by John Gardner
‘Stroll on,’ Tommy repeated. Then he asked about prints. All the film scripts had coppers talking about ‘dabs’ which they just didn’t like and certainly didn’t do. They always spoke of ‘prints’.
‘There’s plenty of gore and possibly flesh on it. Where there’s muck there’s money, Chief.’
‘We’ll do it properly. You come with us, Ron. It can go over to the Bureau as soon as we get in, then you can ride it over to Hendon.’
‘Chief,’ Ron acknowledged. The Fingerprint Bureau was part of Scotland Yard itself. A former inspector general of the Bengal Police, Edward Henry, had been appointed Assistant Commissioner (Crime) early in 1901. A few months later he set up the Bureau, continuing the wonderful work he had begun in India. Hendon, the site of the Police College, was also the home of the Forensic Science Laboratory. The College had been closed for the duration when the war broke out in ’39, but the laboratory remained, despite the mistrust of ‘scientific policing’ in some circles.
Tommy was fond of telling people that when the famed Lord Trenchard, ‘Father’ of the RAF, had become Commissioner of the Met in the Thirties he was told by eminent doctors that they were dead against police-paid scientific experts giving evidence in court. They said the public and the judges wouldn’t accept such evidence.
‘I don’t think there’s much doubt that the blood and flesh on that truncheon belong to Doris Butler,’ Tommy said, then picked up and opened the large envelope that had come from the Yard addressed to him. Suzie’s reports and the photographs spilt out onto the table just as Sergeant Mungo came in with his overnight case.
‘Crikey,’ Mungo peered at the picture of Michael Lees-Duncan, ‘Stan Gittins doesn’t look so good.’ He scowled. ‘Positively peaky.’
‘Who?’ Tommy looked up at him, frowning, then down at his finger touching the edge of the photo of Michael Lees-Duncan looking only half alive even though he was actually dead.
‘That’s Stanley Gittins.’ Mungo said. He was telling them that this was Stanley Gittins, corporal in the 1st Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, friend of Doris Butler. Probably the last person she had been seen with.
‘Of course it is,’ said Tommy feeling the best he’d felt all day. Jackpot, he thought. Bingo, reaching for the telephone to ring Suzie.
Hold the front page, heart.
Got a scoop, have you?
May even have a result. Now this is what I want you to do …
* * *
It was towards the end of August that the bad news came to Max Voltsenvogel. The pink flimsy paper he held in both hands trembled unnecessarily, so he lowered his elbows to the desktop and looked above the paper at the young Unterscharführer Schmidt, his servant, his shadow and, sometimes, his conscience. Now the man’s steady blue eyes appeared to be holding Voltsenvogel’s like a radar beam trying to detect movement. It was a quiet benign battle of wills.
‘This came direct?’ Voltsenvogel asked quietly.
‘Less than five minutes ago, Herr Gruppenführer. In the normal traffic we get around six o’clock. It was sandwiched between an aircraft test transmission and a series of BBC Overseas rubbish. Flaubert would like to speak with Lapin. The willow still weeps in Henley-on-Thames. You know the kind of stuff, sir. It’s clever to piggyback on top of those radio messages. The British are too arrogant to monitor those broadcasts.’
‘I’m surprised London still needs to send the messages, now they’re actually here, on the ground.’
‘It is not altogether a pessimistic situation. Some would say it was evidence that they are not in control of their so-called resistance forces.’
Voltsenvogel smirked. ‘General de Gaulle’s resistance forces, you mean.’
Schmidt nodded with a tight little smile, followed by a small shrug and a knowing look.
Voltsenvogel knew that what he held in his hands was genuine information. It was also bad news. ‘So we must consider that Bellwether (he used the German word Leithammel) is dead?’
‘That’s what it says, Herr Gruppenführer. He’s dead.’
Voltsenvogel nodded and ground his teeth, moved his head in a sideways turn, as if winking, then cursed. Bellwether had been the weak link from the beginning. ‘Always had private agendas, Bellwether.’ He looked at the little corporal as though he was blaming him, personally, for the news of his agent’s death. ‘These Nazis who’re intellectually transformed are like Roman Catholic converts: more holy than the Pope himself: more of a fascist than the Führer. At least we have the Ram.’ – Der Widder.
