Game Without Rules (3 page)

“You don’t look to me,” she said, “like the sort of man who knocks old ladies on the head and grabs their life’s savings. I keep mine in the bank, such as they are.”

“I must confess to you,” said Mr. Behrens, “that I’m probably wasting your time. I’m in Tilbury on a sentimental errand. I spent a year of the war in an Air Force prison camp in Germany. One of my greatest friends there was Jeremy Bessendine. He was a lot younger than I was, of course, but we had a common interest in bees.”

“I don’t know what you were doing up in an airplane, at your time of life. I expect you dyed your hair. People used to do that in the 1914 war. I’m sorry, I interrupted you. Mr.—?”

“Behrens.”

“My name’s Galloway. You said Jeremy Bessendine.”

“Yes. Did you know him?”

“I knew
all
the Bessendines. Father and mother, and all three sons. The mother was the sweetest thing, from the bogs of Ireland. The father, well, let’s be charitable and say he was old-fashioned. Their house was on the other side of the road to mine. There’s nothing left of it now. Can you see? Not a stick nor a stone.”

Mr. Behrens looked out of the window. The opposite side of the road was an open space containing one row of prefabricated huts.

“Terrible things,” said Mrs. Galloway. “They put them up after the war as a temporary measure. Temporary!”

“So that’s where the Bessendines’ house was,” said Mr. Behrens, sadly. “Jeremy often described it to me. He was so looking forward to living in it again when the war was over.”

“Jeremy was my favourite,” said Mrs. Galloway. “I’ll admit I cried when I heard he’d been killed. Trying to escape, they said.”

She looked back twenty-five years, and sighed at what she saw. “If we’re going to be sentimental,” she said, “we shall do it better over a cup of tea. The kettle’s on the boil.” She went out into the kitchen but left the door open, so that she could continue to talk.

“John, the eldest, I never knew well. He went straight into the Army. He was killed early on. The youngest was Mark. He was a wild character, if you like.”

“Wild? In what way?” said Mr. Behrens.

Mrs. Galloway arranged the teapot, cups, and milk jug on a tray and collected her thoughts. Then she said, “He was a rebel. Strong or weak?”

“Just as it comes,” said Mr. Behrens.

“His two brothers, they accepted the discipline at home. Mark didn’t. Jeremy told me that when Mark ran away from school – the second time – and his father tried to send him back, they had a real set-to, the father shouting, the boy screaming. That was when he went off to Spain to fight for the Reds. Milk and sugar?”

“Both,” said Mr. Behrens. He thought of Mark Bessendine as he had seen him two days before. An ultra-correct, poker-backed, poker-faced regular soldier. How deep had the rebel been buried?

“He’s quite a different sort of person now,” he said.

“Of course, he would be,” said Mrs. Galloway. “You can’t be blown to bits and put together again and still be the same person, can you?”

“Why, no,” said Mr. Behrens. “I suppose you can’t.”

“I felt very strange myself for a week or so, after it happened. And I was only blown across the kitchen and cracked my head on the stove.”

“You remember that raid, then?”

“I most certainly do. It must have been about five o’clock. Just getting dark, and a bit misty. They came in low, and the next moment –
crump
,
bump
– we were right in the middle of it. It was the fast raid we’d had – and the worst. You could hear the bombs coming closer and closer. I thought, I wish I’d stayed in Saffron Walden – where I’d been evacuated, you see – I’m for it now, I thought. And it’s all my own fault for coming back like the posters told me not to. And the next moment I was lying on the floor, with my head against the stove, and a lot of warm red stuff running over my face. It was tomato soup.”

“And that was the bomb that destroyed the Bessendines’ house – and killed old Mr. and Mrs. Bessendine?”

“That’s right. And it was the same raid that nearly killed Mark. My goodness!”

The last exclamation was nothing to do with what had gone before. Mrs. Galloway was staring at Mr. Behrens. Her face had gone pale.

She said, “Jeremy! I’ve just remembered! When it happened they sent him home, on compassionate leave. He
knew
his house had been blown up. Why would he tell you he was looking forward to living in it after the war – when he must have known it wasn’t there?”

Mr. Behrens could think of nothing to say.

“You’ve been lying, haven’t you? Who are you? What’s it all about?”

Mr. Behrens put down his teacup, and said, gently, “I’m sorry I had to tell you a lot of lies, Mrs. Galloway. Please don’t worry about it too much. I promise you that nothing you told me is going to hurt anyone.”

