A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  ‘The painter?’ Tennant could vaguely remember seeing some of the nineteenth-century religious artist’s gigantic canvases on display at the Tate. Huge, melodramatic evocations of biblical catastrophe and cataclysm. ‘No, I wasn’t aware of that.’

  ‘He was fascinated by the man; compulsively so. Here, let me show you something.’ The asylum director rose from his chair and went to the row of filing cabinets on his left. He found the right drawer, opened it and withdrew a large manila folder. Returning to his chair, he turned the file around on the desk blotter and opened it. Tennant moved his chair forward and began leafing through the pages contained in the folder.

  It was like staring into a neatly organised vision of hell. Dozens of carefully executed pencil drawings showed various scenes from the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost, each one with a neatly inscribed notation in the lower left-hand corner giving date and source. Pandemonium, The Bridge of Chaos, The Conflict Between Satan and Death, Satan on the Burning Lake, The Destruction of Sodom, The Opening of the Seventh Seal, The Deluge, The Great Day of His Wrath. There were also a series of drawings with a single repetitive image: The Last Judgement. In these the scene was always the same. Hillman read Loudermilk’s own title aloud:

  ‘God, seated on his Heavenly Throne, flanked by A Gathering of Saints, Sternly watching the Avenging Angel bringing the fiery Spear of God to the Damned assembled in the Valley of Jehoshaphat below.’

  The largest of the drawings, folded over twice in the file, had been done on translucent vellum and had obviously been traced. There were literally hundreds of tiny figures in the drawing, each one numbered, faint lines joining one to the other, and all to the tip of the flaming spear.

  ‘There’s another file as thick as this one,’ said Hillman as Tennant went through the drawings. ‘Drawings based on Martin’s plans for… what was it now?’ He paused for a moment and thought. ‘Ah, yes, Plan for Improving the Air and Water of the Metropolis. Quite astounding for the times. Aqueducts, cambered rail lines, bridges. Martin was something of an engineer as well as a painter.’

  ‘You sound as though you learned a great deal about him yourself.’ Perhaps even shared in Raymond Loudermilk’s obsession.

  ‘Part of the therapeutic process.’ Hillman shrugged. ‘He never stated it explicitly but Raymond suffered under the delusion that he was Martin’s reincarnation. Chess was another example.’

  ‘Martin was a chess player?’ asked Tennant, startled at the connection.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Hillman nodded firmly. His hand had gone back to the pencils again. ‘One of the great ones of his time. He had weekly gatherings at his studio. Played with people like Sir Robert Peel, Constable, Turner, even Brunel, the fellow who engineered the Suez Canal.’

  Tennant closed the file in front of him. His mental image of Raymond Loudermilk was complete. It was time to move on to more practical considerations.

  ‘How long was Loudermilk a patient here?’

  ‘A little short of three years.’

  ‘Do you recall exactly when he was released?’

  ‘He wasn’t,’ said Hillman, frowning.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I assumed that you knew.’ The pencils stood in a perfect line. The fingers moved towards the pens. ‘Raymond Loudermilk was never released from Cane Hill. He committed suicide twenty years ago. He’s dead.’

  * * *

  Charlie Snow’s office was located in Golden Cross House, a modern, six-storey Portland-stone block only a year or so old, which had replaced the ancient hotel of the same name. The building was roughly triangular, filling the island site formed at Trafalgar Square by the convergence of Duncannon Street, Charing Cross Road and the entrance to the Strand.

  Officially, Snow was assistant deputy director of the Directorate of Scientific Research’s Department of Scientific Personnel Technical Division, reporting directly to the War Office. Or, as the cardboard placard on his door described him: A.D.Dir/DSR/Dep’t Sci. Per. (Tech Div.)-W.O.

  ‘My God!’ Katherine whispered as Black rapped on the door. ‘And I thought Foggy Bottom was bad!’

  ‘Foggy Bottom?’ Black frowned.

  ‘Forget it.’

  A mild voice came from behind the door. ‘Enter!’

