A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  Neither choice was particularly attractive. If he turned himself over to the British authorities, there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t be interrogated, then tried, convicted and hung for what he was – a traitor and a spy. Even if he was simply imprisoned, he was fully aware that the forces represented by the man on the telephone could hardly let him survive for long.

  On the other hand, what would happen to him if he escaped and made his way to Germany? His usefulness was ended, now that he’d been discovered, and the information in the files and recordings wouldn’t be enough to keep Heydrich and his people occupied for long.

  Depending on the state of Heydrich’s unpredictable mind, he might be pensioned off somewhere without anything like the advantages and perquisites he’d had here in England or, at worst, be put up against a basement wall in Prinz Albrecht Strasse and summarily shot. Unless…

  Tennant glanced at the Rolex on his wrist, calculating quickly, trying to recall the basic tide tables at Sheerness. He nodded to himself and stood up, making his decision. If he hurried, there might still be a chance.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Sunday, December 29, 1940

  4:00 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time

  The man was just where Morris Black expected him to be, even on a Sunday morning in the middle of a war. During his waking hours Roger Burlingame was seldom, if ever, found far from his allotted place in the enormous, glass-domed Reading Room of the British Museum, usually with a tall stack of books at his elbow and his twin, rubber-tipped canes slung over the back of his chair.

  The fact that much of the huge collection had been removed from the library for safekeeping was irrelevant to Burlingame; as long as there were any books at all still in the stacks, he would be there, compiling, collating and updating his endless lists, somehow managing to relate bits of information on virtually any subject to the Burlingame family tree.

  For almost as long as Black had known him, Roger had been writing the family’s official history. A task that was necessary, according to Roger, since it was unlikely that anyone would ever write the unofficial version.

  Black had known the crippled man since childhood. Burlingame, only son of a minor peer, born with withered legs, thin as sticks, had been the object of endless bullying at school, and Black, a Jew, had been equally sought out by the resident bullies. The two boys found common ground together, Black defending Burlingame with his fists and feet, his friend defending Black with his astounding intellect and a wit often crueller than any gibes either boy was given by their enemies.

  Their friendship had continued and Black often spent summers at the family estate in Staffordshire. Burlingame’s father, a bluff, hearty man who was also the local magistrate, regularly took Black and his son on his official rounds and, just as regularly, interrupted them to show the boys something of interest on the way, especially if it had to do with birds and birds’ eggs, Lord Burlingame’s private passion. His Lordship had another vice as well: bells. According to Roger, his father was the pre-eminent bell-ringer in the county and one of the ten best known in England.

  ‘Hello, Roger,’ said Black, sitting down across the narrow table from his old friend.

  Burlingame looked up from the enormous tome opened in front of him and blinked hard, the action detaching his spectacles from their resting position on his forehead. As the years had passed, it seemed to Black that his friend’s body was becoming as wasted as his legs. He looked frightfully thin and Black noticed now the trace of grey in his longish hair. They were both getting old.

  ‘Oh, Morris, it’s you. Been some time since I saw you last. Come down for some intellectual stimulation, have you?’

  ‘Afraid not.’ Roger was right; they didn’t see much of each other anymore, not since Fay had died. For a moment the observation shocked him. Fay’s death seemed to have brought an end to a lot of things in his life. He wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t met Katherine. Perhaps he would have withered up like Roger’s legs.

  ‘Dear me, not a professional visit?’

  ‘I need your advice.’

  ‘My advice? What on earth could I know that would be of interest to you?’

  ‘Can you tie a bell-ringers knot?’ It seemed like a thousand years ago two young boys watched Roger’s father in the bell tower of a village church, tying off a bell rope after ringing a long, complicated course of notes.

  ‘What an astounding question.’ Burlingame sat back in his chair and stared across the table at his friend.

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ The pale, thin man nodded, blinking in the pale light coming down from the green-shaded lamp above his work area. ‘Or I could if you had bit of string lying about.’

  Black pushed back his chair, bent down and untied one shoe. He slipped it off, then stripped out the lace, handing it across the table. Roger took it, the long, deft fingers of his hands a blurring contrast to his almost useless legs. He frowned, concentrating, then turned the final loop. He held up the completed knot.

