DEATH TO FASCISTS
The words were picked out in capitals, in blood, with clotted drips beneath each letter. On another wall there was just one word:
REVOLUTION
Beneath it, there was a hammer and sickle.
A bloody approximation of a red flag with yet another hammer and sickle polluted the wall behind the bed. The window was painted with a bloody drawing of a pig.
The killer had evidently spent a deal of time about his work, for the writing was clear, and the images of the flag and the communist insignia carefully drawn.
‘We found Mrs Langley in the bed. We think she died very quickly. He must have attacked her in her sleep, cutting her jugular and carotid.’
‘And her husband?’ Wilde asked.
Bower grimaced. ‘Rather less fortunate, I’m afraid, if that is not to do a disservice to poor Mrs Langley. But I don’t want her husband’s death reported in all its gory detail. There’s the family to think about.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Eaton said. ‘Nothing untoward will appear in The Times.’
‘Thank you, sir. I do, however, want the political nature of the murder reported. Someone must know who’s behind it – and reports in the press might be useful.’
‘I’m sure space will be found. Tell me what you have discovered, superintendent.’
‘Well, I’m afraid Mr Langley’s death was both terrifying and prolonged.’ Bower pointed up at the beam. ‘We found him strung up there, hanging by his feet with his arms strapped behind his back. Like his wife, his throat had been cut, but he bled to death like an animal at the abattoir, and his blood was collected in the pail. On his forehead the word Nazi had been written in his own blood.’
Eaton met Wilde’s eye and they both grimaced.
‘Do you have any clue to the killer or killers?’ Wilde asked, struggling to contain his horror. He was having difficulty taking it all in. ‘This is the work of a madman, surely? Someone local with a grudge, perhaps?’
‘It is highly unlikely to have been anyone from around here, which is why they’ve brought me in. The only line we have is the obvious: that the murders had a political motive. There is no reason to suspect that this was a burglary gone wrong. The silver cabinets are intact, as is Mr Langley’s wallet, as far as we can see. The one thing I can tell you is this: the killer was very deliberate and methodical. He even went so far as taking a bath to clean himself up.’
‘Who found the bodies, superintendent?’ Eaton asked.
‘The maid. She lives in – and before you ask, I have no intention of giving out her name to you or anyone else. She is a prime witness and her own life may well be in danger.’
‘You mean she was in the house at the time of the killings?’ Wilde could hardly imagine the woman’s terror.
‘Indeed, Mr Wilde, that is exactly what I mean. She has a room at the top of the house. In the middle of the night, sometime between midnight and one, she was disturbed by noises directly beneath her on the first floor. She went downstairs in her nightgown and saw a man disappearing into the bathroom. He was naked and covered in blood.
‘She crept back up to her room. With great presence of mind, she made her bed, switched out her light and climbed into a cupboard. She stayed there, praying that the killer would not come looking for her. Making the bed saved her life, for the killer did come upstairs. He switched on the light, saw that the bed was made and left without searching further. The maid didn’t move. She stayed there for almost two days, huddled and shivering with cold and thirst. She was only found when the vicar called to discuss the sermon and discovered the murders and her.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘She was in a catatonic stupor when she was found and is still in a state of collapse, Mr Eaton, being looked after in a safe place.’
‘Did she give you a description of the killer or killers?’
Detective Superintendent Bower had removed his hat. He shook his head. ‘Not much to go on. She saw one man, naked, from behind. She thinks he was youngish, quite well built.’
‘Complexion? Hair colour?’
‘We’ve got nothing like that from her as yet. All she really saw was blood and bare skin. An overwhelming impression of blood. At the moment she can hardly talk. Perhaps we might coax more out of her in due course.’
‘Did she see or hear a motor car?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘And do you have any idea how the killer or killers got into the house?’
‘Same way the vicar did. The side door was open. I’m told that no one hereabouts bothers to lock up. Why would they? There’s no crime in a place like this.’ Bower let out a heavy sigh. ‘My initial impression is that there was only one killer, because we seem to have only one set of footprints in the blood.’ He clapped his hat back on his head. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I have to proceed with my inquiries.’
