Spy’s Honour

by Gavin Lyall

  O’Gilroy read this through twice and announced: “She’s convinced me. Anything’s better than sitting here sewing for a black-hearted scoundrel like yeself, Mr Spencer.”

  “I observe the sitting but not yet the sewing. I think we agreed you didn’t have to be a good valet, but you had to be seen to be trying.”

  Replacing the tailors’ labels apart, all they now had to do was leave a trunk of unsuitable clothes with the hotel, lodge their old passports and papers at the bank and catch a train to give their new identities a trial run in Brussels.

  Oh yes – and Ranklin could shave his upper lip for the first time in twenty years. His moustache was the one aspect of his Army background he didn’t mind leaving behind. And the risk of being mistaken for a Naval officer was, he reckoned, very slight.

  20

  DID YOU HEAR POOR RICHARD DIED ACCIDENT KIEL QUERY CROSS SENIOR TRAVELLING VIA HOOK STOP HE WOULD MUCH APPRECIATE YOUR MORAL SUPPORT KIEL STOP CONTACT THROUGH VICE CONSUL STOP REGARDS TO MATTHEW AND CONALL ENDS SIGNED UNCLE CHARLIE

  “Bloody hell,” Ranklin croaked sleepily. Then, to the sombre night porter: “Allez reveiller mon domestique, chambre cinque zéro quatre, s’il vous plaît,” and pushed some coins at him.

  They must have been enough because he came back for more, along with a rumpled and dressing-gowned O’Gilroy, and Ranklin sent him for a large cognac. Then he gave O’Gilroy the cable.

  “Richard? Would that be the feller we was talking with in Amsterdam?”

  “Must be. Died in an accident. Christ. How?”

  “D’ye think this is real?” He flapped the cable.

  “I do. That ‘Matthew and Conall’ … If anybody else knows as much about us, how much more can we give away by going to Kiel? You get dressed and pack up, then come back and pack for me. I’ll be downstairs feeding francs into the night manager to get us on the next train.”

  The cognac arrived as Ranklin was tying his necktie. He swallowed half, pretending it was late yesterday instead of early today, and left the rest to stoke up O’Gilroy. The next half-hour was as fraught as he’d expected, but then they were in a cab and almost galloping through the empty dawn streets to the Gare du Nord. Perhaps no city in Europe becomes so much a fortress against the night as Brussels, but now the heavily shuttered windows seemed deliberately blind to the bright new day. And on the whole, Ranklin’s feelings were with the windows and not the day.

  The station platform was barely more wakeful, with hunched sleepy figures standing oblivious to the shrieks, clanks and drifting smoke from the busy shunting engines.

  O’Gilroy lit a cigarette. “And what are we doing when we get there?”

  “I don’t know yet. Can he expect us to investigate how Cross died?”

  “That’d be telling the Germans who we are – if they knew who he was.”

  Ranklin reread the crumpled telegram (should he be sure to destroy it or be sure to keep it? – but have a ready explanation for who Uncle Charlie was? Oh Lord, the complications). “‘He would much appreciate your moral support’. How’s your moral support?”

  “I forgot to pack it.”

  “I wonder if this doesn’t decode as ‘Find out if Mr Cross knew what his son was up to, stop him making a fuss, and pack him off home with the body at the double.’”

  “I’d prefer it that way. Speaking of codes, is that the best the Bureau can do?”

  “In a rush like this, I imagine it is. We don’t want the hotel getting a cable in five-figure cipher groups. Anyway, the cable companies won’t send them except between embassies and governments. And we were told our worst problem would be communications. ”

  “I could’ve told them that meself. But when I was …” then O’Gilroy shut up firmly.

  “Europe’s a little bigger than the back streets of Dublin and Cork, but if you’ve any suggestions …?”

  It was doomed to be a long, hot, crowded day. The train, second- and third-class only, much to O’Gilroy’s disgust, took four sticky hours to crawl the hundred miles to Cologne. At first, Ranklin just sat and watched Belgium’s industrial towns waking up, step by step, town by town, like heavy smokers rolling out of bed and lighting the first cigarette, then the first pipe … by Liège, the windless sky had a false ceiling of smoke from thousands of kitchen and factory chimneys. After that, he read a newspaper.

