Estocada

by Graham Hurley

  Lutzow’s map was back on the blackboard. He used the pointer to jab at the Nationalist positions around Durango. To his disgust, the Condor Legion were dropping bombs for no reason at all. Kill hundreds of civilians, and still Franco’s generals refused to drive their men forward. Hopeless.

  A pilot at the back of the room raised a hand. He wanted to know where the war might go next.

  ‘Good question.’ Lutzow returned to the map. ‘In time even General Mola will move. The axis of advance is this way, along the river.’ The pointer tracked north, then paused eleven kilometres from the coast. ‘My guess is that we bomb again, perhaps here, to bottle up the Reds as they retreat.’

  Dieter had a poor view of the map. He asked for the name of the town. Lutzow obliged with a weary sigh.

  ‘Guernica,’ he said.

  2

  DROCHAID, 12 NOVEMBER 1937

  Tam Moncrieff lay in the dampness of the heather, his binoculars trained on a herd of deer grazing in the valley below. He’d been stalking them since sunrise, following their slow passage along the further bank of the river, making notes on the behaviour of the younger animals, on who bossed whom, on which of the young does was first to the best pasture, on which one took fright at the slightest hint of danger.

  In all there were nine beasts, including three females and a magnificent stag the estate’s ghillie had christened Hermann. The nickname, far from subtle, was intended to raise a smile amongst a party of German industrialists booked in to enjoy a week’s recreational slaughter on the modest Moncrieff estate. They were due to fly into the windswept airfield at Aberdeen at the weekend. Tam’s notes, together with the ghillie’s inexhaustible fund of stories, would serve as an appetiser when they settled around the dining room table for supper ahead of their first day in the field.

  Moncrieff’s shotgun lay beside him. He killed for the pot, mainly pigeons and woodcock and the odd hare. All that would come later in the day when his interest in the deer was exhausted, but the knowledge that he had a weapon at hand was oddly comforting.

  He’d learned to shoot properly in the Royal Marines, a decade and a half of ceaseless challenge that had brought him to the edge of middle age. At thirty-three, with the rank of Major, he’d been assured of further promotion if he’d been prepared to sit behind a desk, grow slowly fatter and joust for territorial advantage with the other high-flyers in the endless corridors of the War Ministry. None of these prospects held the slightest attraction for Tam Moncrieff and so here he was, back in the Cairngorms, cooking for his mad father, chopping logs for the fire, scaling a ladder to replace yet another length of guttering, while at the same time trying to tease the beginnings of a business from the glorious creatures below.

  Week-long shoots with full board had been his mother’s idea. Bedridden with cancer of the liver, one of her last conversations with Tam had been sparked by a visit from a longstanding friend with a much larger estate in the Borders. The McClennans, she whispered, were making a great deal of money out of business people from down south eager for a taste of life in the wild. They charged their clients ridiculous fees, even when they returned from the shoot empty-handed, and it seemed they were only too happy to pay.

  Tam, at first, had dismissed the idea. He knew his mother was frantic to find ways to fill the gap in her husband’s life once she’d gone, as well as giving him an income to live on, but the fact remained that both the house and the grounds were in the saddest of states. Who on earth would be prepared to part with even a modest sum for a week of draughty bedrooms, leaking roofs, uncertain plumbing and unceasing rain?

  His mother, who was only spared the grave by her sheer strength of will, had brooked no argument. If you love me, she’d said, you’ll at least give it a try. And so Tam had put his reservations to one side and set to.

  To his astonishment, the gamble had paid off. Sadly his mother was dead before the first party of guests was due but Tam had rallied support from women in the village to take a paintbrush to room after room. In the meantime, working every hour afforded by the thin winter daylight, he’d spent a sizeable portion of the money left to him by his mother on a programme of badly needed repairs that restored the roof, the windows and an abandoned stable to some kind of order.

