Amy briefly tried to picture Bernard Pardoe. She couldn’t vouch for his brilliance as a correspondent, but on their short acquaintance he had not struck her as a wit. In fact she hadn’t much liked him at all: his humour was angry and sarcastic, and she faintly recoiled from his narrow, squashed features and his clipped moustache. His devotion to Marita was obvious – no husband could have been more uxorious – but it was never clear to Amy what exactly she saw in him. He was possessed neither of looks nor means, despite his way with a gift. She recalled an image of them together at the register office on their wedding day, the bride happy, majestic in navy, and towering over the groom. Of course there was something else that bound them to each other, the same thing that would quickly determine the likelihood of remaining their friend. Amy thought she might not have been the only one to drift away once the Pardoes had wedded themselves to ‘the party’; in 1937 Bernard had stood (and lost) as the Fascist candidate in a London by-election. A couple so openly fanatical about Hitler and Germany would require quite some influence to keep up a position in society.
As if overhearing her thoughts Marita said, ‘The internments cannot last. Once the tide turns decisively in Europe this country will have to seek peace, or else be obliterated. All that has kept it going for this long is Churchill’s stubbornness.’
‘You mean we should surrender?’
‘No. I mean we should negotiate. How many times must I tell you? – Hitler doesn’t want to be our enemy. He has long admired Great Britain.’
‘He has an odd way of showing it,’ said Amy.
But Marita did not seem in the mood for an argument; instead she turned the conversation back to Georgie Harlow and her recent break-up. As they rose to continue their walk she said, ‘You know, the best thing you can do for the woman is find her another chap.’ She uttered this last word with an ironic relish.
‘I’m not sure I dare after what happened. She probably doesn’t trust me as a matchmaker.’
Marita’s expression was non-committal. After a pause she said musingly, ‘If that is the case, may I suggest someone?’
‘You mean – ?’
‘I happen to know a very eligible man, mid-thirties, not badly off. He’s also extremely handsome.’
Amy laughed. ‘I rather like the sound of him myself!’
‘Would your friend be interested, d’you think?’
‘I can ask her. But she may be feeling rather bruised …’
‘All the more reason to cheer her up. He’s the perfect gentleman.’
Amy felt puzzled. She was certainly selling him. ‘What’s the name of this paragon?’
‘Mm? Oh, William. William O’Dare. An Irishman. I’ll arrange an evening – you can meet him, too.’
11
Amy was back at Moody’s office the following Friday. In the anteroom two of his assistants were silently at work; one of them, looking up, indicated by a nod that she should go through. True to his word, the private detective had a report ready for her. She could see on his desk a sheet of paper on which very close writing and several diagrams had been inscribed; the only word on it she could make out was ‘sociable?’.
Moody leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. ‘Because of the unusual nature of this case,’ he began, ‘progress has been, erm, doubtful. You see, I mostly do divorce work. A simple brief. One keeps watch on a gentleman or a lady with a view to catching them in compromising behaviour. In a romantic sense,’ he added, making it sound not very romantic at all.
‘I imagine you have some stories to tell,’ Amy said, eyebrows raised.
‘Indeed.’ He pursed his mouth in a tight smile, as if sealing off the glimpsed avenue of reminiscence. ‘With this case, I can’t be exactly sure what I’m on the lookout for. “Wrongdoing” was your term, as I remember. The party has been kept under surveillance, but so far there’s not much to go on.’
He gestured at the closely written page before him. It was, he explained, a record of Hoste’s comings and goings each day of that week. He had been obliged to do a great deal of waiting around outside his office at Chancery Lane; Amy sensed the tenacity as well as the tedium involved in the private eye’s daily round.
‘So he does go out sometimes?’ she said.
‘Yes. For a tax inspector Mr Hoste is actually quite sociable – likes to meet people in cafes, Corner Houses, a pub on occasion.’
‘What sort of people?’
