SS-GB (20 page)

‘Ah. Well now. In a badly bombed house like this, you’ve got to try to keep the damp out.’

‘Postman been yet?’

The fat man opened a drawer and consulted a tin alarm clock. ‘Any time now, Superintendent,’ he said with a trace of sarcasm.

Douglas went to the dresser and looked through the picture-postcards and undelivered letters. They were addressed to other people. ‘I collect stamps,’ explained the fat man. ‘My neighbours give them to me.’ He went to the cupboard under the dresser. ‘Would you fancy a little something to keep the cold out, Superintendent?’

‘What is it, a mink coat?’

He chuckled. ‘You’re a caution, you are.’ He found a rum bottle, uncorked it noisily and poured a measure into the tea he was drinking from a cup marked ‘Savoy Hotel’. Having decided that Douglas’s reply was in the negative, he replaced the rum and sat down with a loud sigh.

A few minutes later there came the rattle of the letterbox. The man started to get to his feet but Douglas pushed him back into the soft armchair with a heavy hand on the shoulder. ‘You’ve done enough hard manual work for one day, warden,’ he said. ‘I’ll
get your mail for you.’ As he went out of the room Douglas helped himself to the key to Spode’s apartment, that was hanging on the key-board.

Douglas’s long shot paid off. Jimmy Dunn’s last act before being kidnapped was to throw into the mail the large manila envelope marked ‘Photos do not bend’. He picked it up and took it upstairs. In the room where Douglas and Jimmy Dunn had found the false arm in the kitchen table drawer, Douglas stood for a moment before opening the envelope.

Inside the envelope there was the photo of Professor Frick and his fellow scientists. There was also a letter from Jimmy Dunn. It was written in pencil, on the back of a large buff-coloured form about supplementary soap rations for workers in vital industries. Most post offices had bundles and bundles of them, for some administrator’s error had provided half London with paper for notes, wrapping and toilets.

Was it, Douglas wondered afterwards, a sense of foreboding, idle curiosity, or no more than a need for more daylight that made him go to the window to read the note again. As he looked away from it he saw a horse and cart across the road. A man waiting on the street corner with a salvaged armchair lifted it into the cart and then climbed in after it. The cart’s canvas top hid him from Douglas’s view. Fifty yards along the street, two cyclists had stopped and were talking together. It began to rain – dark spots appeared on the road. The men buttoned their collars.

Douglas opened his briefcase and put the note and the photo inside it. Then he removed them again. Douglas Archer read the note for the third time. In his career respect for the preservation of evidence was well known to all his colleagues, but now he was learning new rules. With a pang of conscience he tore
the note into small pieces, and flushed them down the toilet. Then he did the same with the list of libraries Dunn had contacted.

He went back to the window. There was no driver with the horse and cart; its reins had been looped to the lamppost. The horse stood patiently in the drizzle of rain. Douglas locked his briefcase and started down the stairs. The floor below was empty, except for some broken pieces of furniture that had been bundled together for firewood.

He tried the light switch for the dark hall below, but the light did not work. He waited a moment to let his eyes become accustomed to the darkness. The only light came from the crack under the door of the warden’s room, and from there also came the music of the radio – Harry Roy’s dance band was playing, ‘Somebody loves me, I wonder who’. As if in response to the sound of footsteps on the stairs, the volume of the radio was increased.

‘Keep coming, Officer!’ Now Douglas could see him, standing on the welcome mat, a shadowy figure with his shoulders flat against the inside of the door, and keeping very, very still.

‘Who the hell are you?’ said Douglas.

‘I’m a Colt forty-five staring at your belly-button, Officer! So keep coming.’ It was a West Country accent, Devon perhaps. And the only people to address policemen as ‘Officer’ were those who wanted to appear to be respectable members of the middle classes. Douglas stepped down another step, very slowly. The man moved forward to meet him. There were three stairs to go when Douglas heaved the briefcase at him, and jumped the last three steps.

