A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  ‘Ages first.’

  There was a short pause. ‘Ellis was fifty-six,’ said the assistant slowly, reading from the file. ‘Taplow is listed as unknown but presumed to be in his seventies. Dementia praecox, it says here. He was taken away by his nephew.’ Both men were too old.

  ‘Wilkes?’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  Much better, thought Tennant. ‘How tall was he?’

  ‘Five feet seven and one-half inches,’ the assistant answered promptly.

  ‘And Loudermilk?’

  ‘Five foot six.’

  ‘What about his weight?’

  ‘Nine stone four pounds when he arrived, ten stone exactly at his last physical examination.’

  ‘Wilkes?’

  ‘Nine stone thirteen pounds when he was released.’ Tennant nodded to himself. Loudermilk weighed one hundred and forty pounds and Wilkes weighed one pound less. Not enough to make a difference.

  ‘Is there any reference in Loudermilk’s file about particular friends he had while he was at the hospital?’

  ‘Just a minute.’ Tennant could hear the distant, rustling sound of pages being turned. Finally the assistant came back on the line. ‘Yes. Here it is. Listed under social interactions.’

  ‘Well?’ asked Tennant anxiously.

  ‘You’re quite right, Doctor. Loudermilk did work at the library with Wilkes – Arthur Sidney Wilkes.’ Tennant could almost see the man’s eyebrows rising. ‘Now isn’t that a coincidence?’

  ‘Yes. Isn’t it?’ Tennant thanked the man and then rang off. Opening his desk drawer, he took out a sharpened pencil and a tablet of lined paper. In a swift, neat hand he wrote four names, putting them one atop the other:

  John Martin

  Raymond Loudermilk

  Bernard Timothy Exner

  Arthur Sidney Wilkes

  Loudermilk was John Martin, brought back to life. Loudermilk murdered Bernard Exner and took his name. The final link in the chain was Arthur Sidney Wilkes. The last transmigration of Raymond Loudermilk’s black, twisted soul. A journey begun so long ago in the desperately wounded heart of a lonely boy; a journey that was almost ended. Charles Tennant added a fifth name to the list:

  Queer Jack

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sunday, December 29, 1940

  7:00 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time

  Morris Black awoke to the soft breathing sounds of Katherine Copeland next to him on the narrow bed and the deep silence of the Heath beyond the bedroom window. In times past, before the war, before Fay had died, they would wake up on Sunday morning surrounded by the echoing peals from nearby St George’s Chapel and the distant rolling thunder striding magnificently out from St Paul’s and across the city. For Black the bells were a pure, pleasant sound, inextricably entwined with the smell of freshly brewed coffee and the wafting scent of frying bacon – the small, sinful secret he’d somehow managed to keep from his relentlessly kosher mother. Fay had always cooked him breakfast in bed on Sunday. But Fay was gone and he could let himself think about her now with only a fleeting pain in his heart.

  He rolled over and stared at the woman in the bed beside him now. He’d loved his wife deeply but she’d had little of the raw, lustful passion that Katherine had offered to him so freely over the last few days and which he had gladly, then joyously accepted. Sex had been hard for Fay, something to be done in whispers and in haste, not the spirited, bawdy pleasure that Kat made of it.

  Black turned away again, slipping out of bed quietly. Taking his clothes from the back of a chair, he carried them out into the short hall above the stairs and dressed. He frowned, standing on one foot to pull on a sock. For some reason he’d found himself thinking of Trench, the chess-playing Coventry butcher, and from there his thoughts led him to Garlinski and finally to Queer Jack.

  He went downstairs to the kitchen, quietly brewed himself a pot of tea and took a steaming mug of it out through the scullery to the back garden. The fog had cleared and over the waist-high brick wall he could look across the ponds to the heath itself.

  He put his mug down on the top of the wall and lit a cigarette. The sun was still little more than a brightening in the sky above the heath’s low hills but the air was clear and crisply cold. In other times the weather would have meant a pleasant winter’s day; now it was the sure guarantee of a visit from the Luftwaffe. Tonight there’d be a raid.

