A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, smiling pleasantly. ‘Something I can help you with?’ The man was handsome in a gaunt way, a cross between Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and a star from an American western film. The boiler suit he was wearing was filthy but the signet ring on the hand holding the wrench was solid gold. His accent was definitely Oxford, plummy tones and all.

  ‘You’re Mr Gurney?’

  ‘And you’d be from the police,’ the man answered, glancing at Swift as he vanished into the ranks of cars at the other end of the yard. He turned back to Black, still smiling.

  ‘Perceptive of you,’ said Black.

  Gurney shrugged. ‘Not really. Someone from the Yard rang me earlier this morning, asking about a Ford being stored here.’ He paused, the smile turning into a broadening grin. ‘And you have the look.’ He extended a large, grimy hand. ‘George Le Fanu Gurney.’

  ‘Detective Inspector Morris Black.’ He took the proffered hand, ignoring the grime. The dog took one step forward and sniffed at Black’s trouser cuff, then backed away.

  ‘Don’t mind Sam.’ Gurney laughed. ‘He’s been waiting for a burglar for years. Yearns to sink his teeth into human flesh just once before he dies.’ He paused. ‘You wanted to know about David Talbot?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Gurney nodded. ‘Come into the shop.’ He turned and went back into the large shed. Black followed.

  The shop interior was the complete antithesis of the yard outside. Shelves to waist level filled the far wall, an enormous collection of tools neatly arranged along them. More shelves lined the walls on either side, stacked with engine parts and electrical components. A space had been made in one corner for a desk, two chairs and several old-fashioned wooden filing cabinets.

  Directly in front of Black in the centre of the floor was a huge motor car raised five feet into the air on the fat, oil-slick tube of a pneumatic lift. The enormous vehicle was at least eighteen feet long, the majestic, curving body painted a gleaming dark blue with blood red side panels to match the smooth leather interior. The side-opening bonnet was pulled up to reveal an enormous grey and chromium engine that would have looked at home in an aeroplane. The silver grille was topped by a sculpted crane in full, swept-wing flight with an enamelled badge below.

  ‘Nineteen thirty-five Hispano Suiza J12,’ commented Gurney, standing in front of the desk and noting Black’s interest. ‘Picked it up from Whitney Straight, the race driver. Said he needed the money.’

  Black bit back the urge to ask how much. It had to be in the three- or four-thousand-pound range, if not more. And even he knew the name Whitney Straight, mostly from the pages of The Sphere and the Illustrated London News. Straight was an upper-class society sportsman who appeared to spend as much time in Monte Carlo at the casinos and drinking champagne as he did racing cars. Not the sort of man you’d think would be found consorting with an East Finchley garage mechanic – even a mechanic with an Oxford accent who could afford a vehicle like the one in front of him. Gurney caught the expression on Black’s face and read it perfectly.

  ‘I do this sort of work because I enjoy it, Inspector Black,’ said Gurney, looking up from the open file drawer in front of him. ‘Not because I have to.’ The blond man glanced briefly at a framed photograph over the desk. ‘And because…’ He bit off his sentence and went back to the files.

  Black crossed the floor of the shop and joined him. He leaned forward and peered at the photograph over the desk. An extremely good-looking, dark-haired woman in her late thirties, wearing a tweed skirt and a sweater, seated on a picnic blanket. Behind her, barely in focus, were the ruins of an ancient castle. Beside her, one on either side, were two boys, one nine or ten, dark as his mother, the other a few years older and very blond. They were smiling, eyes crinkling as they stared into the camera and the sun.

  ‘Your family?’

  ‘Yes,’ Gurney answered stiffly. ‘Karen and the lads.’

  ‘Good-looking boys.’

