Skyprobe

by Philip McCutchan

  “Ah—Shaw.” It was Latymer. “A news item, for what it’s worth. Danvers-MarshaU’s wife has landed at London airport ex New York. She’s gone straight to her mother-in-law in Long Melford, that’s in Suffolk—near Sudbury. Apparently the old lady’s ill.” The voice paused. “It just occurs to me you might find it useful to have a talk with her.”

  “Oh . . . yes, sir?”

  “Don’t sound so damned skeptical. She’s the closest thing we have to Danvers-Marshall, and women have an attribute they call intuition. Or so they tell me. I’m authorizing you to break security on this and tell her there’s some possibility of trouble. She might come up with something that’ll help. You’ll have to be cruel to be kind— get her worried about her husband’s safety and the results could be quite surprising. You see, if we assume the chief objective of the people behind the threat is Danvers-Marshall himself, then these people just might have cast some sort of shadow before them, if you follow. Something that might have been noticed by a woman—in retrospect that is, once she has cause for anxiety. I may be talking nonsense, but I don’t propose to neglect any possible avenues, however remote. This thing could be dynamite, Shaw . . . if that isn’t too old-world a simile.”

  “I know that, sir. What’s the reaction from the States?” Latymer said, “Cautious disbelief that anything could really happen, except possibly some interception attempt by submarines on splashdown, as I suggested. They’ll be covering that, naturally. They say nothing can go wrong otherwise, but they’ll be on the alert for trouble and the CIA boys are already digging. For the time being they’re not saying anything to the men in the capsule—they don’t want to load them with the extra anxiety unnecessarily. What they do next, depends on what emerges. The wife’s name is Katherine, by the way. She’s also British by birth.” He passed the Danvers-Marshall address then abruptly rang off.

  * * *

  Skyprobe IV was over West Australia as, early next morning, Shaw let himself into his garage. The astronauts were looking down from the intense purple-blackness of the heavens at the vast expanse of the Southland, at the far-distant, twisting eddies and currents and tides of the sea off the Leeuwin and right along the coast to King Sound and beyond—indeed almost all Australia could be seen in a glance. Schuster and Morris felt almost like gods., all-powerful, all-seeing, as they cruised on through space. By the time Shaw was backing the NSU Wankel Spider two-seater convertible out of the garage the astronauts were already over the Brisbane River and Danvers-Marshall was snoring gently in a light sleep. As the capsule headed out across the Pacific and began to come within the calling area of the tracking station on Hawaii, Shaw was punishing the Wankel—she was a new acquisition, a gem of a car with a single rotor Wankel rotary piston engine, rear-mounted and with rear drive, capable of acceleration from zero to sixty in 14.5 seconds, and with a diaphragm clutch and four-speed, all-synchromesh gearbox. Shaw reached the straggling village of Long Melford soon after 0900 hours, finding the Danvers-Marshall home dose to The Bull inn. It was early for a call but there wasn’t time to worry too much about the conventions. A still-attractive woman of around fifty, with grey eyes and a mass of greying auburn hair—a woman with a shy, withdrawn manner that he found appealing—opened the door to him.

  He asked, “Mrs. Danvers-Marshall?”

  “Yes?” She looked back at him enquiringly.

  “May I come in?” Shaw produced his pass. As she examined it he noticed the sudden whiteness in her face, the lines of worry around eyes and mouth that seemed to have deepened already. She asked, “Is this to do with my husband?”

  “Why do you ask that, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall?”

  She flushed this time as she met his eyes. “Why, he seems the only likely link with you people, Commander Shaw.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. It does in fact concern your husband, and you may be able to help us.” He repeated, “May I come in?”

  “Oh yes—of course.” She moved back jerkily from the door. “I’m so sorry, I—” She broke off and Shaw followed her into a cool hall, dark with old oak, and from there into a long drawing-room furnished with expensive antiques. She told him to sit, but remained standing herself, with her back to a big fireplace. He thought: she’s badly on edge . .. the Ministry pass has done that . . . it’s natural enough. Maybe. She was going to have a worse shock in a few minutes; irritably Shaw wished Latymer would run out on bright ideas. He was unconvinced that this was a good one.