‘You said some time ago, Colonel, that much depended on him – on Bellwether. Now he has come unstuck.’ Schmidt’s eyes showed no sign of moving away, steady as a barmaid’s hand on the pump, Voltsenvogel thought. The boy had nerve. Was it paranoid of him to suspect the young man? He hardly thought so. His byword was that you should suspect everyone, especially those who bring bad news and this was bad news for Operation Löwenzahn: Lion’s Teeth.
‘You don’t get more unstuck than dead. But, yes, we have the Ram,’ Voltsenvogel repeated. In his heart he felt the two agents had been wrongly named. Bellwether should have been called the Ram, while the Ram should have been called Bellwether. Why in heaven’s name had Bellwether killed the woman? She was a good, dependable little cog in Voltsenvogel’s English part of the organisation: someone who couriered, and looked after agents for the odd night. ‘Our bed and breakfast girl,’ Schmidt called her. Someone for them to talk with. Damn Bellwether. What had happened? She’d probably looked at him the wrong way, or made a remark he took to be disparaging. He was always a little unhinged, apt to fly off the handle. Become violent. Fool.
The room in which Voltsenvogel sat had originally been planned as the main reception room of this long low bungalow, built in 1938 for a doctor who had his eye on retirement. As soon as you entered this room you were aware of the beautifully sprung and polished natural wooden floor, while the varnished panelling doubled the price. There were four high windows set in the outside wall, and two more in the shorter end wall, for the room was on one corner of the house. The casements were wooden, beautifully crafted and fashioned with great care. Once a show place, the interior, under the SS, had become vulgar and cheap. The curtains were a heavy silk, the colour of the bottom of a pond, which meant they did not match any other colours in the room, making the cream sofas look dingy and clashing unpleasantly with the three big throw rugs, and the heavy peach-coloured wallpaper, chosen by the doctor’s wife herself. Now also the pictures and decorations were not in keeping with the design of the place – Hitler photographed at his desk looking gravely into the camera, like a provincial schoolmaster, another of Reichsführer Himmler, looking exactly what he was – a chicken farmer – and a painting of the Brandenberg Gate in fog that would have not been out of place on a cheap box of chocolates.
The bungalow stood in a small patch of ground – a couple of acres – made into a pleasant formal garden just outside the small town of Huissen, some ten kilometres west of Arnem. Intelligence Group Odin – Voltsenvogel’s own overdramatic nomenclature of his unit – had used this spacious home as their headquarters for a little over a year now.
When he really owned to it, Odin had been conceived by Voltsenvogel as early as the summer of 1940 when, as a member of the RSHA – the Reich Security Administration – he had been trained and posted to Department VI, the Foreign Intelligence division. The plan itself had not formed until it began to flourish in the past two years. But the germ of it had been seeded into his mind back in the early summer of 1940 when nothing could go wrong for the Führer and the armed forces of Nazi Germany.
Voltsenvogel’s face was closed, showing nothing. ‘The Ram,’ he said again. Then, in English, ‘You are looking after the Ram, friend Schmidt? Taking care of him? Preparing him?’
Kurt Schmidt replied in English, fluent, a cultured accent – what the British themselves would, incorrectly, call an Oxford accent. ‘Night and day. I don’t let him rest.’ It was the accent and th
e man’s knowledge of colloquial English that gave Voltsenvogel occasional doubts. Only a week ago, the corporal had said he thought the officers who had tried to kill the Führer – the 20th July plotters – were ‘round the bend’. He had the British slang off to a T, and that had worried Voltsenvogel.
‘What,’ the SS-Gruppenführer asked now, ‘would have happened if von Stauffenberg’s bomb had killed Hitler? Tell me that, Schmidt. What would it have achieved?’
Schmidt held out a hand and tipped it from side to side. ‘Maybe the enemy would have sued for peace: a few thousand lives saved.’
Everyone was conscious that the battle was hopeless. The slow progress of the Allies would have no effect on the final outcome. Everybody in Voltsenvogel’s small command was jittery, straining as though they could hear the raucous sounds of battle from the west.
‘When you cut off the head, the body dies, yes?’ Voltsenvogel nodded. ‘Well, we shall see. Tell the Ram that his time is nigh.’ He sounded like a cheap evangelist thumping his Bible, and knew it, the spectre of a smile around his lips, not even rising up his cheeks.
