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Fascist movement, the man who saw himself as the future Führer of Great Britain, mocked by some, cheered by others and feared by quite a few. With his serious, self-interested mien, his small army of quasi-military ‘blackshirts’ and his ranting, tub-thumping, Hitler-like speeches he had been arrested under an amendment to the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act in May 1940, locked up in Brixton but later moved to be with his wife – one of the eccentric society Mitfords – in Holloway.
‘They let him out last year,’ Tommy muttered. ‘Mosley. Illness. Lees-Duncan part of his lot?’
‘Woolly’s little dossier says that in the Thirties they had Lees-Duncan under what they called “loose surveillance”, and he seemed to turn up at a lot of house parties where Mosley was a guest.’
‘Why does that not surprise me?’ Tommy asked of nobody in particular. ‘I’ve told you before. Study German for your School Certificate and the Branch immediately has you tagged as a spy. Old Mosly appealed to some of the upper classes. Went to lots of country houses, told them what a good fella Hitler was.’ He trailed off and there was silence on the line. Then, ‘Bloody spy mania, that’s what the Branch has.’
‘Well, Lees-Duncan apparently was one – a spy; only they called him an informer.’
‘Mmmm.’
‘He was a spy for someone whose name I know, but I can’t place…’
‘Tell me…’
‘Vansittart.’
‘Robert Vansittart?’
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s Sir Robert Vansittart, Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the Foreign Office.’
‘Ah. Knew I’d heard the name. He would have agents then?’
‘Don’t know about that.’
‘Well, they refer to them as informers.’
‘Probably, yes.’
‘Friend Lees-Duncan claimed to be one.’
‘Did he now?’
‘Early in 1940 the Branch pulled him, Lees-Duncan, felt his collar, gave him a rough interrogation. Had a member of the security service there as well.’
‘Thumbscrews?’
‘Oh, the lot I should imagine, and when they got to asking about Germany and his many friends in the enemy camp, John Reginald Palmer Lees-Duncan said he was one of Vansittart’s informants. Didn’t deny he’d had contacts within the Nazi Diplomatic Corps, their Army and the Luftwaffe. He said it was all in a day’s work, clean as soap powder, Lux, Rinso, whatever you want.’
‘And?’
‘And they checked with – I suppose – the Foreign Office. The notes said they followed it up and Vansittart was a bit cagey. Didn’t want to say anything. Faffed around then finally said that Lees-Duncan had been one of their informants.’
‘Had been?’
‘Yes. Close as they’d come to it. There’s a long note saying that Lees-Duncan possibly still had channels open to the Nazi military. Not in so many words but they were saying they suspected him of being a double. A double agent.
‘Since ’39 he’s apparently disappeared a couple of times, gone off without warning. They’re unhappy about his sons as well – Michael and Gerald. Michael in Mexico, and Gerald living almost silently on the east coast of Scotland: very handy for the Firth of Forth, watching the naval traffic in and out.’
‘So what d’you think, heart? Bearing in mind the fact that you couldn’t stand the man?’
‘I think there’s something to be suspicious about, Tommy, but what do I know? I’ve no real experience of these things. Woolly Bear must know his job, surely, and he’s obviously dubious about the man. I mean…’
‘Woolly’s dubious about everyone, except possibly Old Etonians, and he can be cagey about them.’ Tommy Livermore chuckled. ‘Yes, it’s obvious Lees-Duncan isn’t one hundred per cent clean,’ he laughed again, ‘and the swine speaks German. You’re the fella at the sharp end, heart. You’re the one who’ll have to take a good long look at him. By the way he’s been given a white-hot poker astern; been told not to play the squire with you. They’ve as good as told him he’ll be shot at dawn if he doesn’t cooperate. On the Tower of London rifle range, quarter to dawn, on a particularly cold morning.’
‘That’s a bit strong.’
‘’Tis isn’t it?’ She could hear the laughter in his voice.
‘Before you go, heart,’ he began.
‘Yes…?’
‘Tell you something, heart. Just the two of us, right?’
She waited because Tommy had his serious voice on.
‘Fella I know in MI5, in the security service. Guy Liddell actually. Told me once that the German informers run by the Foreign Office’s Diplomatic Adviser were pretty unreliable. Porous actually.’
He meant porous piss which was a saying of the time. Suzie thought people said it about her, ‘That Suzie Mountford’s porous.’ They didn’t, but she sometimes put herself down with fantasies like that.
‘Not very good then?’ she said.
‘Duff, heart. Old Guy Liddell said he wouldn’t use any of them, not even for practice.’
There was a silence, as though neither of them had anything more to say. Eventually Suzie told him that Woolly Bear didn’t seem too happy about him dealing with the Butler case in Sheffield. ‘I mentioned it, and he kind of withdrew,’ she said. ‘Almost disappeared on the telephone.’