  But would the raid bring out Queer Jack? Maybe Liddell’s rationale had merit. There was a chance that the man who called himself Arthur Sidney Wilkes had died in Coventry, turned to ashes in the storm of fire that had swept through the centre of the city. Perhaps Trench had been the madman’s final victim and Black’s search for the killer was now nothing more than an academic exercise.

  Black sipped his tea and smoked his cigarette. Yesterday he’d left the broken figure of George Le Fanu Gurney behind him and returned to Hampstead, making his way to the Subscription Library. The address they had for Wilkes turned out to be an accommodation, a mailbox rented on a monthly basis from a tobacconist on the High Street.

  From there Black had gone to Church Row and the parish office of St John’s Church. Several Wilkeses were buried in the adjoining churchyard but, according to the records, there hadn’t been a Wilkes in the congregation for more than fifty years. The same was true of the Catholic church on Holly Walk. Nor were there any Raymond Loudermilks. If Wilkes lived in Hampstead, he wasn’t using either name. Black hadn’t mentioned any of this to Katherine or to Fleming. Not yet. Not until he was absolutely sure.

  The detective stubbed out his cigarette on the brick wall and finished off the cooling dregs of his tea. In front of him the soft, velvet hills and vales of Hampstead Heath stretched out forever. With the exception of the dark scars marking the places where the ARP workers had scooped up the soil to fill their incendiary buckets and sandbags, the heath looked as it had a hundred thousand years ago and would look a hundred thousand years hence, long after Morris Black and Arthur Sidney Wilkes had gone to dust.

  He sighed. It was all so bloody meaningless. What did Queer Jack matter in the unravelling skein of time that stretched infinitely back and forth from where he stood? He picked up his mug, preparing to go back into the house, and once again he thought of Trench. Why did the man keep coming back into his mind? He put down the mug, stared out at the heath again, listening to the silence.

  That was it. He’d awakened and the first thing he’d thought of was the sound of church bells in Mayfair. What on earth did that have to do with a butcher in Coventry? Black stood there, frozen, staring blindly at nothing, willing the association to come.

  The Sight again, like the puddling of mercury from a broken fever thermometer, tiny silver beads of disparate fact drawn together by some unseen magnetic force. He waited for it, heart pounding, his growing despair vanishing in the moment. Something about the postcards of cathedrals? Trench? Chess? The sound of Milner-Barry’s voice, the scientist from Bletchley?

  ‘Was your man a musician by any chance?’

  ‘Bells?’ he whispered.

  Something Trench’s wife had said on the telephone and something Trench himself had repeated. Mrs Trench had mentioned that her husband was never home and said something about his work with the Society. Later, speaking with Trench directly, the butcher had said that he, like the man he was to meet that evening, was a member of the Society. Black had assumed that both Trench and his wife had been referring to chess but it was the Correspondence Chess Association, not Society. What Society then?

  Standing there rigidly, Morris Black had a sudden, vivid memory of Spilsbury bending over the fibreboard coffin that contained the liquefying, waxy thing that had once been Jane Luffington. He’d commented on the obscure knot tied in the length of cord that had strangled her. The same knot Black had seen Trench using to tie up the awning as he closed his shop. A knot with two closed loops, intricately twisted so that with a single pull on the free end the whole thing would come undone. Knots. Bells.
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  ‘My God!’ whispered Morris Black, suddenly understanding. ‘Burlingame!’ He turned and raced back towards the house.

  * * *

  ‘This,’ said Maxwell Knight, ‘is almost unbelievable.’ He sat on the edge of Dr Charles Tennant’s couch in Cheyne Walk Mews, still wearing his trench coat and his plain officer’s cap, the exotic Chinese carpet ankle deep in strewn paper and file folders. Thumps and bangs could be heard from the floors above as Fleming and the others rooted through the psychiatrist’s flat.

