‘Like what?’
‘She was quite a looker.’
‘Rose? Are we talking about the same woman?’
He seemed surprised again. ‘Nicely turned out, she was. Hadn’t let herself go like some of the tenants I get. Didn’t peg her as the type to do a flit, if you want to know the truth, but it takes all sorts.’
He dug the rental agreement out of his files to show me and I looked at Cochrane’s signature. Rose hadn’t needed to sign it. He was going to drop it into his basket so I asked if I might keep it.
‘Just wastepaper now,’ he said. ‘Take it if you want.’
I thanked him and took the tube back to Clerkenwell where I found a lorry parked outside the flat and Stan helping a man off-load a cast iron stove. The three of us struggled up the stairs with it to where Ida was waiting dressed in a housecoat and a headscarf, smudges of dust blackening her pretty face. The bruise around her eye had gone down and the split lip had healed a bit more and she was trying to stand out of the way while Stan manhandled the stove on his own, demonstrating I suppose what a healthy young lad he still was. Looking at the two together, I decided Stan hadn’t spent the night with her. Something in the way he was behaving reminding me of a love-struck adolescent. Not a pretty sight in a bruiser like him but there’s no vaccine for the virus and it doesn’t only target the young. I took a leaf out of Ida’s book and kept out of Stan’s way, too. There wasn’t much point in telling him what I’d discovered about Rose Kearney, as his mind looked to be on other things, and Monday in the office would be soon enough.
Back in the flat, I dropped the rental agreement the agent had given me on the table——the place where most of my paperwork fetched up. I still had some bread and found a little piece of cheese in my larder so I bought myself a bottle of beer at the off-licence counter in the pub and made myself some lunch. Sitting at the table I saw the reply to Penny’s letter I’d begun the previous evening, read a few lines, then screwed it up and tossed it into the waste bin. Perhaps seeing how Stan was behaving had knocked some of the sentiment out of me, but looking at what I’d written made me embarrassed to think of Penny reading it. So, instead of thinking about her, I thought about Rose Kearney.
Looking on the charitable side I could see a bit there. To give her the benefit of the doubt, her story of having a cousin Patrick might have been no more than a fabrication to hide the fact she was living with a man. And I suppose she was hardly likely to give her name as Kearney to the letting agent while posing as the wife of Patrick Cochrane. Even all that business about her cousin not liking the British army might just have been a spur of the moment excuse for him not to show his face when Susie and I called round.
Given that then, why wasn’t I feeling charitable? For one thing I couldn’t forget the letting agent describing Rose as a looker. Susie had sensed there was something about her although, beyond the nail varnish, hadn’t been able to put her finger on it. It also seemed suspicious that the two of them——Rose and her so-called husband——had done a moonlight flit shortly after I’d got in touch. Coincidence or something more? It was true that apart from the men supposedly visiting the flat I hadn’t been the only one to call on her——the mysterious Major Hendrix had also been there——and so it might have been him who spooked her. Just why, though, I couldn’t guess. After all, if she had something to hide, why make enquiries about her brother and give out her address?
I thought about Hendrix again and his careless use of different background stories——Graves Commission with Edna Burleigh, Paymaster General’s office with Rose, Provost Marshal with Jack...he’d told Ida he was from Arnold Poole’s battalion. Jekyll maintained no one knew him but I wasn’t ready to take that at face value yet. We knew Colonel G had sections other than ours digging around in his musty files and, despite his claim that he had “just passed” the Dabs’ file on to me, it would be typical of Jekyll to deny the existence of one of his own. Even if I had no idea why he’d do it.
And then it occurred to me that if it wasn’t Jekyll, there was still another possibility...
I finished my beer, giving the matter some thought before going off half-cocked. Then I pulled out my old address book. Combing through the telephone numbers, I wondered how many still existed. Most were pre-war and some perhaps little more than holes in the ground now. But the only way to find the man I was after was to start ringing so I dug out all the copper from my pockets, went down the hall to the pay phone, and piled my stack of pennies on top of it.