  ‘Yes. They were.’ Gurney saw the expression on Black’s face at his use of the past tense and smiled coldly. ‘Karen was an American you see. I thought it would be a good idea if they spent the war there.’ He paused and looked at the photograph again, almost as though he expected the flat, black-and-white images of his wife and children to move within the frame. ‘I booked them passage on the Arandora Star. It was the only ship I could find. I thought they would be safe.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Black said quietly, looking away from the man. The Arandora Star was an Italian passenger liner that had been confiscated when Mussolini joined the Axis. She’d been sunk less than two months before, loaded with more than fifteen hundred internees and others being evacuated to Halifax. Many of the passengers had been children. None had survived.

  ‘Well, Inspector, you didn’t come round to hear about my little tragedy.’ Gurney twitched a file out of the cabinet and opened it on the desk. Black looked over the man’s slumped shoulders at the contents of the docket. Receipts, copies of work orders, a paper-clipped list of parts. ‘Not very much, as you can see.’ He looked up at the detective. ‘Is he in some kind of trouble?’

  ‘You might say that. He’s been murdered.’

  ‘Dear God.’ Gurney seemed genuinely shocked. ‘How did it happen?’

  Black ignored the question. ‘How long did he have his car here?’

  ‘Almost a year. They have a rule at Cambridge about keeping private motor cars within a certain radius.’

  ‘You knew about that?’

  ‘Yes. Before he told me. They had the same sort of regulation at… at the college I attended.’ Black nodded. Gurney seemed embarrassed.

  ‘Can you remember very much about him?’

  ‘He was bright.’ Gurney thought for a moment, sweeping one hand through his longish hair. ‘He’d come down most weekends, chat for a bit, then take the car into town.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He liked chess.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘We used to play.’ Gurney reached down and pulled open one of the desk drawers. He took out a small-hinged box and opened it on the desk. The box contained a miniature chess set, each square drilled with a small hole for pegs set into the base of each tiny piece.

  ‘Was he any good?’

  ‘Very. I think we had a dozen matches over the year. I might have won two or three.’

  ‘I see. Anything else, Mr Gurney?’

  ‘I can’t remember very much. He was Canadian, we talked about that. He was from the western coast.’

  ‘Vancouver.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Gurney nodded.

  ‘You played chess, talked about Canada…’ Black let it dangle.

  Gumey shrugged. ‘He liked to work on his own car.’ Gurney smiled. ‘Said he couldn’t afford my rates. I let him use one of the stalls on the other side of the yard.’

  ‘Did he ever talk about friends he might have had? Ones in London?’

  ‘No, not that I can recall.’ Gumey frowned. ‘He did meet someone here once, though. I remember that.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Gurney seemed to be struggling with some decision. He hesitated for a moment then spoke. ‘Um. Older fellow. He must have come by train because he went off with Talbot in the Ford.’

  ‘You say older fellow. How much older?’

  ‘Thirty, thirty-five. It’s hard to say. I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention. The man did seem very interested in my workshop, though. Knew his way around tools.’

  ‘Talbot never called him by name?’

  ‘Not that I can remember.’

  ‘How long ago was this?’

  ‘A week or so ago. Just before the first big raids. That was the last time I saw him, actually.’ Gurney looked sharply at Black. ‘You think this man had something to do with the murder?’

  ‘It’s quite possible. Do you remember anything else about him? Anything else at all? A bit of a physical description perhaps?’ />
  ‘Well dressed. A suit. Dark hair, thinning a bit on the sides. Average height and weight.’

  ‘Voice?’

  ‘He didn’t say much. Nothing out of the ordinary that I can recall.’

  ‘They went off together?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the car?’

  ‘Yes. I went out to my… to the country that weekend. When I returned, the Ford was back. I remember now, I gave him a key to the gate in case he returned the car before I came back to town.’ Black nodded. No key had been found on David Talbot’s body. It seemed likely that the car had been returned by Queer Jack after the murder. Black heard a sound and turned. It was Swift.

  ‘Did you find the car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was there anything in it?’

  ‘Just this.’ Swift held up a luridly tinted postcard. The cathedral at Bath. Like the postcards in David Talbot’s rooms at Cambridge.