  There was nothing about an Englishman’s death at Kiel, but after two weeks of frontier incidents and skirmishes, real fighting seemed to have restarted in the Balkans. Who had started it was uncertain, but Ranklin’s money was on Bulgaria. They were fighting the Serbs near Kotchana and the Greeks on the river Mesta. He got angry at the lack of certainty and detail, then remembered how much, much less those actually fighting would know of what was going on. So he tried instead to get angry at the stolid pipe-puffing faces around him who thought of this as a distant peasant squabble and didn’t realise that war could run along a telegraph wire faster than fire along a fuse. But if they did realise, what could they do about it? So he glowered at O’Gilroy for having the good sense to fall asleep again.

  They were roused for a long Customs check at Herbesthal, where Ranklin tried to look, casually, for the rumoured signs of preparation for an invasion of Belgium, but saw none.

  At Cologne they had to wait an hour between trains, so they had a late breakfast and then Ranklin changed some money, bought tickets to Kiel and a newspaper while O’Gilroy had an early lunch.

  “I imagine I’ll know when you’re dead when you’ve stopped chewing, not just breathing,” Ranklin said tartly, not having found any mention of Cross’s death in the German paper.

  “How long before we get to this place Kiel?”

  “Um … another ten hours.”

  O’Gilroy said nothing and Ranklin went to buy himself a tin of Nürnberg teacakes.

  They travelled first-class to Hamburg, but even so the last day of June was no time to be going on an unplanned journey. Too much competition with holiday-makers who had booked their campaigns of pleasure months before, and were now spraying chatter and cake-crumbs all around them.

  Ranklin passed some of the time by trying to teach O’Gilroy some everyday words and phrases in German. He was a quick learner, though at his age he would never master another language, and his Irishness would always show through. But being Irish was itself a form of disguise for his present job, and Ranklin was ready to exploit it. He assumed O’Gilroy knew that, but it was too delicate a matter to be mentioned aloud.

  The rest of the time, Ranklin just grew irritated at the journey and the vagueness of their task. At one stop, when they had the compartment briefly to themselves, he grumbled: “They should have some way of getting more information and instructions to us. Once we’re there, we’re bound to be under suspicion – if they suspected Cross – and difficult to get in touch with safely.”

  “Like ye said, the problem of communications.” O’Gilroy was taking it all too equably for Ranklin’s mood.

  “If it is just a clearing-up job – well, they should have somebody stationed permanently in a place as important as the German Navy’s headquarters town. Or they could have sent somebody along with Cross senior.”

  “Mebbe they just don’t have the men. If they could find better than yeself who doesn’t like the job and me who doesn’t belong in it, d’ye think they’d be using us?”

  That, unhappily, was unanswerable.

  At Hamburg, where they changed trains and stations for Kiel, Ranklin bought another newspaper and at last found a reference to Cross’s death. At dawn on Sunday – yesterday – he had been found in one of the new and still empty locks at Holtenau, the Baltic end of the Kaiser Wilhelm Kanal (just Kiel Canal to the rest of the world) a mile or so north of Kiel city. He was a retired Royal Navy lieutenant, aged thirty-five, a keen yachtsman and a regular visitor to previous Kiel Weeks who had been staying at the Imperial Jachtklub. Sad, tragic, unfortunate – but no explanation or speculation. Ranklin guessed it was a simple rep
hrasing of a police statement.

  He translated to O’Gilroy, who thought it over and said: “A sea lock, it’d be. Deep. How deep?”

  “For the last few years they’ve been dredging the Canal and building these new locks to take the biggest battleships.”

  “Forty foot, nearer fifty foot from the dockside, then.” Ranklin had forgotten how close to the sea the Irish lived – closer than the English, since literally every Irish city was a port. And hadn’t there been a hint that O’Gilroy had worked in the shipyards of Queenstown or Kingstown?

  “A long way to fall, anyhow,” O’Gilroy observed. “D’ye mind me suggesting something? That ye don’t read nor speak German too well while we’re here. That way ye might be hearing things people don’t expect ye to understand.”