It was rather like trying to find a way through a maze: wrong numbers like wrong turns until someone I’d known, who didn’t know the man but knew someone who might, would send me in a different direction. Often it proved a blind path, leading me back to where I’d started, but finally by mid-afternoon I had made some progress. Like slipping through a gap in the hedge, I was given an office number to call. No names, and when I did there was a flat denial the man I was after even worked there. But they took my number——just in case.
That was the way of Special Branch. But I’d learned a trick or two myself about deviousness since I’d first run into Henry Gifford.
13
I first met Gifford a year or two before the war. I was eager and officious back then and not out of the police college long enough to have learned any better. As I have said, the station to which I was assigned meant my beat was around one of the better parts of London, certainly among the most expensive. There was money, a smattering of titles, and several consulates and embassies. Burglary was the worst problem——at least for a copper at my level——and it had been made clear we were there to protect the property and persons of those within our precinct. And that we had better know our place while we were doing it.
One evening sometime after midnight and towards the end of my shift, I happened to notice a car parked in West Halkin Street, lights off, with two men sitting in the front seat. I was on the other side of the road and I walked on, affecting not to notice them. I circled around the block and came back behind the car some ten minutes later. It was still there, as were the men. Approaching the nearside front window, I got out my torch and shone it inside. The window wound down and a thin-faced man squinted up at me from under a trilby hat.
‘Move along, sonny, will you? We’re working.’
Being eager and officious I didn’t take kindly to being called sonny and was about to ask the man to step out of the car when he flashed some sort of identification at me. I didn’t get a good look at it and before I could say anything else the driver said, ‘Jesus! He’s leaving,’ and drove off. Leaving me standing on the pavement shining my torch like a fool after them.
I’d been alert enough to get the car number, though, and when I got back to the station gave it to my desk sergeant who said he’d phone it through to the vehicle licensing department. I didn’t think anything more of it until I went on shift the next day and the sergeant told me there was someone waiting to see me in our interview room.
Gifford was there, back to me and staring at the wall as if it was a picture window. He was a tall man, dressed in a raincoat and dark trousers and when he turned around, balanced between a pair of ears designed to catch the wind, I saw a face that might have earned him a living as a professional mourner. They seemed the only mark of individuality about him, the ears and a bristle moustache that put me in mind of the novelist George Orwell.
‘Inspector Gifford,’ he said, by way of introduction. ‘Constable Tennant, is it?’
I was standing as stiff as a broom handle not knowing what to expect.
‘You took the number of a car last night in West Halkin Street, is that right?’
I said it was, and had been pleased with myself for being sufficiently quick to do so. But if I had been expecting a pat on the back Gifford’s tone suggested he hadn’t come to commend me. Although I could think of several reasons why I should have taken the car’s number, something told me not to offer them in mitigation.
‘You were
shown a warrant card, is that correct?’
I told him I hadn’t got a good look at it before they drove away.
‘They were my men,’ Gifford said, ‘and they were watching one of the houses. You putting your big boot into it might have ruined the whole operation.’
I apologised and was impertinent enough to suggest that if there had been a surveillance operation in our district it might have been helpful if we’d been informed.
‘Tell every beat copper what we’re up to?’ Gifford roared back at me. ‘How long do you think that’ll be kept under the helmet?’
I didn’t think he wanted an answer so kept quiet.
‘Smoke?’ he asked suddenly, pulling a packet of Craven ‘A’ cork tips out of his raincoat pocket.
I declined on the grounds of being on duty.
‘Quite right too,’ said Gifford, then lit one himself and carefully placed the spent match in the clean ashtray on the single square table, treading on a dozen spent matches on the floor as he reached over to do so. ‘Well,’ he said, expelling a stream of smoke, ‘I don’t think we can risk another parked car for a night or two. So what’s the answer?’