  They did so. The top-floor office was tiny, no more than twelve feet to a side, with a single window looking down over the grimy façade of Charing Cross Station and the delicate miniature spire of Charing Cross itself, which stood in the station’s forecourt. The replica of the thirteenth-century monument laid down by Edward I on the occasion of his wife’s funeral was the official point from which all distances were measured on Ordnance Survey maps and was almost certainly the X marking the spot on Luftwaffe bombing charts.

  ‘One assumes that Jerry is incapable of hitting the bull’s- eye spot on,’ said Snow, reading Morris Black’s brief glance. ‘Statistically it’s probably the safest place in London.’ Snow came out from around his heavily varnished desk, beaming brightly and adjusting the vest of his blue suit across a beach-ball stomach. He looked to be a well-nourished thirty-five or so. ‘You must be Inspector Black and this would be Miss Copeland.’

  They shook hands and Snow returned to his desk. Black and Katherine seated themselves in two plain wooden chairs across from him. Behind Snow, pinned to the wall, was a gigantic chart filled with names, squares and squiggles that dwarfed the little man below it.

  Snow was small, built like a heavy-chested sparrow, large, intelligent eyes made larger by the thick, perfectly round spectacles perched on his small, beaklike nose. His head was perfectly round, the large dome of his skull feathered by a tonsure of dark hair. He had a full, almost feminine mouth and a soft, rounded chin.

  ‘Have a good holiday, then?’ he asked.

  Black threw Katherine a quick, embarrassed look then turned his attention back to Snow. ‘Yes. Quite.’

  ‘Good. Good.’ Snow nodded, the large head bobbing up and down. Black smiled, suddenly realised why the man looked so familiar. He looked exactly like Mole in the illustrated Wind in the Willows he’d read as a child. ‘Worked all through, myself. First a blizzard and then this hideous fog. Marooned at the Oxford and Cambridge Club for three days.’ He blinked happily behind the glasses. ‘I suppose that illiterate wretch Alexander told you that I’m actually a novelist.’ Black almost laughed. The war at home was apparently being run by a hodgepodge assembly of mystery writers, mathematicians and Oxford dons playing at espionage.

  Black answered Snow diplomatically. ‘He mentioned something about it.’

  ‘God knows what sort of vile aspersions he was casting in my direction. I should have the little rotter sacked.’ Snow smiled again. ‘I could, you know. Apparently that’s the sort of thing I’ve been hired on to do.’ He shook his head. ‘Extraordinary way to spend the war. Much rather be in the field. Rather a good shot in my time, even if I do say so myself.’

  Black tried to imagine the portly figure carrying a Lee-Enfield or wearing a tin hat and manning an anti-aircraft gun. The image failed to materialise.

  ‘Alexander and Milner-Barry said that you might be able to help us.’

  ‘Yes, so you said on the telephone.’ Snow nodded, then pulled out the central drawer in his desk. ‘I’ve done my homework on your request already, as a matter of fact. Got it out of the way first thing.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Snow found what he was looking for – a single sheet of lined paper. He laid it flat on the desk in front of him, frowning. ‘Wilkes.’

  ‘That’s the man’s name?’ said Black. He looked over at Katherine; she’d already taken a stenographer’s notebook from her bag and had it on her lap.

  ‘Yes. Arthur Sidney Wilkes.’ Snow spelled it out slowly and Katherine jotted it down in the book. ‘Odd sort of fellow by the looks of it.’

  ‘He worked at the Cavendish Laboratory?’

  ‘Among other institutions.’ Snow looked up from the sheet of paper and beamed again. ‘Can’t
tell you all the names, I’m afraid. Top secret and all that.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I can tell you that he seems to have been employed as a technician of one sort or another for a number of years. According to the record, he was with Standard Telegraph and Cable for a time and before that he was with the Government Post Office. That was before coming to Cambridge.’

  ‘Can you tell me when that was exactly?’

  ‘Cambridge? Nineteen thirty-eight. March.’

  ‘What about his education?’

  ‘None to speak of. He seems mostly to have been hired on previous experience. Not so uncommon these days.’

  ‘When was he let go?’

  ‘Five months ago,’ Snow answered promptly. ‘July twenty-eighth to be precise.’

