All Honourable Men

4

Ranklin was sitting in the flat at the end of a gloomy, misty day – but a windless one, more like autumn than March – when the voicepipe shrilled and the hall porter reported that a Mr Tilsey, “a friend of Major Kell’s”, was asking to be shown up. Kell headed their sister, spy-catching, service (and didn’t call himself silly things like “Chief’ or “K”), so Tilsey must be one of his men.

“Ship him up,” he ordered, and went to the decanters on the sideboard to see what he had to offer.

Tilsey turned out to be a thin man of roughly Ranklin’s age, with sandy hair and moustache and generally looking military. Which he was, of course. He would be invisible in a respectable London street or Government building, but little use for keeping watch on foul opium dens in dockland. However, any spy who wanted to frequent foul opium dens was welcome to get on with it unwatched.

They exchanged greetings, Tilsey accepted an Irish whiskey and water, and stood warming himself in front of the fire. “Have you heard of a chap called Gunther van der Brock? He’s-”

“One of the Continental secrets-for-sale boys, otherwise a cigar wholesaler in Amsterdam.”

“That’s the chap.”

“-only it’s a whole firm and I believe they pass that name around, so it may not be our lad.”

“Just under six feet, stout, dark hair, big moustache, spectacles, last seen wearing a light grey town suit and a dark green cloak,” Tilsey recited.

“He’s the one I know. Is he over here?”

“You know him? Good. Yes, he got into town around teatime. He’s staying at the Metropole in Northumberland Avenue, quite openly using his own name. Van der Brock, anyway.”

Good for them picking him up so quickly, Ranklin thought. And presumably following his every footstep – or rather, since Kell was even more understaffed than the Bureau, getting Scotland Yard’s Special Branch to do so. “He’s probably the best of that ilk, deals in only the top-quality secrets. But here, he’d bloody well better be selling, not buying. What’s he been up to?”

Tilsey sighed. “We hoped he might have come to see your people, but obviously not. We lost him in Whitehall.”

“In Whitehall?” They’d managed to lose a large man in a green cloak in one of London’s widest streets, well lit and probably not too busy?

Tilsey put on a lopsided smile. “Perhaps you haven’t looked out of the window recently.”

Ranklin walked over, twitched aside the curtains and stared blankly. He rubbed the glass, then realised it was London that had gone blank. Fog.

There should have been trees, lights, a skyline; there was nothing. Down below should be street lamps: there might be a slight glow, that was all. The building felt it had become an island, and those in the street must feel they had fallen overboard in mid-ocean.

“I see what you mean.” He walked back to the fire with an instinctive shiver.

“We were out of touch for nearly two hours,” Tilsey resumed. “He got back to his hotel just half an hour ago. Of course, he may just have been wandering around, lost, himself. But. . .”

Ranklin shared his doubts. Gunther must know London well enough, he wouldn’t be in Whitehall by accident. And that put him within yards of every important Government department, even the Prime Minister.

They sank into armchairs and thoughtful gloom. Reaching for any hope, Ranklin said: “Of course, he wouldn’t be too likely to be visiting an informant in a Government office, out of hours and dressed that memorably. He’d choose a crowded tea-shop or railway buffet . . . sorry.”

Tilsey was nodding politely; he must have thought all that already. “The only other places we know he visited were St Martin’s post office – he picked up a poste restante letter there – and a cigar shop in Trafalgar Square. He was in there about twenty minutes, but perhaps just to give himself a business alibi. Then we lost him near the Admiralty.”

“Perhaps Whitehall was a blind and the cigar shop was what mattered. . .” Ranklin’s imagination raced ahead: important men went to cigar shops, and they didn’t buy in a hurry, they stopped to chat. A cigar shop as an intelligence exchange? – no, a whole raft of them, all such shops in central London, secret messages rolled up inside Havanas. . . It was far better than the popular myth that every German waiter belonged to a great spy ring.

He coughed apologetically. “Daydreaming . . . But how can we help?”

“As I say, we hoped he might have visited you chaps, but. . . However, since you know him, would you care to bump into him ‘accidentally’? – if we can suggest a venue?”

“I’m happy to – but he won’t think it’s an accident,” Ranklin said firmly. “It’d tell him he’s being watched. And he doesn’t let slip information, he sells it.”

“Major Kell will have to decide whether it’s worth that. But if he approves, it may have to be early tomorrow: van der Brock’s only booked in for one night. May I telephone you in, say, half an hour?”

“Of course.” And Tilsey left to search in the fog for the New War Office, luckily only the width of the street away. Ranklin wondered if he should try and locate the Commander and ask for his approval, but decided it was too delicate a matter for the telephone and eavesdropping operators. And dammit, if he was acting deputy, he could authorise himself.

Tilsey rang up after twenty-five minutes. “Would you feel like breakfast at the Metropole tomorrow at eight?”

