Swaffer knew of only one man within that organisation who did not hold ordinary Met detectives in such lowly esteem as the rest of his colleagues, on the basis that they all, like him, ran their own networks of snouts. Funnily enough, it was the same person he had been angling for information about when he interviewed Greenaway about the raid on Dover Street. He was given to believe that the Chief of Counter-Subversion was a man of many unusual tastes.
Greenaway claimed to know nothing about that either, not that Swaffer had expected him to say any different. But he was exhilarated with his discovery. Especially as his next destination was to the Christian Spiritualist Greater World Association in Holland Park, where he was due to deliver a lecture. It seemed an auspicious day.
As his taxi pulled up, Swaffer put the final touches to his plan. He was going to ask Miss Moyes to invite Helen Duncan back – and see if Spooner didn’t turn up to see her. That way, he might find out if the detective and the journalist were, in fact, the same person.
The Paramount Agency was situated at the top of a narrow staircase, above a restaurant in Dean Street. In daylight hours, its grimy, diamond-paned windows looked down on the Soho street below, where trade in food, drink and other good times went on, oblivious to wartime restrictions. It was only a few doors down from the York Minster, known as the French pub, or merely Berlemont’s, after its owner Gaston, who had brought the exiled French community together with a louche bunch of writers, actors, artists and agents to jostle for attention at his bar. Norrie liked to spread his business between the two locations according to licensing hours.
Before visiting his former mentor, Spooner stopped off at Fox in St James to buy one of Norrie’s favourite cigars. There was an excitement in the London air about the imminent arrival of American forces, though the news hadn’t come without a certain measure of umbrage at them for taking so long about it.
“Do them good to find out what’s really going on,” he heard more than one voice on the street opine, “’stead of pretending like it’s none of their business.”
The talk in the York Minster, where Norrie was polishing off bread and cheese with a glass of red wine, was more concerned with the runners at White City dog track that evening. But that changed when Spooner appeared. Dusting crumbs from his fingers and slipping a note into his bookmaker’s top pocket, Norrie steered them back to his office.
“About time you turned up, my boy. I’ve got something to show you,” he promised, leading the way up the creaking, ill-lit stairs, which smelled headily of the onions frying in the restaurant below. He opened the door at the top, ushering Spooner inside.
“Take a seat,” said Norrie. “Any seat.” Spooner tried to locate one, under the piles of paperwork and publicity stills that rested on every surface.
“Me and Bertie got to talking,” Norrie explained as he unlocked a filing cabinet, “about that Clara of yours and some of the German acts we used to know before the war. We had good relations in them days, if you can Adam and Eve it. A lot of them were Jewish, like we are. Obviously not her, but all the same, I wondered if she might have found her way over here with one of the circus troupes or big orchestras. Now then…” He lifted a cardboard tube out of the top drawer, from which he carefully extracted a large sheet of rolled-up paper. “At the death, it wasn’t her we found. But look who we did turn up…”
Norrie unfurled it across the desk – a 1936 poster advertising The Talk of Berlin: Goldschmidt Brothers Circus, appearing at the Holborn Empire. “Now look at this,” he dropped a paperweight over the top left-hand corner of the bill. “Nils Anders,” he read aloud, “the mad-cap whirlwind of the mid-air. There’s even a picture of him.”
It was a beautiful, full-colour artwork, featuring a top-hatted ringmaster, lions and tigers on each side, a trapeze artist flying by one ear and the tightrope walker prancing across the trajectory of the other. Spooner honed in on the latter, took in blond, marcel-waved hair and blue eyes fringed by long lashes, a red grin and rouged cheeks. Anders was dressed as a sailor, dancing the hornpipe on his tightrope. There was something strangely familiar about him.
“So, at least you know roughly what your flying Dutchman looks like, if he ever shows up again.” Norrie scratched behind his ear. “That’s a funny thing with them acts. I’ve known a fair few of them to drag up as women. On and off the wire.”