  Katherine Danvers-Marshall said, “Well, Commander?” The ‘a’ sound was short, flat; she had been too long in America for her British accent to survive entirely.

  Shaw looked into her eyes. “First, I have to ask you to treat all I say as secret information.” He hesitated. “Can we be overheard?”

  She shook her head. “There’s no-one in the house— except my mother-in-law, that is, and she’s in bed. The daily’s not here yet.”

  “Right. Now, what I have to say mustn’t be discussed with anyone at all—not even with your mother-in-law.” Again he hesitated. “I’m bound to add this: the Official Secrets Act could be invoked in the event of any breach of security.”

  “I understand all that,” she said with an underlying edginess in her voice. “I’ve lived with security a good many years now! Will you please get on with what you want to say, Commander?”

  He said, “Yes, of course. I'll start by telling you we’re asking for your help so as to prevent any possibility of anything going wrong with Skyprobe IV while your husband’s in the capsule.” He caught the sudden look of fear in her eyes. “I’ll give you the facts straight, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall.” He told her briefly of his encounter in The Goat in Stafford Street, and of the killing of the man who had tried to pass him a message, and of the possibility of trouble developing with the spacecraft as its centre.

  Her hands were shaking now. She saw he had noticed, and she clasped her fingers behind her back, standing before the fireplace like a man warming his backside. She asked, “Have you no idea what this . . . this threat might be?”

  “No,” he told her. “I’m sorry to say it, but we have no ideas at all at the moment, no leads. I was wondering—”

  “Who was the man?” she asked sharply.

  He said, “I don’t know that either—not for certain. But I believe he was a Pole, and—”

  “A Pole?”

  “Yes. . . He looked at her searchingly, alerted by something in the rigidity of her stance. “Yes, he was a Pole. In fact, I believe him to have been a Colonel Stefan Aleksander Spalinski.” He stopped; her body had swayed a little and her face was a bad colour. He was about to get up and go to her when she stopped him with a gesture of her hand.

  She asked, “Just what do you know about this Colonel Spalinski, Commander?”

  Gravely he returned the question to her. “What do you know about him, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall?”

  FIVE

  The only sound in the room came from a clock which ticked the seconds away behind Katherine Danvers-Marshall’s back. Shaw waited for her to answer his question, watching her face meanwhile. There was fear and anxiety in her eyes but after a while she said in a clipped tone, “It was bound to come out, wasn’t it. Sooner or

  later? I knew that. I always said so to my husband, but he wouldn’t listen. You see, he was so wrapped up in his work. He refused to risk any interruption in that” Suddenly her shoulders drooped; she had a defeated look. “If he’d been . . . entirely honest they’d have taken him off all work involving a security risk, wouldn’t they? Anyway, that was what he believed. Myself, well, I never did think they’d have gone as far as that, but he always said they would.”

  She stopped. Shaw sat very still. When she didn’t go on he said promptingly, “I think you have quite a lot to explain, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall.” He repeated his question, his face hard now: “What do you know of Stefan Aleksander Spalinski?”