  ‘That’s it,’ Black murmured.

  ‘Of course that’s it,’ Burlingame answered, slightly miffed.

  ‘No, I mean, it’s the same knot I saw.’

  ‘Saw where? Hanging about in belfries now, Morris?’

  ‘Around a woman’s neck,’ Black answered, staring at the innocent length of shoelace in his friend’s hand. ‘And tying up a butcher’s awning.’

  ‘Extraordinary. It’s certainly not what it was intended for. The whole point of it is to keep the loose end of the bell pull out of the way when you’re doing the ringing and to keep the pull secure after you’re done.’ Burlingame shook his head. ‘There’s any number of knots you could use to strangle someone or tie back an awning.’

  ‘It’s that rare?’

  ‘Yes. Quite.’ Burlingame laughed, the sound more of a cough. ‘There aren’t that many bell-ringers about, you know. It’s a fairly obscure occupation, especially these days. Not much call for it when you aren’t allowed to ring church bells until the war’s over or the Germans decide to drop in for a visit.’

  ‘Bell-ringers have a guild of sorts, don’t they?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Burlingame nodded. ‘My father was chairman of the Staffordshire chapter for years. The Ancient Society of College Youths.’ He frowned. ‘I’ve no idea why it’s called that. I suppose I’ll look it up one day. Might be an interesting derivation. Surprised I don’t know it actually.’

  ‘How many members all told?’

  ‘In the entire country?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No more than two or three hundred.’

  ‘In London?’

  ‘Fifty or so, perhaps. Maybe less. Being a member isn’t a matter of age, you see, it’s more of an aptitude, so some of the younger members may have been called up.’

  ‘What sort of aptitude?’

  ‘Mathematical.’ Burlingame pursed his lips thoughtfully then spoke again. ‘For instance, a full round of Kent Bob Majors runs to something like, um, fifteen thousand eight hundred and forty changes. Take you about nine hours to ring it in. I think that’s the record. Or it was anyway.’

  ‘A lot of permutations.’

  ‘Endless.’

  ‘Like chess?’

  ‘Oh, much more complicated.’ A sad expression passed across Burlingame’s face. ‘I rang the nine tailors for my father when he died and that was difficult enough to remember.’

  ‘What are the nine tailors?’

  ‘Tellers actually. I think it comes from the French originally, though they don’t have the slightest facility with bells.’ Burlingame paused. ‘That Sayers woman wrote a book all about bell-ringing a few years back. Called it that. You ring the nine teller-strokes on the senior bell, three sets of three, or at least that’s what it is for a man. Six tellers for a woman who’s died. For Queen Victoria they did the Kent Treble Bob Majors, the six tailors and then a toll for each year of her reign on the bells at St Paul’s. Apparently it went
on forever.’

  ‘So you’d need a very good memory.’

  ‘Oh, yes. A bit excessive, really. I’m afraid my father was disappointed because I never really took to it. Not that I could have done what he did, not with my legs.’ Burlingame sighed wistfully. ‘I did his nine tailors sitting in a chair.’

  ‘How would I find out who the members are in London?’

  ‘I’m not sure, really. It’s not as though they keep office hours, Morris.’ Burlingame frowned, thinking again. ‘They used to have some sort of meeting room over a public house in The City.’

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to know which one, I suppose?’ There were dozens of pubs in The City, most of them with rooms above.

  Roger Burlingame smiled. ‘Of course I know which one. The obvious one, Morris. In Wardrobe Place. The Bells.’

  * * *

  Ian Fleming and Guy Liddell, together with a well-armed crew of watchers, reached Rooksnest shortly after noon. They parked at the gate and made their way down the narrow drive leading to the house, then took up positions at the edge of the dense woods, hoping to surprise the psychiatrist as he climbed into his waiting car. Eventually, after a cold and frustrating hour, Liddell ordered the watchers forward but Rooksnest was empty; the bird had flown.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Liddell, standing in the kitchen of the small house.