CHAPTER 11
Eaton and Wilde took their time looking around the Langleys’ house. In the bathroom, Wilde picked up a bloodstained hand-towel from a three-legged wicker stool, holding it between finger and thumb. Beneath it, there was a man’s wristwatch with a leather strap. Taking it in his handkerchief he showed it to Eaton.
‘Could be Cecil Langley’s.’
‘Or a careless killer’s,’ Wilde said. ‘Mind you, it’s a bit pricey for an assassin. Gold casing – and look at the name: Patek Philippe & Co, Geneve. They don’t come cheap.’
The superintendent put his head round the door. ‘Found something, gentlemen?’
‘This.’ Wilde showed Bower. ‘Just discussing how likely it is that a communist assassin would have an expensive Swiss watch.’
‘I think I’d better take that. Mind if I keep it wrapped?’
Wilde handed it over.
‘I’ll get your handkerchief back to you in due course.’
‘No hurry.’
*
While Bower and his men continued to search the house, Wilde and Eaton looked around the Langley grounds. At the back there was a traditional country garden, now bare and wintry, abutting woodland and fields and a stream. The only things of any note were the door through which the killer had gained access to the house and some tyre marks on a track at the edge of the estate where someone, perhaps the killer, had parked a car.
‘He’s quite astute for a copper, our Mr Bower,’ Eaton said, as they strolled back down the garden.
‘Is he? He hasn’t mentioned the possibility of a connection between these killings and the death of a young woman in Cambridge.’
‘Well, we’ll have to put it to him.’
*
Returning to the house, they discovered that Bower’s men had finished their photographic jigsaws. ‘Hitler, Mosley, the King and two other men,’ the superintendent announced.
‘The one with his nose in the air is Lord Londonderry,’ Eaton said. ‘The former Cabinet minister and good chum of Adolf and his gang. And the woman by his side is his wife Edie. The other one is the new German ambassador, von Ribbentrop. When will you have the fingerprint results in?’
‘Certainly not before tomorrow. Probably longer. They’ll have to go up to the Met.’ Bower shrugged helplessly. ‘As I’m sure you’ll understand, there is a great deal of concern about this among the powers that be.’
Wilde could imagine there would be. This was not merely an attack on one man and his wife: it struck at the very heart of those who considered themselves born to run the country.
He took some time looking at the photographs in the room that had escaped the killer’s frenzied attack. The girl, he concluded, was the Langleys’ daughter, Margot, the friend of Lydia and Nancy. He wondered if the police had yet told her the news. Lydia, too, would almost certainly have known the parents. Another picture caught his eye and surprised him: three men together, two of whom he had seen in the past twenty-four hours. The picture was difficult to spot, almost hidden away in an alcove. Cecil Langley, Sir Norman Hereward and Lord Slievedonar
d, together on a viewing platform at what looked very much like one of the Nuremberg rallies. They were all making the straight-arm salute.
‘I don’t hold out much hope of any more information from the house,’ said Eaton.
Nor, Wilde imagined, would the fingerprints throw up a match. But there was still the other matter. ‘Did you know,’ he said to Bower, ‘that a friend of the Langleys’ daughter died in unpleasant circumstances in Cambridge the day before yesterday? Miss Nancy Hereward, daughter of Sir Norman Hereward.’
Bower frowned and peered at Wilde through his thick lenses. ‘Yes, Mr Wilde, I had heard something of it. Is there some connection?’
‘Well, the obvious one – Margot Langley and Nancy Hereward were friends. And Mr Eaton tells me their fathers were friends, too.’
‘But as I understand it,’ Bower continued, ‘the girl in Cambridge died of an overdose. That’s what my colleagues there are saying. Isn’t that correct?’
Wilde turned to the reporter. ‘Mr Eaton, perhaps you’d back me up on this. Surely it’s worth investigating?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Well,’ Bower said, ‘I shall bear your thought in mind and talk to my Cambridge colleagues again. I’m not closing any avenues.’