  * * *

  It was a slightly sordid but wholly understandable story
of promiscuity and evasion. Katherine Danvers-Marshall had known Spalinski years before; her husband, she said, had never met him—but, for a very personal reason, she, at least, owed much to Spalinski and his wife. Spalinski’s wife, the woman who had been the girl Vanessa Burnside, had been married previously to Katherine Danvers-Marshall’s cousin Arnold Burnside, who had been killed at Dunkirk. Katherine, who had been deeply attached to her cousin, had grown fond of Vanessa also. At about the time of her cousin’s marriage Katherine, then aged nineteen, had fallen very much in love with a young man a few years older than herself; at twenty she had borne his child, a girl. After this she had never seen him again (and later had heard, more or less by chance, that he also had been killed at Dunkirk.) As soon as they were able to, the Burnsides had adopted Katherine’s illegitimate baby legally. Katherine had been heartbroken but her parents had made difficulties and in fact the child couldn’t have had a better home. Thus, owing to the cousin’s death in action and Vanessa’s subsequent re-marriage, to Spalinski, it was Katherine Danvers-Marshall’s daughter who was now living, presumably in Poland still, as Spalinski’s stepdaughter. The Spalinskis had taken her there when they had left England in 1948 and Katherine, who two years after they left had married Neil Danvers-Marshall, had had no contact with them since. She had told Danvers-Marshall everything, and, apparently, he had understood. Nothing of the past had ever been talked about to anyone, never even mentioned except between themselves, and by the time of the marriage, which was almost twelve years after the birth of Katherine’s baby, with a world war between, none of their friends knew anything of the story; also, Katherine’s parents were dead by this time and she had never been back to her old home. Thus when Danvers-Marshall had been screened by the security people in the States, nothing had been known and Danvers-Marshall had never volunteered anything. Katherine admitted that he had given deliberately untruthful answers to certain questions and had falsified forms, but this had not been from wrong motives. He was anxious only that nothing should stand in the way of his work; and he was convinced that such a connection in a Communist country would ensure that he was turned down on security grounds.

  “He was probably dead right,” Shaw said grimly. “Especially in the States! He’d be considered wide open to persuasion. That’s precisely the kind of pressure the Communists love to exploit. Now—let’s have a little more about Spalinski.”

  She said, “I can tell you one thing, they could never have pinned Communistic leanings on Stefan—or on Neil, of course.”

  “If Spalinski wasn’t a Communist, why did he return to Poland?”

  She said quietly, “Because he loved his country and had never quite settled to English life. And also because he had been a pre-war officer in the Polish Army. He wanted to fight for Poland in the only way left to him once the war was over—underground.” She added, “When he was still in England, after the war, he became a member of the NTS. I believe he went back to Poland as an agent for them.”

  “Did he indeed? That’s extremely useful to know!” Here was an avenue that could well yield up whatever it was Spalinski had been trying to tell him; Shaw knew precisely where he could find the British agents of the anti-Communist organization known as the NTS. The Popular

  Labour Alliance—which was the translation of the Russian name—was in fact a Russian set-up but it had many sympathizers and active supporters in the satellite countries. Its aim was consistently to organize anti-Communist forces with the object of fostering revolution by peaceful means. To this eventual end the NTS, as directed from its operational centre in Frankfurt, maintained representatives in all important seaports. These agents contacted seamen from Communist-bloc ships in order to disseminate literature and establish contacts with members inside the Communist countries. In addition the NTS organized frontier crossings into these countries and had even, from time to time, dropped parachutists inside the Communist borders. Perhaps this was how the Spalinskis had entered Poland in 1948—completely with forged papers, to start a new life. The Polish authorities could scarcely have been unaware of Spalinski’s connection with the NTS; as Spalinski, he could hardly have expected to remain alive for long once he had crossed the border. He would have been provided with a completely new identity, but Katherine Danvers-Marshall couldn’t be expected to know about that. . . .

  Shaw asked, “Have you any ideas as to what this threat Spalinski spoke of could be? In your personal relationship with your husband, can you find any clues, any pointers?”

  She was puzzled. “How do you mean, exactly, Commander?”

  Shaw frowned; it was a hard question to answer. Latymer had failed to convince him that a woman’s intuition could pierce the intricacies of a Communist plot in advance. He said off-handedly, “It just occurred to me that you might have noticed something off-beat . . . that’s all really.”

  “Men lurking around Florida with cloaks and daggers?” She laughed, cynically. “Doesn’t the British Defence Staff or whatever it is, know better than that, Commander?”

  “I apologize,” he told her, smiling. “I just thought you might have been aware of something in the air—that possibly, for example, your husband had had something on his mind, that he might have made unscheduled trips perhaps, during which, let’s say, he could have been approached by persons who wished to talk to him privately?”

  She stiffened. “Do you mean Neil might have been in touch with foreign agents, Commander Shaw? Why, that’s just ridiculous! He just isn’t—”

  “No,” Shaw broke in. “I don’t mean that—at least, I certainly don’t mean to suggest he’d ever had initiated anything of that sort. But, you see, I do find it hard to believe the Communists would be planning anything that might say, destroy Skyprobe IV unless they had first contacted your husband with a view to getting him to part with information—or whatever it is they want—while he was still on the ground. After all—he’s a pretty valuable property to both sides. He’s not expendable. Do you follow?”

