The Second Assassin

by Paul Christopher

  ‘We’re assuming a political reason for the location,’ said Holland. Barry nodded. He glanced quickly in Hoare’s direction. The home secretary was well known for his strong position supporting appeasement. The death of the king and queen on American soil would cause a rift between England and the United States that would take decades to heal. ‘This is an extremely important diplomatic mission, among other things. We all know how difficult His Majesty finds being in the public eye, let alone speaking in public, yet he is doing it, and doing it at a very difficult time.’

  ‘I assume appropriate security measures have been taken,’ said Barry.

  Kendal, the head of Special Branch, made a small snorting sound, presumably annoyed by what he considered to be the detective’s effrontery. ‘You assume correctly, Inspector. We’ve already dispatched a team of men to go over every foot of rail the royal train will cover in both Canada and the United States. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are rounding up any potential troublemakers and we’re getting the same level of cooperation from the FBI. Their Majesties will be accompanied by Cameron and Perkins, the royal bodyguards, and there will be at least a dozen of my men aboard the train who will accompany the king and queen everywhere. Local police and highway patrol officers will further protect Their Majesties in the United States and they will also be provided special agents from the State Department’s Office of Security.’

  ‘More than enough protection, I should think,’ commented the home secretary. ‘And of the best sort by the sounds of it.’

  Barry said nothing but he could almost hear Brother Emmett as the tonsured bastard stripped the First Place rugby ribbons from the low walls of his little cubicle in the orphanage: ‘Pride goeth before a fall, boyo. You’d be wise to remember that, wise indeed.’ This done a day after the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. Barry had been thirteen years old.

  ‘Cui bono,’ he said, dredging up some hard-earned Capuchin Latin. ‘Who does it benefit?’

  Hoare’s small mouth pinched even more. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘In a crime, look to see who profits. Find the motive, find your man, The best way to protect against a threat is to discover its source and remove it.’

  ‘Rather what I’ve been saying about all of this,’ said Holland gratefully. ‘If such an assassination attempt were successful, who would profit?’ He tapped his cigarette nervously on the edge of the glass ashtray in front of him, looking around the table. No one spoke. ‘The Nazis,’ he said finally. ‘Germany.’

  ‘One nation assassinating the sovereign of another?’ said Hoare. ‘It’s preposterous! Not done!’

  Holland wasn’t fazed by the outburst. ‘It’s the most logical answer to the inspector’s question, I’m afraid. The murder of the king and queen in America would have a devastating effect. It would drive a wedge between our two countries that would last an age, let alone the duration of a European war.’ He paused, glancing down at the open folder in front of him. ‘The German government couldn’t directly orchestrate such a thing, but they could use someone like Russell to do it for them, and we already know the Nazis have actively supported the IRA for years.’ He paused and cleared his throat. ‘Kills several birds with one stone, actually – dividing and conquering in the first instance and leaving the throne vacant in the second.’

  ‘I’m not quite certain what you’re suggesting,’ said Douglas-Home.

  Holland answered, a note of unease appearing in his voice. ‘There is some evidence of a recent meeting between Mr Flynn and the king’s brother at the Hotel Meurice in Paris. There were also two high-ranking members of the Nazi Party present.’

  ‘By the king’s brother I assume you mean the Duke of Windsor?’ Douglas-Home asked.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Holland said. ‘The duke may no longer be in the formal line of succession but then neither is the Princess Elizabeth old enough to assume the throne. A regent would have to be appointed until the princess reached her majority.’ Holland paused again, then reached out and took a sip of water from the glass in front of him. ‘I doubt there could be a more popular choice among the people than the Duke of Windsor for the appointment.’ He put the water glass down on the table. ‘In effect, he would be king again and the duchess would be his morganatic queen.’

  ‘Ridiculous!’ said Hoare. ‘Utter madness!’

  ‘Perhaps so, sir,’ said Douglas-Home smoothly. ‘But I’m quite sure the prime minister would just as soon we erred on the side of caution in this matter.’

  ‘Um,’ said Hoare, ‘perhaps.’