*
The Gaviota, a small steam trawler of a hundred and fifty tonnes, had seen better days. She was a pre-war vessel that had served under several different flags and masters and been adapted for the taking of a variety of different fish, as the markets rose and fell in times of conflict and peace. Now she was floating scrap iron, just about ready for the breaker’s yard.
As she limped past the red and white lighthouse into the broad mouth of an isolated East Anglian river, its water churning where it met the sea, no one save the harbourmaster noted her. She was clearly in trouble, low in the water and listing to starboard, chugging noisily, black smoke belching from her single funnel.
The trawler’s skipper was a man of about thirty with black stubble and a weatherworn brow. He wore durable blue trousers, tied with string at the ankles as though he were about to ride a bicycle, a baggy round-necked sweater and a waxed waterproof. He was at the wheel, a stinking hand-rolled cigarette of north African tobacco wedged firmly in the corner of his mouth. There were two other men aboard, one of them a creaking mariner in his late sixties, the other a youth. All three were similarly dressed; all were unshaven. Anyone looking at the three of them together would have said they were family, and they would be right.
Juan Ferreira, the skipper, was the only one of the three with any English. As he watched the harbourmaster’s vessel approach, he rehearsed his story.
He had another concern, too. The water was shallow here, and rough at the point where the river opened up into the sea. He knew he had to keep between the buoys that marked the navigable channel. But he also knew that there was an ever-present danger of grounding.
In truth, Ferreira was astonished they had got this far, to this lonely stretch of Suffolk coast between Felixstowe and Southwold. The Gaviota – Spanish for seagull – was scarcely seaworthy and he had felt certain that vessels of the famed and feared Royal Navy would intercept them as they crawled up the channel from Finisterre and the Bay of Biscay. It had been a long journey, more than sixteen hundred nautical miles from Cartagena on the Mediterranean coast of republican-held Spain. They had made no more than seven knots, interspersed with diversions to avoid ships in Spanish coastal waters that might be hostile and, later, to make lengthy stops for coal and repairs, particularly at Bordeaux and La Rochelle. At Brest, on the western tip of Britanny, they had had to be towed in for emergency repairs to the screw, which had been damaged by a half-submerged spar from some long-forgotten sailing vessel. It had been an anxious time, for customs officers came aboard and announced they would search the trawler; such vessels had been used too often for smuggling guns since the start of the Spanish war, they said. A bribe of two hundred francs and six bottles of Spanish brandy had satisfied them and so, after a perfunctory search, they had gone on their way with fraternal grins and jovial cries of ‘Vive la Revolution’.
But the autumn weather had been against them. The little vessel struggled against the heavy seas and winds and had to spend more time in port, at one time stranded for more than three weeks, every day fearing that their secret would be discovered.
The Gaviota had stopped again for repairs in Dieppe. By that point, Ferreira’s nerves were in shreds; he had never smoked so much in his life. He found himself wishing he was up on the front line dodging the bullets and bombs of Franco’s men; at least he’d know where he was. This was torment; he could not believe they would get away with it. And yet, they had. So far. Now here they were, forty days out of Cartagena, limping into an English mooring, the gold undiscovered and intact.
What does seven and a half metric tonnes of eighteen-carat gold look like? Gold is heavy and does not take up a great deal of room. These weren’t ingots: this was coin. It was neatly packed into a hundred boxes, each slightly smaller than a case for six bottles of wine. Each box held seventy-five kilos in a variety of currencies: American, Spanish, German, French, British, Austrian, Swiss, Belgian, and more. But mostly US dollars and Spanish currency. They were well hidden in a hurriedly built but solid compartment attached to the outside of the boat, beneath the hull. A frogman searching beneath the vessel might spot something amiss, but customs men searching the inside of the old trawler would find nothing. The danger came when the craft was raised from the water for repairs to the screw. They had had to do the work themselves, for a mechanic brought in for the job would soon have asked questions. Any thorough search below the waterline would result in the gold being discovered. Ferreira’s fingers were yellow from chain-smoking.