  It was a lesson Ranklin seemed to be relearning constantly. His new job could use every skill he had, and many he hadn’t, but use them best in secrecy.

  21

  Kiel was boisterously overcrowded during the biggest event of its year, which meant there wouldn’t be as much as a mousehole left to rent. Nor were there any motor taxis: they simply hadn’t reached Kiel yet. So by the time they had packed themselves and their bags into a cab, Ranklin was reduced to clinging limply to his James Spencer identity and taking everything else one step at a time. The first step was the vice-consul.

  Only, at that time of the evening, he wasn’t there and Herr Kessler was. “You are of Herr Cross a long-term friend?”

  “Ah, yes,” Ranklin agreed, hoping one lunch covered the idea. “I was.”

  “He is dead.”

  “That’s why I’m here. Has his father arrived?”

  “Yes. He is not here. He with Herr Sartori eats.”

  The Sartori family clearly had a whole fistful of fingers in the pie of Kiel, being both British and American vice-consuls as well as Lloyd’s agents, before you started counting the shipping interests and incomes housed in their solid, dark waterfront offices. Kessler was just some senior clerk, but he had the stout unflustered dignity that comes with working for a long-established firm. And death was just another, probably not unfamiliar, commodity.

  “Do you wish to see the police report?” he offered. “Herr Cross did not wish to see.”

  Ranklin could imagine that the details of a beloved son’s violent end might lack appeal, but took the two-page document for himself.

  “It must not this office leave,” Kessler warned.

  So Ranklin stood at one of the high ledger desks in an empty office and picked his way carefully through the report. At least the police side of it was clear and concise: the Nachtwächter at the (new) Holtenau locks had telephoned the local police at 1.43 a.m. They arrived at 2.02, helped get the body out of the lock, and called the Kiel police at 2.17. Hauptmann Lenz arrived from Kiel at 2.39 and confirmed identity of the body (so a police captain, a big fish in a small city like Kiel, already knew Cross; that was bad news). Body sent to the Lazarett by 3.15, a cable sent to Cross’s parents’ home by the vice-consul as soon as the telegraph office opened at 8, medical report received at 1.30 p.m.

  It all looked too neat and precise, but so did any report, including hundreds Ranklin himself had written. He copied all the times down without believing they were more than approximate, and moved onto the medical details. After ten minutes chewing his empty pipe and guessing at German versions of medical Latin, he deduced that Cross had broken almost every bone in his body, but predominantly his arms, skull and kneecaps, ruptured most internal organs but died – and was there a hint of expertise triumphant here? – of asphyxiation due to inhaling water and blood. Water in an empty lock?

  He gnawed his pipe some more, wrote a few more notes, and took the report back to Herr Kessler.

  “You understand?” Kessler asked.

  “I think so. When will Herr Cross come back?”

  “He does not come back. He stays at the Jachtklub or Hotel Hansa.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Please.”

  Kiel harbour was a long inlet with the shipyards on the far, east, side, and most of the town and the docks on the west. Quite apart from the regatta, it was a busy place, the docksides lined with small steamers and Baltic trading schooners, the water crammed with homing fishing boats, ferries and important-acting motor launches. The Yacht Club, which Ranklin decided to try first once he had routed O’Gilroy and their baggage out of the nearest tavern, lay further out, almost on the edge of town and halfway to the Canal mouth and Holtenau.

  “How’s it looking?” O’Gilroy asked, once they were clattering north in a cab.

  “Good and bad.” He gave a rough outline of the report, adding: “The fact that they gave it to our vice-consul – in effect, to our Foreign Office – suggests it’ll stand up to scrutiny.”

  “Sure, but is it the report they put in their own files?”

  And come to think of it, Ranklin realised that the police and medical reports must originally have been separate. “Umm, yes. Well, the Canal and its locks aren’t secret, but they’re government property so it’s a suspicious place to be and a suspicious time to be there.”

  “Did ye find out how easy it is to get to it?”

  “No, but we’ll have a look tomorrow. The Navy probably wants a report from the Bureau so we’ll need all sorts of useless facts to pad it out. But what worries me more just now is Mr Cross Senior. He’s never heard any talk about dear old chum, Jim Spencer.”