  ‘I’ve reviewed the material myself,’ Douglas-Home continued. He glanced at Holland. ‘It is clearly substantive.’

  ‘What do you suggest then?’ Hoare asked. Douglas-Home smiled across the table at Kendal. ‘I think we can assume that Special Branch has done as much as possible to ensure the safety of Their Majesties but there would be no harm in having a discreet, independent inquiry into the matter.’

  ‘What would this inquiry of yours entail?’ Hoare asked.

  ‘It has already been discussed,’ said Kendal. ‘All we need is your final approval.’ He tilted his head towards Howe. ‘Deputy Assistant Commissioner Howe has offered to second Inspector Barry to Special Branch and our mutual friends at St Anne’s Gate have agreed to let us use Lieutenant Colonel Holland for the time being. The inspector reports to Holland. Holland reports to me.

  At the far end of the table Thomas Barry was beginning to realise that he had absolutely no say in his own fate. He remembered the Capuchins at the monastery- orphanage in Cork doing exactly the same thing, talking about him as though he wasn’t in the room, discussing various options for his future, most of them religious, none of them even vaguely considering the idea of personal fulfillment or pleasure of any sort at all. It wasn’t much later that he’d run off to join the army. There’d be no running away from this, however.

  Douglas-Home leaned forward and looked down the table, bringing Barry out of his brief fugue. ‘What’s the matter, Barry? You don’t seem terribly interested in these proceedings. I thought it was every Irishman’s dream to go to America.’

  Barry looked down the table at the pompous little ass of a man. He smiled. ‘Now that’s an engaging theory, Mr Douglas,’ he said, letting his voice fall into a music-hall lilt, purposely cropping the priggish man’s name. ‘The only trouble with it, though, is the fact that I’m not every Irishman.’ Chamberlain’s parliamentary secretary reddened visibly and even Hoare was amused. Douglas-Home snapped his leather folder shut.

  ‘I think our business here is at an end,’ he said crisply and that was that.

  Following the meeting, at the lieutenant colonel’s invitation, Barry dined with Holland at his club, the Army and Navy on Pall Mall. It being Sunday, the small dining room at the rear of the club was almost deserted. Barry had the fish while Holland worked his way quickly through a trio of lamb chops, all of it served by a stooped and grizzled waiter with a limp and the disdainful look of a man who had almost certainly once been a sergeant. Neither man spoke very much during the meal except to exchange biographies, although while reciting his Barry realised his companion probably knew it chapter and verse already.

  Holland’s own story had the flat, bland ring of truth, although given his association with the Secret Intelligence Service it could just as easily have been totally false. According to the balding lieutenant colonel he had been educated at the Royal Military Academy, commissioned in the Royal Engineers and attached to the Royal Flying Corps as an observer in 1916. He served in the Balkans. He was mentioned in Dispatches, given the Distinguished Flying Cross and demobbed as a brevet major.

  According to Holland he’d spent most of his time since then wandering from one boring Whitehall appointment to the next, although he did make a vague reference to having been in Dublin for a brief period during the Troubles. He also mentioned that a chest wound during an operation in Sofia had left him with chronic lung problems, which he assumed would keep him out o
f any front-line posting should war come. All in all his little set-piece biography made him sound like a benign military bureaucrat with a mildly interesting past. A future club bore in the making.

  Dinner over, Holland led the detective down a narrow corridor to the large, oak-panelled Coffee Room overlooking Pall Mall, directing him to a small table and a vacant pair of comfortable-looking red leather armchairs beside one of the tall, arched windows. Like the Dining Room, the Coffee Room was almost empty and the only sounds were the occasional snapping of a newspaper being folded back and the hiss of a coal fire burning in the grate at the far end of the room. They ordered coffee and brandy, and when it came, Holland offered Barry one of his Craven A’s and lit it with a plain gold Dunhill lighter.

  ‘I’m still not sure what the purpose of that meeting was,’ said Barry. ‘Howe or Kendal could have briefed me privately at the Yard.’