“That’s quite some talent to have,” said Spooner, realising what Norrie’s words could mean as he said it. “Especially if you wanted to disappear without trace.”
“What, tightrope-walking?” said Norrie. “I s’pose…”
“No, passing yourself off as a woman when you’re being sought as a man,” said Spooner, mental images slotting into place. “Norrie, you’re a genius.” He delved inside his briefcase to retrieve the first of his offerings.
“Well, I brought you up all right, didn’t I?” Norrie tucked the cigar into his top pocket.
“Now look at this,” Spooner fetched the handbill he had found in Portsmouth. He placed the inky image of the blonde woman next to the full-colour drawing of Anders. “I think there’s a resemblance,” he said. “What d’you make of it? Ever heard them?”
“No,” said Norrie, squinting at one image, then the other. “But I see why you arsk. Let me look into it for you. D’you want to take this with you?”
“Won’t Bertie mind?” asked Spooner.
“He knows you’ll look after it,” said Norrie. “You can bring it back to him next time you’re in Brum. Maybe he can help you track down this pair, eh? Seeing as there seems to be a local connection…”
18
BECAUSE OF ONCE UPON A TIME
Saturday, 20 December 1941
Morning was about to break as the Chief entered Ashburn Gardens, though a blanket of fog muffled its arrival, along with the tops of the giant plane trees he passed as he strode down the middle of the South Kensington garden square. The only sound besides the clack of his feet as he climbed up the black-and-white tiled steps to a white, mid-terrace house was the twittering of birds. Relishing the conspiracy of nature’s cover, he put his index finger to the doorbell of the garden flat.
He didn’t get an answer immediately and had to press the device again at two more five-minute intervals until he finally heard the sound of footsteps approaching. He spent the time identifying the birdsong he could hear, while smiling at the Judas hatch in the door from where he knew the occupant would take their first look at him.
When that portal eventually swung open it was to reveal the scowling visage of a tall, ramrod-thin woman, wearing a padded peach silk dressing gown, feather trimmed, high-heeled slippers and a face all but obscured by cold cream. Only two blue eyes and a pinched pair of lips stared accusingly at him through this protective outer layer, blonde hair swept up by a silk scarf tied into a turban.
“Lady Wynter, how delightful to see you. Did you know you have at least seven different types of garden birds living in that square out there?”
“What is the meaning of this?” the woman demanded.
The Chief gave her his most avuncular smile. “Unfinished business. Mind if I come in?”
“I certainly do,” she snapped, but took a step backwards all the same. “Have you a search warrant this time?”
“Why ever should I need one of those?” asked the Chief. “I only want to have a friendly chat, about a subject dear to your heart. I’m sure we needn’t disturb the admiral with it.”
“You’ve disturbed us enough already, ringing the bell at this hour,” she retorted, the skin beneath the cream turning a shade of puce. “But,” gathering the neckline of her gown together in one hand, she opened the door a degree further, eyes darting along the street for any watching neighbours, “you had better come in.”
The Chief closed the door behind them and followed her down the thickly carpeted hall, through the fire door and down the stairs to her spacious garden flat. Though he had been here before, he trod carefully, for Lady Mirabelle Wynte
r, the wife of a retired British admiral and a former suffragette turned fascist, was one of the most slippery characters he had encountered in his long and strange career.
By rights, she should have been interned by now, along with the rest of her friends that he had scooped up in the May of 1940: Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists, Captain Archibald Ramsay of the Right Club and the fashion designer Olga Wolkov, whose parents ran the Russian Tea Rooms just around the corner on Roland Gardens. It was Wolkov who had been the focus of that operation and was duly convicted for passing on sensitive messages between Churchill and Roosevelt stolen from the US Embassy by her American lover, Taylor Preston, himself now a resident of HMP Camp Hill on the Isle of Wight. But, despite what the Director of Public Prosecutions had considered watertight evidence against her, Mirabelle had been acquitted of assisting her Nazi needlesmith when it came to her turn in the dock.
