A Question of Betrayal

by Anne Perry

  Josephine was thinking aloud. “It seems there was no weapon, except something to hit him over the head, like the spade I thought of before. The assassin was probably younger and a good deal fitter than Stoney.”

  It was a terrible thought, walking around your own home with a man you knew was going to kill you. Lucas wanted to leave this place, at least get Josephine away from it. He was as cold as if the walls were made of ice. He was torturing himself, thinking of Stoney’s last minutes, and he knew it was pointless, but he still went on doing it.

  And then something caught his eye. “Jo, that pile of books on the floor: Did you put them there when you were looking for something?” He pointed to them, stacked as if waiting to be returned to the correct shelves.

  “What are they?” And then she looked at them and read the titles. She looked puzzled. “They don’t seem to have anything in common. What was he trying to say?”

  Lucas kneeled down and studied them without moving anything. They were about all sorts of subjects: poetry, bird watching, a couple of novels, poetry again. What on earth had they in common? The first author was Robert Browning, the last William Butler Yeats. The rest were people he did not know: someone called Roland, others called Alan, Dawson, Lovell, and Evans. And Jerome’s classic Three Men in a Boat.

  Then he saw it, as clear as day.

  Josephine was staring at him. “Lucas?”

  He said nothing.

  “Lucas? What is it?”

  He turned his eyes to her, his face pale. “Bradley.”

  She looked confused.

  “Look at the authors’ names, Jo. It’s not the subject at all, it’s the first letter of each name!” He pointed to all the titles. “Look closely! What does it spell?” Before she could answer, he said, “Bradley!”

  “But Bradley is—”

  “I know, head of MI6.” Lucas felt frozen in place. He forced himself to get to his feet and leave the pile of books exactly where it was. Not that it was proof of anything. There was nothing to show that Stoney had left them there, or that they meant anything at all, except that they were out of place. “Jo, we must leave. Take the photographs; we’ll work on them at home.”

  “Are you going to tell the police?”

  “No use at all. We have no proof, and even if they know it was MI6, they still think we are a couple of old duffers looking for something to do to make ourselves important again. No, I don’t know who I’ll tell. I’ll have to think about this very hard. Surely, Peter first.”

  “But he’s not here,” said Josephine. “He’s flown to Trieste.”

  “Elena,” he said softly, and saw the shadows change in her face.

  “Lucas, she doesn’t know anything about Stoney,” she argued.

  “She knows about the Fatherland Front and Aiden Strother, who is our man in Trieste,” Lucas answered. “Strother is on our side. He was a deliberate deep plant in the Nazi side. She’s gone to rescue him.” He saw from Jo’s face that she only half believed that. “At least that’s what Peter thinks,” he added.

  “Then why has he gone to Trieste, too?” she asked.

  “To get Elena out, and possibly Strother as well. I think the net is tightening. The Front is going to move sooner than we thought.”

  When Josephine spoke, her voice had a slight tremor that she could not hide. “And what are we going to do?”

  “We are going home.” He took her by the arm and, putting the photographs in his inside pocket, guided her to the back door, locking it behind him and walking toward the car. “And we’re going to study those numbers until we know what they mean,” he went on, as he started the engine and drove the car back into the road.

  He thought about it all the way home, almost oblivious to the great sweep of clouds towering white into the blue of the sky. The avenue of beech trees burned bronze and gold with dying leaves. Three times Josephine had to tell him to watch the road, mind the corners. The road held a beauty that usually seized his imagination and his senses, but today all he could think of was Stoney, knowing that he had minutes to live and leaving him the only clue he could: a pile of books on the floor that offered names that spelled out Bradley, and old photographs that almost certainly had no meaning to anyone else, taken over half a century ago, when the slaughter and ruin of the war was unimaginable. How impossibly young they were then. “We must find the places these references indicate,” he said, as he stopped the car at their house, “and what happened there, on those dates. That will tell us something.”

  * * *

  —

  But it told them nothing. The dates covered almost two years leading up to the present day, and the places were cities in France, England, Spain, Italy, and the United States of America.

  “I keep feeling it should be about money,” Josephine said, her voice tired and a little hoarse. She rose to her feet stiffly. “I’ll get us a cup of tea, and perhaps a couple of sandwiches. We forgot lunch.”

  He smiled at her bleakly. “I’m sorry, I…” But he did not know what else to say. “I feel as if it should be about money, too, but who donates odd amounts like 15,522 pounds four shillings and three pence? There isn’t a round figure among them.”

  Suddenly, as if a dark cloud had been pushed aside, Josephine said, “Tea can wait, unless you want to make it. You’ll find cold lamb in the pantry, and you know where the bread and butter are.”

  Lucas was suddenly alert. He knew that voice, the controlled excitement. “What?”

  “And don’t make the slices too thick.”

  “Jo! Tell me!”

  She flashed him an almost mischievous smile. “Not the lamb, Lucas, the bread. Don’t make doorsteps of the bread. Go on!”

