LEN DEIGHTON

SS-GB

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

A paperback edition 2009

FIRST EDITION

First published in Great Britain by

Jonathan Cape Ltd 1978

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017 Cover photograph © Sid Gentle Films Ltd 2017

Copyright © Len Deighton 1978

Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2009

The verse from ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ is reproduced by permission of EMI Publishers Ltd 138–140 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0LD. © 1941 by Shapiro Bernstein & Co., Inc., subpublished by B. Feldman & Co. Ltd

Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © 1978 ISBN: 9780007347742

Version: 2017-05-22

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

About the Author

By Len Deighton

About the Publisher

Introduction

‘My book, Inside the Third Reich, never reached the top of the New York best seller list,’ Albert Speer told me. ‘It was Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but were afraid to ask that always remained at number one.’

I am still not sure if he was joking. Hitler’s onetime Minister of Armaments had a sharp sense of humour, especially about the men with whom he had been in Spandau prison; he always referred to Field Marshal Milch as ‘Milk’. And when writers get together sales talk is not unusual.

But Albert Speer was not the catalyst for SS-GB. It began over a late-night drink with Ray Hawkey the writer and designer, and Tony Colwell my editor at Jonathan Cape. ‘No one knows what might have happened had we lost the Battle of Britain,’ said Tony with a sigh as we finished sorting through photos to illustrate my book, Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain.

‘I wouldn’t go as far as that,’ I told him. ‘A great deal of the planning for the German occupation has been found and published.’

I had read some of that material and, after this conversation, I sought out the official German publications and began wondering if Britain under German rule would make a book. It would have to be what was then called an ‘alternative world’ book and that was outside all my writing experience. On the other hand, research for Fighter and Funeral in Berlin and particularly Bomber, had brought me into contact with many Germans, mostly men who had fought in the war.

I work very slowly so I don’t embark on a story until I am confident that I will be able to get the material for it and live with it for many months, perhaps years. The plot problems seemed insurmountable. Would I create a hero in the German occupation army? I wouldn’t want a Nazi as a hero. If I told the story through the eyes of a British civilian how would such a person have enough information to make the plot work? A notable member of the resistance would qualify as a hero but such heroes would all be dead, or fugitives.

This story had to be told from the centre of power. The police would be the people who connected the conquerors with the conquered but that sort of compromise role was not attractive to me. I went round and round on this until I thought of a Scotland Yard detective as hero. A man who solved crimes and hunted only real criminals could have contacts at the top and yet still be acceptable as a central character. I would frame it like a conventional murder mystery, with corpse at the start and solution at the end.

I like big charts and diagrams. They serve as a guide and reminder while a book is being written. Using the German data I drew a chain of command showing the connections between the civilians and the puppet government, black-marketeers and quislings and the occupying power with its security forces and bitterly competitive army and Waffen SS elements. My old friend, and fellow writer, Ted Allbeury had spent the immediate post-war period in occupied Germany as what the locals called ‘the head of the British Gestapo’. Ted’s experience was very valuable indeed and I used his experience and anecdotes to the full.

For the London scenes, I used only places that I had known in the war, so in that respect there is an autobiographical element in the story. I remembered London in wartime: the dimly lit streets, gas lights that hissed and spluttered, tin baths in front of the fire, rationing that made food a constant subject of thought and conversation, and bombed homes that spewed their intimate household contents into the streets.

The Scotland Yard building had to be the stage upon which my story was played but the police were no longer using it. It had become an office building for members of parliament and was strictly guarded. The Metropolitan Police were very cooperative about letting me into their new building and they let me use their fascinating library and their archives too without restrictions of any kind. I spent many days studying wartime crimes and looking at pictures of Scotland Yard detectives in the natty suits that were mandatory at that time. But the obstacle remained, the police had no authority over the building they had vacated.

By a wonderful piece of luck I found an elderly ex-policeman who knew the building from cellar to attic. I recorded hours of his descriptions but I still could not get into it until a friend named Freddy Warren devised a method by which I could explore every nook and cranny of the historic Scotland Yard building. Freddy’s authority as an official of the Whip’s office was to allot the offices to the politicians. He took me on a guided tour. With him I went everywhere; opening doors, interrupting conferences, awakening sleepers and declining liquid refreshment. No one was going to risk upsetting Freddy. I remain indebted to him and I hope that this record of the Scotland Yard building, as once it was, justifies the trouble he took on my behalf.

When writing the main text begins I have found it beneficial to step away from phones and friends and any social commitments. Together with my wife Ysabele and two small children I climbed into an old Volvo with its trunk crammed with research material. We went to Tuscany. My friend Al Alvarez the writer and broadcaster lent us his wonderful mountainside house near Barga. It was winter and, no matter about the pictures in the brochures, winter in northern Italy is cold and wet. I searched far and wide for an electric typewriter and failed to find one. All I could find was a tiny lightweight portable Olivetti Lettera 22. Yes I know the Lettera 22 is an icon of the nineteen fifties and is found in design museums, but after the soft touch joys of an electric machine, pounding the mechanical keyboard took a lot of getting used to. My fingers swelled up like salsiccia Toscana. But rural Italy worked its magic. Our elderly ‘next door’ neighbours adopted us. Signora Ida and her husband Silvio lavished our children with love, made pizzas for us in their outdoor oven and showed us the secret of making ravioli and the secret of happiness on the slim budget that a few olive trees provide. We will never forget those two wonderful people. They made my time in Tuscany writing SS-GB one of the happiest times of my happy life.

Len Deighton, 2009

‘In England they’re filled with curiosity and keep asking, “Why doesn’t he come?” Be calm. Be calm. He’s coming! He’s coming!’

Adolf Hitler. 4 September 1940, at a rally of nurses and social workers in Berlin.

Oberste Befehlshaber

Berlin, den 18.2.41

Der Oberste Befehlshaber der Wehrmacht

10 Ausfertigungen Ausfertigung

Instrument of Surrender – English Text. Of all British armed forces in United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland including all islands.

1 The British Command agrees to the surrender of all British armed forces in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland including all islands and including military elements overseas. This also applies to units of the Royal Navy in all parts of the world, at port and on the high seas.

2 All hostilities on land, sea and in the air by British forces are to cease at 0800 hrs Greenwich Mean Time on 19 February 1941.

3 The British Command to carry out at once, without argument or comment, all further orders that will be issued by the German Command on any subject.

4 Disobedience of orders, or failure to comply with them, will be regarded as a breach of these surrender terms and will be dealt with by the German Command in accordance with the laws and usages of war.

5 This instrument of surrender is independent of, without prejudice to, and will be superseded by any general instrument of surrender imposed by or on behalf of the German Command and applicable to the United Kingdom and the Allied nations of the Commonwealth.

6 This instrument of surrender is written in German and English. The German version is the authentic text.

7 The decision of the German Command will be final if any doubt or dispute arises as to the meaning or interpretation of the surrender terms.

Chapter One

‘Himmler’s got the king locked up in the Tower of London,’ said Harry Woods. ‘But now the German Generals say the army should guard him.’

The other man busied himself with the papers on his desk and made no comment. He thumped the rubber stamp into the pad and then on to the docket, ‘Scotland Yard. 14 Nov. 1941’. It was incredible that the war had started only two years ago. Now it was over; the fighting finished, the cause lost. There was so much paperwork that two shoe boxes were being used for the overflow; Dolcis shoes, size six, patent leather pumps, high heels, narrow fitting. Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer knew only one woman who would buy such shoes: his secretary.

‘Well, that’s what people are saying,’ added Harry Woods, the elderly Sergeant who was the other half of the ‘murder team’.

Douglas Archer initialled the docket and tossed it into the tray. Then he looked across the room and nodded. It was a miserable office, its green and cream painted walls darkened by age and the small windows heavily leaded and smeared by sooty rain, so that the electric light had to be on all day.

‘Never do it on your own doorstep,’ advised Harry now that it was too late for advice. Anyone other than Harry, anyone less bold, less loquacious, less well-meaning would have stopped at that. But Harry disregarded the fixed smile on his senior partner’s face. ‘Do it with that blonde, upstairs in Registry. Or that big-titted German bird in Waffen-SS liaison – she puts it about they say – but your own secretary…’ Harry Woods pulled a face.

‘You spend too much time listening to what people say,’ said Douglas Archer calmly. ‘That’s your trouble, Harry.’

Harry Woods met the disapproving stare without faltering. ‘A copper can never spend too much time listening to what other people say, Super. And if you faced reality, you’d know. You may be a bloody wonderful detective, but you’re a shocking bad judge of character – and that’s your trouble.’

There weren’t many Detective Sergeants who would dare speak to Douglas Archer like that but these two men had known each other ever since 1920, when Harry Woods was a handsome young Police Constable with a Military Medal ribbon on his chest, and a beat littered with the broken hearts of pretty young housemaids and the hot meat pies of doting cooks. While Douglas Archer was a nine-year-old child proud to be seen talking to him.

When Douglas Archer became a green young Sub-Divisional Inspector, straight from the Hendon Police College, with no more experience of police work than comes from dodging the Proctors in the back streets of Oxford, it was Harry Woods who had befriended him. And that was at a time when such privileged graduates were given a hard time by police rank and file.

Harry knew everything a policeman had to know and more. He knew when each night-watchman brewed tea, and was never far from a warm boiler house when it rained. Harry Woods knew which large piles of rubbish would have money under them, never taking more than a third of it, lest the shopkeeper found some other way to pay the street-cleaners for their extra work. But that was a long time ago, before the generosity of the publicans and barmen of London’s West End had provided Harry with his ruddy face and expanded his waistline. And before Douglas Archer’s persistence got him into CID and then to Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad.

‘C Division have got a juicy one,’ said Harry Woods. ‘Everyone else is busy. Shall I get the murder bag ready?’

Douglas knew that his Sergeant expected him to respond in surprise, and he raised an eyebrow. ‘How the devil do you know about it?’

‘A flat in Shepherd Market, crammed with whisky, coffee, tea and so on, and Luftwaffe petrol coupons lying around on the table. The victim is a well-dressed man, probably a black-marketeer.’

‘You think so?’

Harry smiled. ‘Remember that black-market gang who killed the warehouse manager in Fulham…they were forging Luftwaffe petrol coupons. This could be the same mob.’

‘Harry. Are you going to tell me where all this information comes from, or are you going to solve the crime without getting out of your seat?’

‘The Station Sergeant at Savile Row is an old drinking pal. He just phoned me. A neighbour found the body and told the police.’

‘There’s no hurry,’ said Douglas Archer. ‘We’ll move slowly.’

Harry bit his lip. In his opinion Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer never did otherwise. Harry Woods was a policeman of the old school, scornful of paperwork, filing systems and microscopes. He liked to be talking, drinking, interrogating and making arrests.

Douglas Archer was a tall, thin, thirty-year-old. He was one of a new generation of detectives, who’d rejected the black jacket, pin-stripe trousers, roll-brim hat and stiff collar that was almost a uniform for the Murder Squad. Douglas favoured dark shirts and the sort of wide-brimmed hat he’d seen on George Raft in a Hollywood gangster film. In keeping with this, he’d taken to smoking small black cheroots as often as his tobacco ration permitted. He tried to light this one for the third time; the tobacco was of poor quality and it did not burn well. He looked for more matches and Harry threw a box across to him.

Douglas was a Londoner – with the quick wit and sophisticated self-interest for which Londoners are renowned – but like many who grow up in a fatherless household, he was introspective and remote. The soft voice and Oxford accent would have better suited some more cloistered part of the legal profession but he’d never regretted becoming a policeman. It was largely due to Harry, he realized that now. For the lonely little rich boy, in the big house on the square, Harry Woods, without knowing it, became a surrogate father.

‘And suppose the Luftwaffe petrol coupons are not forgeries; suppose they are real,’ said Douglas. ‘Then you can bet German personnel are involved, and the case will end up with the Feldgericht der Luftwaffe, Lincoln’s Inn. Waste of time our getting involved.’

‘This is murder,’ said Harry. ‘A few petrol coupons can’t change that.’

‘Don’t try to re-write the laws, Harry, there’s enough work enforcing the ones we’ve got. Any crimes involving Luftwaffe personnel, in even the smallest way, are tried by Luftwaffe courts.’

‘Not if we got over there right away,’ said Harry, running his hand back over hair that refused to be smoothed down. ‘Not if we wrung a confession out of one of them, sent copies to Geheime Feldpolizei and Kommandantur, and gave them a conviction on a plate. Oherwise these German buggers just quash these cases for lack of evidence, or post the guilty ones off to some soft job in another country.’

For Harry the fighting would never end. His generation, who’d fought and won in the filth of Flanders, would never come to terms with defeat. But Douglas Archer had not been a soldier. As long as the Germans let him get on with the job of catching murderers, he’d do his work as he’d always done it. He wished he could get Harry to see it his way.

‘I’d appreciate it, Harry, if you’d not allow your personal opinions to intrude into the preferred terminology.’ Douglas tapped the SIPO Digest. ‘And I’m far from convinced that they are soft on German personnel. Five executions last month; one of them a Panzer Division Major, with Knight’s Cross, who did nothing worse than arrive an hour late to check a military vehicle compound.’ He tossed the information sheets across to his partner’s desk.

‘You read all that stuff, don’t you?’

‘And if you had more sense, Harry, you’d read it too. Then you’d know that General Kellerman now has his CID briefings on Tuesday morning at eleven o’clock, which is just ten minutes from now.’

‘Because the old bastard drinks too much at lunch-time. By the time he reels back from the SS Officers’ Club in the afternoon he can’t remember a word of English except, “tomorrow, tomorrow!”’

Harry Woods noted with satisfaction the way that Douglas Archer glanced round the empty chairs and desks, just in case anyone had overheard this pronouncement. ‘Whatever the truth of that may be,’ said Douglas cautiously, ‘the fact remains that he’ll want his briefing. And solving a murder that we’ve not yet been invited to investigate will not be thought sufficient excuse for my not being upstairs on time.’ Douglas got to his feet and collected together the documents that the General might want to see.

‘I’d tell him to go to hell,’ said Harry. ‘I’d tell him the job comes first.’

Douglas Archer nipped out his cheroot carefully, so as to preserve the unsmoked part of it, then put it into the top drawer of his desk, together with a magnifying glass, tickets for a police concert he’d not attended, and a broken fountain pen. ‘Kellerman’s not so bad,’ said Douglas. ‘He’s kept the Metropolitan Force more or less intact. Have you forgotten all the talk of putting German Assistant Commissioners upstairs? Kellerman opposed that.’

‘Too much competition,’ muttered Harry, ‘and Kellerman doesn’t like competition.’

Douglas put his report, and the rest of the papers, into his briefcase and strapped it up. ‘In the unlikely event that West End Central ask for us, have the murder bag ready and order a car. Tell them to keep the photographer there until I tell him to go and to keep the Divisional Surgeon there, as well as the pathologist.’

‘The doctor won’t like that,’ said Harry.

‘Thanks for telling me that, Harry. Send the doctor a packet of wait-about tablets with my compliments, and remind him you are phoning from Whitehall 1212, Headquarters of Kriminalpolizei, Ordnungspolizei, Sicherheitsdienst and Gestapo. Any complaints about waiting can be sent here in writing.’

‘Keep your shirt on,’ said Harry defensively.

The phone rang; the calm impersonal voice of General Kellerman’s personal assistant said, ‘Superintendent Archer? The General presents his compliments and asks if this would be a convenient time for you to give him the CID briefing.’

‘Immediately, Major,’ said Douglas, and replaced the phone.

‘Jawohl, Herr Major. Kiss your arse, Herr Major,’ said Harry.

‘Oh for God’s sake, Harry. I have to deal with these people at first hand; you don’t.’ ‘I still call it arse-licking.’

‘And how much arse-licking do you think it needed to get your brother exempted from that deportation order!’ Douglas had been determined never to tell Harry about that, and now he was angry with himself.

‘Because of the medical report from his doctor,’ said Harry but even as he was saying it he realized that most of the technicians sent to German factories probably got something like that from a sympathetic physician.