Of course, the French hadn’t looked too closely because the new socialist government was on friendly terms with the republican government of Spain in its fight against the rebel brigades of General Franco. But England would be different. Here, in this remote stretch of river, bounded by a shingle spit to seaward and marshland to the west, their voyage would be hard to explain away. And a bribe would not help, because legend had it that British officials were incorruptible.
The harbourmaster’s red and white motor-launch was no more than a hundred yards away, cutting a gentle wash through water, calm now that they were away from the sea and sheltered by the spit. Ferreira knew that if anything was out of place, even slightly, the harbourmaster would summon the police and customs without delay.
The skipper did something he hadn’t done since his childhood. He made the sign of the cross and asked the Almighty for assistance. The prayer gave him no comfort and he did not expect it to be answered. He placed more hope in the French flag now flying at the vessel’s stern in place of the Spanish one.
The motor-launch was almost alongside and the engine was cut to one or two knots. The harbourmaster, greying beard beneath a peaked cap, held a loudhailer to his mouth. ‘Are you all right there?’
‘We head for Yarmouth, sir. Spend night here.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Calais.’
‘Stick to the channel markers. There are free moorings upriver. If you need any help, someone will show you to my office. I’ll be back later. If you get as far as the town, there’s good food and ale in the pub.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Good man. We’ll talk later.’ The harbourmaster let out the throttle on his launch and continued with the ebbing tide downriver towards the open sea.
Juan Ferreira watched him go. He had no intention of going to any town. The hand-drawn map told him there was a smaller creek very soon – and that, in turn, would lead him into a yet smaller waterway. Deserted and unknown by most, a tiny, silent lake of brackish water. He only prayed that the water would be deep enough to accommodate them.
*
Wilde and Eaton walked down from the Langleys’ house to the village of Kilmington.
‘I’ve got the feeling that Bowe
r has already filed any connection to Nancy’s death away under to be disregarded,’ said Wilde. ‘I need a drink.’
The village pub was an old thatched house and the bar was a small, smoky room with low, beamed ceilings. The morning regulars stared at the two men as though they were beings from a distant planet.
In the corner of one wall, next to the bar, a battered cricket bat, an old cricket ball and a scorecard were displayed like trophies. ‘Those are from his glory days,’ the landlord said.
‘Whose?’ Wilde asked.
‘Mr Langley. He used to play for Essex before the war. That’s the bat he used for his first century – and that’s the ball he hit out of the ground the same day. Very kindly gave them to the village.’
‘Was he liked around here?’
‘Aye, he was. A good man, not well treated by Baldwin. Quite a lot of folk in these parts were behind him when he signed up with Mr Mosley.’
‘And you?’
‘My politics is my business.’
‘Did he have enemies locally?’
‘Mr Langley? By no means. He was our squire. Who’ll open the fête with him gone? And his missus, everyone loved her. Where will the WI be without her?’
Eaton handed the landlord half a crown and asked him to announce his presence. He gave a grunt of thanks and banged a pewter tankard on the bar. ‘This young man is a reporter from The Times,’ he said. ‘He wants to buy you all a drink at this sad time – and to listen to what he has to say.’
The room was hushed. Wary eyes rested on Philip Eaton.
‘You will soon find your little village taken over by a horde of reporters from the rag press,’ Eaton said. ‘You will find them intrusive and some of them will be downright unpleasant, prepared to resort to any means to get you to talk to them. It would be my considered advice that you do not talk to them, whatever their grand promises, for they will twist your words – and lie. As a representative of The Times, however, I will treat all information you give me with discretion. If anyone has any knowledge of the Langleys or the tragic events that befell them, I would be grateful to hear from you. Thank you for listening.’ He took a seat at the bar with Wilde. ‘Hopefully that will get them thinking,’ he muttered. ‘Someone must have seen the car, if not the man driving.’
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