‘Like the Cheshire cat?’
‘More or less. Just left a great big question mark.’
‘That’s what Woolly is.’
‘A Cheshire cat?’
‘No, a big question mark.’
Another strangled silence.
‘Right, how’s the hotel?’ she asked.
‘Wizard,’ Tommy said with his smiling voice. ‘You were right, that girl is here, that Chrissie.’
‘Really. Watch how you go
then, Tommy.’ She dropped an icicle into the words, just rubbed it along to let him know. ‘All of you’d better watch out.’
‘All of us?’
‘Yes, you and Peter Rabbit, and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and Jeremy Fisher.’
‘Needn’t bother yourself about Chrissie, heart. Tries too hard. Not for me. Like Guy with those informants, not even for practice.’
At last Suzie put down the telephone and went in search of Sister Eunice and the photo of Novice Theresa when she was still Winifred Audrey Lees-Duncan, or at least was supposed to be Winifred Audrey.
CHAPTER TEN
A few weeks before the Reserve Squad got the call to the Convent of St Catherine of Siena in Silverhurst Road, there had been momentous news from Germany: a serious attempt on Hitler’s life at his headquarters near Rastenburg, in East Prussia. It had been in all the papers and on every radio news bulletin.
People were agog.
Now, far away in the Baltic, on the same day that Suzie came to collect the photograph from Sister Eunice, an unexpected visitor arrived on Usedom Island to take a look at what progress was being made by the men working on the Army rocket; the A-4; the Vengeance Weapon Two; the V-2.
SS-Gruppenführer Max Voltsenvogel arrived by motor launch. He came over the Peene River through the muddy narrows and marshes up to the artificial docks dredged out and constructed on the island near what had once been the village of Peenemünde.
Colonel Voltsenvogel was known even to his friends in the SS as ‘Death’s Head’ Voltsenvogel; it was something of a joke – but only occasionally when things were relaxed. For most of the time the ‘Death’s Head’ appellation was far from funny. Indeed, there was something deeply scary about Voltsenvogel, whose reputation was guaranteed to send a shiver down the spines of even the most innocent men; for it was said that Max Voltsenvogel could obtain a guilty confession of original sin from a newborn child – extracting it by simply looking at the victim.
Gruppenführer Max Voltsenvogel was head of Intelligence Projects, a department mainly of his own devising, on Adolf Hitler’s personal staff. A highly trusted officer, he could plan and execute operations of his own, for, as well as other attributes, he was possessed of a silver tongue.
Voltsenvogel was short and stocky with a bullet head and memorable face: flat ears against the large cranium, deep-seated eyes, big cavernous nostrils and large teeth, square, like small tombstones. His skin was unnaturally tight across his face so that the thin lips were pulled back displaying the teeth in two uneven rows. Indeed as some said he could easily have played the part of Yorick in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Yorick appears only as a skull dug from a grave by an amusing gravedigger in that play so this was, they said, typecasting for the colonel – except for the amusing part.
In spite of his physical appearance, Voltsenvogel was a dandy, liked wearing riding breeches and highly polished boots with lifts in the heels giving him an extra inch of height. In his mind, however, the lifts gave him an extra five inches. Like many small men he was sensitive about his height and overcompensated, a blusterer and a vicious bully. Short men are often given extreme power at times of change and crisis. Those who promote them should have care.
As if to supplement his grotesque features the colonel carried a swagger cane made of treated bone – some, naturally, claimed it to be human bone – one end of which was carved in the representation of a skull. This memento mori was in fact the haft of a thin, tempered steel blade, around eight inches long, that nestled within its bone sheath. Voltsenvogel’s reputation was such that people assumed the blade had been used in murderous diversions.
He came unannounced to Peenemünde bringing with him a technical sergeant and a corporal called Schmidt who doubled as his personal servant. They were not out of place, for SS uniforms abounded on the island: the SS had long since hijacked the Vergeltungswaffe programmes. In particular they were in control of the A-4 weapon. In the tangled web of the Third Reich it was always as well to be implicated in any project with special significance for the Führer. From the beginning, Hitler had been totally involved with both of the so-called vengeance weapons, seeing each of them almost as sacraments of war that would unlock the gates of victory no matter how the world was marshalled against him.
Voltsenvogel wondered how the local officers would take to his arrival in their mess. After all, his special relationship with the Führer was well known, and the events of 20th July were not ten days old. An officer from the Führer’s inner circle arriving so soon after the assassination attempt was bound to cause at least a small twitch of concern. So when he walked into the mess that evening he could not fail to notice how people gave him shifty, anxious glances, and be aware of the undoubted lull in conversation: a general froideur descended among those gathered in the ante-room.
