A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Little town called Arques, sir. We were caught napping, I’m afraid. Stayed back to help some civilians trying to reach the beaches. Ran into a German advance unit.’ Swift’s tone was bland as tapioca; he might just as well have been giving the bus schedule for the Edgeware Road and Maida Vale.

  ‘That’s where you were injured?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I was separated from my bunch. Walked right into one of them.’

  ‘A German.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Frightened him as much as me, I think. Couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty. Didn’t even have his weapon at the ready. I just came around the corner and there we were, a foot apart. I’m pretty sure he squeezed the trigger by accident.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He shot my foot off. The right one. With a Schmeisser.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I fell down, sir.’

  ‘What about the German?’

  ‘I grabbed him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I killed him, sir. It was him or me.’

  ‘How did you kill him?’

  Swift shrugged calmly, his hands fluttering briefly in his lap. ‘I strangled him, sir. There wasn’t time for anything else.’

  ‘And then you managed to rejoin your unit?’

  ‘Yes, sir. That was June third. We were evacuated the next day. Spent a month or so in hospital and then they gave me my new foot.’

  ‘You went back to Hendon.’

  ‘It was either that or a disability pension, sir. I like to work.’

  ‘Your file says you’re a qualified typist.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Swift smiled. ‘Before I joined the police I was a salesman for Imperial, sir. It was part of the job.’

  ‘Typewriter salesman, soldier and now a detective?’

  ‘It’s the only section of Hendon still in operation. And you don’t need to be a sprinter to track down villains, sir. It seemed like a good idea, all things considered. Bit of a future and all that, such as it is.’

  ‘Do you know what any of this is about?’

  ‘I know what I’ve heard.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘You’re looking for a murderer. Multiple. Something has the brass all a flutter but no one’s quite sure why. Most people are saying it’s a spy or a friend of Winston’s gone off his nut.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’ The sort of person who believed rumours was the same sort who spread them.

  ‘I haven’t thought very much about it, sir. All I really know is that it’s very hush-hush.’ Swift paused. ‘And important.’ The last was almost a question. The large eyes behind the spectacles blinked slowly.

  ‘Yes, important. And I need an assistant.’ Black lit a cigarette, offering one to Swift, who refused politely. ‘Can you drive?’ he asked finally.

  Swift nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Bit of a lead foot these days, but I can manage well enough.’

  ‘All right.’ Black nodded. ‘The job is yours if you want. Set yourself up in the room next door and find us a car, would you?’

  The young man lifted himself out of the chair, a flash of pain appearing on his face for an instant. A pain he’d probably be feeling for the rest of his life, Black thought. The young man headed for the door.

  Black stopped him. ‘You won’t be able to tell anyone about what we’re doing. Girlfriend, family, friends.’

  ‘I don’t have a girlfriend at the moment. And my parents emigrated to Australia three years ago.’ Friends, it seemed, were not part of the equation at all.

  ‘All right, Simon. After you’ve signed the Official Secrets Act I’ll fill you in on the details. Then we can get down to it.’

  ‘I’ve already signed it, sir. They insisted downstairs… Inspector Black?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d prefer Swift, sir, if you don’t mind. Simon is a name I never much cared for.’

  ‘Swift it is then.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ The young man smiled briefly. ‘I’m sure that when I find out what it is I’ll actually be doing, I’ll find it most interesting.’ He nodded once then left the room.

  Black sat back in his chair and stared upward, thinking about his new assistant and watching the coils of smoke from his cigarette curl slowly up to the oppressively low ceiling. Swift was a man adrift on the sea of life without a tiller, without a focus, his world a dream ever since he’d killed that young German soldier with his bare hands. His life was never going to be the same and he knew it. Like Black himself ever since the death of his wife. Sad men in a sad world, with sadder times to come.

  Black allowed himself the luxury of a single sigh, sat forward and reached for the newly installed telephone on his desk. He’d been given virtual carte blanche in his investigation of Queer Jack; now it was time to put it to the test. The telephone rang loudly before he touched it and he jerked back, startled. It rang again and he picked it up.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Black?’