‘In those words, Colonel?’
‘In those words exactly.’ A dismissive nod. He wondered if it would work in reverse, cutting off the head. He thought it would cause the Allies to flinch, shrink back and in that moment take their eyes off the ball. The Allies were all so obsessed with the goodness of their cause. It was partly the Jewish question. We would never behave like that, we could never carry out such barbaric acts, they would say to each other. So what was Hamburg and the firestorms? What Dresden? What Cologne? Voltsenvogel thought, ‘Don’t tell me the Allied leaders didn’t know what they were doing?’ Men, women and children consigned to the bombs and the flames?
Cut off the head and the body dies. We’ll see.
As he reached the door, Schmidt said there was one further thing, ‘A secure message on the cipher machine. For you only. From your friend SS-Obersturmbannführer Erich Lottle. From Peenemünde. The beanpole adjutant. Remember him?’ For a moment their differing ranks disappeared.
‘Unzip it for me, Kurt…’
‘But it’s for you only. Your eyes.’
‘As the Yankees say, who’s counting?’
When Schmidt returned with the message neatly typed he told his superior officer that Lottle was showing off. ‘The signal came, forwarded by OKL – Luftwaffe Headquarters. He’s letting you know what an important man he is.’
Voltsenvogel read the message and chuckled. ‘Yes, he’s showing off. We talked about the British cryptonyms – Diver for the Fe103 and Big Ben for the A-4 rocket – the Vergeltungswaffe Zwei. I suppose he’s trying to be witty.’ He read aloud, ‘Big Ben will chime in Paris on 7th and London on 8th.’
So, the big A-4 rockets would be fired at Paris on 7th while the attack on London would begin the following day, 8th September.
Voltsenvogel said something about trying to kill that walking nose General de Gaulle in Paris. ‘I suppose he’s still there.’ Paris had fallen to the Allies on 24th August.
General Charles de Gaulle was not universally loved. The tall Frenchman was one of the few generals who, in the days before the great tactical German victory of 1940, when the Panzers and Stukas swept across Europe, had preached the kind of warfare demonstrated by that Nazi Blitzkreig. To the dismay of the French General, Staff de Gaulle, as early as 1938, had wanted all the troops under his command to be mechanised and foresaw the fast leapfrogging of armour combined with swift, hard-hitting air power.
At the time of the Allied retreat from Dunkirk, de Gaulle slipped out of France, before the French surrender, and took command of the Free French forces in England. In this capacity he did not make himself a beloved figure among his fellow allies. ‘There, but for the grace of God goes God,’ the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was reported to have said of him, while in Nazi-occupied France he was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. But a couple of weeks ago, he had led his troops into Paris, liberating the French capital.
Voltsenvogel picked up his telephone and asked his field switchboard to get him the commanding officer of Luftwaffe unit KG200, Oberst Heinz Heigl. He would either be at the battle group’s headquarters at Rangsdorf, on the placid shore of the Rangsdorfer lake, only a short distance from the centre of Berlin; or at the Führer’s headquarters at Rastenburg, the Wolf’s Lair.
KG200 – Kampfgeschwader 200 – was the most secret unit of the Luftwaffe. Formed only in February, from a nucleus of two large technical wings, KG200’s official job was to evaluate aircraft for warfare. As such they had bases all over occupied Europe, and even deep into Russia. Bomber and fighter Staffels rarely knew when they shared an airfield with a KG200 unit.
KG200 were equipped with every known type of aircraft serving with the Luftwaffe, and also had access to captured RAF, USAAF and Russian aircraft. This was their secret side: their vast collection of British, American and Russian aircraft. They had airworthy DC3 Dacotas, Spitfires, Lancasters, Stirlings, Mustangs, Thunderbolts, Wellingtons and many more. KG200 flew B17 Flying Fortresses stuffed full of radio equipment, shadowing the box formations of the Fortresses that daily bombed German targets. The KG200 Fortresses would follow and report on height, speed and course of the American bombers. They flew Sterlings, Beaufighters, Mosquitos and Wellingtons, tagged to the end of British bomber formations, creeping up on individual aircraft, catching RAF airfields off guard as aircraft were landing.