‘That helped,’ said Douglas lamely.

‘I never realized, Doug,’ said Harry but by that time Douglas was hurrying up to the first floor. The Germans were sticklers for punctuality.

Chapter Two

General – or, more accurately in SS parlance, Gruppen-führer – Fritz Kellerman was a genial-looking man in his late fifties. He was of medium height but his enthusiasm for good food and drink provided a rubicund complexion and a slight plumpness which, together with his habit of standing with both hands in his pockets, could deceive the casual onlooker into thinking Kellerman was short and fat, and so he was often described. His staff called him ‘Vater’ but if his manner was fatherly it was not benign enough to earn him the more common nickname of ‘Vati’ (Daddy). His thick thatch of white hair had beguiled more than one young officer into accepting his invitation for an early morning canter through the park. But few of them went for the second time. And only the greenest of his men would agree to a friendly game of chess, for Kellerman had once been the junior chess champion of Bavaria. ‘Luck seems to be with me today,’ he’d tell them as they became trapped into a humiliating defeat.

Before the German victory, Douglas had seldom visited this office on the first floor. It was the turret room used hitherto only by the Commissioner. But now he was often here talking to Kellerman, whose police powers extended over the whole occupied country. And Douglas – together with certain other officers – had been granted the special privilege of entering the Commissioner’s room by the private door, instead of going through the clerk’s office. Before the Germans came, this was something permitted only to Assistant Commissioners. General Kellerman said it was part of das Führerprinzip; Harry Woods said it was bullshit.

The Commissioner’s office was more or less unchanged from the old days. The massive mahogany desk was placed in the corner. The chair behind it stood in the tiny circular turret that provided light from all sides, and a wonderful view of the river. There was a big marble mantelpiece and on it an ornate clock that struck the hour and half-hour. A fire blazed in the bow-fronted grate between polished brass fire-irons and a scuttle of coal. The only apparent change was the shoal of fish that swam across the far wall, in glass-fronted cases, stuffed, and labelled with Fritz Kellerman’s name, and a place and date, lettered in gold.

There were two men in army uniform there when Douglas entered the room. He hesitated. ‘Come in, Superintendent. Come in!’ called Kellerman.

The two strangers looked at Douglas and then exchanged affirmative nods. This Englishman was exactly right for them. Not only was he reputed to be one of the finest detectives in the Murder Squad but he was young and athletic looking, with the sort of pale bony face that Germans thought was aristocratic. He was ‘Germanic’, a perfect example of ‘the new European’. And he even spoke excellent German.

One of the men picked up a notebook from Kellerman’s desk. ‘Just one more, General Kellerman,’ he said. The other man seemed to produce a Leica out of nowhere and knelt down to look through its viewfinder. ‘You and the Superintendent, looking together at some notes or a map…you know the sort of thing.’

On the cuffs of their field-grey uniforms the men wore ‘Propaganda-Kompanie’ armbands.

‘We’d better do as they say, Superintendent,’ said Kellerman. ‘These fellows are from Signal magazine. They’ve come all the way from Berlin just to talk to us.’

Awkwardly Douglas went round to the far side of the desk. He posed self-consciously, prodding at a copy of the Angler’s Times. Douglas felt foolish but Kellerman took it all in his stride.

‘Superintendent Archer,’ said the PK journalist in heavily accented English, ‘is it true that, here at Scotland Yard, the men call General Kellerman “Father”?’

Douglas hesitated, pretending to be holding still for the photo in order to gain time. ‘Can’t you see how your question embarrasses the Superintendent?’ said Kellerman. ‘And speak German, the Superintendent speaks the language as well as I do.’

‘It’s true then?’ said the journalist, pressing for an answer from Douglas. The camera shutter clicked. The photographer checked the settings on his camera and then took two more pictures in rapid succession.

‘Of course it’s true,’ said Kellerman. ‘You think I’m a liar? Or do you think I’m the sort of police chief who doesn’t know what goes on in my own headquarters?’

The journalist stiffened and the photographer lowered his camera.

‘It’s quite true,’ said Douglas.

‘And now, gentlemen, I must get some work done,’ said Kellerman. He shooed them out, like an old lady finding hens in her bedroom. ‘Sorry about that,’ Kellerman explained to Douglas after they’d gone. ‘They said they would need only five minutes, but they hang on and hang on. It’s all part of their job to exploit opportunities, I suppose.’ He went back to his desk and sat down. ‘Tell me what’s been happening, my boy.’

Douglas read his report, with asides and explanations where needed. Kellerman’s prime concern was to justify money spent, and Douglas always wrote his reports so that they summarized the resources of the department and showed the cost in Occupation Marks.

When the formalities were over, Kellerman opened the humidor. With black-market cigarettes at five Occupation Marks each, one of Kellerman’s Monte Cristo No 2s had become a considerable accolade. Kellerman selected two cigars with great care. Like Douglas, he preferred the flavour of the ones with green or yellow spots on the outer leaf. He went through a ceremony of cutting them and removing loose strands of tobacco. As usual Kellerman wore one of his smooth tweed suits, complete with waistcoat and gold chain for his pocket watch. Typically he had not worn his SS uniform even for this visit by the photographer. And Kellerman, like so many of the senior SS men of his generation, preferred army rank titles to the cumbersome SS nomenclature.

‘Still no word of your wife?’ asked Kellerman. He came round the desk and gave Douglas the cigar.

‘I think we have to assume that she was killed,’ said Douglas. ‘She often went to our neighbour’s house during the air attacks, and the street fighting completely demolished it.’

‘Don’t give up hope,’ said Kellerman. Was that a reference to his affair with the secretary, Douglas wondered. ‘Your son is well?’

‘He was in the shelter that day. Yes, he’s thriving.’

Kellerman leaned over to light the cigar. Douglas was not yet used to the way that the German officers put cologne on their faces after shaving and the perfume surprised him. He inhaled; the cigar lit. Douglas would have preferred to take the cigar away with him but the General always lit them. Douglas thought perhaps it was a way of preventing the recipient selling it instead of smoking it. Or was it simply that Kellerman believed that, in England, no gentleman could offer a colleague a chance to put an unsmoked cigar in his pocket.

‘And no other problems, Superintendent?’ Kellerman passed behind Douglas, and touched the seated man’s shoulder lightly, as if in reassurance. Douglas wondered if his general knew that his internal mail had that morning included a letter from his secretary, saying she was pregnant and demanding twenty thousand O-Marks. The pound sterling, she pointed out, in case Douglas didn’t know, was not the sort of currency abortionists accepted. Douglas was permitted a proportion of his wages in O-Marks. So far Douglas had not discovered how the letter got to him. Had she sent it to one of her girlfriends in Registry, or actually come into the building herself?

‘No problems that I need bother the General with,’ said Douglas.

Kellerman smiled. Douglas’s anxiety had led him to address the general in that curious third-person form that some of the more obsequious Germans used.

‘You knew this room in the old days?’ said Kellerman.

Before the war it had been the Commissioner’s procedure to leave the door wide open when the room was unoccupied, so that messengers could pass in and out. Soon after being assigned to Scotland Yard, Douglas had found an excuse for coming into the empty room and studying it with the kind of awe that comes from a schoolboy diet of detective fiction. ‘I seldom came here when it was the Commissioner’s room.’

‘These are difficult times,’ said Kellerman, as if apologizing for the way in which Douglas’s visits were now more frequent. Kellerman leaned forward to tap a centimetre of ash into a white china model of Tower Bridge that some enterprising manufacturer had redesigned to incorporate swastika flags and ‘Waffenstillstand. London. 1940’ in red and black Gothic lettering. ‘Until now,’ said Kellerman, choosing his words with care, ‘the police force has not been asked to do any political task.’

‘We have always been completely apolitical.’

‘Now that’s not quite true,’ said Kellerman gently. ‘In Germany we call a spade a spade, and the political police are called political police. Here you call your political police the Special Branch, because you English are not so direct in these matters.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But there will come a time when I can no longer resist the pressure from Berlin to bring us into line with the German police system.’

‘We English don’t take quickly to new ideas, you know, sir.’

‘Don’t play games with me, Superintendent,’ said Kellerman without changing the affable tone of voice or the smile. ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

‘I’m not sure I do, sir.’

‘Neither of us wants political advisers in this building, Superintendent. Inevitably the outcome would be that your police force is used against British Resistance groups, uncaptured soldiers, political fugitives, Jews, gypsies and other undesirable elements.’ Kellerman said it in a way that conveyed the idea that he didn’t consider these elements nearly so undesirable as his superiors in Berlin thought them.

‘It would split the police service right down the middle,’ said Douglas.

Kellerman didn’t answer. He reached for a teleprinter message on his desk and read it, as if to remind himself of the contents. ‘A senior officer of the Sicherheitsdienst is on his way here now,’ said Kellerman. ‘I’m assigning you to work with him.’

‘His duties will be political?’ asked Douglas. The SD was the SS intelligence service. Douglas did not welcome this sinister development.

‘I don’t know why he’s coming,’ said Kellerman cheerfully. ‘He is on the personal staff of the Reichsführer-SS and will remain directly responsible to Berlin for whatever he has to do.’ Kellerman inhaled on his cigar and then let the smoke drift from his nostrils. He let his Superintendent dwell upon the facts and realize that the new man presented a danger to the status quo for both of them. ‘Standartenführer Huth,’ said Kellerman finally, ‘that’s this new chap’s name.’ His use of the SS rank was enough to emphasize that Huth was an outsider. Kellerman raised his hand. ‘Under the direct orders of Berlin, so that gives him a special…’ he hesitated and then let the hand fall, ‘…influence.’

‘I understand, sir,’ said Douglas.

‘Then perhaps, my dear chap, you’d do everything you can to prevent the indiscretions – more particularly the verbal indiscretions – of your mentor downstairs from embarrassing us all.’

‘Detective Sergeant Woods?’

‘Ah, what a quick mind you have, Superintendent,’ said Kellerman.

Chapter Three

Some said there had not been even one clear week of sunshine since the cease-fire. It was easy to believe. Today the air was damp, and the colourless sun only just visible through the grey clouds, like an empty plate on a dirty tablecloth.

And yet even a born and bred Londoner, such as Douglas Archer, could walk down Curzon Street, and with eyes half-closed, see little or no change from the previous year. The Soldatenkino sign outside the Curzon cinema was small and discreet, and only if you tried to enter the Mirabelle restaurant did a top-hatted doorman whisper that it was now used exclusively by Staff Officers from Air Fleet 8 Headquarters, across the road in the old Ministry of Education offices. And if your eyes remained half-closed you missed the signs that said ‘Jewish Undertaking’ and effectively kept all but the boldest customers out. And in September of that year 1941, Douglas Archer, in common with most of his compatriots, was keeping his eyes half-closed.

The scene of the murder to which, as Detective Sergeant Harry Woods had predicted, they were called, was Shepherd Market. This little maze of narrow streets and alleys housed a mixture of working-class Londoners, Italian shopkeepers and wealthy visitors, who found in these tortuous ways, and creaking old buildings, some measure of the London they’d read of in Dickens, while being conveniently close to the smart shops and restaurants.

The house was typical of the neighbourhood. There were uniformed police there already, arguing with two reporters. The ground floor was a poky antique shop not much wider than a man could stretch both arms. Above it were rooms of doll’s-house dimensions, with a twisting staircase so narrow that it provided an ever-present risk of sweeping from its walls the framed coaching prints that decorated them. Only with difficulty did Harry get the heavy murder bag to the top floor where the body was.

The police doctor was there, seated on a chintz-covered couch, a British army overcoat buttoned up tight to the neck, and hands in his pockets. He was a young man, in his middle twenties, but already Douglas saw in his eyes that terrible resignation with which so many British seemed to have met final defeat.

On the floor in front of him there was the dead man. He was about thirty-five years old, a pale-faced man with a balding head. Passing him in the street one might have guessed him to be a rather successful academic – the sort of absent-minded professor portrayed in comedy films.

As well as blood, there was a large smudge of brown powder spilled on his waistcoat. Douglas touched it with a fingertip but even before he raised it to his nose, he recognized the heavy aroma of snuff. There were traces of it under the dead man’s fingernails. Snuff was growing more popular as the price of cigarettes went up, and it was still unrationed.

Douglas found the snuff tin in a waistcoat pocket. The force of the bullets had knocked the lid off. There was a half-smoked cigar there too, the band still on it, a Romeo y Julieta worth a small fortune nowadays; no wonder he’d preserved the unsmoked half of it.

Douglas looked at the fine quality cloth and hand stitching of the dead man’s suit. For such expensive, made to measure garments they fitted very loosely, as if the man, suddenly committed to a rigorous diet, had lost many pounds of weight. Sudden weight loss was also suggested by the drawn and wrinkled face. Douglas fingered the bald patches on the man’s head.

‘Alopecia areata,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s common enough.’

Douglas looked into the mouth. The dead man had had enough money to pay for good dental care. Gold shone in his mouth but there was blood there too.

‘There’s blood in his mouth.’

‘Probably hit his face as he fell.’

Douglas didn’t think so but he didn’t argue. He noted the tiny ulcers on the man’s face and blood spots under the skin. He pushed back the shirt sleeve far enough to see the red inflamed arm.

‘Where do you find such sunshine at this time of the year?’ the doctor said.

Douglas didn’t answer. He drew a small sketch of the way that the body had fallen backwards into the tiny bedroom, and guessed that he’d been in the doorway when the bullets hit him. He touched the blood on the body to see if it was tacky, and then placed a palm on the chest. He could feel no warmth at all. His experience told him that this man had been dead for six hours or more. The doctor watched Douglas but made no comment. Douglas got to his feet and looked round the room. It was a tiny place, over-decorated with fancy wallpapers, Picasso reproductions and table lights made from Chianti bottles.

There was a walnut escritoire, with its front open as if it might have been rifled. An old-fashioned brass lamp had been adjusted to bring the light close upon the green leather writing top but its bulb had been taken out and left in one of the pigeon-holes, together with some cheap writing paper and envelopes.

There were no books, no photos and nothing personal of any kind. It was like some very superior sort of hotel room. In the tiny open fireplace there was a basket of logs. The grate was overflowing with ashes of paper.

‘Pathologist here yet?’ Douglas asked. He fitted the light bulb into the brass lamp. Then he switched it on for long enough to see that the bulb was still in working order and switched it off again. He went to the fireplace and put his hand into the ash. It was not warm but there was no surviving scrap of paper to reveal what had been burned there. It was a long job to burn so much paper. Douglas used his handkerchief to wipe his hands.

‘Not yet,’ said the doctor in a dull voice. Douglas guessed that he resented being ordered to wait.

‘What do you make of it, doc?’

‘You get any spare cigarettes, working with the SIPO?’

Douglas produced the gold cigarette case that was his one and only precious possession. The doctor took the cigarette and nodded his thanks while examining it carefully. Its paper was marked with the double red bands that identified Wehrmacht rations. The doctor put it in his mouth, brought a lighter from his pocket and lit it, all without changing his expression or his position, sprawled on the couch with legs extended.

A uniformed Police Sergeant had watched all this while waiting on the tiny landing outside the door. Now he put his head into the room and said, ‘Pardon me, sir. A message from the pathologist. He won’t be here until this afternoon.’

Harry Woods was unpacking the murder bag. Douglas could not resist glancing at him. Harry nodded. Now he realized that to keep the Police Surgeon here was a good idea. The pathologists were always late these days. ‘So what do you make of it, doctor?’ said Douglas.

They both looked down at the body. Douglas touched the dead man’s shoes; the feet were always the last to stiffen.

‘The photographers have finished until the pathologist comes,’ said Harry. Douglas unbuttoned the dead man’s shirt to reveal huge black bruises surrounding two holes upon which there was a crust of dried blood.

‘What do I make of it?’ said the doctor. ‘Gunshot wound in chest caused death. First bullet into the heart, second one into the top of the lung. Death more or less instantaneous. Can I go now?’