The old lady gulped down her own tea. The colour came back slowly to her cheeks. She said, “Whatever it is, I don’t want to know about it.” She stared out of the window at the place where a big house had once stood, inhabited by a bullying father and a sweet Irish mother, and three boys.

She said, “It’s all dead and done with, anyway.”

As Mr. Behrens drove home in the dusk, his tyres on the road hummed the words back at him.
Dead and done with. Dead and done with.

Mr. Fortescue, who was the manager of the Westminster branch of the London and Home Counties Bank – and a number of other things besides – glared across his broad mahogany desk at Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens and said, “I have never encountered such an irritating and frustrating case.”

He made it sound as if they, and not the facts, were the cause of his irritation.

Mr. Behrens said, “I don’t think people quite realise how heavily the scales are weighted in favour of a spy who’s learned his job and keeps his head. All the stuff that Colonel Bessendine is passing out is stuff he’s officially entitled to know. Progress of existing work, projects for new work, personnel to be employed, Security arrangements. It all comes into his field. Suppose he
does
keep notes of it. Suppose we searched his house, found those notes in his safe. Would it prove anything?”

“Of course it wouldn’t,” said Mr. Fortescue, sourly. “That’s why you’ve got to catch him actually handing it over. I’ve had three men – apart from you – watching him for months. He behaves normally – goes up to town once or twice a week, goes to the cinema with his family, goes to local drink parties, has his friends in to dinner. All absolutely above suspicion.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Behrens. “He goes up to London in the morning rush hour. He gets into a crowded underground train. Your man can’t get too close to him. Bessendine’s wedged up against another man who happens to be carrying a briefcase identical with his own. . .”

“Do you think that’s how it’s done?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Mr. Behrens. “But I wager I could invent half a dozen other methods just as simple and just as impossible to detect.”

Mr. Calder said, “When exactly did Mark Bessendine start betraying his country’s secrets to the Russians?”

“We can’t be absolutely certain. But it’s been going on for a very long time. Back to the Cold War which nearly turned into a hot war – 1947, perhaps.”

“Not before that?”

“Perhaps you had forgotten,” said Mr. Fortescue, “that until 1945 the Russians were on our side.”

“I wondered,” said Mr. Calder, “if before that he might have been spying for the Germans. Have you looked at the Hessel file lately?”

Both Mr. Fortescue and Mr. Behrens stared at Mr. Calder, who looked blandly back at them.

Mr. Behrens said, “We never found out who Hessel was, did we? He was just a code name to us.”

“But the Russians found out,” said Mr. Calder. “The first thing they did when they got to Berlin was to grab all Admiral Canaris’ records. If they found the Hessel dossier there, if they found out that he had been posing successfully for more than four years as an officer in the Royal Marines—”

“Posing?” said Mr. Fortescue, sharply.

“It occurred to me as a possibility.”

“If Hessel is posing as Bessendine, where’s Bessendine?” said Mr. Fortescue.

“At the bottom of a pre-Aryan chalk pit in Whitehorse Wood, above Lamperdown,” said Mr. Calder, “with a bullet through his head.”

Mr. Fortescue looked at Mr. Behrens, who said, “Yes, it’s possible. I had thought of that.”

“Lieutenant Mark Bessendine,” said Mr. Calder, slowly, as if he was seeing it all as he spoke, “set off alone one November afternoon, with orders to close down and seal up Post Six. He’d have been in battle dress and carrying his Army pay book and identity papers with him, because in 1940 everyone did that. As he was climbing out of the post, he heard, or saw, a strange figure. A civilian, lurking in the woods, where no civilian should have been. He challenged him. And the answer was a bullet, from Hessel’s gun. Hessel had landed that day, or the day before, on the South Coast, from a submarine. Most of the spies who were landed that autumn lasted less than a week. Right?”

“They were a poor bunch,” said Mr. Fortescue. “Badly equipped, and with the feeblest cover stories. I sometimes wondered if they were people Canaris wanted to get rid of.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Calder. “But Hessel was a tougher proposition. He spoke excellent English; his mother was English, and he’d been to an English public school. And here was a God-sent chance to improve his equipment and cover. Bessendine was the same size and build. All he had to do was to change clothes and instead of being a phony civilian, liable to be questioned by the first constable he met, he was a properly dressed, fully documented Army officer. Provided he kept on the move, he could go anywhere in England. No one would question him. It wasn’t the sort of cover that would last forever. But that didn’t matter. His pickup was probably fixed for four weeks ahead – in the next no-moon period. So he put on Bessendine’s uniform, and started out for Gravesend. Not, I need hardly say, with any intention of going back to Headquarters. All he wanted to do was catch a train to London.”