  To his slight surprise, he’d enjoyed the work. Making do with his own company had never been a problem. Indeed, he relished the busy silence of The Glebe House. Perched on the roof with a mouthful of nails in the freezing wind he could take his hammer to yet another slate and then lift his head to savour the view down the valley towards the looming frieze of mountains dusted with snow. As a child growing up in the draughty chill of The Glebe House, these mountains had always fascinated him. Smooth, bare and humpy, they looked like the work of a giant on a beach, and as winter gave way to spring and the melt came, he’d taken advantage of the extra daylight to tidy up the pointing on the chimney stacks.

  The first paying guests had arrived in a charabanc from the station on a glorious afternoon in early April. The stalking party, jowly men with ready laughs, came from an aluminium-rolling mill in the West Midlands. Their first breakfast featured bowls of steaming porridge, a platter of Arbroath kippers, and what Tam’s newly acquired cook termed ‘an Ulster fry’. Despite the efforts of the past few months, there was still no disguising the fact that The Glebe House had seen better days, but the men from the Black Country appeared to love it. It was, they said, just the thing. They felt both replete and very much at home.

  Tam remembered the arrival of the morning papers. A lengthy article in The Times had sparked a passionate debate about the awful reports emerging from Northern Spain. A town called Guernica had been more or less destroyed by German bombers from the Condor Legion. One or two of the men around the table considered the incident to be regrettable, wondering aloud what other atrocities Mr Hitler might have up his sleeve, but the overwhelming consensus was that this – from the business point of view – was very good news. The destruction of an unknown town in the Basque Country was proof that a new kind of war was on the way. A war of fighters and bombers. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. All made of aluminium.

  That first morning around the breakfast table had stayed fresh in Tam’s memory. He could still hear the laughter and feel the warmth that bonded these blunt businessmen so eager to stretch their legs and bag a beast or two. It meant that his mother had been right. It meant that the house and the estate, a lifeline for Tam’s bereft father, would remain in the family. And when, at the week’s end, one of the happy guests slipped Tam a handsome tip for the cook and the housekeeper, he’d taken careful note of the muttered advice that came with it. You know where the real money is these days? Get some of those rich Germans across for a spot of shooting. They’ll pay through the nose. You’ll make a fortune.

  As it happened, Tam spoke half-decent German, thanks to his father’s insistence that his son should learn the language. This was back in his schooldays. The Huns might be on their knees after the war, his father had warned, but you’ll never keep these people down. Tam hadn’t enjoyed university at all, but the two years he’d spent studying German before he bailed out and joined the Marines had given him a real taste for the language. He liked the challenge of the grammar. He enjoyed taking a great bite out of a sentence laden with impossibly long words and then giving them a thorough chew. And most of all, on his visits to Berlin and Munich, he enjoyed being able to eavesdrop on conversation after conversation.

  On the whole he’d found the Germans a strange people, a breed apart, and the more he had to do with them the less sure he became that he’d ever properly get their measure. There was much to admire about German Kultur, not least their beer and their music, but it was rare to leave a conversation without a gruff lecture about the iniquities of recent history. How they’d been cheated of victory in the last war. How they’d been bullied into humiliation and poverty by the peace treaty that followed. How they’d very nearly been delivered into the hands of the Communists. O
nly now, thanks to the Nazis, was the rest of the world to discover that Germans were capable of anything. He’d first heard the boast in a Munich Bierhalle and for whatever reason it had refused to go away. A people besotted by their own destiny, he’d concluded, and largely deaf to the opinion of others.

  Tam was back at The Glebe House by late afternoon. He’d bagged a rabbit and a couple of pigeons in the walk down through the woods and he left them in the stable out of reach of the dogs. A car he’d never seen before was parked on the patch of gravel in front of the house and when he went inside he found a stranger sitting at the table in the dining room. He was tall, well-built. He had heavily lidded eyes deep-set in a sallow complexion. A mane of greying hair swept back over the collar of his shirt. The house was full of the sweetness of fresh baking and the stranger was picking up crumbs from his plate with a moistened finger as Tam shut the door.