‘I won’t keep you longer than absolutely necessary,’ said Douglas without any note of apology in his voice. From his position crouched down with the body, he looked back to where the killer must have been. At the wall, far under the chair he saw a glint of metal. Douglas went over and reached for it. It was a small construction of alloy, with a leather rim. He put it into his waistcoat pocket. ‘So it was the first bullet that entered the heart, doctor, not the second one?’

The doctor still had not moved from his fixed posture on the couch but now he twisted his feet until his toes touched together. ‘There would have been more frothy blood if a bullet had hit the lung first while the heart was pumping.’

‘Really,’ said Douglas.

‘He might have been falling by the time the second shot came. That would account for it going wide.’

‘I see.’

‘I saw enough gunshot wounds last year to become a minor expert,’ said the doctor without smiling. ‘Nine millimetre pistol. That’s the sort of bullets you’ll find when you dig into the plaster behind that bloody awful Regency stripe wallpaper. Someone who knew him did it. I’d look for a lefthanded ex-soldier who came here often and had his own key to get in.’

‘Good work, doctor.’ Harry Woods looked up from where he was going through the dead man’s pockets. He recognized the note of sarcasm.

‘You know my methods, Watson,’ said the doctor.

‘Dead man wearing an overcoat; you conclude he came in the door to find the killer waiting. You guess the two men faced each other squarely with the killer in the chair by the fireplace, and from the path of the wound you guess the gun was in the killer’s left hand.’

‘Damned good cigarettes these Germans give you,’ said the doctor, holding it in the air and looking at the smoke.

‘And an ex-soldier because he pierced the heart with the first shot.’ The doctor inhaled and nodded. ‘Have you noticed that all three of us are still wearing overcoats?’ said Douglas. ‘It’s bloody cold in here and the gas meter is empty and the supply disconnected. And not many soldiers are expert shots, doc, and not one in a million is an expert with a pistol, and by your evidence a German pistol at that. And you think the killer had a key because you can’t see any signs of the door being forced. But my Sergeant could get through that door using a strip of celluloid faster than you could open it with a key, and more quietly too.’

‘Oh,’ said the doctor.

‘Now, what about a time of death?’ said Douglas.

All doctors hate to estimate the time of death and this doctor made sure the policemen knew that. He shrugged. ‘I can think of a number and double it.’

‘Think of a number, doc,’ said Douglas, ‘but don’t double it.’

The doctor, still lolling on the couch, pinched out his cigarette and put the stub away in a dented tobacco tin. ‘I took the temperature when I arrived. The normal calculation is that a body cools one-and-a-half degrees Fahrenheit per hour.’

‘I’d heard a rumour to that effect,’ said Douglas.

The doctor gave him a mirthless grin as he put the tin in his overcoat pocket, and watched his feet as he made the toes touch together again. ‘Could have been between six and seven this morning.’

Douglas looked at the uniformed Sergeant. ‘Who reported it?’

‘The downstairs neighbour brings a bottle of milk up here each morning. He found the door open. No smell of cordite or anything,’ added the Sergeant.

The doctor chortled. When it turned into a cough he thumped his chest. ‘No smell of cordite,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll remember that one, that’s rather rich.’

‘You don’t know much about coppers, doc,’ said Douglas. ‘Specially when you take into account that you are a Police Surgeon. The uniformed Sergeant here, an officer I’ve never met before, is politely hinting to me that he thinks the time of death was earlier. Much earlier, doc.’ Douglas went over to the elaborately painted corner cupboard and opened it to reveal an impressive display of drink. He picked up a bottle of whisky and noted without surprise that most of the labels said ‘Specially bottled for the Wehrmacht’. Douglas replaced the bottles and closed the cupboard. ‘Have you ever heard of postmortem lividity, doctor?’ he said.

‘Death might have been earlier,’ admitted the doctor. He was sitting upright now and his voice was soft. He, too, had noticed the coloration that comes from settling of the blood.

‘But not before midnight.’

‘No, not before midnight,’ agreed the doctor.

‘In other words death took place during curfew?’

‘Very likely.’

‘Very likely?’ said Douglas caustically.

‘Definitely during curfew,’ admitted the doctor.

‘What kind of a game are you playing, doc?’ said Douglas. He didn’t look at the doctor. He went to the fireplace and examined the huge pile of charred paper that was stuffed into the tiny grate. The highly polished brass poker was browned with smoke marks. Someone had used it to make sure that every last piece of paper was consumed by the flames. Again Douglas put his hand into the feathery layers of ash; there must have been a huge pile of foolscap and it was quite cold. ‘Contents of his pockets, Harry?’

‘Identity card, eight pounds, three shillings and tenpence, a bunch of keys, penknife, expensive fountain pen; handkerchief, no laundry marks, and a railway ticket monthly return half; London to Bringle Sands.’

‘Is that all?’

Harry knew that his partner would ask for the identity card and he passed it across unrequested. Harry said, ‘Travelling light, this one.’

‘Or his pockets were rifled,’ said the doctor, not moving from his position on the sofa.

Harry met Douglas’s eyes and there was a trace of a smile. ‘Or his pockets were rifled,’ said Douglas to Harry.

‘That’s right,’ said Harry.

Douglas opened the identity card. It was written there that the holder was a thirty-two-year-old accountant with an address in Kingston, Surrey. ‘Kingston,’ said Douglas.

‘Yes,’ said Harry. They both knew that, ever since the Kingston Records Office had been destroyed in the fighting, this was a favourite address for forgers of identity documents. Douglas put the card in his pocket, and repeated his question. ‘What sort of game are you playing, doctor?’ He looked at the doctor and waited for an answer. ‘Why are you trying to mislead me about the time of death?’

‘Well it was silly of me. But if people are coming and going after midnight the neighbours are supposed to report them to the Feldgendarmerie.’

‘And how do you know that they didn’t report it?’

The doctor raised his hands and smiled. ‘I just guessed,’ he said.

‘You guessed.’ Douglas nodded. ‘Is that because all your neighbours ignore the curfew?’ said Douglas. ‘What other regulations do they regularly flout?’

‘Jesus!’ said the doctor. ‘You people are worse than the bloody Germans. I’d rather talk to the Gestapo than talk to bastards like you – at least they won’t twist everything I say.’

‘It’s not in my power to deny you a chance to talk to the Gestapo,’ said Douglas, ‘but just to satisfy my own vulgar curiosity, doctor, is your opinion about benign interrogation techniques practised by that department based upon first-hand experience or hearsay?’

‘All right, all right,’ said the doctor. ‘Let’s say three A.M.’

‘That’s much better,’ said Douglas. ‘Now you examine the body properly so that I don’t have to wait here for the pathologist before getting started and I’ll forget all about that other nonsense…but leave anything out, doc, and I’ll run you along to Scotland Yard and put you through the mangle. Right?’

‘All right,’ said the doctor.

‘There’s a lady downstairs,’ said the uniformed police Sergeant. ‘She’s come to collect something from the antique shop. I’ve told the Constable to ask her to wait for you.’

‘Good man,’ said Douglas. He left the doctor looking at the body while Harry Woods was going through the drawers of the escritoire.

The antique shop was one of the hundreds that had sprung up since the bombing and the flight of refugees from Kent and Surrey during the weeks of bitter fighting there. With the German Mark pegged artificially high, the German occupiers were sending antiques home by the train-load. The dealers were doing well out of it, but one didn’t need lessons in economics to see the way that wealth was draining out of the country.

There were some fine pieces of furniture in the shop. Douglas wondered how many had been lawfully purchased and how many looted from empty homes. Obviously the owner of the antique shop stored his antiques by putting them in the tiny apartments upstairs, and justified high rents by having them there.

The visitor was sitting on an elegant Windsor chair. She was very beautiful: large forehead, high cheekbones and a wide face with a perfect mouth that smiled easily. She was tall, with long legs and slim arms.

‘Now maybe someone will give me a straight answer.’ She had a soft American voice, and she reached into a large leather handbag and found a US passport, which she brandished at him.

Douglas nodded. For a moment he was spellbound. She was the most desirable woman he’d ever seen. ‘What can I do for you, Madam?’

‘Miss,’ she said. ‘In my country a lady doesn’t like being mistaken for a Madam.’ She seemed amused at his discomfiture. She smiled in that relaxed way that marks the very rich and the very beautiful.

‘What can I do for you, Miss?’

She was dressed in a tailored two-piece of pink wool. Its severe and practical cut made it unmistakably American. It would have been striking anywhere, but in this war-begrimed city, among so many dressed in ill-fitting uniforms or clothes adapted from uniforms, it singled her out as a prosperous visitor. Over her shoulder she carried a new Rolleiflex camera. The Germans sold them tax-free to servicemen and to anyone who paid in US dollars.

‘My name is Barbara Barga. I write a column that is syndicated into forty-two US newspapers and magazines. The press attaché of the German Embassy in Washington offered me a ticket on the Lufthansa inaugural New York to London flight last month. I said yes, and here I am.’

‘Welcome to London,’ said Douglas dryly. It was shrewd of her to mention the inaugural flight on the Focke-Wulf airliner. Göring and Goebbels were both on that flight; it was one of the most publicized events of the year. A journalist would have to be very important indeed to have got a seat.

‘Now tell me what’s going on here?’ she said with a smile. Douglas Archer had not met many Americans, and he’d certainly never met one to compare with this girl. When she smiled, her face wrinkled in a way that Douglas found very beguiling. In spite of himself, he smiled back. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she said. ‘I get on well with cops, but I didn’t expect to find so many of them here in Peter’s shop today.’

‘Peter?’

‘Peter Thomas,’ she said. ‘Come on now, mister detective, it says Peter Thomas on the door – Peter Thomas – Antiques – right?’

‘You know Mr Thomas?’ said Douglas.

‘Is he in trouble?’

‘This will go faster if you just answer my questions, Miss.’

She smiled. ‘Who said I wanted to go faster…OK. I know him –’

‘Could you give me a brief description?’

‘Thirty-eight, maybe younger, pale, thin on top, big build, six feet tall, small Ronald Colman moustache, deep voice, good suits.’

Douglas nodded. It was enough to identify the dead man. ‘Could you tell me your relationship with Mr Thomas?’

‘Just business – now what about letting me in on who you are, buddy?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ said Douglas. He felt he was handling this rather badly. The girl smiled at his discomfort. ‘I’m the Detective Superintendent in charge of the investigation. Mr Thomas was found here this morning: dead.’

‘Not suicide? Peter wasn’t the type.’

‘He was shot.’

‘Foul play,’ said the girl. ‘Isn’t that what you British call it?’

‘What was your business with him?’

‘He was helping me with a piece I’m writing about Americans who stayed here right through the fighting. I met him when I came in to ask the price of some furniture. He knew everybody – including a lot of London-based foreigners.’

‘Really.’

‘Peter was a clever man. He’d root out anything anybody wanted, as long as there was a margin in it for him.’ She looked at the collection of silver and ivory objects on a shelf above the cash register. ‘I called this morning to collect some film. I ran out of it yesterday, and Peter said he’d be able to get me a roll. It might have been in his pocket.’

‘There was no film found on the body.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll get some somewhere.’

She was standing near him now and he smelled her perfume. He fantasized about embracing her and – as if guessing this – she looked at him and smiled. ‘Where can I reach you, Miss Barga?’

‘The Dorchester until the end of this week. Then I move into a friend’s apartment.’

‘So the Dorchester is open again?’

‘Just a few rooms at the back. It’s going to be a long time rebuilding the park side.’

‘Make sure you leave a forwarding address,’ said Douglas although he knew that she’d be registered as an alien, and registered with the Kommandantur Press Bureau.

She seemed in no hurry to depart. ‘Peter could get you anything: from a chunk of the Elgin marbles, complete with a letter from the man who dug it out of the Museum wreckage, to an army discharge, category IA – Aryan, skilled worker, no curfew or travel restrictions – Peter was a hustler, Superintendent. Guys like that get into trouble. Don’t expect anyone to weep for him.’

‘You’ve been most helpful, Miss Barga.’ She was going out through the door when Douglas spoke again. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘do you know if he had been to some hot climate recently?’

She turned. ‘Why?’

‘Sunburned arms,’ said Douglas. ‘As if he’d gone to sleep in the hot sunshine.’

‘I only met him a couple of weeks back,’ said Barbara Barga. ‘But he might have been using a sun-lamp.’

‘That would account for it,’ said Douglas doubtfully.

Upstairs Harry Woods had been talking to Thomas’s only neighbour. He had identified the body and offered the information that Thomas had been a far from ideal neighbour. ‘There was a Luftwaffe Feldwebel…big man with spectacles – I’m not sure what the ranks are – but he was from that Quartermaster’s depot in Marylebone Road. He used to bring all kinds of stuff: tinned food, tobacco and medical stuff too. I think they were selling drugs – always having parties, and you should have seen some of the girls who came here; painted faces and smelling of drink. Sometimes they knocked at my door in mistake – horrible people. I don’t like speaking ill of the dead, mind you, but they were a horrible crowd he was in with.’

‘Do you know if Mr Thomas had a sun-lamp?’ Douglas asked.

‘I don’t know what he didn’t have, Superintendent! A regular Aladdin’s cave you’ll find when you dig into those cupboards. And don’t forget the attic.’

‘No, I won’t, thank you.’

When the man had gone, Douglas took from his pocket the metal object he’d found under the chair. It was made from curved pieces of lightweight alloy, and yet it was clumsy and heavy for its size. It was unpainted and its edge covered with a strip of light-brown leather. It was pierced by a quarter-inch hole, in line with which a screw-threaded nut had been welded. The whole thing was strengthened by a section of tube. From the shape, size and hasty workmanship Douglas guessed it was a part of one of the hundreds of false limbs provided to casualties of the recent fighting. If it was part of a false right arm the doctor might have made a remarkably accurate guess and Douglas could start looking for a left-handed ex-service sharpshooter.

Douglas put the metal construction back into his pocket as Harry came in. ‘You let the doctor go?’ said Douglas.

‘You rode him a bit hard, Doug.’

‘What else did he say?’

‘Three A.M. I think we should try to find this Luftwaffe Feldwebel.’

‘Did the doctor say anything about those sunburns on the arms?’

‘Sun-ray lamp,’ said Harry.

‘Did the doctor say that?’

‘No, I’m saying it. The doctor hummed and hawed, you know what they are like.’

Douglas said, ‘So the neighbour says he was a black-marketeer and the American girl tells us the same thing.’

‘It all fits together, doesn’t it?’

‘It fits together so well that it stinks.’

Harry said nothing.

‘Did you find a sun-ray lamp?’

‘No, but there’s still the attic.’

‘Very well, Harry, have a look in the attic. Then go over to the Feldgendarmerie and get permission to talk to the Feldwebel.’

‘How do you mean it stinks?’ said Harry.

‘The downstairs neighbour tells me everything about this damned Feldwebel short of giving me his name and number. Then this American girl turns up and asks me if I found a roll of film on the body. She tells me that this man Peter Thomas was going to get a roll of film for her last night…ugh! A girl like that would bring a gross of films with her. When she wanted more, she’d get films from a news agency, or from the American Embassy. Failing that, the German Press Bureau would give her as much as she asked for; you know what the propaganda officials will do for American newspaper people. She doesn’t have to get involved with the black market.’

‘Perhaps she wanted to get involved with the black market. Perhaps she is trying to make contact with the Resistance, in order to write a newspaper story.’

‘That’s just what I was thinking, Harry.’

‘What else is wrong?’

‘I took his keys downstairs. None of them fits any of the locks; not the street door or this door. The small keys look like the ones they use on filing cabinets and the bronze one is probably for a safe. There are no filing cabinets here, and if there is a safe, it’s uncommonly well hidden.’

‘Anything else?’ said Harry.

‘If he lives here, why buy a return ticket when he left Bringle Sands yesterday morning? And if he lives here, where are his shirts, his underclothes and his suits?’

‘He left them at Bringle Sands.’

‘And he intended to go to bed here, and then get up and use the same shirt and underclothes, you mean? Look at the body, Harry. This was a man very fussy about his clean linen.’

