Blackstone and the Endgame

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Twenty-eight,’ Max said, though he hated to make himself older than he actually was.

  The station master sighed. ‘I can pick up the phone at this very moment and ring a dozen people who will be willing to come to the station to identify you. So wouldn’t it be easier – for both of us – if you just told the truth?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I am Max Schneider,’ Max admitted.

  The station master nodded. ‘Good. Now, according to some records I have just been studying, you went to England in 1909. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A lot of other young men did the same. I applaud their spirit of adventure. So what else do we know? Ah yes, in August 1911, you received your call-up papers from the German high command. You were informed in those papers that you would be serving in the U-boat service. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The submarine service is considered to be an elite branch of the navy, and there are many patriotic young Germans who would have given their right arms to serve in it, yet you, without making any effort, were one of those selected,’ the official said. ‘Do you know why that is?’

  ‘No,’ Max admitted.

  ‘Would you like to know the reason?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Well, I think I will tell you anyway. It is because your father has friends in high places and went to considerable trouble and expense to arrange that particular posting.’

  The old bastard, Max thought – the vicious, conniving, evil old bastard.

  ‘I spoke to your father less than an hour ago,’ the station master continued. ‘He said he’d wanted to give you the opportunity to serve your country with honour. He’d thought that in the U-boat service you might finally become the kind of son he could admire. And did you grab this golden opportunity with both hands?’

  ‘I don’t like enclosed spaces,’ Max said.

  ‘That is not the question I asked,’ the station master said angrily. ‘Did you – or did you not – grab this golden opportunity with both hands?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘So what did you do instead?’

  ‘I changed my name and stayed in England.’

  ‘And that is where you have been since 1911?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have never come back to Germany in all that time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So tell me, Herr Schneider, how did you manage to support yourself in a foreign country, where you could no longer even use your own name?’

  Max sought for an acceptable way to describe how he had earned his living.

  ‘I was an entertainer,’ he said finally.

  ‘Were you?’ the station master asked. ‘Well, let us both hope the appropriate authorities find you entertaining.’

  PART THREE

  Endgame

  TWENTY-THREE

  21st December 1916 – Julian calendar; 3rd January 1917 – Gregorian calendar

  The letter had been brought from England by Vladimir’s own courier.

  It began:

  Hello Sam

  I thought I’d just drop you a line to let you know how we’ve been getting on over here while you’ve been living the life of Riley in Russia.

  It ended:

  So it’s time to turn your back on the dancing girls and the champagne, come back to London and start being a right proper bastard, like all the other top brass.

  Yours sincerely,

  Inspector Archibald Patterson.

  Sandwiched between the whimsy of the greeting and the flippancy of the sign-off were ten pages of a tightly argued report in Patterson’s careful, elementary school handwriting.

  Blackstone read through the report once and then – aware that Vladimir, sitting behind his desk, was watching him closely – he read through it again.

  There were a number of things he still found troubling about the report, and one of them was Brigham’s role in the whole affair.

  The superintendent had struck him as a bastard from the start – but not a corrupt bastard.

  And Brigham had said he never wanted Blackstone to be the one to take the money to the docks.

  ‘Why me?’ Blackstone had asked. ‘Couldn’t your lads do it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brigham had replied, ‘they most certainly could, and I would rather entrust it to one of them than to an inspector who has had what can be called – at best – a chequered career. But that option is not open to me. The man insists that you should be the go-between. He refuses to accept anyone else.’

  It would have taken a very good actor to carry that off – and Blackstone didn’t think that Brigham was that good.

  So the whole conversation only made sense as long as Brigham was actually what he appeared to be – a policeman who hoped to buy plans of submarine movements from a German agent and had been told by that German that Blackstone would be the only acceptable courier.

  And that meant that it was Max – and Max alone – who had insisted that he act as the courier, that it had been Max – and Max alone – who had decided to frame him.

  But why would Max Schneider – a man he’d never met – pick him out specifically to be set up?

  It felt as if the truth had been held back by a huge dam. Now the dam had been cracked, and more questions came trickling through that crack, until they became a flood.

  ‘You have gone very quiet, my friend,’ Vladimir said.

  ‘I was thinking,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About how difficult it is, when you’re continually being spun round on a whirligig, to see things as they really are. And I’ve been on a whirligig for some considerable time.’

  ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’

  ‘You’re playing another of your games, aren’t you?’

  Vladimir smiled. ‘Am I?’

  ‘And this particular game is designed to find out just how smart I am,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘And just how smart are you?’ Vladimir wondered.

  ‘Is it at all likely that a minor official in the German navy would come across secret submarine plans?’ Blackstone asked, postponing the question of his own intelligence until later.

  ‘I should think it is highly likely,’ Vladimir said. ‘War sweeps away old-established procedures and demands new ones. And while these new procedures are being put in place, there will always be minor failings which the watchful can quickly exploit.’

  ‘True,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘But how likely is it that this same minor official would be able to get several weeks’ leave in the middle of the war?’