The attempt on the Führer’s life had taken place at the melodramatically named Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) near Rastenburg, in the mosquito-laden forests of East Prussia.
Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg had flown down for a strategic meeting with senior officers, and the Führer. He entered the conference room with three pounds of explosive in his briefcase wired to a percussion cap and a simple timing device. The officers were ranged around a large wooden table covered with maps and papers, so von Stauffenberg armed the bomb, placed the briefcase on the floor under the table, sliding it towards the Führer with his foot. He then made an excuse to leave the room, waiting outside until the device exploded with a mighty roar, leaving a dark pall of smoke hanging over the wooden building.
Surely the Führer could not have survived such destruction, he reasoned.
The dead and wounded were carried out and von Stauffenberg stayed until a body was removed covered by Hitler’s cloak. At that point he could be forgiven for thinking his part in the plot had succeeded.
So he left, returning to his aircraft and flying back to Berlin.
By a miracle, it seemed, the Führer survived; another officer had kicked the loaded briefcase away from Hitler’s end of the table, so when it exploded many were injured and four died. But Hitler lived. Von Stauffenberg flew back to Berlin and prepared to take part in the second phase of the plot: the takeover of the military and the nullification of the National Socialist Party in order to bring the war to a quick conclusion.
It was not to be. By the following afternoon von Stauffenberg was court-martialled and summarily shot, in the courtyard of the War Ministry. More suspects were being rounded up, already there had been many arrests, some, it appeared, at random. It was said that if you looked at somebody in an inappropriate manner you could be accused. It was all reminiscent of the days of finding witches by seeing who sank and who floated.
Hence the circumspect manner in which Voltsenvogel was greeted.
‘How nice to see you, Gruppenführer,’ lied the adjutant of the A-4 Programme, SS-Obersturmbannführer Erich Lottle. ‘We had no notification of your impending arrival. Is there anything I can do…?’ Lottle had a good line in frozen smiles.
‘Just a short visit. An overnight stay.’ Voltsenvogel smiled his foxy smile, lifted his chin and looked Erich Lottle in the eyes. ‘The Führer is anxious to find out how the Vergeltungswaffe Zwei is progressing: he simply asked me to come down and get the information myself. I am a direct conduit to the Führer.’ Adolf Hitler had asked no such thing, though naturally he would be pleased to hear, for the Allied armies were fighting hard to push themselves away from the vicinity of the Normandy beaches around Caen and the Cotentin peninsula. ‘If the Americans and British continue to move south we’re going to need the A-4. We can’t leave it all to the Fiesler 103.’
The A-4 was the great 8,800 pound long-range rocket, 46 feet high, powered by a propulsion engine burning a mixture of alcohol, liquid oxygen, T-Stoff (hydrogen peroxide) and Z-Stoff (sodium permanganate) carrying a warhead of around one ton of high-explosive, and guided by a sophisticated gyroscopic system.
Erich Lottle told him the A-4 programme had made grea
t strides. ‘Who would you like to speak with to get the details? General Dornberger? Von Braun?’ Dornberger, a founding father of the rocket project, held the rank of Lieutenant General while Werhner von Braun held only a courtesy SS rank.
Voltsenvogel gave him the foxy smile again, perhaps a shade broader this time. ‘I think I should go to the top. To Hans Kammler.’
‘But, Gruppenführer…?’
‘I think I should speak with General Kammler.’ Voltsenvogel left no doubt that he meant exactly what he said, but of course he knew what nobody else knew that Kammler would be promoted in a few weeks, elevated to Major-General, vaulting in one bound over Walter Dornberger who had spent years clawing his way to the top of the A-4 programme.
By this time Max Voltsenvogel was seated and had ordered a large schnapps, totally at ease among the engineers and fellow SS officers. Lottle signified that he would like permission to sit next to the colonel, and Voltsenvogel inclined his head, answering in the most cavalier fashion.
‘I fear you will have to wait a few days to speak with General Kammler.’ SS-Obersturmbannführer Erich Lottle lowered his head so that his lips were only a few inches from the colonel’s ear before he spoke. ‘At the moment the general is at the far end of the island conducting a test launch of one of the testbed A-4s. There have been problems.’
‘Then you tell me about them. I’ve yet to meet an adjutant who doesn’t know the ins and outs of his command. Some, I find, know a great deal more than their commanding officers.’
Lottle, a tall man, thin, a beanpole with a face tarnished by worry, long sagging cheeks, dull, pouched eyes and a mouth turned irrevocably down at each corner gave a huge shrug as though accepting the colonel’s judgement with some misgivings. Then he explained the rocket programme was still irretrievably running behind schedule – nobody’s particular fault, simply an unfortunate fact of military life. ‘There have been problems, Colonel,’ ticking them off on his fingers. ‘They have only just solved the difficulties regarding mobile launching sites.’