‘You don’t think he lived here?’

‘I don’t think anyone lived here. This place was just used as somewhere to meet.’

‘Business you mean – or lovers?’

‘You’re forgetting what Resistance people call “safe houses,” Harry. It might have been a place where they met, hid or stored things. And we can’t overlook the way he was wearing his overcoat.’

‘You told the doctor it was cold.’

‘The doctor was trying to irritate me and he succeeded. That doesn’t mean he was wrong about someone sitting here waiting for Thomas to arrive. And it doesn’t explain him keeping his hat on.’

‘I never know what you’re really thinking,’ said Harry.

‘Watch your tongue when you are over at the Feldgendarmerie, Harry.’

‘What do you think I am – stupid?’

‘Romantic,’ said Douglas. ‘Not stupid – romantic.’

‘You think he got those burns from a sun-lamp?’ said Harry.

‘I never heard of anyone going to sleep under a sun-lamp,’ said Douglas, ‘but there has to be a first time for everything. And try to think why someone has taken the light bulb out of that adjustable desk light. There was nothing wrong with the bulb.’

Chapter Four

The beer seemed to get weaker every day and anyone who believed those stories about the fighting having destroyed the hop fields had never tasted the export brands that were selling in German soldiers’ canteens. In spite of its limitations Douglas bought a second pint and smothered the tasteless cheese sandwich with mustard before eating it. There were several other Murder Squad officers in the ‘Red Lion’ in Derby Gate. It was Scotland Yard’s own pub, more crimes had been solved in this bar than in all the offices, path labs and record offices put together, or so some of the regulars claimed, after a few drinks.

A newspaper boy came in selling the Evening Standard. Douglas bought a copy and turned to the Stop Press on the back page.

MAN FOUND DEAD IN WEST END LUXURY FLAT

Shepherd Market in Mayfair was visited by Scotland Yard officers today when the body of a man was discovered by a neighbour bringing the morning pint of milk. The dead man’s name has not yet been released by the police. It is believed that he was an antique dealer and a well-known expert in pearls. Scotland Yard are treating the death as murder, and the investigation is headed by ‘Archer of the Yard’ who solved the grisly ‘Sex-fiend murders’ last summer.

Douglas saw the hand of Harry Woods in that; he knew Douglas hated being called ‘Archer of the Yard’ and Douglas guessed that Harry had spoken over the phone and said the dead man was an ‘expert in girls’ before incredulously denying it on the read-back.

It was raining as Douglas left the ‘Red Lion’. As he looked across the road, at the oncoming traffic, he saw Sylvia, his secretary. She’d obviously been waiting for him. Douglas let a couple of buses pass and then hurried across the road. He waited again for two staff cars flying C-in-C pennants. They hit the ruts left by bomb damage and sprayed water over him. Douglas cursed but that only made it rain harder.

‘Darling,’ said Sylvia. There was not much passion in the word but then with Sylvia there never had been. Douglas put an arm round her and she held her cold face up to be kissed.

‘I’ve been worried all morning. The letter said you were going away.’

‘You must forgive me, darling,’ said Sylvia. ‘I’ve despised myself ever since sending the damned letter. Say you forgive me.’

‘You’re pregnant?’

‘I’m not absolutely sure.’

‘Damn it, Sylvia – you sent the letter and said…’

‘Don’t shout in the street, darling.’ She held a hand up to his mouth. The hand was very cold. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have come here?’

‘After three days I had to report your absence. The tea lady asked where you were. It was impossible to cover for you.’

‘I didn’t want you to take any risks, darling.’

‘I phoned your aunt in Streatham but she said she’d not seen you for months.’

‘Yes, I must go and see her.’

‘Will you listen to what I’m saying, Sylvia.’

‘Let go of my arm, you’re hurting me. I am listening.’

‘You’re not listening properly.’

‘I’m listening the same as I always listen to you.’

‘You’ve still got your SIPO pass.’

‘What pass?’

‘Your Scotland Yard pass – have you been drinking or something?’

‘Of course I haven’t been drinking. Well, what about it? You think I’m going to go down Petticoat Lane and sell the bloody pass to the highest bidder? Who the hell wants to go into that hideous building unless they are paid for it?’

‘Let’s walk,’ said Douglas. ‘Don’t you know that Whitehall has regular Gendarmerie patrols?’

‘What are you talking about?’ She smiled. ‘Give me a proper kiss. Aren’t you glad to see me?’

He kissed her hurriedly. ‘Of course I am. We’ll walk up towards Trafalgar Square, all right?’

‘Suits me.’

They walked up Whitehall, past the armed sentries who stood immobile outside the newly occupied offices. They were almost as far as the Whitehall Theatre when they saw the soldiers doing the spot-check. Parked across the roadway there were three Bedford lorries, newly painted with German Army Group L (London District) HQ markings: a crude Tower Bridge surmounting a Gothic L. The soldiers were in battle-smocks with machine pistols slung on their shoulders. They moved quickly, expanding the spiked barrier – designed to pierce tyres – so that only one lane of traffic could pass through in each direction. The check-point command car was parked against the foot of Charles the First’s statue. The Germans learned quickly thought Douglas, for that was the place the Metropolitan Police always used for central London crowd-control work. More soldiers made a barrier behind them.

Sylvia showed no sign of apprehension but she suggested that it would be quicker if they turned off at Whitehall Place and went towards the Embankment. ‘No,’ said Douglas. ‘They always block the side roads first!’

‘I’ll show my pass,’ said Sylvia.

‘Have you gone completely out of your mind?’ said Douglas. ‘The Scotland Yard building houses the SD and the Gestapo and all the rest of it. You might not think much of it, but the Germans think that pass is just about the most valuable piece of paper any foreigner can be given. You’ve stayed away without reporting illness, and you’ve kept your pass. If you read the German regulations that you signed, you’d find that that’s the same as theft, Sylvia. By now, your name and pass number will be on the Gestapo wanted list. Every patrol from Land’s End to John o’Groats will be looking for it.’

‘What shall I do?’ Even now there was no real anxiety in her voice.

‘Stay calm. They have plain-clothes men watching for anyone acting suspiciously.’

They were stopping everything and everyone; staff cars, double-decker buses, even an ambulance was held up while the Patrol Commander examined the papers of the driver and the sick man. The soldiers ignored the rain which made their helmets shiny and darkened their battle-smocks, but the civilians huddled under the protection of the Whitehall Theatre entrance. There was a revue showing there, ‘Vienna Comes to London’, with undressed girls hiding between white violins.

Douglas grabbed Sylvia’s arm and before she could object he brought out a pair of handcuffs and slammed them on her wrist with enough violence to hurt. ‘What are you bloody well doing!’ shouted Sylvia but by that time he was dragging her forward past the waiting people. There were a few muttered complaints as Douglas elbowed them even more roughly. ‘Patrol Commander!’ he shouted imperiously. ‘Patrol Commander!’

‘What do you want?’ said a pimply young Feldwebel wearing the metal breastplate that was the mark of military police on duty. He was not wearing a battle-smock and Douglas guessed he was a section leader. He waved his SIPO pass in the air, and spoke in rapid German. ‘Wachtmeister! I’m taking this girl for questioning. Here’s my pass.’

‘Her papers?’ said the youth impassively.

‘Says she’s lost them.’

He didn’t react except to take the pass from Douglas and examine it carefully before looking at his face and his photo to compare them.

‘Come along, come along,’ said Douglas on the principle that no military policeman is able to distinguish between politeness and guilt. ‘I’ve not got all day.’

‘You’ve hurt my bloody wrist,’ said Sylvia. ‘Look at that, you bastard.’ The Feldwebel glared at him and then at the girl. ‘Next!’ he bellowed.

‘Come on,’ said Douglas and hurried through the barrier dragging Sylvia after him. They picked their way through the traffic that was waiting for the checkpoint. They were both very wet and neither spoke as a luxury bus came through Admiralty Arch and into Trafalgar Square. Its windows were crowded with the faces of young soldiers. Softly from inside there came the amplified voice of the tour guide speaking schoolboy German. The young men grinned at his pronunciation. One boy waved at Sylvia.

A few wet pigeons shuffled out of the way as they walked across the empty rainswept square. ‘Do you realize what you said, just now?’ said Sylvia. She was still rubbing her wrist where the skin had been grazed.

It was just like a woman, thought Douglas, to start some oblique conversation about something already forgotten.

‘One of the most important pieces of paper that the Germans issue to foreigners; that’s what you said just now.’

‘Give over, Sylvia,’ said Douglas. He looked back to be sure they were out of sight of the patrol, then he unlocked the handcuff and released her arm.

‘That’s what we are as far as you’re concerned –foreigners! The Germans are the ones with a right to be here; we’re the intruders who have to bow and bloody scrape.’

‘Give over, Sylvia,’ said Douglas. He hated to hear women swearing like that, although, working in a police force, he should by now have got used to it.

‘Get your hands off me, you bloody Gestapo bastard.’ She pushed him away with the flat of her hand. ‘I’ve got friends who don’t go in fear and trembling of the Huns. You wouldn’t understand anything about that, would you. No! You’re too busy doing their dirty work for them.’

‘You must have been talking to Harry Woods,’ said Douglas in a vain attempt to turn the argument into a joke.

‘You’re pathetic,’ said Sylvia. ‘Do you know that? You’re pathetic!’

She was pretty, but with the rain making rats’ tails of her hair, her lipstick smudged, and the ill-fitting raincoat that had always been too short for her, Douglas suddenly saw her as he’d never seen her before. And he saw her, too, as she’d be in ten years hence; a tight-lipped virago with a loud voice and quick temper. He realized that he’d never make a go of it with Sylvia. But when her parents were killed by bombs, just a few days before Douglas lost his wife, it was natural that they sought in each other some desperate solace that came disguised as love.

What Douglas had once seen as the attractive over-confidence of youth, now looked more like unyielding selfishness. He wondered if there was another man, a much younger one perhaps, but decided against asking her, knowing that she would say yes just to annoy him. ‘We’re both pathetic, Sylvia,’ he said, ‘and that’s the truth of it.’

They were standing near one of the Landseer lions, shining as black as polished ebony in the driving rain. They were virtually alone there, for now even the most stalwart of German servicemen had put away their tax-free cameras and taken shelter. Sylvia stood with one hand in her pocket, and the other pushing her wet hair off her forehead. She smiled but there was no merriment there, not even a touch of kindness or compassion. ‘Don’t be sarcastic about Harry Woods,’ she said bitterly. ‘He’s the only friend you’ve got left. Do you realize that?’

‘Leave Harry out of it,’ said Douglas.

‘You realize he’s one of us, don’t you?’

‘What?’

‘The Resistance, you fool.’ The expression on Douglas’s face was enough to make her laugh. A woman, pushing a pram laden with a sack of coal, half turned to look at them before hurrying on.

‘Harry?’

‘Harry Woods, assistant to Archer of the Yard, protégé of the Gestapo, scourge of any who dare blow raspberries at the conqueror, and yet, yea, verily, I say unto you, this man dare fight the bloody Hun.’ She walked to the fountain and looked at her reflection in the shallow waters.

‘You have been drinking.’

‘Only the heady potion of freedom.’

‘Don’t take an overdose,’ said Douglas. It was almost comical to see her in this sort of mood. Perhaps it was a reaction to the fear she’d felt at the spot-check.

‘Just look after our friend Harry,’ she called shrilly, ‘and give him this, with all my love.’

The hand emerged from her pocket holding the SIPO pass. Before Douglas could stop her, she lifted her arm and threw it as far as she could into the water of the fountain. The rain pounded the stone paving so heavily that the water rebounded to make a grey cornfield of water-spray. She walked quickly through it, towards the steps that led to the National Gallery.

Under the rain-spotted water it was only just possible to see the red-bordered pass as it sank to the bottom amongst the tourists’ coins, Agfa boxes and ice-cream wrappers. Left there, it might well be spotted by some high-ranking official, who would make life hell for the whole department. Douglas stood looking at it for a moment or two but he was already so wet that it would make little difference to go into the water up to his knees.

Chapter Five

When Douglas got back to his office that afternoon, he had barely enough time to clean himself up, and put on dry shoes, before there was a message from the first floor. General Kellerman wanted a word with Douglas, if that was convenient. It was convenient. Douglas hurried upstairs.

‘Ah, Superintendent Archer, so good of you to come,’ said Kellerman as if Archer was some sort of visiting dignitary. ‘I seem to have such a busy day today.’ Kellerman’s senior staff officer passed his chief a teleprinter sheet. Kellerman looked at it briefly and said, ‘This chap from Berlin, Standartenführer Huth…you remember?’

‘I remember everything you said, sir.’

‘Splendid. Well, the Standartenführer has been given a priority seat on the afternoon Berlin-Croydon flight. He’ll be arriving about five I should think. I wonder if you would go there and meet him?’

‘Yes, sir, but I wonder…’ Douglas couldn’t think of a good way to suggest that an SS-Standartenführer from Himmler’s Central Security Office would consider a welcome from one English Detective Superintendent less than his rank and position merited.

‘The Standartenführer has requested that you meet him,’ said Kellerman.

‘Me personally?’ said Douglas.

‘His task is of an investigative nature,’ said Kellerman. ‘I thought it appropriate that I assign to him my best detective.’ He smiled. In fact Huth had asked for Archer by name. Kellerman had energetically opposed the order that put Douglas Archer under the command of the new man, but the intervention of Himmler himself had ended the matter.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Douglas.

Kellerman reached into the pocket of his tweed waistcoat and looked at his gold pocket watch. ‘I’ll start right away,’ said Douglas, recognizing his cue.

‘Would you?’ said Kellerman. ‘Well, see my personal assistant so that you know all the arrangements we’ve made to receive the Standartenführer.’

Lufthansa had three Berlin–London flights daily, and these were additional to the less comfortable and less prestigious military flights. Standartenführer Dr Oskar Huth had been given one of the fifteen seats on the flight which left Berlin at lunch time.

Douglas waited in the unheated terminal building and watched a Luftwaffe band preparing for the arrival of the daily flight from New York. The Germans had the only land-planes capable of such a long-range, non-stop service and the Propaganda Ministry was making full use of it.

The rain had continued well into the afternoon but now on the horizon there was a break in the low clouds. The Berlin plane circled, while the pilot decided whether to land. After the third circuit the big three-engined Junkers roared low over the airport building, and then came round for a perfect landing on the wet tarmac. Its hand-polished metal flashed as it taxied back to the terminal building.

Douglas half expected that any man who had his doctorate included with his rank on teleprinter messages might have retained a trace of the bedside manner. But Huth was a doctor of law, and a hard-nosed SS officer if Douglas had ever seen one. And by that time Douglas had seen many.

Unlike Kellerman, the new man was wearing his uniform, and gave no sign of preferring plain clothes. It was not the black SS uniform. That nowadays was worn only by the Allgemeine SS – mostly middle-aged country yokels who donned uniform just for village booze-ups at weekends. Dr Huth’s uniform was silver-grey, with high boots and riding breeches. On his cuff there was the RFSS cuffband worn only by Himmler’s personal staff.

Douglas looked him up and down. There was something of the dressmaker’s dummy about this tall, thin man, in spite of the state of his uniform which was carefully pressed and cleaned but unmistakably old. He was about thirty-five years old, a powerful, muscular figure with an energy in his stride and demeanour that belied the hooded eyes that made him seem half-asleep. Under his arm he carried a short silver-topped stick, and in his hand a large briefcase. He didn’t go to the door marked for customs and immigration, he rapped the countertop with his stick, until a uniformed Lufthansa official opened the gate for him to go into the reception hall.

‘Archer?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The, officer shook his hand perfunctorily, as if his briefing had said that all Englishmen expect it.

‘What are we waiting for?’ said Huth.

‘Your staff…your baggage…’

‘Shotguns, golf clubs and fishing tackle, you mean? I’ve no time for that sort of nonsense,’ said Huth. ‘Have you got a car here?’

‘The Rolls,’ said Douglas, pointing to where, seen through the doors of the terminal, there stood the highly polished car with uniformed SS driver and Kellerman’s official pennants.