  ‘That is less likely,’ Vladimir conceded. ‘But he could have just deserted, of course.’

  ‘And if he did desert, what are the chances that this minor official – on the run from the German authorities – could get himself smuggled into England? And once he was in England, how would he go about recruiting at least two other men – and possibly more – to help him in his scheme?’

  ‘When this Max of yours lived in England, he seemed to have more money than he could ever have earned legally, so perhaps he looked up some of his old criminal associates,’ Vladimir suggested.

  ‘How would you know what Max did in England before the war?’ Blackstone asked.

  Vladimir smiled. ‘Ah, a mistake,’ he said.

  But it wasn’t a mistake – it was all part of the game.

  The soldiers were not the cannon fodder sent into battle unarmed to exhaust the enemy’s supply of bullets, but crack troops who had seen heavy fighting on the Eastern Front and emerged from it bloody but unbowed. They had been spilt into teams, each one carefully briefed on its part in the death trap, and now that trap was about to be sprung.

  They moved with speed, making little noise on the freshly fallen snow which had yet to become crisp.

  The best marksmen – dressed in white camouflage uniforms – set up their rifles and tripods in the street and lay behind them on their stomachs, almost invisibl
e in the snow.

  Other teams entered the houses on the middle section of the prospekt through the back entrances and immediately began knocking on apartment doors.

  ‘This apartment is being commandeered for a military operation,’ they told those tenants whose lounges overlooked the prospekt. ‘You are to go to one of the apartments at the rear, where you will be given shelter.’

  ‘You will soon be receiving some unexpected guests,’ they told the tenants at the back of the building. ‘Once they have been admitted, you are to lower your blinds and lock your doors. You will not come out again until you are told to do so.’

  They met with no resistance – no argument – because only a fool argues with heavily armed soldiers with bloodlust in their eyes.

  ‘You hav’ der money?’ Blackstone asked Vladimir, in a fair imitation of the voice he had heard on the docks.

  Vladimir’s smile widened. ‘I could easily have sent someone else, but – as you know – I have always had a flair for the melodramatic,’ he said. ‘When did you realize it was me?’

  ‘About two minutes ago,’ Blackstone admitted.

  ‘And what tipped you off?’

  ‘The fact that whoever it was waiting for me at the docks didn’t have the two coppers who were on duty there killed. It would have been easier to kill them than to tie them up. It would have been safer to kill them. And Max – who we now know to be Vladimir – would have been hanged anyway if the police had got their hands on him, so he had nothing to lose by killing them.’

  ‘So why didn’t I kill them?’ Vladimir asked.

  ‘Because you knew that if I eventually found out, there would be no forgiveness, and I wouldn’t rest until I’d avenged them by killing you.’

  ‘Yes, you do seem to have an exaggerated sense of loyalty to your fellow officers,’ Vladimir agreed.

  ‘Do you want to tell me about the rest of it?’ Blackstone suggested.

  ‘Yes, why not?’ Vladimir agreed. ‘When the snippet of German submarine intelligence came into my hands, I saw immediately how I could make money out of it. And I needed the money. As the war progresses, my department is having to do more and more on less and less cash.’

  ‘So you decided to steal it from us?’

  ‘I decided to seek a subsidy from one of our allies without that ally actually realizing it was subsidizing me.’

  ‘And so you became Max. And at what point did your devious mind work out that this operation could achieve not just one objective but two?’

  ‘Almost immediately.’

  ‘So you set it all up to make it look as if I had been a part of the conspiracy to steal the money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then, after allowing me to wander around London as a fugitive, stewing in my own juice, for a week …’

  ‘You were quite safe. I had my men watching you all the time, and nothing would have been allowed to happen to you.’

  ‘… after allowing me to wander around London as a fugitive, stewing in my own juice, for a week, you appeared and rescued me.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘The old gentleman I found collapsed in the alley was working for you, of course.’

  ‘How can you be sure of that?’

  ‘Because now I’ve got off the whirligig, I’ve started asking myself the questions that I should have asked at the time. And one of those questions was: if the old gentleman wanted some air because he was feeling faint, why didn’t he take his coachman with him for support?’

  ‘Quite right,’ Vladimir agreed.

  ‘Then the two thugs attacked me, and just before you slit the throat of the one straddling me, he screamed something like “Listen, this wasn’t never part …” That wasn’t a plea for mercy, Vladimir – it was a desperate complaint that things weren’t going as they were supposed to.’ Blackstone paused for a second. ‘Was it really necessary to kill them both?’

  ‘Strictly speaking, no,’ Vladimir admitted. ‘But it did add a certain extra verisimilitude to the scene. And you shouldn’t mourn for them, Sam. They were quite willing to kill you. In fact, they were very disappointed when I told them that they couldn’t.’