  Black nodded to himself. Six weeks for the anger to grow. Six weeks to first put his terrible plan into place and then into action.

  ‘Do you have his National Registration Card number?’

  ‘Certainly.’ Snow read it off and Katherine wrote in her notebook once again.

  ‘What about an address or a telephone number?’

  ‘No telephone. And the only address I have here is a postal box number.’

  ‘Which district?’

  ‘NW3.’

  Katherine looked up from her notebook. ‘Where’s that?’

  Black’s voice went cold. ‘Hampstead.’

  * * *

  Wexfordian was a roller. The eight-hundred-ton coastal steamer twisted like a corkscrew with each passing wave and Guy Liddell’s stomach twisted with it. It was late afternoon now, and somewhere the sun was setting, but the intelligence officer hadn’t seen even the vaguest sign of it since they’d left Douglas Bay three hours before. According to the latest Met report, the fog that covered half of southern England was also covering most of the Irish Sea from Drogheda to Caernarvon.

  Liddell couldn’t have cared less; as he sat on a bench bolted to the bulkhead of the topside stern cabin, every ounce of his concentration was fixed on the Wexford Steamship Co. pennant fluttering on its lanyard over the stern. Above him, at his back, Wexfordian’s foghorn sounded a single, doom-filled note.

  Somehow he had convinced himself that if he focused on the little striped flag, he wouldn’t be sick again. Unbelievably, the ghastly, Gravol-resistant motion of the coastal steamer didn’t seem to be having any effect at all on Steinmaur. The last Liddell had seen of him he was sleeping comfortably in the day cabin they’d been offered as quarters for their passage.

  Liddell lifted his wrist and glanced at his watch. Time seemed to be standing still, and time, it seemed, had now become his greatest opponent. Steinmaur had positively identified the man he’d seen at the Liverpool internment camp and Liddell had no way of acting on the information. The undersea telephone cable had been out even before he arrived on the Isle of Man and there was no way that he was going to trust the incredible news to a wireless transmission.

  All through Christmas and Boxing Day the storms sweeping down from the north had made flying out of Douglas impossible and then the fog had appeared like some creeping nemesis sent by something Dennis Wheatley or one of Maxwell Knight’s other spiritualist friends might have dreamed up.

  Wexfordian had been the first ship out of Douglas, and Liddell, almost frantic with frustration, had booked passage for himself and the little German. He’d regretted his decision from the first minute past the end of Victoria Pier. And there was worse to come.

  As well as carrying coal and mixed cargo, Wexfordian also carried mail. She would put in at Wicklow and her home port of Wexford on the Irish coast, then cross to Cardigan and Pembroke before finally docking at Cardiff sometime late tomorrow. That is unless they were interrupted by a passing U-boat off to deliver more Special Branch fifth columnists to the Irish coast.

  If by some lucky twist of fate they arrived at Cardiff intact, he and Steinmaur would catch a connecting train to London but the earliest they could arrive would be close to midnight. Sadly, Dr Charles Tennant, captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps and suspected Nazi spy for Reinhard Heydrich, would have to wait one more day for his just deserts.

  Steinmaur’s immediate and unequivocal identification of the psychiatrist still astounded Liddell. There had been seven members of the medical committee on the tour of the Liverpool internment camp, all in uniform. Of them, Charles Tennant was the last one Liddell would have suspected. With hindsight he was the obvious man, of course, at least as far as his usefulness to Heydrich was concerned.

  The implications of the man’s treachery were mind-boggling. Charles Tennant was an adviser to Masterman and the Double X Committee, one of several psychiatric advisers to the Home Security Office on matters pertaining to mental health and morale and he sat on the Air Ministry Fitness Evaluation Board. Even worse than his official status was the man’s private practice.

  Liddell had only the vaguest notion of the psychiatrist’s social and professional contacts but even so he was aware of Tennant’s reputation. From what he knew the bulk of Tennant’s practice was made up of ministerial wives, ministerial mistresses and the ministers themselves. God only knew what deep dark secrets they’d divulged in confidence and God only knew what damage the man had done by passing those secrets along to the Nazis.