Moody gave a shrug. ‘Ordinary people. It would be more satisfying if they were “sinister” or “shifty-looking”, I know, but there seemed nothing very remarkable about them at all. Occasionally he meets two or three at once. I’ve got close enough to eavesdrop on them but, again, the conversation was nothing very unusual.’
‘And they talk about – ?’
‘The war, mostly. A few made comments about … members of the Jewish faith. The sort of thing you hear every day. Nothing to suggest subversive tendencies, or a desire to help Germany.’
Amy wasn’t quite sure where her next question came from. ‘Did any of these meetings strike you as “romantic” in nature?’
Moody’s eye twitched: he wasn’t sure either. ‘I – um – wouldn’t say so. The only time I saw him behave in a familiar way was with a lady, who I took to be a friend.’
From his description of her Amy thought it might have been the woman she had seen on the stairs that day, the first time she visited his office. ‘Or a colleague of his, do you think?’
‘Quite possibly. There was an animation in his manner I detected at no other point. The lady seemed to respond in kind.’
Amy bit her lip meditatively. Moody, scrupulous to a fault, had supplied an account of the time and place of each meeting, the number of people, the stray remarks overheard. She briefly scanned the document, and could find nothing of any significance in it. Wasn’t it as she had expected? There had never really been much likelihood of catching Hoste and co. flinging Nazi salutes at one another.
Moody had been watching her read it. ‘I hope you don’t mind that I’ve appended a few small expenses …’
‘No, of course not,’ she replied, with a distracted air.
‘I am sorry, miss. I knew you’d be disappointed. Should we conclude the matter here?’
His tone had become sympathetic, underscored by the merest batsqueak of pity – I was sorry to take the money off her, poor thing …
‘Give it another week, would you?’ she said. ‘I don’t mind paying.’
He looked at her; inclined his head. ‘As you wish.’
It did not take Marita long to follow up her matchmaking suggestion. Amy could hardly recall such eagerness in her. A reservation was made at a little restaurant on Fitzroy Street for four people; Amy would accompany Georgie, while Marita would bring along her Irish friend. Better to make it seem a casual dinner than simply throw two strangers together.
Amy had to screw up her courage before consulting Georgie. At one point she had considered not even revealing to her the motive behind the dinner; then she decided it was better to come clean about it than be caught out later in yet more meddling. To her surprise Georgie had accepted the invitation unhesitatingly. The experience with Christopher, far from discouraging her, had put some steel in her soul. She seemed more worldly; less fearful. On the night of the dinner, Marita had been all charm, and set the tone by ordering champagne. She had not exaggerated William O’Dare’s good looks: tall and rangy, his sculpted cheekbones and deep-set eyes lent him a saturnine allure, and a confiding manner blended happily with his not altogether comprehensible Ulster accent.
The evening went well, though doubt had kept tugging at the edges of Amy’s consciousness. For one thing, while she had been intrigued to meet O’Dare, she found herself not quite trusting him. His suavity felt like an act, there was too much effort in it, and she couldn’t help noticing the quick glances he flicked at Marita. It led her to wonder if the pair had once been something more than friends to each other. And it seemed so
very unlike Marita to go out of her way to play Cupid. Hitherto she had always cultivated a cynical amusement on the subject of romance – even Bernard came in for an occasional barb – but here she was promoting O’Dare’s merits with all the pushiness of a trader in a souk. The enthusiasm was somewhat baffling. The Irishman himself responded to it with an embarrassed touch of self-deprecation, as if he knew that Marita was overegging it. ‘She’s not always this nice about me,’ he joked, and another look passed between them.
Whatever game they were playing, it worked on Georgie. She looked thoroughly charmed, laughing at O’Dare’s unremarkable comic sallies and entering the convivial mood of the occasion. Amy on the one hand was relieved, for it seemed to signal a willingness to put the recent heartache behind her and get on with her life; on the other, she felt alarm that Georgie’s lack of experience had made her rather susceptible. She had been too long on the ration where male courtship was concerned. While O’Dare was pleasant, and handsome for sure, she sensed that he was possessed of little to keep a bright woman stimulated. Of course it wasn’t necessarily intellectual stimulation a woman might be looking for … but she didn’t even want to think about that.