  * * *

  Dr Charles Tennant sat in a cafe almost directly across from the modern, white concrete mass of Broadcasting House, occasionally letting his glance drift slightly north to the gloomy mansion a few doors up from the BBC headquarters. Like Broadcasting House the main entrance of the building was fronted by head-high piles of sandbags. Over the double doors a large, limp Swedish flag hung motionless in the still, early-aftemoon air.

  It was the lunch hour and the cafe was crowded, mostly with BBC employees desperate for a change from the overcooked, officially sanctioned diet offered up by the basement canteen. Several times in the past quarter of an hour Tennant had been given sharp looks by people wanting his table by the window but he had studiously ignored them, sipping at the small, lukewarm glass of lemon squash in front of him and smoking, keeping watch on the Swedish embassy.

  Tennant was nervous. Socially he knew quite a few people who worked for the BBC and although he had a perfectly reasonable excuse for being in the area – a tea break after visiting one of his colleagues on Harley Street – the last thing he wanted was to meet someone now.

  There was another, much more serious reason for his growing anxiety. Ten minutes before, a green, unmarked Fordson van had pulled into a clearly marked no parking zone a few yards up the broad thoroughfare and shut off its engine. Almost immediately the van had been approached by a uniformed policeman but the man seated on the van driver’s left had showed the patrolman something, at which point he nodded and moved on. The van remained. The two men in the Fordson were either Special Branch, plain-clothes detectives from the Yard or something even more dangerous.

  Prudence suggested that Tennant leave the area at once. He was reasonably sure that the two men in the Fordson weren’t on to him, but if, as he now suspected, they were ‘watchers’ from MI5’s B(6), it was almost certain they were keeping the Swedish embassy under surveillance, just as he was – which meant in turn that they knew about his contact.

  The man, a flight engineer for Swedish Airlines, was also a diplomatic courier and supposedly had immunity, but these days both the police and organisations like MI5 had virtual carte blanche when it came to search and arrest procedure. Sweden was a neutral country but it was also known to have strong pro-Nazi ties, if only because of that country’s fear of imminent invasion.

  If MI5 wanted to scoop up the man and take him to Latchmere or one of the other interrogation centres nearby, nothing would, or could, be done to stop them. The courier knew nothing of Tennant except his code name but even the smallest shred of information in the wrong hands was dangerous. Tennant, so sure of his invisibility up to now, had suddenly become vulnerable. One way or the other the connection had to be severed before it was too late.

  Looking out the window of the cafe, the psychiatrist froze in his seat as he saw his man step out through the main doors on the opposite side of the broad thoroughfare. He’d been through the same procedure several times before and normally he would have waited for a moment, then trailed after the tall, blond man at a distance, just to make sure he wasn’t being followed. This time he stayed where he was, his eyes now on the parked Fordson van.

  Thirty seconds after the courier left the embassy, the passenger door of the van opened and a heavyset man in a tan overcoat stepped onto the pavement. He had an ill-fitting dark homburg pulled low over his eyebrows and his hands were thrust deeply into his pockets. He headed north, walking parallel to the Swede and twenty or thirty yards behind. There was no doubt about it now; the courier had been blown.

  Trying to stay calm, Tennant rose to his feet and made his way through the crowded cafe to the door. He stepped outside, pausing for a moment as though trying to decide which way to go. In fact, he knew exactly what his destination was going to be; at that moment it was his only advantage.

  Taking two steps towards the curb, he raised his arm, preparing to hail a cab, then felt a large hand clap down onto his shoulder. His heart leapt into his throat and he turned, muscles in his shoulders and legs bunching, a thousand alternatives streaming through his brain in a mad, incoherent current. He could run, but how far, and how long?

  ‘Tennant, old man!’ His assailant’s breath reeked of alcohol. The psychiatrist found himself staring into a florid, beaming face he couldn’t quite put a name to. He frowned, trying to regain control of himself, the man’s hand like a huge weight on his shoulder, pinning him down. Then he had it. He swallowed, tried to smile.

  ‘Burgess.’

