A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  ‘Why do they have a Canadian in charge of a Polish squadron?’

  ‘Dunno.’ Kent shrugged. ‘Just worked out that way. They only just got operational status for one thing and also because they’re all crazy. Urbanowicz is the worst. Like a mad dog, really. Sees a German and that’s it, he’s off, guns blazing, no matter what anyone else is up to. He says he doesn’t speak English so he can’t follow orders, but you should see him going after the girls. His English is pretty good then, let me tell you… Here we go.’

  Kent pulled a thick folder out of a file drawer and brought it to the desk. He sat down and lit a cigarette, staring curiously at Black over the bulky file. The policeman lit a cigarette of his own in self-defence as the little chamber filled with smoke.

  ‘I’ve never met a real live Scotland Yard inspector,’ said the Canadian. ‘Kind of like meeting a descendant of Sherlock Holmes.’

  ‘Holmes was a private detective. He worked with a Yard man named Lestrade.’

  ‘Right, right.’ Kent puffed on his cigarette. To Black he seemed nervous, almost defensive. Finally he spoke again. ‘Look, I don’t want to seem rude but just why is it you want to know about Kosciuszko?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Sorry. That’s the squadron name. To us it’s 303 Northolt, to the Poles it’s Kosciuszko. He was a hero of theirs, in the States as a matter of fact, something to do with their Revolution.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Me neither.’ Kent laughed. ‘For a long time I thought he was a flier who hadn’t reported for duty. That language of theirs is a bit of a trick – like talking with your mouth full of marbles.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Black, who wasn’t interested at all. The flight lieutenant seemed intent on avoiding the reason for their meeting. ‘You asked me why I was interested. Group Captain Vincent didn’t tell you?’

  ‘Nope. Group doesn’t talk with lowly flight lieutenants, not much anyway. I was given a note from Station Ops to meet with you here. That’s all I know.’

  ‘There was a man murdered in London at the weekend. We have reason to believe he was a Polish airman.’

  Kent frowned. ‘What reason? And why 303? We’ve got Poles in half a dozen RAF squadrons.’ There was a defensive note in the man’s voice.

  ‘There was evidence of Polish ancestry at the postmortem. This is also the only squadron that’s entirely Polish and it’s close to London.’ Black paused. ‘Have you got anyone from your squadron who’s gone missing?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’ Kent flipped open the folder and thumbed through it. He removed a single sheet, glanced at it, then handed it across to Black. It was a Photostat copy of a man’s service record. A small, square photograph was in the upper left-hand corner. Even blurred and badly reproduced, there was no doubt.

  ‘Stanislav Rudelski,’ said Black, reading the spidery writing under the photo. ‘Born March 22, 1921, Warsaw, Poland. Not even twenty years old when he died.’

  ‘Your murdered man?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, yes.’

  ‘Shit.’ Kent flushed. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Quite all right.’

  ‘He was a good kid.’ Kent sighed. ‘Flew like he’d been born with a stick in his hand.’

  ‘He was very young.’

  ‘Old enough,’ Kent answered, frowning. ‘Fought in Poland, flying one of those idiot P-11s. Got out with a few others just in the nick, managed to get into France and flew for the Armée de l’Air. Six kills in a Bloch 152, which is saying something in itself. Flew one of them into Biggin Hill a few days before the Panzers rolled into Paris.’ The Canadian nodded firmly. ‘Oh, he was old enough all right, Inspector.’

  ‘Rudelski had a weekend leave?’

  ‘Open leave. If the squadron stood down for weather or if we didn’t have a kite for him. All any of us has to do is sign out with Ops.’

  ‘And he did?’

  ‘Friday evening.’

  ‘Due to return when?’

  ‘Sunday night.’

  ‘Any idea where he might have gone?’

  ‘No.’ Kent looked embarrassed for a moment. ‘I… we don’t socialise much with the men. Language.’

  ‘Did Rudelski speak English at all?’

  ‘Only the orientation course they gave him at HQ. Enough to get by. “Please” and “thank you”, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Did he have any interests?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘A girlfriend in London perhaps?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’ Kent flushed again.

  ‘A man friend?’ Black asked gently.