‘Kellerman let you have the Rolls-Royce, did he?’ said Huth as they got into it. ‘What is he using this afternoon, the coronation coach?’ Huth’s English accent was perfect, with the sort of polish that comes only from multilingual parents, or a multilingual mistress. And yet, for all Huth’s smooth polish, there was no mistaking the hard ambition that shone beneath it.

Huth’s father was a professor of modern languages. The family had lived in Schleswig-Holstein until, after the first war, the new frontier had made their home a part of Denmark. Then they had moved to Berlin, where Oskar Huth had studied law before going on to complete his studies at Oxford, where Douglas Archer had gone a few years later. In spite of the disparity in their ages, Douglas Archer and Huth were able to find memories and acquaintances in common. And Douglas’s mother had, as a young woman, been an English governess in Berlin; Douglas knew it from her stories of that time.

‘What are you working on at present?’ Huth asked very casually as he looked out of the window. The car slowed for the traffic at Norwood. A long line of people waited in the rain for the bread ration to arrive. Douglas half expected Huth to comment on them but he leaned forward with balled fist, and used his signet ring to rap against the glass of the driver’s compartment. ‘Use the siren, you fool,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’ve got all day!’

‘Double death in Kentish Town Tuesday. They fell on the electrified rail of the Underground railway. I treated it as murder at first, but then decided it was a suicide pact; the man was an escapee from the camp for British POWs at Brighton.’ Douglas scratched his cheek. ‘A shooting in a nightclub in Leicester Square on Saturday night. A machine-pistol was used, about one hundred and fifty rounds; no shortage of bullets it seems. All the signs of a gang killing. The proprietor says the takings were about six thousand pounds – if you allow for what he’s probably falsifying on his tax returns, it’s probably double that – in used notes: O-Marks mostly. Manager and cashier both dead, three customers injured and one still in hospital.’

‘What about the Peter Thomas murder?’ said Huth, still looking out of the window at the drab, rainswept streets.

‘That was only this morning,’ said Douglas, surprised that Huth was so up to date on what was happening.

Huth nodded.

‘So far we’ve found no one who heard the pistol shot but the doctor thinks death occurred about three A.M. The dead man carried papers saying he was Peter Thomas but the papers are probably forgeries. Criminal records have nothing listed under that name. Fingerprints are working on it but it will take a long time before they finish. He had a railway ticket from Bringle Sands. That’s a small coastal holiday resort in Devon.’

Douglas looked at Huth who was still staring out of the window. ‘I know exactly where Bringle Sands is located,’ said Huth. Douglas was surprised. He’d not known where it was himself until consulting an atlas.

‘Go on,’ said Huth without looking at him.

‘There were military stores in the apartment…not much. Typical black-market items: cigarettes, drink, petrol coupons. We have a written statement from the neighbour who insists that a Luftwaffe Feldwebel was there frequently. He gave a description so my Sergeant went to see the Feldgendarmerie this afternoon. I will wait now to see if they want to take over the investigation, or whether I continue.’

‘What about the murder?’

‘It has all the signs of a killer who let himself in, waited for the victim to arrive home…’

‘But you don’t think so?’

Douglas shrugged. There was no way to tell this SS officer of the problems such investigations brought. The penalties for even slight breaches of the regulations were now so severe that ordinarily law-abiding men and women would give false evidence. Douglas Archer understood this, and, in common with all the rest of the police in Britain, he turned a blind eye to many less serious offences. ‘Probably a black-market murder,’ said Douglas, although his instinct told him that there was more to it.

Huth turned and smiled. ‘I think I’m beginning to understand the way you work, Superintendent,’ he said. ‘Probably a black-market killing, you say. And Saturday’s was a gang killing. Tuesday’s was a suicide pact. Is this the way you work at Scotland Yard? You have these convenient pigeon-holes that are a cunning way of classifying cases that would otherwise be put together in a gigantic file marked “unsolvable”. Is that it?’

‘I didn’t use that word, Standartenführer, you did. In my opinion, such cases are perfectly straightforward, except that Wehrmacht personnel are involved. In such cases my hands are tied.’

‘Very plausible,’ said Huth.

Douglas waited, and when he added nothing more said, ‘Would you please elaborate on that, sir?’

‘You don’t for one moment think it’s a “black-market killing”,’ said Huth contemptuously. ‘Because a man like you knows every damned crook in London. If you thought this was anything to do with the black-market you’d have searched out every important black-marketeer in London and told them to hand over the culprit within a couple of hours, or find themselves doing ten years’ preventive detention. Can you tell me why you didn’t?’

‘No,’ said Douglas.

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘I can’t tell you, because I don’t know why I didn’t do that. All the evidence is as I told you…but there’s more to it, I think.’

Huth stared at Douglas and tipped his peaked cap back on his head with the tip of his thumb. He was a handsome man but his face was colourless, his grey drill uniform, and its black and silver SS collar patches, little different from the pale complexion resulting from a life spent in ill-lit offices. Douglas found no way to discover what was going on inside this man’s head, and yet he had the uncomfortable feeling that Huth could see right through him. But Douglas did not avert his eyes. After what seemed an interminable time, Huth said, ‘So what are you doing about it?’

‘If the Feldgendarmerie identify the Feldwebel mentioned in the neighbour’s written statement, it will be up to the Feldgericht der Luftwaffe to decide…’

Huth waved his hand disdainfully. ‘A teleprinter message from Berlin instructed the Luftwaffe to pass all papers back to you.’

Douglas found this truly astonishing. The Wehrmacht jealously guarded the right to handle their own investigations. The SD – the intelligence service of the SS – had achieved the seemingly impossible when it extended its investigative powers to include not only the SS, but also the SA and the Nazi Party. But even they never attempted to bring charges against a member of the armed forces. There was only one level at which the Luftwaffe could be ordered to pass an investigation over to the SIPO – and that was the supreme controller of civil power and supreme commander of the armed forces, Adolf Hitler.

Douglas’s imagination raced ahead, to wonder if the crime might have been committed by some high-ranking Nazi, or a relative, associate or mistress of such a person. ‘Is there a theory about who the killer might be?’

‘You find the killer, that’s all,’ said Huth.

‘But why this particular crime?’ persisted Douglas.

‘Because it’s there,’ said Huth wearily. ‘That should be enough for an Englishman surely.’

Douglas’s mind was filled with fears and objections. He didn’t want any part of this very important investigation, with a sinister SS officer looking over his shoulder all the time. But this was obviously not the moment to voice his objections. A little watery sunlight dribbled through the clouds and lit the shiny streets. The driver used the distinctive police siren and sped past the high walls of the Oval cricket ground.

Douglas said, ‘I will collect you at seven-thirty for the reception in your honour at the Savoy Hotel. But, on the way to your accommodation, in Brook Street, Mayfair, General Kellerman thought you might like to see Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament.’

‘General Kellerman is a peasant,’ said Huth affably in German.

‘And does that mean you would like to drive past Buckingham Palace or not?’

‘It means, my dear Superintendent, that I have not the slightest intention of spending the evening watching a roomful of army officers, and their overdressed women, guzzling champagne, and, between mouthfuls of smoked salmon, telling me the best place to buy Staffordshire china.’ He continued to speak German, using the word ‘fressen’, normally used to describe the eating habits of livestock.

‘Take me to my office,’ said Huth. ‘And get the best damned pathologist available to look at Peter Thomas tonight. I want to be there for the postmortem.’ He saw the bewilderment on Douglas’s face. ‘You’ll soon get used to the way I work.’

A man can get used to yellow fever, thought Douglas, but many of them die in the attempt. ‘So I’ll cancel the reception?’

‘And deprive Kellerman and his friends of their party? What sort of fellow are you, Superintendent, a kill-joy?’

He gave a soft laugh. Then he rapped the glass partition again and shouted ‘Scotland Yard!’ to the driver.

Chapter Six

And so, at the very time when General Kellerman, HSSPf (Senior SS and Police Leader) Great Britain, was playing host to some of the senior officials in London, their guest of honour was in a mortuary behind Baker Street wearing a white butcher’s apron and watching Peter Thomas’s corpse being slashed open by Sir John Shields, the pathologist.

It was a grim little building, set back from Paddington Street by enough space for the hearses and ambulances to unload behind the oak doors that make the entrance so innocuous to passers-by. The interior of the mortuary building had received so many coats of dark green and brown paint that the brickwork was now smooth and shiny, like its stone stairs and polished wooden floor. The low-power light bulbs provided only small puddles of dull yellow light, except where a green-shaded brass lamp had been pulled down close to Peter Thomas’s pale dead belly.

There were nine people present: Huth, Sir John Shields and his assistant, Douglas Archer, a man from the coroner’s office, a clerk, two mortuary workers in rubber aprons and waterproof boots, and a fussy little German police Major who had also flown in from Hamburg that day. He took notes, and continually asked for translations of bits of Shields’s impassive commentary. There were too many people round the slab, and Douglas readily conceded his place in the front row. He had no taste for these gory excursions, and even with his eyes averted, the sounds of the knife and hacksaw and the gurgling liquids made him want to retch. ‘Haemorrhage, haemorrhage, haemorrhage!’ said Shields, indicating with the knife. They peered closely at the dead man’s insides. ‘I don’t like the look of his liver,’ said Shields, grabbing it, cutting it free and holding it nearer to the light. ‘What do you think, doctor?’ His voice echoed in the dark mortuary.

Shields’s assistant prodded the liver, and looked at it through a magnifying glass for a long time. Shields bent down to sniff at the corpse.

‘Explain to me,’ said Huth impatiently.

‘Diseased,’ said the doctor. ‘Most interesting. I’ve never seen one quite like it. I wonder how the fellow kept going.’

The little German police Major was scribbling in his notebook. Then he, too, wanted to look at the liver through a magnifying glass. ‘How near to death was he due to failure of the liver?’ he asked in German and waited while his query was translated by Huth.

‘I’d not like to answer that,’ said Sir John. ‘A man can go the devil of a time with a bad liver – you should see the chaps at my club!’ He laughed.

‘This is not a joke,’ said Huth. ‘Was the man sick?’

‘He certainly was,’ said Sir John.

‘To death?’

‘I wouldn’t have given him more than a couple of months, would you, doctor?’

Sir John’s assistant demonstrated agreement by means of a noisy intake of breath, and a slight shake of the head.

Huth put his arm round the shoulder of the Major and steered him away, out of earshot, where they stood and whispered together. Sir John clearly thought this a breach of good manners and he did nothing to hide his annoyance.

When Huth returned to the slab he told Sir John that he would want all the internal organs packed and ready to be flown to Berlin on the next day’s flight from Croydon.

‘Then there is nothing to keep me here,’ said Sir John Shields.

‘Don’t be offended, Sir John,’ said Huth with a smooth charm that Douglas had not seen him use before. ‘We’ve no one in Berlin with your knowledge and experience. I’m hoping very much that you and your colleague will continue with the postmortem so that we can have a report by tomorrow morning.’

Sir John took a deep breath, and came to his full height, as Douglas had seen him do so often in the law courts just before crushing some overconfident counsel. ‘There can be no question of my attempting any further examination of this body without the facilities of a hospital laboratory, fully equipped and fully staffed.’

Huth nodded but said nothing.

Sir John continued. ‘Even then, it would be a long job. All the London hospitals are overworked to a point of near exhaustion, and that for reasons that I will not embarrass you, or your army colleague, by elaborating.’

Huth nodded gravely. ‘Of course not. And that’s why I have arranged for the SS Hospital, at Hyde Park Corner, to have their laboratory entirely at your disposal. I have two cars and an ambulance here, a telephone line has been kept clear for you and you have only to ask for any extra personnel and materials.’

Sir John looked at Huth for a long time before answering. ‘I would like to believe, Brigadier, that this extraordinary display of German military resource is a compliment to me. However, I suspect it is more accurately a measure of your concern with this particular death. I’d therefore appreciate it if you’d be a little more forthcoming about its circumstances – and what you know already.’

‘Standartenführer,’ said Huth, ‘Standartenführer, not Brigadier. All I can tell you, Sir John, is that I dislike mysteries even more than you do, and that especially applies to mysterious death.’

‘Epidemic?’ said Sir John. ‘Contagious disease? Virus? Plague? Pestilence?’ His voice rose a fraction. ‘You mean you’ve seen something like this before?’

‘Some of my staff have seen something like this before,’ admitted Huth. ‘As for plague and pestilence, we’re dealing with something that could prove so deadly that not even the Black Death would compare with the consequences – at least, that’s what my experts tell me.’

Chapter Seven

It was after midnight before Huth and Douglas Archer got back to Scotland Yard. For the first time Huth was persuaded to go to the office that had been prepared for him on the mezzanine floor. It was a magnificent room, with a view across the Thames to County Hall. Endless trouble had been taken to get the room exactly right, and General Kellerman had inspected it twice that afternoon, showing great concern that the rosewood desk was polished, the cut-glass light-fitting washed and the carpet cleaned and brushed. There was a new Telefunken TV set ready for the BBC’s resumed service that was promised for Christmas. Under it, a panelled cabinet contained Waterford cut glass and a selection of drinks. ‘He’s sure to like it, isn’t he?’ Kellerman had asked in that hoarse whisper that Harry Woods could imitate to perfection.

‘Anyone would, sir,’ said Kellerman’s senior staff officer, whom Kellerman liked to call his ‘chief of staff’.

‘A very nice place,’ said Huth sarcastically. ‘A very nice place to hide me away so I don’t interfere with the workings of the department. Even my phone goes through Kellerman’s switchboard, I notice.’

‘Is it the location you don’t like?’ said Douglas.

‘Just get rid of all this furniture and junk,’ said Huth. ‘It looks more like a Victorian brothel than an office. Does Kellerman think I’m going to sit here getting drunk until the TV begins?’

‘There is a cable TV connection,’ said Douglas. ‘It can be used to carry police information; photos of wanted persons and so on.’

‘I’ll get you a job in the bloody Propaganda Ministry,’ said Huth. ‘How would you like that?’

‘Perhaps I could have time to think about it,’ said Douglas, pretending to take it seriously.

‘Just get this furniture out of here. I want metal filing-cases, with good locks on them, and a metal desk with locks on the drawers, and a proper desk light, not that damned contraption. You’ll be sitting in the adjoining office, so you might as well get whatever you want in there too. Get phones: four direct lines and have your extensions changed to up here. In the corridor I want a table and chair so that my sentry won’t have to stand all the while – and where the hell is the sentry?’

‘Sentry, sir?’

‘Don’t stand there repeating everything I say,’ said Huth. ‘The Peter Thomas murder investigation is part of an operation we have code-named “Apocalypse”. No information of any sort – in fact nothing at all – goes outside this room without my written permission, or that of the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler. Is that clear?’

‘Unforgettably so,’ said Douglas, desperately trying to fathom what could be behind it.

Huth smiled. ‘In case the unforgettable quality lessens, there will be an armed SS sentry outside in the corridor for twenty-four hours of every day.’ Huth looked at his wristwatch. ‘He should be on duty now, damn him. Get on the phone to the SS guard commander at Cannon Row. Tell him to send the sentry and half-a-dozen men to clear this furniture out.’

‘I doubt if there will be workmen available at this time of night,’ said Douglas.

Huth tipped his head back and looked from under his heavy-lidded eyes. Soon Douglas learned that this was a danger sign. ‘Are you making another of your jokes? Or is this some new kind of provocation?’

Douglas shrugged. ‘I’ll phone.’

‘I’ll be in the number three conference room with Major Steiger. Tell the SS officer I want all this furniture out of here before I get back. And I want the new furniture installed.’

‘Where do I get metal desks?’ said Douglas.

Huth turned away as if the question was hardly worth answering. ‘Use your initiative, Superintendent. Go along this corridor and, when you see the sort of thing you need, take it.’

‘But there will be a terrible row in the morning,’ said Douglas. ‘They’ll all be here moving it back again.’