  ‘It was just too much of a coincidence that you should appear on Battle Bridge Lane at just the right time,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Yes, I always knew that was the weakest part of the whole plan,’ Vladimir admitted, ‘but fortunately you were too busy spinning on your whirligig to see the flaw.’

  ‘What would you have done if Archie Patterson hadn’t decided to rescue me from the Black Maria?’ Blackstone asked.

  Vladimir roared with laughter. ‘You don’t really think I’d have relied on fat Archie to spring you from the Black Maria, do you?’

  ‘Wasn’t it him?’

  ‘Of course not! One of my operatives slipped Patterson a drug in the Goldsmiths’ Arms, and while another of my men was freeing you, your fat sergeant was quite happily snoring away in a back alley.’

  ‘Why was it necessary to implicate Archie by dressing your man in a coat just like his?’ Blackstone asked, a hint of anger in his voice.

  ‘Why should you be so concerned about that?’ Vladimir wondered. ‘It’s true that Patterson went through two weeks of minor discomfort, but he did emerge at the end of it with a promotion.’

  ‘I don’t think his family will have considered it a minor discomfort,’ Blackstone said stonily. ‘Why did you implicate him?’

  ‘For the same reason that I implicated you – but we’ll come to that later,’ Vladimir said airily. ‘The important point is that once my excellent lawyer – Mr Hartington – had secured his release on bail, I set Patterson on the trail that would eventually – and inevitably – lead him to Brighton.’

  ‘You set him on the trail?’

  ‘Oh yes, I planted lots of clues. I even told Hartington to make sure he used the words “paper trail”, which made Archie think – as I knew it would – of the government warehouse containing all those records.’

  ‘You planted the attaché case and the railway ticket to Brighton in Max’s lodgings.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know now why you insisted I should be the one to buy the case in the first place,’ Blackstone said. ‘You knew I’d mark it in some way, so it could be identified later. And it was very important that when Archie found the bag, he could positively identify it.’

  ‘Just so,’ Vladimir agreed.

  ‘But why did you insist that I buy it from Harrods?’

  ‘I knew that would worry you – and I wanted you worrying over the details that didn’t matter, because that might stop you thinking about the details that did.’

  ‘It was your men who placed the photograph of Max and Brigham in the photographer’s window in Brighton, wasn’t it?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because if the photographer had taken the picture himself, he would have given Brigham a ticket for it, and once Brigham was aware of the photograph’s existence, he would have bought up all the copies of it.’

  ‘You’re quite right,’ Vladimir agreed. ‘One of my people took the photograph and then bribed the photographer to display it in his window. I had several ingenious schemes in play to make sure that Ellie Carr actually saw the photograph, but none of them proved necessary.’

  ‘Why did you select Brigham to take the fall?’

  ‘That had more to do with Max than with Brigham. In 1911, he was conscripted into the submarine service. He never did join it, of course, but you didn’t know that, so he was the ideal person to hide behind.’

  ‘So you knew Max before the war?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you know him?’

  ‘When he was lodging with Mrs Wilson, he held wild parties with the sole aim of making the other tenants leave, and when they did go, Max took over their rooms and moved his friends in.’

  ‘I know about that from Patterson’s notes.’

  ‘And do Patterson’s notes tell you why Mr
s Wilson tolerated such behaviour?’

  ‘She told him Max’s friends were prepared to pay twice as much for the rooms.’

  ‘And so they were. They could afford to, because what Mrs Wilson didn’t tell Patterson was that she and Max were in partnership and were running a male brothel. And that brothel had some very interesting clients – military men and civil servants, for example.’

  ‘So that’s how you got to know Max – he was spying for you.’

  ‘Yes, he did feed me a titbit of information now and again, though nothing of very great importance. Then he got his call-up papers from the German submarine service, and he went on the run. He still continued in his chosen profession – a man has to live – but now he was working independently. I kept tabs on him, because I knew that one day he might be useful to me again. And once I got the submarine plans, I knew exactly how I could use him, though, of course, he would know absolutely nothing about it.’

  ‘Brigham was one of his clients,’ Blackstone guessed.

  ‘He was – and that made him perfect for what I had in mind. Even now, I’m willing to wager, he’d rather be thought of as a spy than as a pederast.’

  ‘If the police had caught Max, the whole plot would have fallen apart,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Yes, it would. And that is why I had him packaged up and sent home to dear old dad.’

  As well as the camouflaged soldiers lying in the street, there were now men at the apartment windows and on the roofs. Twenty rifles were pointed at the window of the apartment on the first floor, another dozen at the front door of the building.

  They were only waiting for the team with the battering ram to arrive, and then they were ready to go.

  ‘I’ve been very patient, but now I’d like to know why you felt it was necessary to frame Archie Patterson?’ Blackstone said.

  ‘I did it because I knew that while you’d never come to Russia to save yourself, you might come to save Patterson.’

  ‘You must have wanted me here very badly.’

  ‘I did. I never really tried to hide that.’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘I always knew you brought me here for a purpose, but I still don’t know what the purpose was.’