  ‘Mr Moncrieff?’ He got to his feet and extended a hand. ‘My name’s Sanderson. You’ll forgive me for intruding.’

  ‘You’ve come for the scones?’ Tam was looking at the empty plate.

  ‘A windfall, Mr Moncrieff. One would have been sufficient. Three was your housekeeper’s idea. In my defence, she insisted.’ He smiled for the first time, and then patted the flatness of his belly. ‘Gluttony, I’m afraid. Rude to say no.’

  Moncrieff held his gaze. The newcomer was wearing a well-cut tweed suit that accentuated his powerful frame and there was a hint of a Scots accent in his voice. Edinburgh, Tam thought. Either a lawyer or a businessman.

  ‘So why are you here?’ Tam nodded towards the gathering dusk outside the window. ‘We normally take bookings by post. Or sometimes on the phone. You could have spared yourself the journey.’

  ‘That’s kind of you. But I’m afraid we need to talk.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About you, Mr Moncrieff.’

  *

  Sanderson was gone within the hour, declining an invitation to stay for supper. He’d been less than precise about the details but he assured Tam that he’d come with the authority of his masters down in London. His line of business, a phrase he chose with some care, enjoyed a loose connection to the War Office. He was part of an outfit that belonged to none of the mainstream armed services but had won itself a degree of independence. The work was complex and demanding and much of it took place abroad, and even when they took a scalp or two their efforts went largely unsung. They lived in a world of constantly moving targets, and untold frustrations, and all too often your only guarantee of survival was to be even more devious than the enemy. Yet to sup at this table, he hinted, could be a pleasure as well as a privilege.

  Enemy? Tam had said nothing. He knew enough about the upper reaches of the military to recognise the markings of the priesthood to which Sanderson, if that was his real name, belonged. He clearly worked for one of the intelligence organisations and he was here on a fishing expedition. He’d been sent to take the measure of the ex-Marine, sample his language skills and judge his fitness to serve in a higher cause. This wasn’t a job interview. Sanderson was far too subtle for that. Instead, he’d made Moncrieff aware that he might be able to offer King and country much needed assistance in ways that had nothing to do with conventional warfare. In short, he was being assessed as a potential spy.

  The conversation at an end, Tam had walked him out to the car. A driver materialised from nowhere, emerging from the car to open the rear door. Tam paused in the darkness and then shook Sanderson’s outstretched hand.

  ‘Who gave you my name?’ he asked.

  ‘Gunther Nagel.’

  ‘Gunther’s due here at the weekend. He’s been before. He runs one of the Krupp factories in Essen.’

  ‘That’s right. He said it was a pleasure to meet you. And for the record, he was very impressed.’ He paused. ‘He believes I’m with the Foreign Office, by the way. I wouldn’t want him to think anything else.’

  Without a word of farewell Sanderson ducked into the car. Seconds later it was disappearing down the drive that led back to the village and the main road out towards Aberdeen. Tam watched until he could hear nothing but the wind in the trees. Then – from the house – came the first chords of the evening, the violin still wildly out of tune, and a soft chuckle from the cook as she poured his father’s second whisky.

  Tam listened for a long moment, then stepped back inside the house and put his head round the door of the big kitchen to say hello. The old man glanced across, unshaven, painfully thin. He was wearing a threadbare dressing gown over his pyjamas and he badly needed a haircut. He broke off playing and let the bow dangle from one bony hand.

  ‘Your name, sir?’ He was frowning, annoyed by the interruption.

  Tam stared at him. For a second or two, he assumed that this was some kind of joke, but then he realised that his father meant it.

  ‘My apologies.’ Tam forced a smile, already backing into the passage. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude.’