‘And they will find an armed SS sentry preventing them taking anything out of this room on the orders of the Reichsführer-SS. And that includes metal furniture.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘In my brief-case you’ll find a cardboard tube containing a small painting by Piero della Francesca. Get it framed and hang it on the wall to hide some of this ghastly wallpaper.’

‘A real painting by Piero della Francesca?’ said Douglas who’d heard amazing stories of the artifacts plundered during the fighting in Poland, France and the Low Countries.

‘In a policeman’s office, Superintendent Archer? That would hardly be appropriate would it?’ He went out without waiting for an answer.

Douglas phoned the SS guard commander, and passed on Huth’s message with the friendly rider that Standartenführer Huth was in a great hurry.

The guard commander’s response was one of consternation. Kellerman’s briefing about the arrival of the new man was obviously taken seriously by the security force.

Douglas stepped across to the window and looked down at the Embankment. The curfew ensured that few civilians were on the street – Members of Parliament, and shift workers in essential industries and services, were among the exceptions – and the street and bridge were empty except for parked lines of official vehicles and an armed patrol who visited the floodlit perimeters of all the government buildings.

A motorcycle and sidecar combination stopped at the checkpoint where Victoria Embankment met Westminster Bridge. There was a brief inspection of papers before it roared away into the dark night of the far side of the river. From across the road there came the loud chime of Big Ben. Douglas Archer yawned and wondered how people like Huth seemed to manage without sleep.

He opened Huth’s briefcase to get the Francesca reproduction for framing, but before he had time to unroll it he saw, inside the pocket of the case, a brown manila envelope sealed with red wax and bearing the unmistakable heraldic imprint of RSHA – the Central Security Department of the Reich, and holy of holies of Heinrich Himmler and all he commanded. The envelope had already been opened along the side and a folded paper was visible.

Douglas could not repress his curiosity. He pulled out a large sheet of paper and unfolded it to find a complex diagram, as big as the blotter on the desk. It was drawn in black indelible ink upon handmade paper that was as heavy as parchment. Even Douglas Archer’s fluent German did not equip him to comprehend fully the handwriting of the German script, but he recognized some of the symbols.

There was a reversed equilateral triangle, inscribed within a double circle. The triangle contained two words, written to form a cross – Elohim and Tzabaoth. Douglas Archer’s successful investigation of a series of Black Magic murders in 1939 enabled him to recognize this as a ‘pentacle’ representing ‘the god of armies, the equilibrium of natural forces, and the harmony of numbers’.

A second pentacle was a human head with three faces, crowned with a tiara and issuing from a vessel filled with water. There were other water signs too. Handwritten alongside it was ‘Joliot-Curie laboratory – Collège de France, Paris’. And close against another water sign was written ‘Norsk Hydro Company, Rjukan, Central Norway’.

Heaped earth, spades and a diamond pierced by a magic sword ‘Deo Duce, comite ferro’ was an emblem of the Great Arcanum representing, according to the chart, ‘the omnipotence of the adept’ and here the runic double lightning of the SS was lettered, and followed by ‘RSHA Berlin’.

The third symbol was the spiral marked ‘Transformatio’ which became a spinning toy top with ‘Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, England’ written there, and the words ‘Formatio’ and ‘Reformatio’ arranged over ‘Transformatio’ to make a triangle. Below it ‘German army reactor in England’ was written against a spinning device. In another hand, ‘Peter Thomas’ appeared here in pencil, as if added hurriedly at the last moment.

Douglas straightened as he heard the sound of German boots on the mosaic stone of the corridor. He folded the diagram too quickly to be sure that it showed no sign of being tampered with. Then he tucked the envelope away into the red-lined pocket of the case and closed it.

There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ said Douglas as he unrolled the Francesca reproduction.

‘One sentry and six men for duty,’ reported the SS officer.

‘Standartenführer Huth wants this furniture removed,’ explained Douglas. ‘Replace it with metal furniture from offices on this corridor.’

The SS officer showed no surprise at the order. Douglas had the feeling that this farmer’s son from Hesse – as Douglas accurately guessed him to be – would have obeyed an order to jump out of the window. The officer took off his jacket to work with his six brawny lads while their armed comrade stood on duty in the corridor.

The job was almost finished by the time Harry Woods arrived at 2 A.M. He’d been at the reception at the Savoy. Douglas noticed, with some apprehension, that Harry was slightly drunk.

‘Talk about a new broom sweeping clean,’ said Harry as he watched furniture being moved. ‘I haven’t seen this kind of activity since that night when the invasion started.’

‘Do you know where we can get this picture framed?’ Douglas asked him.

Harry Woods held the edge of the picture and looked at it. It was ‘The Flagellation’. Douglas knew the painting – a fine colonnaded piazza, flooded with overhead sunlight from a blue sky. In the background Christ is scourged. Three magnificently attired men – the Count of Urbino and his two advisers – turn their backs upon the scene and converse calmly together. In real life, the advisers depicted in the painting were suspected of complicity in the murder of the Count. For centuries art experts have argued about the hidden meaning of the picture. Douglas found it appropriate as a decoration for the office of this hard-eyed emissary from the Byzantine court of the Reichsführer-SS.

‘Funny bugger, isn’t he?’ said Harry, looking at the painting.

‘We’d better learn to live with him,’ said Douglas.

‘He’s down in number three conference room,’ said Harry, ‘talking to that squeaky-voiced little police Major that he took along to the mortuary. Who is he?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Douglas.

‘They’re talking together as if the world was about to come to an end.’ Harry brought out his cigarettes and offered them to Douglas, who shook his head. It was no longer done to accept a friend’s tobacco ration. ‘What’s it all about, chief?’ said Harry. ‘You understand all this double-talk. What’s it all about?’

‘I thought you might be able to tell me, Harry. I saw Sylvia today. She told me that you have a finger in everything that’s going on in town.’

If Harry guessed what Sylvia actually said, he gave no sign of it, but he didn’t seem surprised that Sylvia had turned up at Scotland Yard. Douglas wondered if she’d seen Harry too.

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ said Harry. ‘That little Major is nothing to do with pathology or medicine or anything like that. I’d like to know why he was at the mortuary. Do you think this bloke Huth let him come along just for a laugh?’

‘You’ll soon find out that our new Standartenführer is not that keen on laughs,’ said Douglas.

‘There are some bloody peculiar people about, you know that. I mean, letting that little wireless mechanic come along there was wrong. And I’d tell Huth that straight, and to his face. I’d tell him it was all bloody wrong. You think I wouldn’t but I’d tell him.’ Harry swayed slightly and steadied himself by gripping the desk.

‘Wireless mechanic?’

‘Hah!’ said Harry with the arch smugness of the slightly drunk. ‘I saw his file. He’s got a police uniform but that’s just for show. I phoned Lufthansa, and got his number from the flight manifest, then I went upstairs and looked up his record.’

‘You got his file?’

‘Just his card. Say you work for the Gestapo and you can get any bloody thing. Do you know that, Douglas?’

‘You don’t work for the Gestapo,’ Douglas pointed out.

Harry waved his hand in front of his face as if trying to remove a speck from a dirty windscreen. ‘Wireless mechanic, it said, a doctor of wireless theory. They’re all bloody doctors these Huns, have you noticed that, Douglas?…Studied at Tübingen. Only came into the police service one year ago, straight from lecturing at Munich.’

‘Wireless mechanics don’t study at Tübingen and lecture at Munich,’ persisted Douglas.

‘All right, all right, all right,’ said Harry. ‘I haven’t got your command of the German language but I can find my way through a record card.’ Harry gave Douglas a sly smile and, like a stage conjurer producing a rabbit from a hat, he pulled a record card from his inside pocket. ‘There you are, old lad, read it for yourself.’

Douglas took it, and read it in silence.

‘Come on, Super, give us a smile. You’re wrong and you know it.’

‘The Major,’ said Douglas, speaking slowly so that he could think about it himself, ‘is a physicist, an expert on radioactive substances. He was a lecturer on nuclear physics.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ said Harry, rubbing his nose.

‘Those burns on the dead man’s arm,’ said Douglas. ‘Sir John didn’t mention those last night. Perhaps the little Major went there to examine them.’

‘From a sun-lamp?’

‘Not from a sun-lamp, Harry. Those burns were bad ones, the sort of skin damage a man would suffer if he was exposed to the rays that come from radium, or something like that.’

There was another knock at the door. The SS guard commander came to say that SS Signals wished to report that four new telephone lines were connected and tested. No sooner had he said so than Huth’s direct line rang. Douglas picked up the phone on his desk and said, ‘Standartenführer Huth’s office, Detective Superintendent Archer speaking.’

‘Archer – oh, splendid. General Kellerman here. Is the Standartenführer with you?’ Douglas looked at his watch. That Kellerman should be telephoning here at this time was amazing. He was not noted for his long working hours.

‘He’s in number three conference room, General,’ said Douglas.

‘Yes, so I understand.’ There was a long pause. ‘Unfortunately he’s left orders that no calls should be put through to him there. That doesn’t apply to me of course but I don’t wish to make the operator’s life too difficult, and there seems to be something wrong with the phone in the conference room.’

Douglas realized that Huth had given the phone operator the ‘direct orders of the Reichsführer’ stuff, and then left the phone off the hook, but he had every reason to help the General save face. ‘The phone is probably out of use because the Signals staff have been changing the phone lines.’

‘What?’ shouted Kellerman in shrill alarm. ‘At this time of night? What are you talking about?’ He changed to German and became more authoritative. ‘Look here. What is this about changing phones in my office? Explain what’s been happening. Explain immediately!’

‘Purely routine changes, General,’ said Douglas. ‘The Standartenführer preferred that Sergeant Woods and myself were accommodated in the clerk’s office next to his. This meant putting in extra lines for us and bringing our outside line up here – it’s usual to keep an outside number unchanged during the process of an inquiry…informants and so on.’

From somewhere near the General’s elbow there came the petulant murmur of complaint. It was youthful and feminine, and Douglas found no resemblance to the voice of the General’s wife, who had flown from Croydon to Breslau to see her mother the previous week.

‘Oh, routine, you say,’ said Kellerman hurriedly. ‘Then that is in order.’ He paused with the phone capped at his end. Then he said, ‘Have you been with the Standartenführer this evening?’

‘I have, sir,’ said Douglas.

‘What exactly is the problem, Superintendent? He never arrived at the Savoy, you know.’

‘The Standartenführer has a great deal of urgent work outstanding, General,’ said Douglas.

At that moment Huth entered the room. He looked at Harry Woods who was resting against the desk with his eyes closed. Then Huth looked at Douglas and raised his eyebrows quizzically.

At the other end of the phone, General Kellerman said, ‘Do you think I should come over there, Superintendent Archer? I can rely upon a loyal and conscientious officer like you to assess the situation.’

Huth had walked over to his desk and now stood with head bent towards the earpiece of the phone.

‘I’m sure that the General…’ Huth tried to grab the phone but Douglas held on to it long enough to say, ‘The Standartenführer has just come in, sir.’

Huth took the phone, cleared his throat and said, ‘Huth here, General Kellerman. What is it you want?’

‘I’m so pleased to locate you at last, my dear Huth. I want to tell you –’

Huth interrupted Kellerman’s greeting. ‘You’re in a nice warm house, General, in a nice warm bed, with a nice warm woman. You stay there and let me continue my work without interruption.’

‘It’s simply that my switchboard couldn’t seem –’ the phone clicked as Huth dropped the earpiece back on to its rest.

Huth looked at Douglas. ‘Who gave you permission to discuss the workings of this office with an outsider?’

‘But it was General Kellerman…’

‘How do you know who it was? It was just a voice on the phone. I’m reliably informed that your drunken friend here…’ he jabbed a thumb at where Harry Woods was blinking at him, ‘…can manage a fairly convincing imitation of General Kellerman’s English.’

No one spoke. Any of Harry Woods’s previously stated intentions to tell Huth straight about the decorum of having the little Major along to the mortuary had been put aside for another time.

Huth tossed his peaked cap on to the hook behind the door and sat down. ‘I’ve told you once, and now I’ll tell you for the last time. You’ll discuss the work of this office with no one at all. In theory you can speak freely with the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler.’ Huth leaned forward with his stick and jabbed Harry Woods playfully. ‘You know who that is, Sergeant? Heinrich Himmler?’

‘Yes,’ growled Harry.

‘But that’s only in theory. In practice you won’t even tell him anything, unless I’m present. Or if I’m dead, and providing you’ve satisfied yourselves personally that my life is extinct. Right?’

‘Right,’ said Douglas quickly, fearing that Harry Woods was working himself up to a physical assault upon Huth who was now waving his stick in the air.

‘Any breach of this instruction,’ said Huth, ‘is not only a capital offence under section 134 of the Military Orders of the Commander-in-Chief Great Britain, for which the penalty is a firing squad, but also a capital offence under section 11 of your own Emergency Powers (German Occupation) Act 1941, for which they hang offenders at Wandsworth Prison.’

‘Would the shooting or the hanging come first?’ said Douglas.

‘We must always leave something for the jury to decide,’ said Huth.

Chapter Eight

Long ago Seven Dials had been a district noted for vice, crime and violence. Now it was no more than a shabby backwater of London’s theatreland. Douglas Archer got to know this region, and its inhabitants, during his time as a uniformed police Inspector, but he little thought that one day he would live here.

When Archer’s suburban house – situated between two prongs of the German panzer thrust at London – had been demolished, Mrs Sheenan had offered him and his child bed and board. Her husband, a peacetime policeman, was an army reservist. Captured at Calais the previous year he was now in a POW camp near Bremen, with no promised date of release.

The table was laid for breakfast when Douglas Archer got back to Monmouth Street and the little house over the oil-shop. Mrs Sheenan’s son, Bob, and young Douggie were being dressed in front of a blazing fire, in a room garlanded with damp laundry. Douglas recognized the striped towel that cloaked his son. It was one of the few items he’d managed to salvage from the wreckage of his house in Cheam. It brought back happy memories that he would have preferred to forget.

‘Hello, Dad! Did you work all night? Is it a murder?’

‘It’s a murder in an antique shop, isn’t it, Mr Archer?’

‘That’s right.’

‘There, told you so, Douggie,’ said young Sheenan. ‘It said so in the newspapers.’

‘Hold still,’ said Mrs Sheenan as she finished buttoning her son’s cardigan. Douglas helped her dress young Douggie. That finished, she reached for a pan on the hob. ‘You like them soft-boiled, don’t you, Mr Archer?’ She kept their relationship at that formal stage.

‘I’ve had my eggs this week, Mrs Sheenan,’ said Douglas. ‘Two of them fried on Sunday morning –remember?’

The woman scooped the boiled eggs with a bent spoon and put them into the egg cups. ‘My neighbour got these from her relatives in the country. She let me have six because I gave her your old grey sweater to unravel for the wool. All the eggs should be yours really.’

Douglas suspected that this was just a way of letting him have an unfair share of her own rations but he started to eat the egg. There was a plateful of bread on the table too, with a small cube of margarine, the printed wrapper of which declared it to be a token of friendship from German workers. What about a gesture of friendship from German farmers, said the wags who preferred butter.

‘Suppose there was a murder in a French aeroplane flying over Germany, and the murderer was Italian and the man murdered was…’ Bob thought for a moment ‘…Brazilian.’

‘Don’t speak with your mouth full,’ said his mother. On the radio the announcer played a Strauss waltz, requested by a German soldier stationed in Cardiff. Mrs Sheenan switched the music down.

‘Or Chinese!’ said Bob.

‘Don’t pester the Superintendent. You can see he’s trying to eat his breakfast in peace.’

‘That would be for the lawyers to decide,’ he told Bob. ‘I’m only a policeman. I just have to find out who did it.’

‘Mrs Sheenan is going to take us to the Science Museum on Saturday,’ said Douggie.

‘That’s very nice of her,’ said Douglas. ‘Be a good boy and do as she tells you.’

‘He always does,’ said the woman. ‘They both do; they’re both good boys.’ She looked at Douglas. ‘You look tired,’ she said.

‘I’m just getting my second wind.’

‘You’re not going back there again, without a rest?’