  ‘I really have no idea what sort of friendships he had.’ The flight lieutenant’s voice was clipped and formal. Morris Black didn’t pursue the point. Although he was curious by nature as well as vocation, it had taken him half a lifetime to learn a basic fact about his fellow man: people generally wanted to know less, not more.

  Even Spilsbury, privy to the most unpleasant secrets the world had to offer, seemed to have been put off by Black’s suggestion about Rudelski’s sexual proclivities and now Kent was clearly feeling uncomfortable about it as well. After more than two decades as a policeman, Black himself was completely inured to such things. In his book consensual sodomy rated as no more than a mild eccentricity. His own sexuality had been buried along with his wife at the Jewish Cemetery in Golders Green.

  ‘Would it be possible for me to see Rudelski’s billet?’ Black asked. ‘His personal effects?’

  ‘I suppose so. Snookie’s around somewhere, I’ll get him to show you.’

  ‘Snookie?’

  ‘Captain Sznuk. He’s on loan from Sikorski’s bunch for a while. Speaks about a dozen languages from what I can gather.’

  Capt. Stefan Bronislaw Sznuk turned out to be a diminutive red-haired man in his mid-forties with an enormous nose and a cracked, high-pitched voice. He spoke in rapid-fire, heavily accented English augmented by an exhausting array of sweeping gestures to demonstrate his points. On the short walk from the Operations Centre to the main barracks building, the little man gave Black his entire military history.

  ‘So Sikorski says to me, Snookie, how do you like this war? And I say to Sikorski, General, for me this is the fourth war I have been in and I am always on the wrong side, yes? Russians, Prussian, Germans, French. Always the same. Poland is the foot-wiper of Europe.’

  ‘Doormat?’ offered Black. Sznuk beamed, nodding and throwing his arms about.

  ‘Quite, quite.’

  ‘You flew in the Great War?’

  ‘Oh, yes! Sopwith Camel, Pup, Bristol.’ His left hand swooped in mock combat with his right. ‘Of course the Spitfire is far superior.’ He lifted his hands, thumbs upward, and made a rat-a-tat-tat sound. ‘Much better for killing Germans. Even better than ack-ack, you know, the anti-aircraft guns.’ He let out an unpleasant, cackling laugh. The look in his eyes wasn’t quite normal, an impassioned fury and sadness for the homeland he’d been forced to flee. Kent had mentioned it – they were all crazy and fought like mad dogs. Not surprising under the circumstances.

  They reached the nearer of the two large barracks buildings and went up to the second floor. Captain Sznuk led Black to a small cubicle at the far end of the dormitory, screened off from the other bunks by a makeshift partition built up with a large metal wardrobe and several steamer trunks. Other cubicles like it were scattered around the room. Except for Sznuk and Black the barracks was empty.

  ‘Where are the men?’

  ‘There is an alert. They are waiting at the dispersal huts on the field for the signal to scramble.’ The little man ran in place and buckled on an imaginary helmet to demonstrate. He pulled back a row of towels hanging on a sagging length of rope and ushered Black into Rudelski’s tiny home.

  A high window was at the end of the ersatz room, carefully covered with sheets of paper sellotaped in place over the glass in case of blast. Directly beneath the window was a narrow, metal-framed bed with a ne
atly rolled mattress at the end.

  Several uniforms and shirts were in the wardrobe but no civilian clothes. A steamer trunk had been converted into a bedside table complete with gooseneck lamp, a row of well-worn books and a heavy glass ashtray. Beside the ashtray there was a packet of tabac noir French cigarettes; Spilsbury had been right about that too. A photograph was tacked to the door of the wardrobe. Rudelski at age twelve or thirteen, standing with an older man wearing a dark suit. Behind them Black could make out the corner of a large, stone house.

  ‘His father was with the Warsaw engineering department. An important person I think,’ Sznuk commented.

  ‘Did you know Rudelski well?’

  ‘No. He was very… quiet, yes?’

  ‘He was a homosexual?’

  ‘Yes, almost certainly.’

  ‘He had a… friend, here?’