  It took him a quarter of an hour to boil a kettle, make the tea properly—heating the pot first, letting the tea steep—then cut the sandwiches by buttering the loaf and then slicing it so it did not fall apart, finally placing the meat carefully. He did not care in the least about making the sandwiches nicely, but he knew she did. And she needed time to follow through on her idea, without him breathing down her neck.

  When he finally walked back into the sitting room carrying the tray, setting it down on the table, he found her scribbling lines of figures all over sheets of paper and smiling.

  “Tea’s up,” he said, half expecting her not to hear him.

  She looked up at him, her face shining with victory. “Thank you, my dear. And I know what it is! These are amounts of money from different places, the dates on which they were transferred in rounded amounts, and in the original currency.” Her smile widened. “But when you exchange them into German marks, they come out odd numbers, of course, and slightly different amounts from day to day…as the exact exchange values go up and down. But they always start as round numbers. Here, look at this.” She indicated the first one she had done. “This is thirty thousand pounds on the twentieth of January 1932. It’s an odd number changed to this amount exactly, but it tallies precisely with the exchange rate that day, plus the cost of the transaction.” She pointed to another set of figures. “This one is fifty thousand American dollars. It works out on this date, the fourth of February 1932, at this amount of money.” She indicated another set of seemingly erratic numbers. “Lucas, they all work out to the penny, or whatever it is, when you know what you’re looking at. It’s exactly right, it’s proof. There’s no way on earth this could be coincidental, and it’s an enormous amount. I am over halfway through, but the amounts are getting larger, and there is more than seven million here. Look.” She turned the page round so he could see.

  And he could. Once you knew what you were looking at, it was crystal clear. “I’ll write down a copy of it,” he said, “after we’ve had a cup of tea. And then, when it’s all finished, I’ll take it to Churchill, just to cover myself. We can’t be the only people who know this, for our own safety as well as the
survival of the truth. Then I’ll take it to the home secretary.”

  He must be careful to whom he spoke, but he knew the home secretary, Sir John Gilmour, was trustworthy. Those who wanted to avoid another war at any price were easy enough to understand, even to sympathize with. The difference lay in what they believed the alternative would be. Lucas believed it would be a slow corruption, with people ultimately being consumed by violence and hysteria. He had no wish to die on any battlefield, but he preferred that to slowly giving in again and again, until you become so like the enemy you cannot tell yourself apart.

  * * *

  —

  He went the following morning to the home secretary, whom he had met on several occasions. He gave his name to Sir John Gilmour’s assistant as Lucas Standish, head of MI6 during the war and for some time afterward.

  “Good morning, Standish, good to see you. How are you?” Gilmour said warmly. One glance at Lucas’s face told him that Lucas knew better than to waste his time. This was not a social call.

  “Gladstone Canning, who also worked for MI6, was very recently murdered, sir. He entrusted me with the work he was involved in. I have come to give you the result of it.”

  Gilmour took a deep breath. “Don’t mince words, do you?”

  “No, sir. It concerns funding for the new Fatherland Front created and supported by Hitler and the Nazis, for the purpose of overthrowing Chancellor Dollfuss and eventually annexing Austria.”

  “I presume you can back all this up, or you wouldn’t have come to me. Why didn’t you take this directly to Bradley at MI6?” He looked at Lucas very directly, his eyes narrowed.

  Lucas swallowed. “Because Gladstone Canning believed Bradley was behind it, sir. Canning was murdered. I believe the medical report will confirm this—it certainly won’t dismiss it—although his killing was very cleverly done. I’ve known Gladstone Canning for half a century. He left clues that only I would recognize regarding the sources of the money and its transfer. My wife actually decoded it. She worked on decoding during the war.”

  “I know,” Gilmour said succinctly. “And you think Bradley killed Canning himself?”

  “I don’t think he would trust anyone else with a job like that. I wouldn’t in his place. Give someone else that kind of a hold on me? Unnecessary risk. Canning was an old man, no match for Bradley.”

  “And Peter Howard?”

  “Gone to Italy, sir, to sort out that end of it. A lot of information is coming in about the Fatherland Front from Trieste.”

  “I see, and what is it precisely that you would like me to do?”

  “Send the best police you’ve got, men you trust, to arrest Jerome Bradley for the murder of Gladstone Canning. Unless he has been there and moved them, there is a pile of books that Stoney left on his office floor. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, and a pile whose authors’ names spell out ‘Bradley.’ I can’t prove that I didn’t put them there, but I didn’t. I should have seen it sooner. It wasn’t until I went down and saw them sideways that I noticed.”

  “There will be hell to pay if you’re wrong.”

  “Yes, sir, and hell we’ll all pay if I’m right, and we do nothing about it.”

  “I miss you, Standish. You have an eye for the absurd that no one else rises to. God knows we’re going to need it.”

  “There’s hope for Peter Howard, sir,” Lucas replied. “He has an eye for the absurd, too.”

  “He’ll need it! Right, I’ll do it and take it out of your hide if you’re wrong. You’d better give my men all the details.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When Lucas walked out of the office, he released a loud sigh, feeling the tension fall away. Gilmour believed him, and he was a man of action.