  Guy Liddell sat behind Tennant’s desk, going through the drawers, more files piled in front of him. An hour ago they’d found the hidden wire recorder and great loops of flex now hung down from the ceiling, ending with the microphone hidden in the wall to one side of the patient’s couch. So far they’d found no spools of recording wire that might have been used on the machine.

  They had, however, cleared up the mystery of the Italian fountain pen. Liddell’s idle fantasy about Joan Miller and Maxwell Knight hadn’t been far wrong. The woman had bought the pen for her psychiatrist. Tennant had even made a note of the gift. Liddell hadn’t mentioned his discovery to Knight, nor would he.

  ‘Yes,’ Liddell said absently. ‘It’s quite disturbing.’

  ‘Disturbing?’ Knight crowed. ‘This is King Solomon’s mines, Liddell.’ He glanced at one of the file folders in his hand. ‘Astounding. We’ve got half the bloody aristocracy having it off with the other half and more besides. The Duchess of Kent sobbing on about her husband and Noël Coward. Dear God, Liddell! Think of it!’

  And Charles Henry Maxwell Knight having it off with his chauffeur, thought Liddell, closing the file folder on the desk in front of him. Joan Miller’s file. Dear God indeed. After arriving at Cheyne Walk Mews and beginning their search, it quickly became clear to Liddell that they had fallen upon a powder keg, not a gold mine. At least a third of the patient records in Tennant’s office were neatly cross-indexed with references to an entirely different set of files – files that they had yet to find.

  Even without them the basic patient records would be enough to blot the escutcheons of a score of ancient and influential families, not to mention ruining the reputations of at least that many cabinet ministers, high-ranking bureaucrats and intelligence officers. This was Pandora’s box with all the plagues and furies about to be released.

  Liddell had already found a file on Poppy Baring, his ex-wife’s sister, which linked directly to the Duke of Kent and elsewhere, and another file on Diana Cooper, Duff Cooper’s wife, listing both her lovers and her husband’s mistresses as well as giving details of her various addictions to cocaine, morphine and even chloroform.

  Going through the vast assortment of files was like peeping through some all-encompassing social and political keyhole. What, for instance, would the world press do with the knowledge that the Duke of Windsor suffered from a bluntly self-descriptive medical condition called ‘micropenis’ and at his wife’s insistence was regularly taking a drug prescribed for him by Theodore Morrell, Adolf Hitler’s personal physician? It was worse than anything Liddell could possibly have imagined.

  ‘These will all have to be destroyed of course,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you, Knight?’

  ‘You must be mad. We can’t do that!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Liddell stiffly. Maxwell Knight had influential connections within the intelligence establishment but, officially at least, Liddell was his superior. Apparently his long-time detachment to the small unit at Dolphin Square had given him airs.

  ‘We have the makings of something here,’ the smaller man insisted, a handful of paper clutched in each hand. ‘You can’t simply make it all just vanish.’

  The makings of what? thought Liddell – an empire of secrets, with Max Knight on the throne, bringing all the high and mighty to heel like so many baying hounds? A corrupt and evil man had gathered all this information together and whoever used it would be equally corrupted. This kind of power could not be allowed to survive.

  ‘Yes. We can make it all vanish. We have to.’

  ‘We’ll have to evaluate it all first, you’ll agree to that, certainly.’

  A conditional armistice. Without Knight’s help there was no way that Liddell could keep the secret of Tennant’s treachery. A word or two in the appropriate ear and Liddell would be swamped with calls from the man’s patients, all of them desperate to retrieve their confessions.

  ‘There’ll have to be a time limit,’ Liddell murmured cautiously.

  ‘It will take at least two months to go through all of this,’ said Knight, gazing around the littered room.

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Give me to the end of the month.’

  ‘All right. Then everything is destroyed. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  Knowing that Knight was watching him, Liddell opened the file in front of him again, withdrew the sheaf of papers, folded them lengthwise, and slipped them into the inside pocket of his jacket. Knight frowned but said nothing. Who shall watch the watchers? Liddell thought. If Knight went too far, there was enough information in the file he’d just taken to bring the man down to earth again. He rubbed a hand across his jaw and yawned. He was still recovering from his voyage across the Irish Sea and the long train trip that followed. With this job done and Steinmaur under guard and hidden away safely, all he wanted to do now was sleep. He knew that he wasn’t likely to get the chance.