  ‘Quite right! Quite right!’ The pale, ginger-haired man let his hand slide away from Tennant’s shoulder. Guy Burgess was someone he’d met briefly at Emerald Cunard’s country estate. Lady Cunard was known for the eclectic, eccentric assortment of people who travelled in her wake but Guy Burgess was bizarre even by her standards. He dressed like a circus clown who slept in his clothes, drank huge quantities of alcohol and made no bones at all about his homosexuality; in fact he flaunted it.

  Tennant vaguely recalled that the man had some sort of job in radio. He was also one of the regular group who spent time at the Rothschild flat at 5 Bentinck Street. Burgess was a BBC ‘God-knows-what-have-you’ at the ‘Bolshie drinking club and high-class male brothel’ Liddell favoured. Even in the present situation Tennant could see the irony of it, and at any other time he would probably have taken advantage of the chance meeting, but at that particular moment the pasty-faced drunk was his worst nightmare come to life.

  Burgess blinked, his thick, damp lips pursing. He gripped Tennant by the upper arm and turned up the wattage of his bleary smile as he began urging the psychiatrist down the street.

  ‘Come along, Tennant. I’ll buy you a large gin at the George. You can tell me all about your loonies and I’ll entertain you with stories about all the fairies at the Bloody British Buggering Corporation.’ The smile had become a loose grin now. ‘My private name for the place,’ Burgess slurred. He blinked again and squinted as though he were standing in bright sunlight rather than a brooding grey overcast. It was barely noon and the man was already falling-down drunk. ‘Three-B C. The BBBC, don’t you know? Maybe you can cure us all, what?’

  Looking back over his shoulder, Tennant could see the Fordson begin to move off, keeping close to the curb. Tennant stopped in his tracks and firmly pulled Burgess’s fingers off his arm.

  ‘Some other time perhaps,’ Tennant said quickly. ‘I’ve got a bit of an emergency right at the moment.’ He smiled briefly and then turned away in the opposite direction.

  ‘Charming,’ snorted Burgess. A few seconds later Tennant managed to flag down a cab. He climbed in and slammed the door, feeling the sweat begin to pool in his armpits. Another few minutes with the drunken homosexual and he might never have been able to get away.

  ‘Where to?’ asked the driver.

  ‘The zoo,’ Tennant instructed, leaning back against the seat. He turned and looked out the rear window. Burgess was still standing there, weaving slightly at the curb. He made a rude gesture in Tennant’s direction then struck off through the heavy, midday traffic, holding up one
imperious hand as he staggered back towards Broadcasting House.

  ‘Fool,’ muttered Tennant.

  ‘Beg pardon?’ asked the driver.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Which entrance, Guv?’

  ‘Main gate. And hurry.’

  They moved north up Portland Place, heading for the semicircle of elegant Regency mansions at Park Crescent. They passed the slow-moving Fordson, the MI5 watcher and finally the tall, blond-haired courier, then bore to the right, following the wide avenue to the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park, arcing up to the main entrance to the Zoological Gardens.

  Tennant’s cab dropped him in front of the main gate on the Outer Circle Road across from the crescent-shaped car park. He paid the driver, gave his shilling to the man at the ticket office and went through the turnstile. The rear of the monkey house was directly in front of him and his nostrils were instantly assaulted by the stench of several hundred of the creatures all assembled in one place.

  To left and right were large aviary buildings, their occupants keeping up a steady, idiotic screeching. A light drizzle had begun to fall, and the gravelled pathways meandering around the cages, pavilions and small treed areas were almost empty.

  Not that the zoo was doing any great business these days – since the evacuation of London’s children the Zoological Gardens had lost their most loyal customers. Over the last twelve months the daily admissions had dropped from eighteen thousand to less than a quarter of that number. On a rainy Monday afternoon there’d be even fewer people about.

  Tennant pulled up the collar of his jacket and glanced over his shoulder. Still no sign of the Swede and the watchers following him. From past experience the psychiatrist knew that the courier always walked up to the Regent’s Park tube station then took a cab to the main entrance or more often a No. 74 bus to the north entrance on Albert Road. Either way, Tennant still had a few minutes to prepare.