‘There’s a Mr Moody here to see you,’ said Miss Ducker dubiously. ‘He doesn’t have an appointment but said you’ll know what it’s about.’
Amy presented her most reassuring smile and asked her to send him in. She and Moody were not scheduled to meet until the end of the week. Something must have come up, though the detective, poker-faced, didn’t say a word until Miss Ducker and her thwarted air of inquisitiveness had vacated the room.
‘Sorry to drop in like this, Miss Strallen,’ he said, his gaze quickly taking in his surroundings, ‘but I thought it best to apprise you of developments immediately.’
‘Developments?’
Invited to take a seat, Moody produced another of his close-packed reports from his briefcase. There was almost a gleam in his eye as he gathered himself.
‘I kept watch on the party, as per your instructions, and found no change in his habits at all – office hours, has lunch in a cafe nearby, takes an occasional stroll to the West End to meet this or that person. Nothing out of the ordinary – only yesterday he met that lady, the one I told you about last time. This was in the Kardomah on Fleet Street. And something rather interesting occurred.’
Amy, almost sick with curiosity, asked him to continue.
‘As I mentioned, they appeared to know one another quite well. I got close to them, or as close as I dared. The lady had such a watchful eye I was afraid of being rumbled. So there they were, talking, in voices so low I couldn’t hear. I almost gave the thing up, but I’m glad I didn’t, because I would have missed a little transaction between them. The party very discreetly handed an envelope to the lady – the work of an instant, unnoticed by anyone except –’ He paused, gave a modest cough. ‘Indeed, such was the sleight-of-hand by which this was effected one might deduce that the parties were observing a routine. They had done this before.’
‘How can you tell?’ asked Amy.
‘In this business one comes to recognise the signs,’ he said, and paused again.
‘So what happened then?’
Moody looked momentarily embarrassed. ‘I had a close call …’ Despite extreme circumspection on his part he had a distinct sense that ‘the lady’ had registered his presence. She must have alerted Hoste, because within a minute or so they rose to leave. Moody followed them out in time to see the two of them parting on the street. His objective now was to discover the identity of the woman, and, if possible, the contents of that envelope. The difficulty of this was clear: she had probably noticed him already, and would be on the lookout for anyone dogging her footsteps. ‘It’s one of the trickiest follows I ever did,’ he said, narrowing his gaze. ‘She boarded a tram, and got off after two stops to catch a bus going the opposite way. That’s when I knew she was on to me. She tried a few old ruses – at one point she ducked into a hotel, and I gambled on her not slipping out the back. I kept my watch in a doorway opposite the entrance, and like a pro she left the same way she came in.’
It took another hour of this cat-and-mouse pursuit before Moody ran his quarry to ground. She entered a library, and after waiting ten minutes he followed in after. Keeping well out of sight he spotted her working at a desk. He waited, and waited. Just when it seemed she would never leave her post she rose and went off in the direction of the powder room. This was his one chance. He quickly occupied the desk next to hers, and thanked the stars that she had taken only her purse, not her handbag. ‘She must have thought she had shaken me off,’ he said. Amy listened agog as he described his rifling of the handbag. ‘The envelope was there, with four pounds inside it. Her identity papers named her as Monica Berens, though they looked to me like a forgery. There was a handwritten letter in there, too, which confirmed that Berens was an alias. You see, the envelope had that name on it, but the letter inside was addressed to someone called Marita.’
Amy’s sudden intake of breath caused Moody to stop.
‘You know her?’
‘Yes.’ She knew it could be no other.