  It was Liddell.

  * * *

  Dressed conspicuously in his Medical Corps captain’s uniform and armed with the appropriate ‘essential services’ petrol warrant sticker on his windscreen, Dr Charles Tennant drove his dark Bentley Speed Six out of London, heading west on the main road to Maidenhead. He left the highway at the newly built Colnbrook bypass and stopped for a short luncheon, then continued on, still moving westward until he reached Burnham Beeches Station.

  Just beyond the tiny railway halt he turned south on the narrow secondary road leading down through woodland and small farms to Burnham Abbey, Dorney Village and the Thames at Queen’s Eyot, his final destination.

  He stopped again, opened the ancient gate and drove the last few hundred yards along the rutted track that wound through the screening ash and beechwood to Rooksnest, the simple, plain brick farmhouse that served as his country home.

  The house was neat and square, two and a half storeyd, slate roofed, the windows veiled by simple white shutters, the pale brick covered with a veinlike network of spreading ivy.

  The spaces between the stone steps leading to the white, Georgian-styled door were sprouting with willow herb and the narrow beds around the foundation were a tangle of meadow grass and briar rose.

  To the left of the house there was the overgrown, skeletal remains of an old apple orchard and on both sides of the two-acre property, high, ancient hedgerows ran down to the water’s edge, two hundred feet away at the end of a sloping meadow that had once been a croquet lawn and was now a patchwork breeding ground for scatterings of campion and convolvulus.

  Overall, the property had a look of elegant neglect. Not quite abandoned but not a proud man’s castle either. Rooksnest had the air of an afterthought, which was precisely the impression Dr Charles Tennant wanted to give his distant neighbours beyond the hedgerows and any curious passersby on the river.

  Tennant took his overnight bag out of the Bentley and went to the front door, pausing for a moment to examine the small security devices he’d left at the end of his last visit to the property. Satisfied that they hadn’t been disturbed, he unlocked the door and went inside.

  Two rooms were off the main hall on the ground floor, a drawing room to the left and a dining room to the right, both low ceilinged, plaster walled and plainly decorated. At the rear of the house, facing the water, there was a larder, kitchen and scullery with a door leading outside.

  Narrow stairs ran up from the hall to the first floor, which contained three small bedrooms, only one of which was furnished. On the upper landing a counterweighted ladder gave access to the half-storeyed attic above, empty except for a few trunks and bits of bric-a-brac left there by the previous owner.

  Taking his bag up to the first-floor bedroom, Tennant changed out of his uniform and put on a pair of dark twill trousers, heavy wool socks and a dark blue roll-neck sweater. Returning to the ground floor, he went to the kitchen, slipped into
a well-worn pair of Wellingtons and stepped out of the house through the back door, leaving it unlocked behind him. Humming quietly, he went down the long gravel path to the small dock at the riverside and his boat, Sandpiper.

  The twenty-foot Thornycroft motor yacht had been part of his purchase agreement for the house and was ideally suited for his purposes. Sandpiper was as old as she was long, planked with Oregon pine and decked in Burma teak. Her shallow keel was English elm, the tiller was oak and the original solid-core single mast and boom had been made of straight-grained Norway spruce.

  Altogether a very cosmopolitan little boat, which wasn’t surprising since the original owner had been a lumber importer and had supplied the wood used in Sandpiper’s construction to Thornycroft at a discount. The Bermuda-rigged vessel slept two on narrow bunks in the small forward cabin, was fitted out with a gas cooker and a small WC between the cabin and the bow and was powered by an inboard three-horsepower Stuart-Turner petrol engine that was capable of pushing her along at a demure six knots without excessive noise or vibration and ten knots if really necessary.

  The only major change Tennant had made in Sandpiper had been the replacement of the solid-spruce mast. The boat was now stepped with a hollow-core laminated mast of the same height with an aluminum spine running from top to bottom. The rigging, once hemp, was now plough-steel wire of a type normally used on much larger craft.