A Lancaster would be making its final approach to its home base, the crew relaxed and relieved they had completed another mission intact. Then, out of the night would come a Beaufighter or a Mosquito, hammering bullets and canon shell into the big bomber, sending it sprawling onto the runway in flames.
KG200 had many tricks up its deadly sleeve using captured Allied aeroplanes, literally flying under a false flag.
When Oberst Heigl came on the line, Voltsenvogel sounded almost lighthearted. ‘Heizi,’ he chirped. ‘It’s Max from the Research Department.’
‘So, what are you after this time?’
‘I’ve got a holidaymaker who needs a seat on one of your planes. We need a good pilot, one who’ll get him safely into the glorious English West Country. Last time we used a Grasshopper I recall.’
‘The Grasshopper could be difficult, but I’ve got a nice little Stinson. The L-5, what they call the Sentinel. Land and takeoff on an English cricket pitch. When do you want it?’
‘Sometime after 8th of next month: say the 10th or 11th, depending on weather, of course.’
The Sentinel was a two-seat, high-wing monoplane that the Americans used for liaison work, for taking senior officers around.
Voltsenvogel knew exactly where there was a flat stretch of ground ideal for the Sentinel, close to the rail track that ran from Exeter to Exmouth in Devon, glorious Devon.
As Schmidt left the office, Voltsenvogel called after him, ‘Tell the Ram he’ll be taking a little trip around the 10th or 11th.’
‘He’ll be delighted,’ said Corporal Schmidt, then, showing off his versatility, he broke into song—
‘When Adam and Eve were dispossessed from their garden up in heaven,
They planted another one out in the west,
T’was Devon,
T’was Devon, glorious Devon.’
* * *
When Schmidt returned, around thirty minutes later, Voltsenvogel was standing looking out of one of the big windows.
‘I’ve talked to the Ram,’ Schmidt told him. ‘He seems nervous. Jumpy. What if this doesn’t go properly, Herr Gruppenführer?’
Voltsenvogel shrugged. ‘If something goes wrong and the thing doesn’t work then it doesn’t work. There’s no point in being concerned. We’re not fanatics, Schmidt, my friend. I believe in the Führer and in the National Socialist Party. I believe in the Führer’s way of running Germany, the Third Reich. But, if he’s wrong then he’s wrong. We can do nothing about it. I don’t believe in fanaticism. Understand?’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The truncheon found by Ron Worrall close to Doris Butler’s garden turned out to be the goods. The fingerprints belonged, indisputably to Michael Lees-Duncan, and after three days the forensic lab came back from Hendon with the news that the blood, at least, matched that of the late Mrs B.
Tommy had not gone home to Suzie: stayed in his big office on the fourth floor of Scotland Yard waiting for the forensic results, spending the nights on the unspeakably uncomfortable camp bed, and the days reading up on Suzie’s assessment of the situation vis-à-vis the Lees-Duncans and the Toveys.
He was amused to find out about Lees-Duncan’s courtship by the security service: more than amused to discover that they weren’t sharing much with ‘Woolly’ Bear and the Branch. In theory the Branch was a kind of mailed fist for MI5, but it seemed to be a fact that they didn’t like sharing with their friends in the Met.
She had gone for Tovey immediately after he had identified the body of his daughter, Dulcie. ‘I felt he was more vulnerable than Lees-Duncan,’ she wrote: adding that she had already worked out what had probably happened: pieced it all together from the two conversations and her own observation. Tommy felt proud of her as he read the transcript.
DI MOUNTFORD: Mr Tovey, you’ve identified your daughter’s body, so now I have to return to the questions I started in your cottage, back in Churchbridge.
TOVEY: I told you, I ’en’t answering no more questions. You can ask as long as you like, but I en’t answering.
Later she told Tommy that he almost spat it at her, a fine spray of spittle hanging in the air and dropping to the table between them. ‘It didn’t matter,’ she said, ‘because you didn’t have to be Professor Joad to work the whole thing out anyway.’
Professor Joad was a household name, appearing weekly on the BBC’s Brains Trust, a hugely successful programme throughout the war. Joad was greatly imitated because he had what amounted to a catchphrase. When asked a question he would come back with, ‘It all depends on what you mean by … whatever.’ Comedians found him a natural. Later Joad was to fall from grace by being caught travelling by train without a ticket.