‘It’s a murder inquiry,’ said Douglas. ‘I must.’

‘Told you so, told you so, told you so!’ shouted Bob. ‘It’s a murder! Told you so!’

‘Quiet, boys,’ said Mrs Sheenan.

‘I have a car here,’ said Douglas. ‘I’ll pass the school – in about half an hour – will that be all right?’

‘A car. Have you been promoted?’

‘I have a new boss,’ said Douglas. ‘He says he likes his men to have the best of everything. His own car has a wireless in it. He can send messages straight to Scotland Yard while he’s driving along.’

‘Listen to that!’ said Bob. He pretended to use the phone. ‘Calling Scotland Yard. This is Bob Sheenan calling Scotland Yard. Like that, Superintendent? Does it work like that?’

‘It’s morse code,’ explained Douglas. ‘The wireless operator has to be able to use a morse key but he can receive speech messages.’

‘What will they think of next?’ said Mrs Sheenan.

‘Can we see your car?’ said Bob. ‘Is it a Flying Standard?’

‘The police have all sorts of cars, don’t they, Dad?’

‘All sorts.’

‘Can we go to the window and look at it?’

‘Finish your bread and then you can.’

With whoops of joy the two children went into the front room and raised the window to look down into the street at the car.

‘The bath water is still warm,’ said Mrs Sheenan. ‘Only the boys have used it.’ She looked away, embarrassed. Like so many people, she found the social degradation of the new sort of poverty more difficult to bear than its deprivations.

‘That would make a new man of me,’ said Douglas, although in fact the new changing rooms at the Yard had baths, and hot water in abundance.

‘There’s a bolt on the scullery door,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you won’t get into trouble taking us to the school?’

‘It will be all right.’

‘The regulations about the misuse of fuel are horrifying. That manager in the coal office in Neal Street was sentenced to death. I read that in the Evening News last night.’

‘It will be all right,’ said Douglas.

She smiled contentedly. ‘It’s more than a year since I was in a motor-car. My Uncle Tom’s funeral. That was before the war – seems like a hundred years ago, doesn’t it?’

Mrs Sheenan came and sat near the fire, and looked at it as it burned. ‘The wood is almost finished,’ she said, ‘but the oil-shop man will lend me a few more logs until the new ration period starts next week.’

Her voice made Douglas start, for the food, the hot tea and the warmth of the fire had caused him to close his eyes and nod off.

‘There’s something I have to bother you with, Mr Archer,’ she said.

Douglas reached into his pocket.

‘Not money,’ she said. ‘I can manage on what you give me, and the supplementary ration card you get makes a wonderful difference.’ She put out a hand and mechanically felt the heat of the teapot under its knitted cosy. ‘The two boys have an extra hour’s music lesson on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s only a shilling a week and they seem to like it.’

Douglas knew that she’d originally started to say something different but he didn’t press her. Instead he closed his eyes again.

‘More tea?’

‘No thanks.’

‘It’s the German ersatz. They say it’s made for them to have with lemon. It’s not very nice with milk is it?’

She disappeared behind the hanging gardens of damp garments, touching each of them to see how they were drying. She turned some of the garments round. ‘The woman down the street saw an ambulance train going through Clapham Junction last Monday. Carriages crowded with wounded soldiers – dirty looking and with torn uniforms – and two red cross coaches on the back, the sort they have for stretcher cases.’ She put the pegs in her mouth while she rehung a child’s pyjama top. ‘Is there still fighting?’

‘I’d be careful whom you tell that to, Mrs Sheenan.’

‘She wouldn’t make up stories – she’s a sensible woman.’

‘I know,’ said Douglas.

‘I wouldn’t tell strangers, Mr Archer – but I always feel I can say anything to you.’

‘In the towns it’s just bombs and murdering German soldiers. In the country districts there are bigger groups, who ambush German motorized patrols. But I doubt if they will survive the winter.’

‘Because of the cold?’

‘You can’t light fires, because of the smoke. The leaves come off the trees, and so there’s no concealment, no cover. And in winter the spotting planes can see a man’s tracks better on the ground – and if it snows…’ Douglas raised his hands.

‘Those poor boys,’ said Mrs Sheenan. ‘They say it’s terrible in the unoccupied zone now, with the winter not even started. Shortages of everything.’ She hovered over Douglas and he knew she had something to tell him. Like any good policeman he let her take her time about it.

‘This music master who does the lessons – he’s very young, wounded in the war and everything, so I wouldn’t like to complain about him,’ she paused, ‘but he was asking the boys a lot of questions, and I knew you wouldn’t like it.’

Douglas was suddenly wide awake. ‘Questions? What sort of questions?’

‘Yesterday afternoon at the music lesson. They have a proper gramophone and loudspeakers, and everything to play the music – it’s music appreciation really – and he has someone to work it, that’s why it costs the extra shilling.’

Douglas nodded. ‘What’s his name?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Archer. Your Doug told me afterwards that the teacher was asking about you – what time you got home and so on. I didn’t want to question Douggie too much about it. You know how sensitive he is, and what with losing his mother…sometimes I could cry for the little love.’ She smiled suddenly and shook her head. ‘I’m probably being a silly old woman. I should never have worried you about it.’

‘You did right,’ said Douglas. ‘Questions, you say?’

‘Oh, nothing like that – rest your mind. He’s not that sort of man at all. I can spot those sort of men a mile off.’

‘What then?’

‘I think he wanted to know if you liked the Germans.’ She stood up and straightened her hair, looking in the mirror. ‘I don’t want to get either of them into trouble. And I know you wouldn’t either. But if something happened to you or your Douggie, how would I be able to live with myself if I’d not told you?’

‘You’re a sensible woman, Mrs Sheenan. I wish I had a few more police officers as sensible as you are. Now tell me more about these two teachers.’

‘Only one’s a teacher, the other just helps with the music. They’re from the war – officers I should think, both wounded; one has lost his arm.’

‘Which arm?’

‘The right one. And he used to play the piano before the war. Isn’t it a terrible thing, and he can’t be more than twenty-five, if that.’

‘I’ll have that bath now, Mrs Sheenan. You get the boys ready and I’ll take you to the school in about fifteen minutes’ time.’

She got the children’s raincoats from the cupboard. One of them was threadbare. ‘Bob’s raincoat was stolen from the cloakroom last week. He’s back to wearing this old one again. I’ve told the boys to take their coats into the classroom in future. There are some terrible people about, Mr Archer, but there, you must know that better than any of us.’

‘This fellow had a false arm, you say?’

‘No, his arm is missing, poor boy.’

Chapter Nine

When Douglas returned to Scotland Yard, having dropped the others at the school, he sought out a young police officer named Jimmy Dunn, and got permission to use him on plain-clothes duty. PC Dunn was keen to get into CID. He’d proved a good detective for Archer on previous cases.

‘Find out what you can about this music teacher,’ Douglas said. ‘Political? Sexual? Someone with a grudge against coppers? I don’t want to do it myself because it sounds like he’d recognize me.’

‘Leave it to me, sir,’ said Dunn who could hardly wait to get started.

‘Might be just a crank,’ said Douglas. ‘Might be nothing at all.’

Happily, Jimmy Dunn began tidying up his desk. He only tolerated his job with Assistant Commissioner Administration because his office on the mezzanine was so close to the Murder Squad and Flying Squad teams.

‘Oh, and Jimmy…’ said Douglas as he was turning to leave. ‘There’s a million to one chance that this one-armed fellow might be connected with the Peter Thomas murder. I think you’d better draw a pistol from our friends downstairs. I’ll give you a chit.’

‘A pistol?’

Douglas had to smile. ‘Take something small, Jimmy, something you can tuck away out of sight. And keep it out of sight, unless you have to defend yourself. We can’t be too careful nowadays. There are too many guns in this town at present, and there’s the devil of a row if someone loses one.’

In the new office on the other side of the building Douglas found Harry Woods valiantly telling lies to all-comers to cover Douglas’s absence. General Kellerman’s office had been asking for Douglas since nine o’clock that morning.

From Whitehall came the constant sound of workmen hammering. Berlin had announced that, to celebrate the friendship between Nazi Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a week of Kameradschaft would be celebrated in all parts of the two vast empires. It was to begin the following Sunday, when in London, units of the Red Army and Navy, complete with band and choir, were to combine with the Wehrmacht for a march through town.

The whole route was being decorated, but Whitehall and Parliament Square were coming in for special treatment. As well as hundreds of flags, there were heraldic shields bearing entwined hammer, sickle and swastika surmounting a small Cross of St George which had now replaced the Union Flag for all official purposes in the occupied zone.

Hitler had provided the Red Fleet with anchorages at Rosyth and Scapa Flow as well as Invergordon. Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry said that this was a natural outcome of the bonds of friendship that drew these two great peoples together. Cynics said it was Hitler’s way of putting some Russians between him and the Americans.

In spite of all the extra work that the German/Soviet Friendship Week would give Scotland Yard, General Kellerman remained his usual genial unhurried self. Even when he returned from a conference at the Feld Kommandantur with a briefcase loaded with FK-Befehle he was able to laugh about the way these reams of printed orders about the Friendship Week required the full-time attention of a roomful of clerks.

The proliferating orders coming from the Military Commander GB (and the Military Administration Chief GB who supervised the British puppet government and the German officials) were a sign of growing fear that the Friendship Week might become the occasion for violent demonstration. And yet the intense rivalry – not to say hatred – that the German army Generals felt for Himmler’s SS organization, and police affiliates, determined the army to ask from General Kellerman no more than the normal police requirements.

‘What do you think?’ General Kellerman asked Douglas. ‘You can be quite frank with me, Superintendent, you know that.’

Kellerman spread out on his desk that morning’s newspapers. They all headlined the Friendship Week announcement from Berlin. There was a certain irony in the way that the official Nazi newspaper in London, Die Englische Zeitung, did little more than print the official announcement verbatim, within a decorative box on the front page. The Daily Worker, on the other hand, devoted four pages to it – ‘Britain’s Workers Say Forward’ with photos of the Russian and British officials who would be present at the saluting base. Stalin had already penned a suitable message. Those who remembered the congratulations Stalin sent to Hitler after the fall of France found his latest missive no less fulsome.

‘Will there be trouble?’ asked Kellerman.

‘From whom?’ said Douglas.

Kellerman chuckled. ‘The regime has enemies, Superintendent.’ He scratched his head as if trying to remember who they were. ‘And not all of them are on the General Staff.’ Kellerman smiled, enjoying his joke. Douglas was not sure whether he was expected to participate in this gross defamation of the German high command. He nodded as if not quite understanding.

‘There will be a lot of extra work for us,’ said Kellerman. ‘Berlin insists that the army line the entire route with soldiers. I should think there will be precious few left to march in the procession.’ He chuckled again. There seemed to be nothing to compare with the German army in trouble to put General Kellerman in a light-hearted mood. ‘And they plan to have Gendarmerie units every three hundred metres. How will they manage?’

‘And the Metropolitan Force?’

‘Normal police duties except for the issuing of movement passes.’

‘How will that work, sir?’

‘London Outer-Ring residents will be permitted to come into Central London each day for that week only. Local police stations will be issuing the passes, I’m afraid. Daily passes.’

Douglas nodded. It was easy to imagine the chaos that was going to descend upon suburban police stations. Half London had close relatives they could not visit because of the travel restrictions. ‘It would cut the work by half if the police stations could issue some passes for the whole week.’ Kellerman looked up and stared at him. Douglas added, ‘They would only be issued in the case of proved compassionate necessity.’

Kellerman looked at him for a long time before his face relaxed into a slight, inscrutable smile. ‘Of course, Superintendent. Only in the case of…what was it – proved compassionate necessity.’ Kellerman picked up the FK-Befehle and found the paragraphs referring to the issuing of passes. ‘I see no reason why I couldn’t introduce that provision into the orders.’ He smiled at Douglas. They both knew that this would provide a loophole, by means of which the local police stations would cut their workload drastically.

‘And the passes would make such splendid souvenirs,’ said Kellerman. ‘I’ll have a designer from the Propaganda Department work on it. Lots of decorations, with only the barest minimum of printing on the counterfoil.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Douglas. That would be a way of preventing the Wehrmacht doing any proper analysis of the counterfoils.

‘None of this should affect you personally, of course, but I always value your views on these matters.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Douglas.

‘I know that your work with the Standartenführer is of special interest to the Reichsführer-SS. I’ve therefore taken it upon myself to excuse you all other duties.’

‘That’s very considerate, General.’

‘You look tired, Superintendent. I suppose you got to bed rather late?’

‘I haven’t been to bed at all, sir.’

‘Well, that’s dreadful! I can’t allow that. Not even a brilliant young officer such as Standartenführer Huth can be permitted to totally exhaust my officers. Especially one of the most able officers I have in my entire command.’

‘The General is most gracious and generous.’

Kellerman walked over to the tiny turret appendage of his room. ‘Have you seen that?’ Douglas followed him. They looked at Westminster Bridge; gangs of painters were colouring it gold. Red flags and swastikas were being fixed along a scaffolding some three metres tall. Douglas guessed that this was a means of concealing bridge, river and roadway; probably because it would be used to concentrate mobile Gendarmerie units on both road and river, ready to move to any trouble spot.

‘Do you like it?’ said Kellerman. Douglas recalled a quotation from the Classics about building for your enemies a golden bridge but decided against mentioning this to Kellerman.

‘I’m a Londoner,’ said Douglas. ‘I like things to stay the way they always have been.’

‘I like an officer who speaks his mind,’ said Kellerman. ‘I want you to remember, Superintendent Archer, that you are an important man here at Scotland Yard. Any suggestion, any complaint would carry a lot of weight with the people at the top.’ Kellerman got his humidor and opened it. This time he didn’t go through the ritual of lighting a cigar for him. Douglas had the idea that Kellerman was treating him differently from the way he’d been treated at all their previous meetings.

Kellerman waited while Douglas selected, cut and lit his own cigar. Then, when it was well alight, he said, ‘More influence than perhaps you realize, Superintendent Archer. Berlin congratulated us on the crime figures. You played a major part in those, you know.’

‘Only the homicide,’ said Douglas.

‘And who do you think reads beyond the murders? Police forces, and their commanders…’ he grinned and scratched his pink cheek, ‘are judged according to the proportions of murders solved. No one worries about the really important crime – fraud, sabotage, arson, robbery, blackmail and so on. No, they concern themselves with murder, the only crime seldom committed by criminals. So you chaps in the Murder Squad are damned important, and that’s why cunning old foxes, like me, make sure that the best detectives are assigned to homicide cases.’

‘I see, sir,’ said Douglas doubtfully.

‘The point I’m making, Superintendent, is that I will back you through thick and thin. Remember that. If you are happy working with this new fellow Huth – fine. But if any difficulties arise, come and see me and I’ll give him another officer.’

‘Thank you, General. I’ve no complaints.’

‘You’re not the sort who complains, Superintendent. I know that well enough. But my door is always open…Open to you, that is.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Douglas reeled out of Kellerman’s office, lightheaded from the loss of sleep, sweet cigar smoke and the rich diet of flattery.

Harry Woods was snowed under by paperwork when Douglas returned to the office. The Gendarmerie had had no idea that the Peter Thomas murder might come into Wehrmacht jurisdiction until Harry Woods had arrived with a handful of Luftwaffe petrol coupons, and a written statement mentioning the Feldwebel and his black-market activities.

The military police and their civil counterparts were usually able to come to terms with this sort of crime, and in the usual course of events this matter would have probably been handled by the police unit best able to investigate the most serious part of the crime. In this case the Metropolitan CID would have been asked to investigate the murder.

But then came the top priority teleprinter message from Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Berlin, instructing, with lots of Streng Geheim, Chef Sache and so on, that all files, documents and memoranda should be passed to SS-Standartenführer Huth at Scotland Yard.

Everyone informed of this new development knew that to deny that they had any files, documents or even memoranda would be interpreted at best as an indication of sloth and incompetence, at worst as a wilful refusal to obey this order from the most exalted levels of command.