  Even the most practised eye would never have noticed the almost invisible wire leads connecting rigging to mast spine and mast spine to a cable under the cabin floorboards that led under the port-side bunk. Nor would that eye have spotted the equally well-hidden power line stretching from the aft engine well and storage battery to the same location.

  Since the first part of his journey was downstream with the current, Tennant only raised the foresail mizzen, leaving the mainsail furled for the moment. He cast off his lines fore and aft, stepped down into the boat and pushed off, seating himself on the wooden jump seat beside the small wheel. He turned Sandpiper into the stream, watching as the slight breeze caught the triangular sail, then settled back against the small padded cushion on the gunwale. To all intents and purposes he was every inch the Saturday sailor, off for an afternoon cruise along the Thames.

  Pushing back the sleeve of his sweater, he checked the time and smiled, then lit a cigarette. He was right on schedule. Tennant nudged the wheel slightly, putting himself into the deep-water channel, pointing Sandpiper’s stubby little bow towards the playing fields of Eton and the looming fortress walls of Windsor Castle, slightly less than five miles downriver.

  He’d learned a great deal since his appointment with Joan Miller the previous day. Immediately after she left his office the psychiatrist had called George Smith at Special Branch. That evening several large glasses of Scotch followed by an unrationed and hideously expensive meal of roast lamb at the Junior Carlton loosened the priggish little man’s tongue, adding to the few intriguing morsels provided by his attractive patient.

  According to ‘Nosey’ Smith, there had been three murders so far, two in London and one in Portsmouth. He wasn’t certain about the details but he did know that it was being assumed that all three deaths were related and that somehow the killer knew the locations he chose for the murders were about to be air-raid targets.

  The first two murders had been given to a detective inspector named Morris Black to investigate. Following the third death, Black had suddenly been given indefinite leave from his duties at the Yard and all files relating to the murders had been quietly removed from Central Records and the Home Office Coroner’s Index. Rumour had it that Black, or the ‘Jewboy’ as Smith called him, had been seconded to MI5 and put under the wind of an ex-Special Branch man named Liddell.

  Liddell of course was the connection to Maxwell Knight but Tennant had heard the name before and not from Joan Miller. Another of his patients, a friend to one of the younger Rothschilds, had spent an entire homophobic session with him discussing the grotesque antics of a group of young men and women who rented a maisonette on Bentinck Street just off Oxford Street in Bloomsbury.

  The large three-storeyed flat, owned by the younger Rothschild, had been let to a Cambridge Apostle who was vaguely related to the king and was supposedly an art historian. The art historian in turn had opened the doors of number 5 Bentinck Street to a veritable who’s who of revolutionaries, most of whom had indeterminate sexual habits and were what Tennant’s patient sneeringly referred to as ‘cabinet ministers to be, honored gurus of the extreme left to be, connoisseurs extraordinary to be, Etonian mudlarks, and BBC God-knows-what-have-you.’

  Other visitors to the flat included several War Office ‘civil assistants,’ which, in the language of Whitehall meant MI5 (Counter-intelligence) and MI6 (Secret Service) operatives. Liddell fell into this group. According to Tennant’s source, Liddell’s marriage to the well known debutante Calypso Baring had collapsed long before the war and he sought regular solace at Bentinck Street, using it as a place to relax, discuss the progress of the war and practise the cello.

  That a man of Liddell’s station spent a fair amount of his free time at what Tennant’s patient described as a cross between a ‘Bolshie drinking club and a high-class male brothel’ was valuable information and a potential source of leverage but at this point Tennant wasn’t quite sure what to do with the knowledge. The fact that a detective inspector investigating a trio of murders had been transferred to Liddell’s care was even more interesting.

  If Liddell had taken control of the ‘Jewboy’ Morris Black, presumably at the insistence of Maxwell Knight, it meant the murders had to have a strong intelligence value of some sort. At any rate, it was something Tennant intended to pursue and something his people in Hamburg needed to know about as soon as possible.