  ‘Fog,’ said Holland, smiling broadly.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Fog,’ repeated Holland. ‘My own terminology. Stands for Fear of God. You were meant to be suitably impressed by being allowed into the Cabinet Room. Impressed and cowed. It’s a game they play, the Eton–Oxford set, people like Douglas-Home.’ Holland paused and puffed on his cigarette. ‘Know anything about his background?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Barry.

  ‘Hereditary Scottish lord. Home of the something or other. Eton, third-rate degree in history from Oxford. Never worked a day in his life. Played cricket and shot grouse until he decided he wanted to go into politics. Hasn’t looked back. They’ll give him a knighthood eventually, just for sticking it out, and if he sticks it out even longer he’ll probably be prime minister himself one day. A political dilettante who likes to play at power. Exactly what we don’t need in this next war.’

  Barry smiled. ‘I gather you don’t like him.’

  ‘Not him so much,’ Holland answered, warming to the subject. ‘His type. We gave Kendal the information on Russell and Kendal passed it on to Chamberlain’s Scotty dog. Home doesn’t believe there’s any plot and neither does Hoare. They think it’s going to be a gentleman’s war and gentlemen don’t go about shooting kings and queens.’ Holland shook his head. ‘Well Herr Hitler’s no bloody gentleman, believe me.’

  ‘If they don’t believe there’s any real assassination plot, what am I supposed to be investigating?’

  ‘We’re a sop, you and I,’ Holland explained. ‘They have to make some sort of response to the information simply because we sent the information their way. Our so-called independent investigation is what they’ve decided on. If, by some terrible chance, something does go wrong, then you and I will be the scapegoats.’ He smiled bleakly. ‘It’s the kind of contrivance our cricket-playing friend thrives on. Damned if we do and damned if we don’t, just so long as none of the damning damns him.’

  ‘What do you think about the plot?’ Barry asked. He stubbed out his cigarette and took a sip of coffee. ‘Do you take it seriously?’

  ‘Historically most assassinations are senseless, the acts of lunatics or zealots.’

  ‘Like Russell.’

  ‘I think you know better than that, Inspector. Russell’s neither zealot nor madman. He swaggers about O’Connell Street in a bright red MG to match his hair, looking for young ladies to impress. He’s six feet two inches tall and as far as the records show he’s never shot at anyone in his life. He’s a drinker, a talker, a fundraiser. Hardly my first choice for an assassin.’

  ‘Sometimes the Irish can fool you.’ Barry smiled. Holland smiled back. ‘Oh, I’m aware of that, Inspector. Have no doubt on that score. Which is precisely why I think you’re just the right man for this job.’

  Barry laughed. ‘As a sop?’

  ‘As a detective and a good one too if your record is any indication.’ He paused and shook another cigarette from the packet on the table between them. ‘I could be wrong, of course, but I trust my intuitions about things like this. Whatever Sean Russell’s involvement, there’s rarely smoke without fire, and these days most fires have names like Fritz and Ernst and Heinrich, the de Valeras and McGarritys aside.’

  ‘We’ve got a dozen IRA men under lock and key in the Scrubs but they’ll not likely have much to tell you about Russell, or tell me, for that matter.’

  Holland laughed and lit his cigarette. He leaned back in his chair, smiling. ‘No, we won’t find answers at Wormwood Scrubs.’

  ‘Where then?’ Barry asked.

  ‘Dublin, for a start,’ Holland answered.

  Chapter Six

  Sunday, April 16, 1939

  New York City

  Dan Hennessy dropped Jane off at the Flatiron Building then headed back to Centre Street to put his report together. Jane went into Walgreens, picked up a Dixie of coffee and a doughnut at the soda fountain, then went up to her office, riding the slow, moaning elevator and thinking about the dead man she’d just immortalised on film.

  Howie Raines, a kid she used to play nurse and doctor with, no queer then certainly, who worked for a shady law firm like Fallon and McGee and wound up bopped in a New Jersey ditch on a Sunday. So what got him killed? The shyster part of the equation or the queer part? And much more interesting, why was Dan Hennessy being told to zip lips? Howie was no big-time Mob mouthpiece. So far it wasn’t making much sense at all. The elevator jerked to a halt two inches below floor level. Jane stepped out, went down the quiet corridor and let herself into her office.