  “With being in the Navy, the boy’d be away a whole lot and making all sorts of friends,” O’Gilroy said sagely. “Anyhow, best mumble and be short on words. Ye know? – just like an Englishman.”

  The big bright windows of the Yacht Club gazed out across its railed garden of well-clipped shrubs, across the harbour road, and onto a gently swaying plantation of bare-masted yachts. And a larger-than-life statue of Krupp the Cannon King gazed with them, justifiably, since he had paid for it all.

  The front rooms were all laughter and loud talk. In a small, quiet back room, Mr Cross, seventyish and with a sad spaniel face and big white moustache, half got up to shake Ranklin’s hand and say: “Very good of you to come,” without much meaning it.

  The other two men introduced themselves: Kapitanleutnant Reimers, slim with a sharp imperial beard in uniform mess dress, and police Hauptmann Lenz, a burly man of about forty who, oddly, had a more weatherbeaten face than Reimers the sailor.

  Ranklin sat down. Cross went on staring at a full glass of schnapps, then said wearily: “You knew my boy?”

  “We hadn’t met for some time, until the other day in Amsterdam. And when I heard … I still can’t believe it. How could it happen?”

  Cross obviously wasn’t going to say anything, so Lenz had to. “On Saturday,” he announced formally, “there was much drinking …” Cross shook his head; Lenz went on: “Perhaps Leutnant Cross also – here at the Club he was with friends, then they to the Weinkeller went. I do not know why he is at Holtenau. The night-watch telephoned.”

  “And you went out there?” Ranklin asked, adding quickly: “I saw the report at the vice-consul’s. You knew Lieutenant Cross already?”

  “Do you speak German well?” Reimers asked. His English was far more fluent than Lenz’s and, oddly to Ranklin’s ear, had a slight American accent.

  “Just schoolboy level,” Ranklin said, trying for a charming smile.

  A servant quietly put an unasked-for glass of schnapps in front of Ranklin and three of them drank with polite formal gestures. Cross did nothing.

  “I had met Leutnant Cross when he visited here before,” Lenz said firmly, looking squarely at Ranklin.

  Ranklin just nodded, closing the subject, and asked Cross: “Is there anything I can do, sir? Anything at all?”

  “Very good of you,” Cross mumbled automatically, but then roused himself. “Yes, there’s one thing: if you could go through his kit in his room, get it packed up and sent home – and if there’s anything – like letters, you know – you think his
mother shouldn’t … I can’t face it.”

  “Of course.” It was what you did for the battlefield dead: sifted out letters, photographs, perhaps a diary, that didn’t fit the image of a young hero so heroically dead.

  But he instinctively glanced at Reimers for permission, and got an official nod, confirming his feeling that the Naval officer was in charge. But in charge of what?

  Cross levered himself to his feet. “I’ll get back to the hotel. Will you be here in the morning?”

  “I don’t yet know where I’m staying …”

  Reimers said: “You can take Lieutenant Cross’s room, if that suits you.”

  That was a stroke of luck. No, it wasn’t: it kept Ranklin where Reimers could find him.

  And it confirmed Reimers’ influence: Club rooms would be rare pearls in Kiel Week, even to Club members. But it still suited Ranklin – particularly the idea of getting at Cross’s papers.

  “That’s very kind of you. Perhaps the Club could suggest a small hotel for my man-servant?”

  That flummoxed them. Perhaps they hadn’t thought of a spy (and he must remember they would suspect him if they had suspected Cross) bringing along a valet. That might reduce the suspicion. Anyway, another nod from Reimers dumped the problem on Lenz.

  They escorted Cross to the entrance hall and into a waiting cab, then got O’Gilroy summoned from down among the kitchens. Since Reimers was quite blatantly listening, Ranklin had to stay in Character.

  “Gorman, I’m staying here tonight to sort Dickie Cross’s things. They’re putting you into some hotel. Have you got enough money?”

  “I wouldn’t be knowing, sir.” O’Gilroy did mournful truculence infuriatingly well.