“But the Luftwaffe caught him.”

“They did indeed,” said Mr. Calder. “They caught him – and they set him free. Free of all possible suspicion. When he came out of that hospital six months later, he had a new face. More. He was a new man. If anyone asked him anything about his past, all he had to say was, ‘Oh, that was before I got blown up. I don’t remember very much about that.’”

“But surely,” said Mr. Fortescue, “it wasn’t quite as easy as that. Bessendine’s family—” He stopped.

“You’ve seen it too, haven’t you?” said Mr. Calder. “He had no family. No one at all. One brother was dead; the other was in a prison camp in Germany. I wonder if it was a pure coincidence that he should later have been shot when trying to escape. Or did Himmler send a secret instruction to the camp authorities? Maybe it was just another bit of luck, Like Mark’s parents being killed in the same raid. His mother’s family lived in Ireland – and had disowned her. His father’s family – if it existed – was in New Zealand. Mark Bessendine was completely and absolutely alone.”

“The first Hessel messages went out to Germany at the end of 1941,” said Mr. Fortescue. “How did he manage to send them?”

“No difficulty there,” said Mr. Calder. “The German short-wave transmitters were very efficient. You only had to renew the batteries. He’d have buried his in the wood. He only had to dig it up again. He had all the call signals and codes.”

Mr. Behrens had listened to this in silence, with a half-smile on his face.

Now he cleared his throat and said, “If this—um—ingenious theory is true, it does—um—suggest a way of drawing out the gentleman concerned, does it not. . .?”

“I was very interested when you told me about this dene-hole,” said Colonel Bessendine to Mr. Behrens. “I had heard about them as a boy, of course, but I’ve never actually seen one.”

“I hope we shan’t be too late,” said Mr. Behrens. “It’ll be dark in an hour. You’d better park your car here. We’ll have to do the rest of the trip on foot.”

“I’m sorry I was late,” said Colonel Bessendine. “I had a job I had to finish before I go off tomorrow.”

“Off?”

“A short holiday. I’m taking my wife and daughter to France.”

“I envy you,” said Mr. Behrens. “Over the stile here and straight up the hill. I hope I can find it from this side. When I came here before I approached it from the other side. Fork right here, I think.”

They moved up through the silent woods, each occupied with his own, very different thoughts.

Mr. Behrens said, “I’m sure this was the clearing. Look. You can see the marks of the workmen’s tractors. And this – I think – was the stump.”

He stopped, and kicked at the foot of the elm bole. The loose covering pieces of turf on sticks, laid there by Arthur, collapsed, showing the dark entrance.

“Good Lord!” said Colonel Bessendine. He was standing, hands in raincoat pockets, shoulders hunched. “Don’t tell me that people used to live in a place like that?”

“It’s quite snug inside.”

“Inside? You mean you’ve actually been inside it?” He shifted his weight so that it rested on his left foot and his right hand came out of his pocket and hung loose.

“Oh, certainly,” said Mr. Behrens. “I found the body, too.”

There was a long silence. That’s the advantage of having a false face, thought Mr. Behrens. It’s unfair. You can do your thinking behind it, and no one can watch you actually doing it.

The lips cracked into a smile.

“You’re an odd card,” said Colonel Bessendine. “Did you bring me all the way here to tell me that?”

“I brought you here,” said Mr. Behrens, “so that you could explain one or two things that have been puzzling me.” He had seated himself on the thick side of the stump. “For instance, you must have known about this hideout, since you and Sergeant Brewer and Corporal Stubbs built it in 1940. Why didn’t you tell me that when I started describing it to you?”

“I wasn’t quite sure then,” said Colonel Bessendine. “I wanted to make sure.”

As he spoke his right hand moved with a smooth unhurried gesture into the open front of his coat and out again. It was now holding a flat blue-black weapon which Mr. Behrens, who was a connoisseur in such matters, recognised as a
Zyanidpistole
or cyanide gun.