  Ponce de Leon shrieked an obscene hello and she gave the bird a piece of doughnut just to shut him up. She took her Contax into the bathroom/darkroom, threaded the roll of film into her Reelo Tank and developed the negatives. When she was finished she clothes-pinned them up in strips over the sink to dry, then went back out front and finished her cooling coffee. She glanced at her watch. It was one thirty – lots of time to get over to the dead man’s apartment and have a look-see before she went to visit her sister.

  On her way out the door she pulled another camera out of the filing cabinet, this time choosing her smallest: a fully loaded Model E Leica that fit easily into the pocket of her jacket. She rode the elevator to the ground floor and stepped out into the early afternoon sunshine.

  Instead of taking a hack, this time she went to the bus stop on Fifth Avenue and waited for a Sunday schedule No 1, smoking two Camels in the process. When the bus finally pulled up she was pleased to see that it was one of the older-style double-deckers. Jane got on, paid her dime and took the little spiral staircase up to the top level. She sat down, lit another cigarette and rode to the end of the line at Washington Square, feeling a bit like a tourist as she watched the sights go by from her elevated perch.

  The bus drove through the arch and pulled to a stop just past it. Jane climbed down and stepped out into the sunlight again. The big rectangular park was full of life. Italian boys and girls in their Sunday best played running games among the scattered pin oaks and locust trees while their parents sat on blankets, some of the men stripped down to their undershirts to catch the sun. There were students here as well, reading on the benches or stretched out on the grass, escaping the drab buildings of New York University on the eastern side of the park.

  Jane dug into her shoulder bag and touched the ring of keys Dan Hennessy had given her. Taking a path that would lead her out to Washington Square North she wondered how many of the people enjoying their afternoon outing knew that once upon a time the park had originally been New York’s potter’s field and that there were more than ten thousand nameless graves beneath their feet or that some of the big elms giving them shade had once been used for gallows.

  Washington Square North ran for a block on either side of Fifth Avenue and was made up of an almost intact line of early nineteenth-century Greek Revival town houses of red brick and white limestone trim sitting on land that had once been part of the old Warren estate. Once upon a time the houses had been part of one of New York’s most elegant residential areas but times had changed. At least half o
f the buildings had been transformed into rooming houses, several were closed up, windows blinded by heavy shutters and two or three were for sale, although the signs advertising their availability were so old the paint on them had partially faded away.

  The street numbers ran from east to west, which put number 26 west of Fifth Avenue at the MacDougal Street end of the park. Except for the fact that the low hedge in front of the building was neatly trimmed the building wasn’t much different from its neighbours on either side – three and a half storeys tall, three windows across, the front door accessible up six stone steps leading to a false portico, the inset oak door flanked by a pair of outsized Ionic columns. The windows and the door were shaded with green-and-white-striped awnings but the fabric was washed out and stained and tears were developing here and there. Twenty-six Washington Square North was on the way down.

  Behind a low wrought-iron fence a steep flight of steps led down to the basement apartment. Two small windows were filled with glass blocks cemented together. Jane went down the steps, took out the ring of keys and let herself into the apartment.

  She found herself in a narrow foyer with a hat rack on the right and an oval mirror on the left. There were a homburg and a topcoat hanging from the hat rack and a pair of toe rubbers on a sisal mat at its base. Jane closed the door and locked it behind her, tasting the air. Stale with a back-scent of cigarette smoke. No blood tang, no smell of death. Howard Raines had been dumped in that ditch but he hadn’t been killed here.

  An archway on the left led into a small, low-ceilinged sitting room, the walls cheaply decorated with movie posters, an oval rag rug on the floor, brown sofa on the right, dark green upholstered easy chair opposite under the glass block windows and a gas fireplace in between. There was an ashtray and a small pile of magazines on a low table beside the easy chair. Jane leafed through the magazines. Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, Newsweek, Baseball and Flying Aces. Two of his favourite things. Ball games and a kid’s dream about being a fighter pilot.