It hadn’t helped that the Americans, on the directions of their ambassador, had not allowed the Chief to show his evidence, a Top Secret message between the Prime Minister and the President copied out in Lady Wynter’s hand, to the jury. But, despite the paucity of her testimony, it seemed they had found it impossible to believe that a titled, educated woman – a former doctor and an admiral’s wife, to boot – was capable of such treachery. The Chief knew it was the admiral himself who had introduced her to the Wolkovs and that the pair of them shared views more common to the ruling elite – that the working class were subhumans deserving of no form of advancement and that Britain could only be great again after it had been scoured of Jews – than to the representatives of the lesser orders who had weighed up her case in court. It was to his bitter regret that they had believed her lies.
What he hadn’t known then was that Lady Wynter had another passion: for the supernatural. Going back to the watchers he had sent to shadow her and Wolkov before their arrests, he learned that Mirabelle boasted of psychic talents, claiming to have once seen the shades of duelling knights on the lawn of the ancient Hampshire pile owned by her husband’s family. The Chief had not infiltrated the Ghost Club before and, with Spooner’s own enquiries ongoing, didn’t want its president to suspect he was coming under any scrutiny from spooks of a different nature from those that he studied. But one of his friends, a writer of thrillers who was given to throwing a good party, had been a member for years.
The Chief asked if he wouldn’t mind inviting over a few of his Ghost Club friends for a soirée one evening, so that he could be introduced to them as a fellow writer engaged in researching a biography of their most illustrious former member, Charles Dickens. He hit gold with the Club’s secretary, Mrs Pamela Joyce. Pam, as she soon asked him to call her, was a Dickens devotee and most keen on the idea that the Chief might rekindle knowledge of his interest in the Club.
It became evident from their conversation that, while Harry Price was the flamboyant figurehead, it was Pam who was the keeper of the Ghost Club crypt, taking care of most of the arrangements, correspondence and all of the records, from its beginnings at Trinity College Cambridge to its closure in 1936 and subsequent revival eighteen months later – both of which had been instigated by Price. In the time of Dickens and up until the First War, the Club’s members had actively investigated supernatural phenomena. But these days, it was more of a supper club, meeting to hear talks given by psychic researchers – another ring to the Price circus that attracted curious socialites like the Chief’s writer friend, who could be relied on to pay their subs.
The Chief offered to take Pam for lunch at Rules in return for a look at the hallowed archives. She happily agreed. Not only that, she was decorous enough to leave him in solitude to make his search – which was when he found an entry in the visitors book for 1940. At a lantern-slide talk “Behind the Scenes with the Mediums” given by Mr William Marmolt at the Hall of India Overseas House on 7 June, Lady Mirabelle Wynter (Member) had attended with two male guests – neither of whom had been her husband.
Though the Chief was well aware that she would do her utmost to deceive him about her relationships with these men, he was also certain that she would not want to risk another day in court with him. Which was why he had come early and without warning, employing the psychology of the regime on the continent that she was so keen on. Mirabelle was a drinker; she would not be at her best at 6am.
Dropping curses under her breath, she ushered him into her lounge and bade him sit on an uncomfortable looking metal chair. She perched herself opposite on a chaise longue.
“Well,” she said, eyes flashing. “What is it this time?”
“A few items of interest have cropped up,” said the Chief. “Could you tell me how you came to be friendly with Harry Price?”
Mirabelle plucked a tissue from a dispenser on the coffee table between them and began to slowly wipe the cream from her face. It was a good distraction technique, he thought, enabling her to obscure her features while she took the time to form a reply.
“Harry Price?” she repeated. “From the Ghost Club?”
“That’s right. You’re a member, aren’t you?”
She shrugged. “He works around the corner from here,” she said, “I couldn’t help but notice. He used to be in the papers the whole time, investigating poltergeists at Borley Rectory.” She crumpled the tissue, dropping it into the waste paper basket and reaching for another. “I’m interested in such things.”