  Her mouth was still tight. “Yes,” she said. “I follow, all right. But there wasn’t anything like that, I assure you. He’d have told me—I know he would. And if there had been anything likely to go wrong, and if Neil had known about it, or if approaches, as you call them, had been made to him . . . well, he’d scarcely have cleared the flight at all, would he? He’d have reported to NASA or CIA or someone and called it off!”

  “It was just an idea,” Shaw murmured, “and obviously a poor one! In any case, this threat may not exist at all for all I can say at the moment.” He didn’t want to add to this woman’s worries by reminding her that Danvers-Marshall was still liable to pressures on account of the girl in Poland and that, if approaches had been made, he could hardly report them unless at the same time he was prepared to reveal that he had come in on a dirty ticket years before. In the light of what he had heard, and of what Latymer had told him the previous day, Shaw was currently unhappy about Neil Danvers-Marshall; but all he said, when he got to his feet, was: “I don’t think I need bother you any more for now, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall. You’ve been a lot of help, and I’m grateful.” He paused, then said casually, “As a matter of fact, though, there is just one more thing. Do you know a man called Rudolf Rencke, by any chance?”

  “Rudolf Rencke?” She frowned. “Heavens, what a name . . . no, I’ve never heard of him. Should I have?”

  He shrugged. “Not necessarily.” He turned for the door, but she stopped him.

  She asked, “What about Neil. . . afterwards?”

  “Once we’ve bowled this thing out and the capsule’s down safely?” He felt she was going ahead a little too fast, perhaps. He wanted to let her down lightly for now, even at the expense of a white lie. He went on, “I’m bound to report what you’ve told me, you’ll realize that, and I can’t forecast the official reaction. But I doubt if after all these years they’d drop a man of the Professor’s stature just because of an omission in his original security statement, still less make any charges publ
ic.” He didn’t add that that would apply only if Danvers-Marshall hadn’t in fact had any contact with hostile agents that he had failed to report; he left her to fill that in for herself.

  * * *

  By lunch-time Shaw was back in London.

  Wasting no time he drove through to the car park at Tower Hill, where he left the Wankel. He walked quickly through to Houndsditch where half way along he took a turning to the left. He crossed the road, went on for another thirty yards, then entered a dismal-looking shop over which was a fascia board inscribed P. J. Fetters. Stamps—Coins—Curios. A bell gave a tinny sound as he pushed the door open. There was a musty smell, a smell compounded of dust and mothballs, decay and mildew and damp. Shaw waited at the counter; behind it, a door led into P. J. Fetters’s private apartments but no P. J. Fetters appeared. Shaw went back to the door and operated the bell again. He returned to the counter and banged on the wood. When this produced no result he went behind the counter and opened the inner door and he found P. J. Fetters stone cold dead on the floor of a shadowy room overfilled with stuffy Victoriana.

  SIX

  P. J. Fetters had been an old man with silver hair. That hair was covered now by a black skull cap, a fitting tribute to the dead. Shaw knew all he needed to know about him. He had been a White Russian, and one of the founder-members of the NTS in London. His name at birth had been Serge Neruyin, and his father had been an officer of the Czar’s court at St. Petersburgh. Shaw looked quickly round the room. On either side of an empty fireplace were armchairs, dilapidated and overstuffed with bulging horsehair. The small space was burdened with a proliferation of P. J. Fetters’s wares—stamps mounted on sheets of squared paper, coins in frames and in specially fitted velvet-lined presentation boxes, curios ranging from stuffed baby crocodiles and the coloured shells of sea urchins to fearsome-looking weapons from all over the world. In a cage in the grimy window a dispirited canary sat glumly on its perch, staring at P. J. Fetters’s body with beady-eyed unhopefulness of ever again being fed. The floor and the general clutter of stock in the area below the suspended cage were liberally sprinkled with discarded birdseed husks.