I wasn’t sure if this question was rhetorical so didn’t reply. When the silence started to become embarrassing, though, I began suggesting hesitantly that since the house in question was on my beat, if I knew which one he was keeping under surveillance, I could keep a watch out myself.
‘This isn’t a Buck Ryan cartoon,’ Gifford replied sarcastically.
I countered that by saying the residents were used to seeing me walk down the street several times a night, and would think nothing of it.
He seemed to consider the suggestion then told me which house he was interested in.
‘Nothing out of the ordinary, Tennant. Don’t increase the number of times you pass the place. But if you do happen to see anyone enter or leave, a car arrive, or anything else at all, just make a note of it and let me know.’ He wrote a number on a card and placed it on the table.
Back to being pleased with myself, I assured him I would.
‘And the next time you see two men in a parked car along that street, walk on by even if one of them’s dressed like the Angel Gabriel, understand?
‘And here,’ he said, dropping his Special Branch warrant card onto the table in front of me. ‘The next time you’re shown one of these, you’ll know what it is.’
I didn’t see anything happen at the house, of course, and my shift was changed before I had a chance to see the men and the car again. After a couple of months, I’d all but forgotten the incident. It only came to mind after Chamberlain returned from Munich with his piece of paper and over the next few months Special Branch made several arrests of suspected spies. Gifford’s name may have been mentioned but whether, at the time I met him, he had been looking for German agents or Russian, I couldn’t say. He certainly hadn’t. And after the Russians and Germans signed their non-aggression pact in August 1939, just a few days before war was declared, it hardly mattered.
By then everyone knew war was inevitable and, after Dunkirk when it became obvious we were on our own, I swapped uniforms. Of course in Berlin a few years later there was no shortage of spies. And no shortage of Intelligence agents supposedly countering them. I never had much to do with them beyond liaising with the local police if one of them got himself in strife, but we all knew SIS had men on the ground and that they were liaising with MI5 and Special Branch back home.
Well, that was the way it was supposed to work, and we were expected to stay out of their way. That had suited me then, but the wheel turns and we either make accommodations or we’re liable to find ourselves in a seat at the bottom with no view. Those sitting at the top, of course, can see everything that’s going on around them.
And that’s how I was beginning to feel——sitting at the bottom of the wheel——and if I was ever going to see what was going on around me I decided I needed to do something about it.
*
I left my door open so I’d hear the telephone if it rang but it was gone six in the evening before it did. I clattered down the stairs to catch it before they rang off and was panting so hard I could hardly hear the man on the other end when he said his name was Gifford. I took a deep breath and told him that we had once met. Before the war, when I was in the police force. Now, I said talking myself up, I headed up a military war crimes unit and was concerned I might be in danger of stepping on Special Branch’s toes with my latest investigation. I needed some guidance, I told him, and suggested we meet. He didn’t sound keen. I assumed he felt his steel toecaps more than sufficient to protect his toes from the likes of me. So that’s when, in the vaguest of ways, I dropped Sir Maurice Coveney’s name into the conversation. I said I’d heard the Foreign Office might have an interest in the case I was pursuing. Gifford asked where I was and I told him near Farringdon underground station. He named a pub some half-a-mile from it and said, seven o’clock.
I knew the place although had never been inside. When I got there I could see why. It lay at the dingy end of the spectrum London pubs run and, although the competition down among the sawdust and the dirt and the lack of hospitality can often be fierce, this place must have been in the running for a rosette. I found a few drinkers here and there when I walked in, sitting like islands of depression in a sea of silence. Even the barman didn’t speak. He merely looked at me with a blend of boredom and expectancy. I asked for a pint of beer, paid for it and took a sip, soon wishing I hadn’t. The other drinkers were avoiding being caught looking at me and none, as far as I could see, fit the idea of what I thought Gifford might look like eight years older. I took a table near the door where I could see anyone who came in and left my sour beer to stew in its own juice.