  After an uneventful hour’s sailing Tennant reached Boveney Lock, paid his shilling to pass through, then went under the railway bridge, joining the throng of punters and day trippers in their electric canoes, intent on enjoying a last taste of cooling summer on the river as they darted about like frantic water beetles in the mid-afternoon sun, all under the gloomy watch of Windsor Castle on the southern heights.

  Climbing onto the foredeck, Tennant dropped the mizzen, then returned to the wheel and started up his engine. Tooting Sandpiper’s horn he turned across the main stream and came up alongside the tea garden of the Thames Hotel, a large, mock-Tudor building fronting on Barry Avenue at the foot of River Street, almost directly under the castle walls.

  The Thames was more a public house than a real hostelry, specialising in luncheons for riverine Hornblowers like Tennant and passengers from the narrow, fringed-awning steamers that carried holiday travellers up to Maidenhead and beyond to Oxford. Two of the steamers were already tied up at the hotel dock, and as Tennant sat down at the table he’d reserved before leaving London he saw that a third steamer was sliding out from under the shadows of Windsor Bridge a few hundred feet away. He glanced at his watch. The military-style Rolex showed 4 p.m. Teatime.

  He ordered a bottle of Courage and a steak and kidney pie, then inquired after a newspaper. The best the waiter could do was the most recent edition of the Illustrated London News. Sipping his ale and searching almost in vain for meat among the vegetables on his plate, Tennant spent the next three quarters of an hour reading quietly and watching the river.

  For a nation poised on the edge of invasion and with its greatest city having endured a full week of aerial evisceration by the Luftwaffe, the contents of the slim magazine were remarkably banal. A full-page illustration demonstrating how the ill-equipped Home Guard practised shooting at model Stukas launched towards them on strings while Boy Scouts flung firecrackers about to provide authenticity; a review of a book entitled Barbarians and Philistines, Democracy and the Public Schools; a ludicrous article by Arthur Bryant in which he used a muddled metaphor about a chair factory to demonstrate the immorality of the Nazi regime; and to finish off, a peculiar treatise, more than sufficientl
y illustrated, concerning the ‘rasping tongues of fruit-eating moths.’ Scattered throughout the magazine in grotesque counterpoint were photographs of hardworking firemen, ruined buildings and blown-up views of insects’ digestive tracts and mouth parts. It was insane, like something out of Lewis Carroll seen through the eyes of Gustave Doré.

  The psychiatrist smiled at that and dropped the magazine onto the table. He wondered if Guy Liddell, cello-playing intelligence officer with MI5 and friend to ‘Bolshie fairies,’ was any relation to Alice Liddell, the source of Carroll’s inspiration for his looking-glass world. He glanced out at the placid, genteel scene before him. Wonderland, indeed, and naive enough to be the setting for any number of innocent children’s tales. Or the work of a Reich Security Administration spy.

  Tennant paid for his meal then returned to Sandpiper. He cast off fore and aft, started the little engine then turned the boat upstream and returned to Boveney Lock. During his meal several more Thames steamers and three or four smaller vessels like his own had created a queue at the entrance gates, waiting for the lockmaster to finish his own tea. Manoeuvering Sandpiper expertly, he throttled back the engine and took his place at the end of the line. By the looks of things it would take another twenty minutes or so before his turn through the locks came. More than enough time.

  Tennant looped Sandpiper’s aft line over a bollard on the lock wall then ducked down into the small cabin. Immediately through the hatchway there was a tiny galley, gas stove on the port side, sink to starboard. Beyond that, a pair of leather-covered banquettes doubled as bunks, a small fixed table between. Hidden behind the louvered doors of the cupboard forming the divider galley and saloon there was a built-in wireless, complete with a set of headphones, and below that a storage drawer.

  Working quickly, the psychiatrist sat down on the port banquette, opened the louvered doors and took down the headphones. He unscrewed both earpieces, exposing the small, heavily varnished speakers and the connecting screws fixing the wires. Twisting off the screws he pulled the wires free, then set the headphones aside.