  Flushed with exertion, Ian Fleming came into the room. He was dressed informally, wearing twill trousers, a navy roll-neck sweater and smoking a cigarette. He was carrying a magazine.

  ‘What did you find?’ Liddell asked.

  ‘National Geographic,’ said the young man from naval intelligence. ‘Swift was right. A new key for the code with each month’s issue.’

  ‘Do we have any indication of where Tennant might be?’ asked Knight.

  Fleming shrugged again. ‘It looks as though he has some country place along the Thames. Calls it Rooksnest, just below Dorney Village. There were some receipts in the desk in his bedroom for work he’d had done.’

  ‘Then we should cut along and find the bastard.’ Liddell frowned. ‘Pray God he hasn’t already done a bunk.’ He turned to Knight. ‘Will you be coming with us?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Knight smiled thinly. ‘You take the kudos, old man. After all, you were the only one who really believed that he existed.’ He paused. ‘Plenty to do here. Cleaning up this lot.’

  ‘Where will you be taking it?’

  ‘Not Dolphin Square,’ Knight answered. No indeed, thought Liddell. Not with Joan Miller so close at hand.

  ‘The Pimlico address?’

  ‘Yes, I think that would do well enough, at least for the time being.’

  ‘All right.’ Liddell nodded. ‘I’ll see you there then. After we’re done.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Knight smiled again. ‘Good luck.’

  * * *

  Charles Tennant was coming up the path from the river when he heard the ringing of the telephone. He frowned. No more than half a dozen people in London even knew that Rooksnest existed, let alone that it was equipped with a telephone. Probably a wrong number. Even so he quickened his pace, went in through the scullery door and crossed the kitchen without taking off his Wellingtons. The ringing continued. He reached the small desk beside the stairs in the hall, hesitated then picked up the telephone receiver.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Dr Tennant?’ The voice was flat and businesslike, the accent neither one thing or the other. They had a name for it: mid-Atlantic?

  ‘Yes.’ He knew the voice, had prayed that he would never hear it again. Coming now, it could only mean one thing.

  ‘You know who this is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’ve identified you.’

  Tennant closed his eyes, squeezing them tightly shut. He could feel a rushing sound in his ears and his mouth was suddenly dry.

  ‘How?’
r />   ‘Something we couldn’t have foreseen. They’ve already raided your house in Cheyne Walk Mews. They’ll be coming there next.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Of course. You’re very lucky they didn’t catch you.’ There was a crackling electronic pause. ‘We’re all very lucky. We’d like that luck to continue, Dr Tennant.’

  ‘I’m very close. Another few hours and I can—’

  ‘That doesn’t matter now. You’ll have to leave.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘There’s too much at stake, Doctor. If you’re captured and interrogated…’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘You know the procedure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Get out now. You’ll have to hurry.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Goodbye, Doctor. Have a safe journey.’ There was a harsh click and then nothing. Tennant stood numbly, the receiver hanging limply from his hand. His world had been turned upside down in a single instant and for a moment he didn’t know what to do. Panic welled up in him and it was only through sheer force of will that he regained control of himself.

  He’d been found out but he hadn’t been captured yet and he had all the linking files and wire recordings here with him at Rooksnest. Hanging up the telephone, he went back into the kitchen, sat down at the table and quickly examined his options.

  As far as he could see, only two choices were left open to him. He could either use the files and the recordings as a form of barter with the British authorities or he could follow the procedure set down by Schellenberg after their last meeting.

  The escape route was simple enough and as close to foolproof as could be expected. He was to take Sandpiper to the mouth of the Thames, wait for nightfall then sail directly out into the Channel. Once he reached one of the floating ‘rescue islands’ set out by the German Navy for downed pilots, he would send out a prearranged radio signal, scuttle the little boat and wait on the rescue platform for an E boat to pick him up.