In the circumstances it was unreasonable of Harry Woods to curse the men who were transferring to him virtually empty files, blank filing cards and meaningless dockets, every one of which was registered as very secret and so required faultless paperwork that the sender could produce, should the subject be raised again.

Douglas helped Harry Woods sort out some of the most difficult ones. Many of the forms, printed in German, were new to both men. Douglas had one of the porters bring them tea and sandwiches, and they worked through the lunch time. They always got on well together when they were working, and Harry Woods was, for a time, his old self. There was no sign of Huth. A message said he was in conference, but Harry said he was probably in bed and asleep.

It was two-thirty that afternoon when the phone call came from PC Jimmy Dunn. ‘I’ve seen the man, sir,’ Dunn told Douglas. ‘I didn’t speak with him of course but he met his friend the music-teacher for lunch today at the school. He’s due to be at the music class there this afternoon, the headmaster said. John Spode his name is.’

‘Good work, Jimmy,’ said Douglas.

‘He’s not a teacher, he just got himself a temporary job there on a day-to-day basis. I got his address from the school. I said I was from the Education Authority but I’m not sure they believed me. Then I went to look at his rooms. It’s a broken-down old place in Mafeking Street, Marylebone, not far from the school. No proper locks on the doors, and the caretaker was out, so I walked in and looked round.’

‘And?’

‘Two rooms, and share a bathroom. Not bad really, considering the way things are. It’s a bit grubby but there is a lovely little inlaid desk and some pictures on the wall that look as though they are worth a bit of money. I mean, art and antiques are not in my line, sir, but these things are old-looking but in very good condition. And I think that’s usually a sign things are worth something.’

‘But he’s clean?’

‘Well I haven’t turned him over, sir. But he’s clean I’d say: clean but not kosher.’

This had become the English policeman’s way of describing offences to which he would turn a blind eye.

‘Stay there, Jimmy,’ said Douglas. ‘I’ll come over and have a look round myself.’

Chapter Ten

The top storey of the house had been burned out by incendiary bombs, and Douglas could see through empty spaces that had once been windows, to charred rafters crisscrossing the sky. The ground floor windows were boarded up, the high price of glass made that a common sight in this neighbourhood. The suspect’s rooms were on the second floor. Jimmy Dunn led the way.

He’d rightly described the furniture as valuable. There was enough in this room to keep a man for a decade, a choicer selection by far than the items for sale in the Shepherd Market antique shop.

‘Still no sign of the caretaker?’ said Douglas.

‘There’s a bottle of milk outside his door. Looks like he’s been out all night – missed curfew and stayed overnight perhaps.’

‘Douglas nodded. Breaching German regulations –which required special permission for anyone, except the registered occupiers, to stay in a house overnight – was common enough.

‘Is there something funny about this place, Jimmy? Or am I just getting too old?’

‘In what way, sir?’

‘Valuable antiques in this room, and a cracked soap-holder in the bath; priceless carpet on the floor and dirty sheets on the bed.’

‘Perhaps he’s a miser, sir.’

‘Misers don’t buy soap at all,’ said Douglas. It was a silly answer but he knew this wasn’t the squalor of the niggard. ‘Smell the mothballs?’ Douglas got down on his hands and knees, and sniffed the carpet, but that had not been wrapped with mothballs. ‘It’s been in a storeroom,’ said Douglas, getting to his feet and brushing his hands to remove the dust. ‘That would be my guess.’ Douglas began going through the small chest of drawers, turning over a few shirts and underclothes, most of them British army issue. ‘There must be something more personal here,’ said Douglas as he rummaged, ‘…ration books, discharge papers, pension book or something.’

‘A lot of people carry all those sort of things with them,’ said Dunn. ‘There’s so much housebreaking. And it takes so long to get papers replaced.’

‘And yet he leaves all these valuables, without even a decent lock on the door?’ Douglas opened the next drawer, and went through it carefully. ‘Ah! Now what’s this?’ Under the newspaper that lined the drawer, his fingers found an envelope. Inside it he found half-a-dozen photos; Spode’s parents standing in a suburban garden somewhere, with two young children. A child on a tricycle. ‘A man finds it difficult to throw these kind of souvenirs away, Jimmy,’ he told the Constable. ‘Even when his life is at stake, it’s difficult to throw away your family.’ The next photo depicted a bride and groom. It was a snapshot, slightly out of focus.

Douglas looked through all the pictures. The largest one was an old press-photo; sharp, contrasty, and well printed on glossy paper. It was of a group of laboratory workers, in white coats, standing round an elderly man. He turned the photo over to read the caption. Rubber stamps gave the date reference number and warned that the photo was the copyright of a picture agency. The tattered typewritten caption-paper said, ‘Today Professor Frick celebrated his seventieth birthday. With him at his laboratory were the team who worked with him when, last year, his experiments brought him worldwide acclaim. By bombarding uranium with neutrons to form barium and krypton gas, he proved previous theories about the disintegration of the uranium nucleus.’

It was hardly the stuff of which newspaper headlines are made. The names of the scientists were also listed. They were meaningless except for the names ‘Dr John Spode and Dr William Spode’. Douglas turned the photo over to study the faces of the men squinting into the sun on that peaceful day so long ago. ‘Is that our man?’ he asked Dunn.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Dunn. ‘That’s him all right.’

‘Christ! This one next to him is the dead man in that Shepherd Market murder!’

‘Shall I ask the photo agency if they have a record of anyone buying an extra print of this photo?’ said Dunn. ‘It’s been sent here to this address.’

‘It’s worth a go,’ said Douglas. He made another circuit of the room; walls, cupboard, floorboards, all without marks of recent disturbance. Nothing hidden in the cistern of the WC, only accumulated filth on the cupboard tops, and dust under the carpet.

Douglas looked at the big kitchen table that had been pushed into a corner to make more room. He felt underneath to be sure that nothing was hidden there by means of sticky tape. Then he knelt down and looked under it too. ‘Look at that, Jimmy,’ he said.

Like most kitchen tables it had a cutlery drawer, and this one was concealed by the way the table was pushed against the wall. Together they heaved the heavy table aside until there was enough room to open the drawer.

It was a big drawer. In it there were a few spoons and forks, and a broken egg beater, but occupying most of the space there was an arm. It was a right arm made of lightweight unpainted alloy that had come to pieces after a nut and bolt had loosened. Douglas knew exactly the part it needed, and, with the stagecraft of an amateur conjurer, he took it from his pocket and held it in place.

Dunn gave the low appreciative whistle that was obviously expected of him.

‘That’s enough for me,’ said Douglas. ‘That came from the scene of the murder. I wonder if it was loosened in a struggle?’

‘The Peter Thomas shooting?’

‘We can start calling it the William Spode shooting from now on, Jimmy.’ He put the piece back into his pocket and replaced the false arm in the drawer. There was a paper bag there too. He looked inside it and found a well-worn, but well-cared for, Leica camera. There were some accessories too; extension rings, filters, lens hoods and a set of four legs, tied together with string to which was also tied a large ringlike holder for them. ‘Worth a few pennies, that lot,’ said Douglas. They replaced the things and moved the table back against the wall.

‘Leica cameras have become a second currency,’ said Dunn. ‘I know a man who’s invested his life savings in a couple of dozen of them.’

‘Sounds like a dangerous investment,’ said Douglas.

‘But so is paper money,’ said Dunn. ‘So you think the dead man was misidentified?’

‘We’ll never prove it was deliberate,’ said Douglas. ‘They’ll all insist that they did it in good faith. But I’d bet my month’s tobacco ration that they were lying.’

‘Why, sir?’

‘Too many witnesses telling me the same thing, Jimmy.’

‘Perhaps because it was the truth, sir.’

‘The truth is never exactly the same thing,’ said Douglas. ‘You say this fellow Spode is at the school this afternoon?’

‘Should be,’ agreed Dunn. ‘Are we going round there?’

‘I’ll phone Central first,’ said Douglas. ‘I think my new boss will want to get into the act.’

Douglas Archer’s prediction proved correct. Standartenführer Huth, in the words of Harry Woods, provided ‘a typical example of SS bullshit’.

Chapter Eleven

Beech Road School was the same sort of grim Victorian fortress in which so many London children spent their days. On one side there was a semi-derelict church, a paved part of its graveyard provided the recreation yard for the school. What a place to consign a child to waste away a precious youth, thought Douglas. Poor little Douggie.

A teashop faced the school. In other times it had been a cosy little den, smelling of Woodbine cigarettes, buttered toast and condensed milk. Douglas remembered it from when he was a young detective, its counter buried under slabs of bread pudding; heavy as lead and dark as thunder. Now the tea-urn, its plating worn brassy, provided only ersatz tea, and there wasn’t enough warmth in the place to glaze its window with condensation.

‘We have four platoons of infantry in reserve,’ Huth told Douglas. ‘I’m keeping them out of sight. The rest of the men have the block surrounded.’ Douglas went to the door of the café and looked out. The men were in full combat order, from battle-smocks to stick grenades in the belt. There were lorries in Lisson Grove, and standing alongside them were the mass-arrest teams, complete with folding tables, portable typewriters and boxes of handcuffs.

Douglas knew that it was official German policy to make ‘the enforcement of law and order a demonstration of the resources available to the occupying power’ but he didn’t expect this.

‘You should have let me do this alone,’ Douglas told Huth.

‘I want to show these people that we mean business,’ he replied. ‘Let’s go and get him, shall we?’

The men walked across the road. A soldier laughed. Douglas looked back to where the assault teams were standing together in those relaxed postures that soldiers assume the moment they’re given the chance. He wondered if the SS soldiers would obey an order to open fire on the school. If he knew anything of children, they’d be pressing their noses against the windows by now – or fretting for permission to do so. Anxiously he looked for his son’s face but didn’t see him.

As they stepped into the entrance hall, a fussy porter came to greet them. There was a false calm in the air, as if the school had been ordered to ignore the military activity in the street outside.

‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?’ said the porter.

‘Get out of my way!’ said Huth. ‘Where’s the headmaster – hiding under his desk?’

Douglas said to Huth, ‘Standartenführer, this man is the subject of my inquiries. I must insist that his civil rights are not infringed. I will be the one to take him into custody.’

Huth smiled. ‘We’re not going to shoot him “while he tries to escape” if that’s what your little speech is about.’ He stepped forward, opened the swing doors through which the porter had disappeared, and shouted, ‘Hurry yourself, headmaster, damn you!’ into the dim corridors. Then he turned back to Douglas Archer and said, ‘Too many questions remain unanswered for him to be endangered at this stage of the game.’

The headmaster arrived in a fast walk that would not have disgraced an athlete. ‘Now what is the meaning of this interruption?’ he asked in the sort of voice Douglas had not heard since he was at school.

Huth turned to look at the headmaster. Then he took his silver-topped stick and reached forward until it touched the man’s chest. ‘Don’t,’ said Huth, pausing for a long time during which the silence was broken only by the headmaster’s heavy breathing, ‘…talk to me…’ Huth spoke very slowly, prodding him to emphasize the most important words, ‘…or to my police officers like that. It provides a poor example for your pupils.’

The headmaster’s eyes popped open very wide, and the measured speech, and dignified tone, gave way to a gabble. ‘Is this about the Spode fellow? Wish I’d never given him a job. He’s been nothing but trouble, and I’m not sure he’s been loyal to me…’

‘Where is he?’ said Huth, still speaking as if to a small child.

‘Spode?’

‘Who else could I mean? Do you think I’d pop in and consult you about the whereabouts of Reichsmarschall Göring?’ – a long pause – ‘…or about the whereabouts of the King of England, the Queen and the two Princesses?’

‘No, indeed. Very amusing, Herr Colonel. The King…well, ha, ha! I know the King is at Windsor with the Royal Family and they are all in very good health. I read the bulletin about that, and I make sure that all my staff know I won’t tolerate the disgraceful rumours about His Majesty being confined in the Tower of London.’

‘Where’s Spode?’ said Huth, easing his hat back a fraction on his head, as though the head-band was constricting him.

‘Spode?’ A nervous smile. ‘Spode? Well you know where he is. He’s at the police station.’ Another smile that, as he watched Huth, became a frown. ‘Isn’t he? An official came this morning and asked for Spode’s home address.’ Huth raised an eyebrow at Douglas who nodded affirmation. The headmaster watched the exchange anxiously, and then continued, ‘Naturally I helped in every possible way, and don’t imagine that I pry into your way of doing things. I don’t. Before the war I had holidays in Germany. I admired the system – still do, of course, especially in Germany…or rather that’s not to say I don’t admire the system in England…’

Douglas moved across the hall to where PC Dunn was waiting. ‘Better pop back there and get that false arm, Jimmy, and the photos and stuff.’

‘Control yourself, you wretch,’ said Huth. ‘Where is this man Spode?’

‘I’ve told you, Herr Oberst. The police station phoned and wanted him. Of course I gave him permission to leave his class.’

‘Who took the phone call, headmaster?’

‘My secretary. I sent for Spode immediately and let the police talk to him. There is only the one phone, you see.’

‘How long ago?’

The headmaster looked at his watch, tapped it and put it to his ear. ‘About an hour ago.’

Huth went to the main doors, stepped outside and blew two short blasts on his whistle. Infantry doubled across the recreation yard with a loud clatter of tipped boots. They formed up before Huth as if on parade, their officer in front of them with his hand raised in what the English were learning to call the German Salute.

‘Take this fool into special custody and hold him apart from the rest.’

‘You mean the phone call was from one of his accomplices…Oh my God!’ said the headmaster. He grabbed Douglas Archer’s arm, and held on to him. ‘This man Spode tricked me,’ he told Douglas. ‘Tell them. You’re English, I know you are…Tell them I’m innocent.’

Douglas went rigid in shame. A soldier prised the headmaster’s fingers away. ‘Then at least let me phone my wife,’ implored the headmaster. But already the soldiers were hustling him away through the entrance. ‘Take all the teachers,’ Huth told the SS officer, ‘and take the older children too. We can’t be sure the children aren’t involved. We’ve had fifteen-year-olds killing our soldiers in the past few months.’

‘I’ll try and get some sort of lead as to where Spode went,’ said Douglas.

‘He’s well away by now,’ said Huth. ‘These people are damned efficient.’

‘Who’s “they”?’ said Douglas.

‘Terror fighters,’ said Huth using the official German term for the Resistance, armed or otherwise. ‘No. Go and see your son – he’s here today, isn’t he? Take him home. Explain to him.’

‘Explain to him!’ said Douglas. He knew no way of explaining the insanity of the world to his child.

‘Children are flexible creatures,’ said Huth. ‘Don’t try to shoulder all the guilt for your son being motherless.’

Douglas didn’t answer. They both watched the soldiers herding a group of teachers into the school yard. Lorries were being backed through the narrow gates.

‘We don’t need all this,’ said Douglas. ‘These teachers are innocent; they know nothing.’

‘Too late to stop it now,’ said Huth, ‘even if I agreed with you.’

There was a crash as a tail-board dropped. Then the first of the teachers climbed into the lorry. He was an old man, and needed the helping hand of a soldier. One of his colleagues gave a soft cheer and the old man smiled sheepishly. It was always like this with the mass arrests, thought Douglas. The prisoners were reassured to be together with people they knew. They felt that nothing too bad could come of it, and were always comforted by the thought that they had committed no crime. The arrest procedure became an outing, a picnic, a break from the monotony of everyday life. The soldiers knew this, and they encouraged the levity, knowing that their task would be easier, and less harrowing, if the prisoners smiled all the way to the detention centre.

‘Have you heard anything more from the girl?’ said Huth.

Douglas was disconcerted and didn’t answer.

‘I know about the Trafalgar Square business, you idiot,’ said Huth. ‘Has she contacted you again?’

‘You have me followed – but you don’t have her followed?’

Huth feigned a look of pain. ‘You touch a nerve, my friend. She was quick and clever – more clever than the man assigned to her.’

‘One man?’

‘The voice of the professional! Yes, my people have a lot to learn. They didn’t realize they were dealing with a very experienced agent.’

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