  ‘No!’ Sznuk shook his head violently. ‘The others in Squadron Kosciuszko are very…’ He lifted one arm and squeezed the biceps with his other hand, frowning angrily. ‘Masculine. Very much for the ladies.’ Sznuk then made an astoundingly obscene gesture Black had never seen before and leered, lifting one eyebrow suggestively. Sznuk shrugged. ‘No one cared though. Rudelski made no great thing of it. He could fly. That is all that mattered.’ Bending down, Black saw a small storage chest under the bed and pulled it out. The simple hasp had no lock. He lifted the chest onto the springs of the bed and opened it. On the left there was a carefully folded, dark-blue uniform with an officer’s peaked cap resting on it. On the right there was a chequerboard, a small wooden box, a deck of playing cards and a bundle of letters done up with a piece of twine. The lettering on the outside of the top letter was in Polish. There was no shaving kit.

  Black handed the letters to Sznuk. ‘Who are these from?’ The Pole pulled one out, removed the letter from its envelope and read briefly. He took out a second letter, then a third. ‘They are from his mother. From when he was at flying school.’ The red-haired man smiled sadly. ‘He tells her that the food is very poor and that his stomach is missing her barscht and kluski’ He paused. ‘You wish to know more?’

  ‘Not at the moment. But perhaps you could have all his personal things removed from here and taken somewhere for safekeeping.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything else here.’

  ‘No.’ Sznuk shook his head sadly. ‘I think there is very little of Rudelski in this place.’

  Sznuk returned with Black to the Operations Centre. Kent had vanished but the Pole arranged for another WAAF driver to run him across to the train station. He was back in London in time for a late tea. An hour later the Luftwaffe returned and the bombs began to fall again.

  * * *

  Dr Charles Tennant, wearing the uniform of a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, sat in the small, darkened room staring intently through the small square of one-way glass. Beside him was Col. John Cecil Masterman, one-time prisoner of war, later censor of Christ Church Oxford and presently head of B1(a), an obscure, utterly secret division of MI5, British counter-intelligence, charged with the debriefing of downed airmen and the eventual ‘turning’ of captured German spies.

  Masterman was not in uniform. Instead the small, beak-nosed man wore a poorly fitted dark blue suit over a white shirt with frayed collar and cuffs and a Christ Church tie sporting two decades’ worth of cigarette burns and jam stains – the prototypical dress of an Oxford don. Tennant’s uniform on the other hand was exquisitely tailored, perfectly cut to the man’s slight athletic figure. At forty-nine Masterman was only five years older than Tennant but the psychiatrist looked considerably younger. What little hair Masterman still had was yellow-grey, his lean face seamed, lined and stubbled. In contrast, Tennant’s hair was thick and very dark, his handsome face perfectly shaven, nails neatly manicured.

  The room the two men sat in was located in what had once been the administration wing of Wormwood Scrubs Prison in Hammersmith on the western edge of the city, taken over early in the war by MI5.

  The Scrubs was a bleak Edwardian horror in brick and stone, surrounded by crouching grey cottage suburbs, freight yards, windswept cemeteries and the rusting hulks of abandoned gasworks. For Tennant it represented the worst of Empire and British hypocrisy – the blight of hardship and mindless, gruelling labour within a stone’s throw of the lush Royal Gardens at Kew.

  On the other side of the mirror a nervous-looking man in his late twenties and dressed in pyjama-like grey overalls was being interviewed by an interrogator wearing an RAF uniform completely devoid of any rank or insignia. The voices, both speaking in rapid-fire German, were being transmitted by a hidden microphone to Tennant and Masterman.

  ‘His name is Zeidler,’ Masterman said quietly. ‘We’ve given him the code name Summer.’

  ‘Recent?’ asked Tennant.

  Masterman nodded. ‘Fresh as a daisy. Dropped out of the sky just before dawn on Friday not far from Oxford. We managed to get him within a few hours. Claimed he was Polish but he couldn’t find Warsaw on a map. Silly really. I’m beginning to wonder where Canaris finds these people.’

  ‘He’s very nervous. More than you’d expect.’

  ‘Really? You’d think nerves would be the order of the day under the circumstances.’

  ‘At this stage it’s more likely that he’d still be in shock,’ the psychiatrist answered. ‘Numb rather than nervous.’

  ‘Well, you are the expert.’ Masterman shrugged. Like Masterman, Tennant spoke fluent German, held a commission in the Royal Army and was the perfect choice to evaluate the psychological state of the poor unfortunates who had been caught in Masterman’s web since the first days of the Double Cross counter-intelligence group. The fact that he was a member of the same social set as Masterman and tended to the psychiatric needs of half the political and military wives in Mayfair and Belgravia made his appointment as psychiatric consultant to MI5 a fait accompli. The fact that he was handsome, enjoyed the company of women and was an extremely eligible bachelor was also in his favour.