  * * *

  —

  Lucas entered the office of MI6 quietly, like anyone else, an elderly man, still tall and with a slight stoop, the wind ruffling his gray hair, now thinning. He was accompanied by two policemen in plain clothes. It was a gift from the home secretary that he should do this himself, as if he still held office; as if he had never retired, never been told he had served well and the country was grateful, but he was too old now. Of course, it had not been put in such crude terms, but that was what it amounted to. This was a subtle gift, to be sure, but it was also a way of accomplishing this decisively and without hesitation.

  They went in quietly, without speaking to one another. It had all been said already.

  At the outer door to Bradley’s office they entered without knocking. The secretary had changed since Lucas’s day, and she did not recognize him, but Lucas shook his head. “Lock the door,” he directed. “Keep her here.”

  The men understood and obeyed.

  Understanding also flared on the woman’s face. Even unintentionally, she might warn others, perhaps call for assistance.

  Lucas opened Bradley’s door without knocking and closed it just behind him.

  Bradley was standing in front of the window, staring out at the handsome view of the trees and the street. At the sound of the door, he turned sharply. For an instant his expression was blank, then it was filled with anger.

  “This might have been your office once, Standish, but it’s not now. You bloody well knock now, and you come in only if I say so!”

  “Don’t be an ass, Bradley,” Lucas said quite softly. He was a man who spoke quietly when he was very, very angry. Bradley had betrayed an office that Lucas had held with honor, even reverence. And he had betrayed Elena, too, making her the goat when he knew that she was guilty of falling in love with Aiden Strother, but was innocent of treason. Everything Bradley had done was calculated to hurt Lucas, taint his reputation and his legacy.

  Bradley saw a difference in Lucas’s face. He recognized something that, under the bravado, he had feared for years.

  Lucas saw the man’s face turn pale. He knew. “This is the end of the road, Bradley. Stoney left your name quite clearly for us…before you killed him.”

  Bradley chose to bluff. “Stoney Canning? That old fool…”

  “Has outwitted you,” Lucas finished for him. “You can give up with grace, or struggle and be half carried out like some dangerous lunatic.”

  “Ha! You think you’re man enough to do that?” Bradley laughed, but utterly without humor. “You’re an old man, Standish. Past your time! Long past it. You’re finished. Hitler is rising. You’re a relic of the past, and too damn stupid to see it.”

  Lucas took a step backward and opened the door. The two policemen came in. The secretary was just visible, handcuffed to the desk. Her face was ashen.

  Bradley looked at her, then at the unsmiling police, and lastly at Lucas. “You may have won this round, Standish, but this is far from the end. There will be no war, no battles, just a slow change, from the top, to join our natural allies, the Germans. Then you’ll know what defeat really is.” Suddenly he dived forward and lashed out at the nearest policeman, who staggered backward, and stumbled.

  Lucas picked up the hard-backed chair, swung it high, and brought it down hard on Bradley’s shoulders.

  The man let out a cry and collapsed to the floor.

  Two policemen picked him up, carrying him out of his office like a sack of rubbish.

  Lucas stared around him. This was a sad and bitter victory. But it was a victory nevertheless, and the beginning of a new battle.

  CHAPTER

  20

  They walked in silence toward the waterfront. Elena’s mind was teeming with questions, but she did not know how to frame them. What had happened so quickly that they needed to escape immediately? And now that Ferdie was dead, how long could it be before the police found his body and raised the alarm? Some of them, at the very least, would assume that the people who killed Ferdie, whoever they were, would make for the port and the first ship out. Ferdie had tried to kill them befor
e they could escape—and do what? Tell everyone that part of the Front had splintered off and struck early, preemptively? They would know that by now. Know the chain of command upward, to whoever was the leader. Was Aiden aware of that? Did it even matter anymore?

  She was short of breath and her feet hurt, but she matched Aiden stride for stride. It was getting dark quickly; buildings were becoming black shapes without features, heavy blocks against the luminous embers of sunset in the sky. Did Aiden know where they were going? Had he thought of this route ahead of time, or could he be as lost as she was, just better at hiding it?

  He had taken it for granted that she would come. Why? Now that she was on the run the police would suspect her of killing Max, or at least being the cause of his death. She had found his body with Aiden, and they had run away from the area together. And yet it had never occurred to her not to go with him. It was her duty to get him out. It was what she had come for: to save him, and to save the list, and then get it to Peter Howard. But she could not afford a confrontation with the police now, and the risk of being caught out in a lie.

  She was holding the money for their passage back to England, for both of them. Aiden was relying on her. He had not questioned her. Could trust bind you to loyalty? Yes. He knew that it mattered to her. Trust must never be broken. The thought chilled her.

  They reached a major intersection illuminated by streetlights and car headlamps, busy with bright sweeping movement and noise.

  Aiden came to a stop, holding his arm out to keep Elena from moving past him. He glanced at her, and the light of the nearest lamp was faint but clear on his face. He seemed exhilarated, and more alive than she had ever seen him.