I knew Gifford as soon as he walked in, a fact I can take little credit for as no one else came through the door from ten-to-seven until twenty past. I didn’t know what George Orwell looked like after six years of war but Gifford hadn’t changed that much. Bespectacled now and a little stooped, as if catching spies in wartime had been a wearing business, he seemed just a touch greyer than I remembered and perhaps more mournful. He walked to the bar without looking around, bought a whisky and came straight to my table as if he’d known me for years.
‘Constable Tennant,’ he said with what I supposed for him passed as humour.
‘You remember me, then?’
‘West Halkin Street, wasn’t it? You put one of your big boots into an operation of mine.’
‘I hope I didn’t ruin it,’ I said.
‘No, my marks weren’t that smart. I had your shift changed though. Just in case. I don’t suppose you minded——daylight hours are generally more sociable. Or are you like me and prefer the night?’
He was looking at me as if he was genuinely interested in my answer. Oddly it had never occurred to me that it might have been Gifford who had engineered my shift change. Eager, officious and naïve, it seemed.
I shrugged, as if it hardly mattered. ‘A police constable just does what he’s told.’
‘Not now though?’ he asked. ‘When did you switch to the army?’
‘Nineteen-forty.’
‘You could have stayed where you were. Even London would have been safer.’
‘That’s what my wife said.’
‘Going back into the force?’ He raised two greying eyebrows and regarded me over the top of his spectacles. Had he worn them when we first met? I didn’t think so.
‘I doubt it,’ I replied. ‘I can’t imagine myself going back as a copper on the beat. Not after——’ What I was going to say was not after having the rank of captain and running my own unit, but I didn’t finish.
‘There’s ways,’ Gifford said. ‘Don’t dismiss it out of hand. Unless you’ve got something else in view...?’
It struck me that I had very little in view beyond the immediate future. It also struck me that although I was the one who had got in touch with him in the hope of learning something,
Gifford was the one getting all the information.
‘What I called you about,’ I said, getting to the point, ‘was an investigation I’m conducting into a dead private and a missing sergeant. I’m finding a man called Hendrix getting everywhere before me. Says he’s a major but can’t make up his mind in what.’
‘What’s so special about your two men?’ Gifford asked.
Exactly what I’d been wondering myself. Beyond the manner of Dabs’ death, ostensibly nothing at all. Since I wasn’t aware of anything particularly sensitive about our work——certainly nothing I couldn’t say to a member of Special Branch——I told him about Kearney and the rest of the carrier crew; how Dabs was found shot in the back of the head.
‘We investigate anything that might possibly be classed as a war crime,’ I explained. ‘Not the big stuff——concentration camps and the wholesale massacres——more run-of-the-mill incidents. Summary execution of POWs...reprisals against civilians...that sort of thing.’
‘And who did you say your section was under?’
I hadn’t but since it wouldn’t have taken him long to find out I gave him Jekyll’s name.
‘And this Hendrix, you’re sure he isn’t connected with another unit who might be looking into the same incident? SIB, for instance?’
The Special Investigation Branch were part of the military police but the equivalent of the CID. They came from all the services but mostly from the army, having been formed early on in the war. I had thought it possible that Hendrix was SIB, but any attempt to find out on my part would have had to go through Jekyll and I had to assume he’d already checked.
‘Not according to my colonel,’ I said.
‘Well he’s not someone I’ve run across. Description?’
For a moment I wasn’t sure if Gifford meant Hendrix or Jekyll. Assuming he was talking about Hendrix I said:
‘No, afraid not.’
The truth is, until recently, it had never occurred to me to ask anyone for a description. People tend to look at the uniform rather than the man. I told him about the carrier crew and how all the family members we’d interviewed had already been approached by Hendrix. ‘And the odd thing is,’ I said, ‘he tells everyone a different story.’
The Unquiet Grave Page 13