  ‘He can’t be far,’ said Fleming. ‘His car is still here.’

  ‘He’s gone. I can feel it.’

  ‘You think someone warned him?’

  ‘It’s possible.’ In his mind’s eye the intelligence officer saw the flood of files strewn across the man’s office floor. A hundred names and at least a dozen of them directly, or indirectly, connected to Whitehall and the War Office. Easy enough to blackmail one of them to be his informant. Or perhaps blackmail hadn’t been necessary. He’d seen the film Knight had shown Bingham and the Copeland woman and he’d read the transcripts. No, there’d be no lack of help for Tennant, under duress or freely given. These days treason was being traded as openly as a commodity on the stock market.

  Fleming came back into the room. He had a small notepad in his hand.

  ‘I’ve just been on to the telephone exchange,’ he said, looking at the notes he’d made. ‘Our man was rather busy right up until a few hours ago. He placed more than a dozen calls.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘John Martin. All different ones, listings in the London directory.’

  ‘Who the bloody hell is John Martin?’

  ‘There was a pile of books on his desk in town. They were all about someone named John Martin. An artist, turn of the century.’

  ‘Tennant’s not ringing up dead artists,’ fumed Liddell.

  Another of the watchers appeared, coming in through the kitchen door. The cuffs of his trousers were splotched with mud.

  ‘He had a boat, sir,’ the man said. ‘There’s a dock. Bit of oil slick around the piers.’

  ‘That’s it then.’ Liddell nodded. ‘He’s on the river.’

  ‘Upstream or down, I wonder?’ said Fleming. Upstream there was Oxford, downstream, Windsor and the city.

  ‘Get your men together,’ Liddell ordered the watcher. ‘Canvass every house for half a mile in either direction. See if you can find out what sort of boat he had, a name and find out if anyone’s seen it on the river in the last twenty-four hours. I want to know which way he was heading.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the man and vanished.

  ‘This is a disaster,’ said Liddell. ‘There’s a hundred places he could have gone to ground. And we don’t know how long he’s been gone.’

  ‘You really think he can escape?’ said Fleming.

  ‘Of course he can!’ snapped Liddell. ‘The man’s no fool. All he needs is a change of clothes and the price of a ticket to Ireland. Bloody, bloody hell!’

  The younger man nodded towards the pad in Liddell’s hand. ‘Maybe he’s gone off to find Mr Martin. Maybe we should do the same.’

  ‘I suppose we ought to have a fucking go at it,’ Liddell growled.

  Fleming was momentarily startled by the profanity and then he smiled thinly. ‘I suppose you’re right. It’s all we’ve fucking got.’

  * * *

  Charles Tennant’s escape in Sandpiper was completely uneventful. From Queen’s Eyot to the serpentine curve of the Thames above Kew, he barely saw another soul except a series of bored, uninterested lock-keepers who took his fees and moved him on his way. It was too cold for punting and the season for day-trip steamers was long over.

  For the first hour his nerves were wire taut, and he expected to see waiting platoons of policemen at every bridge and lock, but as the miles went by, his tensions eased. After a time he even began to enjoy himself, faintly surprised that he was looking forward so eagerly to a confrontation with his quarry.

  He watched, sitting in the stern, as the river water changed from clear, cold crystal to the colour of beer, filthy as he reached Richmond, carrying enough sediment to plant an allotment garden in and full of the stink from the huge filter plant and sewage pools at Barnes, across from Fulham Cemetery.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time he reached Hammersmith Bridge, the sun already lowering in a pale winter sky. A brisk wind was blowing upriver now, coming from the south in breezy gusts, and the tide was at half-ebb. Another hour and he would have been too late; as it was, there was less than a foot of freeboard by the time he swung in towards the pier.

  He moored Sandpiper, slipping her discreetly between a coal barge and a small steamer, obviously docked now until the spring. There were at least fifty possible moorages on the Thames between Rooksnest and Hammersmith and another hundred beyond from Hammersmith to the docks at Tilbury. If Sandpiper was being looked for at all, she’d be almost impossible to find. He was safe enough for now.