There was a sharp intake of breath – it was a heavy briefcase – and then came the soft plop of a silenced gun, followed by the crash of glass as a bullet went
out through a pane of the back door’s fanlight. And then Douglas was on him. Douglas Archer was not in first class physical shape but, like so many men who neglected the need for exercise, he was heavy. The force of his jump knocked the man backwards, and he hit the door with a crash that almost took it off its hinges. There was a low pitched ‘Ahhhhhhhhh!’ of pain as his breath was expelled past Douglas’s ear. Douglas jabbed him in the belly, just in case he should try inhaling and stepped back as he jackknifed forward, one hand clutching his middle and the other holding the gun as he gasped desperately for air.

Douglas kicked the pistol with enough force to scuff his shoe and then stooped down to retrieve it. He levelled it at the man. This Colt .45, with a huge home-made silencer fixed to the barrel, was as big as a blunderbuss and twice as badly balanced. With a smaller gun the man might have brought it round fast enough to shoot.

‘Get up!’ said Douglas. ‘Let’s see what you look like in the light.’ Douglas stepped back to give him more room. Had the man on the floor been less dazed, he might have provided Douglas with a warning, but he had both hands on the floor, his head was bowed and he was trying to vomit.

Douglas was suddenly pinned by someone with arms like steel cables. He tried to twist away but he couldn’t move a muscle or even turn his head. The dirty wallpaper was bathed in light as a door opened behind him, and the music of Harry Roy became very loud.

‘Who started bloody shooting?’ It was the fat man’s voice.

‘Get back in your cage, you gorilla,’ said a voice very close to Douglas’s ear. ‘This won’t take a minute.’

Douglas smelled a sweet sticky smell, and then there
was a wet cloth across his face that made his eyes tingle. He gasped for breath but could only inhale the smell. He tried to twist his head away but the hand gripped roughly at his face. The lights dimmed and Douglas sank into a bottomless hole that was turning very slowly.

It was Harry Woods who was holding Douglas as he came conscious. A voice from someone out of sight said, ‘We won’t need the ambulance – he’s coming round now.’

Harry Woods’s face came very close. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m feeling stupid,’ said Douglas and closed his eyes again.

‘I’ve got a car. Think you could manage, if I help you?’

‘My briefcase.’

Harry Woods shook his head. ‘I looked already; I guessed you’d have it…they must have taken it with them.’

‘The warden?’

‘Scarpered!’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Douglas. He looked at Harry Woods and wondered whether he had really failed to find the briefcase and, more important, the photo of Professor Frick that was inside it. Douglas stared at his Sergeant, silently accusing him of complicity in everything that had gone wrong with this inquiry but Harry Woods stared back guiltlessly.

‘You’re burning the candle at both ends,’ said Harry Woods. ‘Everybody gets careless when they’re exhausted. Take my tip; stay in bed and sleep the clock round.’

‘I’m going to the office,’ said Douglas.

‘Please, Douglas,’ said Harry Woods. Only rarely did he address his superior by his first name. ‘I wouldn’t tell you wrong – you need rest.’

No matter how much his reasoning warned him that Harry Woods was deeply involved with one or other of the Resistance groups, Douglas found it impossible to disregard the devotion and loyalty that his Sergeant had always shown for him, first as a child and later as a police Superintendent. Harry Woods had been like a father to Douglas. No matter how much the rift, now between them, widened, that relationship remained. ‘I must go back to the Yard, Harry. But I’ll get away soon and have an early night.’

‘You’d better,’ said Harry with mock severity.

It was the middle of the afternoon when General Kellerman asked if Douglas felt well enough for ‘a chat’. Douglas arrived upstairs in the famous office to find his General in that state of post-prandial euphoria that Harry Woods euphemistically termed ‘over-refreshed’.