  As well as monitoring the mental condition of captured spies and the odd downed Heinkel pilot, Tennant was also charged with interviewing prospective applicants to MI5 itself. In doing so he quickly came to realise that being brought into what Masterman referred to jovially as ‘the Land of Smoke and Mirrors’ had far more to do with one’s social acceptability than one’s qualifications. Of the applicants he’d spoken to over the past year or so almost two- thirds had attended Oxford or Cambridge and an even higher percentage had gone to Eton before that.

  ‘I wouldn’t invest too much time and effort in this one,’ Tennant murmured, watching the man on the other side of the glass. ‘He might turn just to avoid the threat of execution but he’ll turn again.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Masterman. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Positive.’ Tennant nodded.

  The interrogation of the man Masterman had code-named Summer took several hours and by the time Tennant passed through the main gate of the Scrubs it was early evening.

  Far off to the east the Luftwaffe bombers were pounding Docklands again, the light from the East End fires pulsing on the horizon, explosions lighting up the underside of the low clouds overhead like gigantic flashbulbs.

  The relentless sound of the bombs rolled across the city in a stuttering funereal thunder and Tennant smiled. Much more of this and the lags and lads of Spitalfields would win the war for Germany before the Germans had a chance to invade; there were already rumours of quickly stifled riots and talk that, just as it had been in the last war, it was the poor who were being used as cannon fodder, this time in their own homes rather than the trenches.

  Chauffeured in the staff car provided by Masterman, Tennant went to the station at St Quintin Park, boarded an almost empty, blacked-out train and began the slow journey through the darkened, waiting outskirts of the city. He spent the time contemplating the absurd construction of Masterman’s organisation. It was defini
tely an ‘old boys’ network and one that appeared to be populated by more than its fair share of homosexuals and self-confessed communists. Not surprising really when you considered the educational environment.

  To Tennant it seemed an extraordinary way to run an intelligence service. If the Abwehr, the Reich Security Administration, was run that way the European blitzkrieg would have ground to a halt before it began. This was no mere hypothesis, since, among other things, Dr Charles Tennant had been in the employ of the German Secret Service for the past five years, working directly under the authority of the Nazi spymaster Reinhard Heydrich.

  Born in Sheffield, in 1896, Charles Reid Tennant was the only child of Sir William Morpeth Tennant, an industrialist who’d made his fortune in steel and munitions, and Julia Steinmaur, the aristocratic sister of one of his Austrian partners. Shortly after Charles Tennant’s fourth birthday his father died and, because of his mother’s ‘nervous condition,’ the task of raising him fell to his widowed aunt from Vienna, Elizabeth Von Letz, followed by a succession of boarding schools.

  Leaving Eton on the eve of World War I, Charles Tennant was accepted into University College, Sheffield, where he studied medicine for the next five years, specializing in mental diseases. He then interned as a resident in psychiatry at the Sheffield Lunatic Asylum for a sixth year and obtained his specialist’s certificate.

  In 1921 his aunt, Elizabeth Letts (the ‘Von’ discreetly erased and the spelling of the name subtly altered in 1914), arranged an appointment for him at the newly created Vienna Institute of Psychiatry, where he spent the next three years as a resident and, out of desire as well as necessity, regained his boyhood fluency in German.

  In 1924 his mother, institutionalised for several years previously, committed suicide and Charles Tennant came into his inheritance. After establishing a trust for his elderly aunt he used part of his newly acquired wealth to travel, spending the next four years in Canada and the United States, studying first at McGill University in Montreal and then at Princeton in New Jersey.

  Returning to England in 1928, following the death of his aunt, Tennant purchased a house in Cheyne Mews, Chelsea, a discreet, luxurious residence not far from the Royal Hospital and directly across the Thames from Battersea Park. Caught in the great Crash the following year, Tennant lost virtually everything except for the mews house and, for the first time in his life, found himself in the odd position of actually having to earn a living. Using his old contacts, he found a position at the Vienna Institute and returned to Austria in the spring of 1930.