  Climbing up to the wharf, he checked the daily tide table tacked up on the wharf hoarding. By six the tide would be fully ebbed, only the very centre of the river carrying an appreciable flow. By ten it would be navigable once more. He’d be travelling against the current then but at full speed he could make Canvey Island by three or four in the morning, then wait and ride the racing current into the Channel well before dawn.

  He handed a ten-pound note to the wharfkeeper, asking him to put up some provisions in a basket for his return later that evening. After some coaxing and another ten-pound note, he also managed to hire the man’s nondescript Fordson van. Telling the wharf-keeper that he would return for the van within an hour, he went up to the Dove, an old public house higher up the Embankment and supposedly the trysting place of Charles II and Nell Gwynne.

  He used the call box to ask for a cab to be sent round and when it arrived he told the driver to take him to Bruton Street and the premises of Holland and Holland, the gunsmiths and outfitters. Once there, he purchased several items of foul-weather gear, including a warm, fleece-lined jacket, a large clasp knife equipped with a sturdy marlinespike and a civilian model of the standard Enfield service revolver, complete with cleaning kit and extra cartridges.

  Taking another cab, he returned to Hammersmith Pier, changed clothes aboard Sandpiper and then went to collect the Fordson. By four fifteen, with full darkness approaching quickly, he was on the Hampstead Road, travelling north. As he drove, Tennant mentally retraced the investigation that had taken him here.

  Finding out where Queer Jack actually lived had, in the end, been ludicrously simple. It was all a matter of identity. At some early point in his life the boy must have learned of his less than auspicious beginnings and this lack of an ‘honest’ name might well have been the start of his slide towards insanity. He had ‘adopted’ Wilkes’s name and identity and resurrected Bernard Exner’s name to suit his needs as well.

  Given Loudermilk’s obsession with patterns, numbers and rituals, it was also fascinating to note that Wilkes’s name was as perfect a choice as his body measurements. Exner’s initials, read aloud rather than spelled, were BTX. Wilkes’s
initials were ASW. It was a variation of a standard substitution code. B followed A, T followed S, W preceded X. There was an insane logic about it. A small point, perhaps, but for Raymond Loudermilk the pattern must have seemed like some sort of terrible omen – by his very name Arthur Sidney Wilkes was the perfect sacrifice.

  It wasn’t a great leap from that to assuming Loudermilk/Exner/Wilkes might have another ritual name, one kept pure and without any possible connection to the others: John Martin.

  After his illuminating conversation with the administrative assistant at Cane Hill, Tennant had gone to the Chelsea Library and consulted the most recent Kelly’s London Post Office Directory. With either a name, postal address or telephone number it was possible to find the other, missing elements. Within an hour he had what he needed. He drove directly to Rooksnest. When he was done, a transmission to Heydrich would be in order.

  Forty-five John Martins had been listed in Kelly’s Directory and another sixty listed simply as J. Martin. Assuming that Loudermilk’s passion and obsession with the artist would not allow him the use of an initial, Tennant ignored the J’s and concentrated on the Johns. He began to call them one by one and then stopped. Why would he need a telephone for an identity that only existed in his mind? Ruling out any listing in Kelly’s with telephone service, only two names remained. One address was given as the Chelsea Hospital, which almost certainly made him some ancient veteran of an equally ancient war. The last was John Martin of 31 Mount Vernon Street, Hampstead. Then the telephone call had come and everything had changed. Without Queer Jack’s secret he would be forced to face Heydrich empty-handed. It was that or hand himself over to Masterman and the others at MI5.

  By the time Tennant reached Hampstead in the Fordson van, night had drawn in completely and the streets were dark, the blackout fully in effect. Slowed to a crawl, he piloted the rented vehicle through the tree-lined streets of the old village, turning past St John’s Church and the cemetery flanking Church Row, then climbing Holly Walk to the Catholic chapel. He parked the van beside the church and stepped out into the chilly air. Adjusting the padded Grenfell jacket he’d purchased at Holland and Holland, he climbed the rest of the way up the hill and turned onto Mount Vernon Street.