Kellerman’s wardrobe of British native costume was still being expanded. Today he was wearing a smooth herringbone, single-breasted suit, complete with waistcoat and a cream-coloured Sea-Island cotton shirt with foulard bow-tie and brogue shoes. It was the sort of outfit that a foreigner would expect to see on a typical Oxford University lecturer, a consideration not entirely absent from Fritz Kellerman’s motives in choosing it.

On the side table Kellerman had a silver tray with a big pot of real coffee that perfumed the whole room. There were two Limoges cups and saucers, and an assortment of extras. Kellerman took his time in preparing coffee topped with a large dollop of cream and dusted with a little powdered chocolate. ‘Ah, Vienna,’ said Kellerman, remembering that Douglas drank his coffee without any such additives. ‘So out of date, so passé, so decadent…and yet still the most enchanting city in the world. Spiritually I am Viennese.’

‘Really?’ said Douglas politely, and sipped his black coffee appreciatively. All the Austrians he’d met in London seemed anxious to describe themselves as German. Perhaps only men who wore the neat little gold badge – that distinguished the first one hundred thousand members of the Nazi Party – that Kellerman
now wore, and whose accent was unmistakably that of Munich, amused themselves by claiming to be Viennese.

‘Yes, indeed. Vienna is a city with a soul.’ Even in English, Kellerman was able to introduce into his speech that slight nasal braying that could make an Austrian joke so much funnier. ‘You’ll have a bruise,’ Kellerman said suddenly. ‘It’s changing colour already. Damned gangsters! Are you sure you wouldn’t like to go over to St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner?’ Out of deference to the feelings of his English subordinate, he did not call the SS General Hospital by its proper name.

‘Cannon Row police station gave me some aspirins from their first-aid box,’ said Douglas. He drank some more coffee. ‘And thank you for the present for my son. I’ll give it to him on his birthday, and then he’ll write to you.’

‘All boys like cars,’ said Kellerman, ‘and I decided that you would prefer him not to have a military toy.’

‘It was most thoughtful, General.’

‘Are you an angler, Superintendent?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Pity. Best pastime a police officer can have, in my opinion. Fishing teaches a man patience; and teaches him a lot about men.’ He stepped across the room to tap a glass case. Inside it there was a large trout, stuffed at the moment of pulling a face. ‘I caught that fellow, Superintendent.’

‘Really, sir,’ said Douglas, although Kellerman had drawn his Superintendent’s attention to that fact a dozen or more times, and the circumstances of the unfortunate creature’s demise were recorded in gold lettering on the case.

‘Standartenführer Huth, on the other hand,’ said Kellerman, walking back to his desk but not sitting
down, ‘is a ski champion.’ Kellerman picked up the coffee pot and smiled at Douglas.

Douglas, deciding that some reaction was expected, said, ‘I didn’t know that, sir.’

‘He went to Garmisch for the 1936 Olympics,’ said Kellerman – unable, in spite of his animosity, to keep a note of pride out of his voice. ‘He was a competitor in the men’s combined downhill and slalom event. He won no medals but it is a distinction to compete, eh?’

‘Indeed it is,’ said Douglas. By now his head was beginning to ache; it was the after-effect of the ether with which he had been drugged.

‘The sport a man chooses tells you a lot about his personality.’ Kellerman smiled. ‘Standartenführer Huth is always in a hurry; I am never in a hurry. Do you understand what I mean, Superintendent?’

‘I do indeed, sir.’

‘Have a little more coffee,’ said Kellerman, pouring it for him. As he came close, Douglas smelled the mint cachou that Kellerman used to sweeten his breath.

Outside, in Whitehall, the combined bands of Army Group L (London District) HQ were beginning a rehearsal for the German–Soviet Friendship Week ceremonies. Douglas recognized the ‘Petersburg March’, which at one time only the 2 Garde-Infanterie Brigade were permitted to march to, and which the Berliners sang to well-known ribald lyrics.