“You had many things in common with him, then?” the Chief enquired. “I gather he’s rather fond of Germany too. Has a lot of friends over there, to the point he was even in negotiations to move his operations to Bonn University, just before the war.”
“He’s a very cultured man, as well as being highly intelligent. Of course he would converse with his academic counterparts around the world, their work is ground-breaking – or it was, before all this nonsense,” she curled her upper lip into a sneer, “intervened.”
“What a great pity for him,” said the Chief. “I’m told such a deal would have given him the ongoing financial assistance he’s so sorely lacking at the moment. Tell me, do you have much of an occult library yourself?”
Her sneer turned into a pout. “I have signed first editions of all Harry’s books, naturally.”
“But you’re not a serious collector? I mean, as much as you are interested, you wouldn’t go as far as some of the more arcane works that he has in his own collection? Spellbooks,” he paused to smile, “and suchlike?”
The blue eyes narrowed and she dropped the second tissue into the waste paper basket, staring at him down the planes of cheekbones that needed no real adornment. “You’re not seriously suggesting that I’m a witch, are you?”
“Well, you do continue to surprise me,” the Chief admitted. “Had I known about your involvement in the Ghost Club the last time we met, then I might have learned about your relationship with our absent friend—” he paused, studying her face as intently as he had been listening to the wildlife, “De Vere.”
For just a second, a tiny muscle twitched underneath her left eye. Then she waved her hand dismissively. “De Vere?” she said. “I don’t know who you mean.”
“Then your memory must be very poor,” said the Chief. “Can’t it even reach as far back as the Ghost Club’s June gathering in 1940? Mr Price’s secretary Mrs Joyce signed you in, and she distinctly remembered seeing you, Lady Wynter, because you were in such dashing company that night – both De Vere and that handsome friend of his from the RAF, what was his name?” The Chief leaned forward. “Ralph Nicholson. You knew De Vere from the Right Club, of course,” he said. “But I wonder if you knew Flight Lieutenant Nicholson as well?”
With a glare, Mirabelle reached for the cigarette box. Her hand wobbled as she lit herself up. The Chief wondered if it was delirium tremens or if he’d managed to get to her.
“The man you were introduced to as Ralph Nicholson was an RAF Intelligence officer, whose mission was to monitor De Vere on suspicion that he was assisting the e
nemy. I’ve checked the reports he made to his CO and he provides a detailed account of the evening that he spent in your company. It wasn’t just Mr Marmolt’s anecdotes about Conan Doyle that he found fascinating. It was the mentions you made of your mutual acquaintances – Mosley, Captain Ramsay and that dear friend of yours and your husband’s, the former Ambassador Von Ribbentrop. Though, what De Vere was most interested in talking about that evening was Harry Price’s book collection. There was one manuscript in particular for which he was prepared to pay an extortionate sum – and you made an introduction for him.”
Mirabelle exhaled a line of smoke from between her pursed lips. She broke eye contact, glaring out of the French doors to the garden beyond. “I somehow don’t recall any of this,” she said, outright denial continuing to be her favoured method of defence. She tried to keep her tone low and calm, but the pitch of her voice was beginning to rise, as it had done under questioning in court.
“You are a terrible liar, my dear,” the Chief pointed out.
That brought her gaze back to him in an instant. “Don’t you ‘dear’ me!” she snapped.
The corners of his mouth turned in grim parody of a smile. “I have the testimony of a senior RAF officer to take to court with me this time, and no helpful Ambassador Kennedy to direct that it should be withdrawn as evidence. They will be much stronger charges this time, Lady Wynter: Accessory to Murder and Treason, the latter, of course, being a capital offence…”
This time, real fear bloomed in her irises and the twitching beneath was more of a spasm. “What are you talking about?” she said, her voice louder, the pitch higher. “How dare you imply…”
That Old Black Magic Page 17