‘It was the name of her correspondent who caught my eye. The letter had come from an internment camp, you see, and the censor had printed the prisoner’s name at the top – Bernard Pardoe. One of Mosley’s cronies. So your hunch about Fascist subversion may not be wide of the mark …’
Amy was still absorbing the shock as Moody talked on. Marita and Hoste – in cahoots. It was incredible, and yet in hindsight perfectly obvious. She thought back to the first time Hoste had introduced – insinuated – himself into her life, the aborted interview at the bureau, then the accidental meeting at the National Gallery and her noticing Bernard Pardoe’s so-called tax records at his flat. None of it ‘accidental’ at all. My God, the act he had put on … He had used her in order to get to Marita. It had been no overture of friendship, just a coldly calculated subterfuge. She felt a sudden wild plunge in her stomach.
She heard Moody repeat her name, and looked up. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Sorry, I’m just – um … stunned. What is – what do you think he was paying her for?’
Moody made a face. ‘Who knows – information? Like I said, it seemed to be a regular transaction between them.’
The plunge in her stomach had turned acid. ‘What should I do?’
‘I believe there’s only one thing you can do – report it to the authorities. If it’s as we suspect, they’re engaged in a serious crime. Treason, in fact.’
‘But … what if we’re wrong? If it’s just a terrible misunderstanding?’
Moody’s sympathetic look cut right through her. ‘You don’t really think it’s a misunderstanding, do you? There’s an old saying in our business, Miss Strallen – once there’s a doubt, there’s no doubt.’
She took the rest of the afternoon off, pleading a headache. Johanna had been very understanding, though she betrayed her own curiosity about Amy’s visitor when she whispered, ‘Miss Ducker was imagining all sorts …’ Amy fobbed her off with the excuse of ‘a family matter’, which had the advantage of sounding both vague and too delicate to be divulged.
Treason. The word seemed so antiquated, conjuring images of the Tower of London, of bearded plotters wearing doublet and hose, clapped in irons. But people guilty of treason were traitors, which was much more to the point. Those odd conversations Hoste had started with her – about her attitude to the Jews, to Germany, to the war – they played in her head as evidence for the prosecution. That he had seemed unlikely as a Nazi agent now made sense to her, for what better cover was available to an agent than unlikeliness? Hoste’s mild-mannered character and his air of trustworthy diligence were cleverly adapted to neutralise the slightest suspicion.
Must she really hand him over to the police? There would be no going back once she did. The consequences of her reporting him offered a bleak prospect either way. If Hoste was innocent of any
charges he would never look upon her as a friend again. If guilty, he would go to jail for a long time. She looked out over Queen Anne Street as night fell, turning it over, fretting. There was doubt – there was always doubt; if he were a committed Nazi, why had he taken up the job of ARP warden? Unless that, too, was a cover. It was clear that he and Marita had betrayed her. But had they betrayed the country?
The next morning, after a deep and dreamless night’s sleep, she picked up the telephone and asked to be put through to Marylebone Police Station.
12
As Hoste entered the room he felt a distinct edge of nervousness among them. For reasons of security he had rarely visited the headquarters of the Section, and after weeks of silence he would sometimes wonder if they had forgotten about him. But here they were, all three senior members – Castle, Traherne, Hammond – and by the tall window two secretaries facing one another across a desk, at work. The room was almost severe in its absence of homely touches – no pictures adorned the walls, and the parquet flooring made a lonely echo underfoot. Castle, with an expression of kindly regret, gestured him to the oxblood-coloured chesterfield. He sat down, and waited.
‘We’ve had to haul her in, old boy,’ he said.
Hoste stared at him, baffled. ‘Who – Marita?’
‘No, no. I mean Amy Strallen. I’m afraid she’s on to you.’
He sat up suddenly, as if prodded by a sharp stick. ‘How?’
Castle flicked a glance to his colleagues. ‘She hired someone to track you. And she’s made a report to the police, so it’s serious.’
Hoste thought back to the previous morning, when he’d met Marita at the Kardomah: she’d noticed the tail almost immediately, and they’d cleared out of there. To think that Amy Strallen was behind it … But he couldn’t imagine what had given him away. He’d been careful, so careful that in his six years with the Section no one had ever suspected him.
Tessa Hammond fixed him with an odd look. ‘You had no idea?’
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