  The intelligence officer stared numbly out at the seething, porridge-grey surface of the water running out from beneath the low, rounded stern of Wexfordian. He shivered in the damp, foggy air. The whole idea of it was as brilliant as it was grotesque.

  A psychiatrist to the gentry, privy to every sin and cause for shame offered up to him freely and in total confidence, or so the gentry imagined. What better way to wheedle out the grubby horrors burrowed so securely in the woodwork along the corridors of power?

  The Pig and Eyes on Halifax, Channon and the esteemed Rab Butler had been responsible, at least in part, for the downfall of the Peace at Any Price cabal. What could Tennant accomplish with the information contained in his files?

  Liddell was also well aware that far more was at risk here than just the nation’s secrets. If news of Charles Tennant’s role as a spy got out, there’d be skeletons rattling from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall, not to mention Secret Intelligence and MI5. He only knew the names of a few of Tennant’s patients but for the seasick intelligence officer it was more than enough.

  The present wife of Stewart Menzies, head of SIS, had been under the psychiatrist’s care for a variety of eating disorders and Menzies’s first wife, a member of the ubiquitous Sackville clan, was also his patient. What tattle were they whispering in Tennant’s ear?

  Worse yet, it was common knowledge that Princess Marina, the Duchess of Kent, was also seeing the psychiatrist on a regular basis, probably to complain about the nocturnal activities of her husband, George, younger brother to the king.

  Prince George’s coterie included a host of other Clubland figures like Dickie Mountbatten, Patrick, the seventh Baron Plunkett, and the foppish James Pope-Hennessy, now conveniently installed in a Foreign Office sinecure within cooing distance of none other than Chips Channon. Princess Marina, of course, would know them all, and well.

  Thinking about Pope-Hennessy brought Liddell up short. The man’s sister, Caroline, was a secretary in his own office. He moaned, wondering just how far Tennant had managed to spin his web. His stomach lurched violently at the thought of what that could mean.

  He rose quickly, staggered to the portside rail and vomited again. He had enough secrets of his own to keep and he knew that he wasn’t alone. Above him, just forward of the tall, single-striped funnel, Wexfordian’s foghorn boomed out, shatteringly loud, the sound seeping into the mist, then fading without an echo into nothingness.

  Liddell retched until he tasted bile then stumbled back to the bench. Too many secrets to protect, too many lies to tell in order to keep them safe. There would be some judicious editing of Dr Charles Tennant’s records and case histories before they drifted too far beyond Liddell�
�s reach. Vertigo and nausea returned as his train of thought plunged into a bottomless chasm of linked, accumulating disaster.

  Gritting his teeth, he focused hard on the dangling pennant, silently cursing whatever convolution of fate had put him on this wretched lurching ship, tossed on this wretched, heaving sea.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Saturday, December 28, 1940

  11:00 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time

  Morris Black walked up East Finchley Road from the underground station and paused in front of the high wooden gate barring the entrance to the Stag Motor Garage. It seemed as though the world had changed in the span of a few short days, or at least his world. In Katherine’s arms he’d felt a terrible burden of sadness lifted magically from his shoulders and now he could feel the familiar, cold sense of elation that came with the Sight.

  This, he thought, was how an actor must feel, reaching the penultimate dramatic speech in the final act of a play. It was as though the lines had already been written, needing only to be spoken for the climax to be reached.

  There was always the chance that he was mistaken about Gurney but he’d sensed something false in the man at their earlier meeting and the fact that the Finchley Road garage stood on the border of Hampstead – the location of Wilkes’s postal box – was an added incentive for returning to the Stag. He pushed open the small door set into the gate, entered the cluttered yard and crossed to George Gurney’s shop.

  Sam the dog came out to meet him, fangs bared, growling low in his heavy chest but this time Black ignored him. Inside the shop the Hispano Suiza had been replaced by a Wolseley with a crumpled bonnet. Gurney, dressed in his oily boilersuit, was standing at his workbench when the detective entered. Turning, the tall, blond-haired man stared blankly for a moment, wiped his hands with a rag then crossed the shop to where Black was standing.