  *

  Gunther Nagel’s second visit to The Glebe House was an enormous success. He arrived with a small party of favoured executives and news from the Reich, which he shared with a degree of incaution that took Tam by surprise. At the supper table that first night he boasted that factories the length of the Ruhr were producing everything from tanks and heavy artillery to armour plate for the new Kriegsmarine. Capital funding was suddenly no problem and higher wages on the assembly lines had filtered down to the working man. The shops were well-stocked, the kids couldn’t wait to get into uniform, and the Rhineland, peaceably German once again, was thriving. In short, National Socialism had restored German fortunes and German pride, just the way the little corporal had always promised. So much for Versailles. So much for the Bolsheviks. Here’s to the one alliance that will really matter. Das Dritte Reich mit Grossbritannien.

  At the time, reaching for his glass, Tam had said very little but three days later in failing light Nagel managed a fine shot that brought down the biggest of the estate’s stags. Tam and his German guest strode together through the soaking heather to inspect the steaming corpse. The ghillie had got there first but took a respectful step back when the two men approached. Nagel squatted briefly beside the dead beast, his rifle cradled in his arms, insisting on a photo. Afterwards, shaking the rain from his cape, he fell into step alongside Tam for the long walk back to The Glebe House.

  By now it was nearly dark. Nagel, still beaming from the kill, began to enthuse about the challenges awaiting him in Essen. A new steel alloy on which Krupp had just secured a world patent. Calls from the generals in Berlin for yet more battle tanks for the new Panzer divisions. When Tam enquired lightly where all this frenzied rearmament might lead, Nagel paused in the gloom, beckoning Tam closer with a sudden grin. The gesture was conspiratorial, the offer of news you’d only share with a trusted friend.

  ‘Those bloody Czechs,’ he said, ‘will be the first to find out.’

  *

  A week and a half later, nearly December, Tam was summoned to London. The telephone call came from Sanderson. Tam left The Glebe House in darkness the following morning and drove himself to the station in Laurencekirk. A watery sun rose as the train clattered over the Tay Bridge but it was raining long before they crossed the border. The ten-hour journey was interminable, the fug in the compartment laden with pipe tobacco, an overweight Labrador sprawled beside the door.

  Tam resisted the occasional conversational advance from his fellow passengers, staring out through the smeary window at the deadness of winter. The smoky heart of Newcastle and the flat, wet fields further south were an invitation to think in earnest about the decisions that might face him over the coming couple of days. Did he really want to step back into the world of the military? A world where he’d no longer be his own boss? A world where he’d have to do someone else’s bidding?

  In truth, he’d loved much of his time as a bootneck, especially the early days when the Royal Marine instructors – with a mystifying belief in this towe
ring ex-university student – had set him challenge after challenge. He’d risen to all of them, surprised and gladdened that his body had proved so infinitely capable, but there’d come moments when his growing self-belief hadn’t been quite enough to overcome the inner conviction that what he was doing was crazy.

  One night in the Western Highlands he and his troop had scrambled for six hours in full combat order up and down a particularly unforgiving three thousand foot peak. The tussock at the bottom of the mountain was sodden, a trap for the unwary, and by midnight half a dozen young marines were hobbling along with ankle injuries. Then, in the windy darkness, lashed by sudden squalls of rain, came the sudden relief of a metalled road.

  Seconds later the CSM had barked at the men to take the next couple of miles at the double, a heavy jog. Backpacks swaying, rifles clutched to chests, the untidy column began to lengthen out. Thinking back, Tam could still feel the rasp of breath in his lungs and warning stabs of pain from his right knee. The moorland road went on for ever until, quite suddenly, the CSM brought them to a halt. The clouds had parted. The rain had stopped. In the light of the full moon a bend in the road had revealed the long white curl of a dam still in the process of construction.

  The CSM told them to take a good look. This, it turned out, was the final test. Another minute’s rest and they’d be doubling down the road to the dam. Happily, he said, retaining walls at the top of the dam had yet to be built. Two hundred paces, same speed, would take them over the roughly poured concrete to the other side. The allotted path, a couple of feet wide, hung over a three hundred foot drop. One mistake, one moment’s lack of concentration, and the consequences wouldn’t bear thinking about. Keep it steady. Keep it simple. One step at a time. Good luck, eh?