* * *

After his stay at the Savoy, Ranklin’s hotel standards were high, and the Metropole didn’t match up – except for size. At breakfast time, the vast pillared dining-room had a funereal air. Not the jolly scandal-swap when the deceased has been planted, but the brittle, respectful hush of the gathering beforehand.

Ranklin persuaded a waiter to lead the way to where Gunther – still wearing a distinctive and foreign-looking light grey suit – was buttering toast and reading the Financial Times. He looked up, spread his arms in welcome and spattered crumbs from under his heavy moustache.

“Captain! A wonderful surprise! Sit down, sit down. Coffee?” The waiter found another cup. “You have not yet eaten?” Ranklin asked for bacon and eggs. “If I had a magic carpet, I would every day breakfast in England. Except, I do not understand porridge.”

“It’s Scottish. A Presbyterian form of the confessional: after eating it, you can behave any way you like.”

Gunther chuckled, adding more crumbs to the atmosphere. “And your Chief is well? Good. And Mr O’Gilroy? I thought of him only this morning. This weather hurts my side,” and he touched his right ribs. That dated from their first meeting when Gunther wanted to kill them and had rashly got into a bayonet duel with O’Gilroy. However, once he had convalesced, they had become . . .

. . . not friends. Yet more than business associates. Looking idly around the room – not full, at this time of year – Ranklin thought smugly They don’t know. Here we sit, two men from the world of international espionage, and nobody here knows. Such thoughts were one of the few compensations of the job; it was like belonging to a secret family: you can’t choose your relatives, but they were still family . . .

The waiter brought Gunther a plate of bacon, eggs and everything else, assuring Ranklin that his would be along in a moment. Then, professionally looking at neither of them, asked: “Are you gentlemen together?”

“On my room bill, of course,” Gunther said expansively. A clue? Since he watched the pennies, had he already concluded a good piece of business? But buying or selling?

He held his knife and fork poised, deciding which part of the crowded plate to clear first, and asked before his mouth got full: “And is this just a sociable meeting?”

“When one hears that a master dealer has set up his stall in town, naturally one hurries to view his stock.” Then Ranklin realised he had to go on, since Gunther’s cheeks were bulging. “We were just a little hurt that you hadn’t let us know you were coming.”

Gunther swallowed. “Others have more money.” Of course he would claim he was selling, that was no crime. And the ministries were certainly richer than the Bureau. And Gunther had been in business longer than the Bureau: he must still have other clients in London.

Gunther added: “I have an Italian naval code,” before restocking his mouth.

“Yes? When are they due to change it?” Gunther wouldn’t cheat by selling the same information twice: the code to you, then the fact that you’d got it to the Italians. But he’d sell a code that was about to be abandoned. It was a fine line, and a funny-peculiar one, but he trod it religiously in a world where heresy was a capital offence.

Gunther grinned, shrugged, and suggested: “The Schlieffen Plan? Do you know the latest amendments of that?”

“If you can prove it really isn’t just a staff exercise,” Ranklin said, “we might swap it for something about the Spanish Royal Family.” Then his bacon and eggs arrived and the conversation became just nods and grunts, finely tuned to mean “Everybody knows that” or “You’re joking”. Ranklin was now convinced that Gunther hadn’t anything serious to offer and was mainly trying to find out what the Bureau knew or – just as important – wanted to know.

So when they had finished, and called for a fresh pot of coffee, Ranklin asked bluntly: “So what are you doing here now?”

Gunther’s eyebrows rose from his thick spectacles in mock surprise. “Selling cigars, it is my business. Have one.” He opened a silver pocket case. From their looks, they might have served to take away the taste of an over-hot curry, but not just after breakfast. Gunther lit one himself.

The hotel didn’t exactly allow smoking at breakfast, but it didn’t want to alienate what few clients it had in the low season. Anyway, the only others left in the room were foreign tourists waiting hopefully for the fog to clear. So Ranklin lit a cigarette.

“And how about the Eastern Question?”

“Ach – only you English could have such a phrase, that can mean everything or nothing. No, I have nothing from there. But Serbia, I hope soon to have some most interesting news from Belgrade. You must remember to call me . . .” The conversation wound down slowly until, at half past nine, Gunther heaved himself to his feet. “Now, you will excuse me, I am going home today and first I must observe the English custom and ‘have a breath of fresh air’.” He chuckled as he gestured at the world beyond the windows.

“I’ll come out with you.”

Gunther had brought his cape downstairs with him and they stood on the front steps looking out on nothingness the colour of dirty washing-up water. But not silence: Northumberland Avenue was a cacophony of honking horns, clattering hooves and jingling harness. Lamps glowed, crawled past attached to the dim shapes of cabs and taxies, and vanished. On the pavement, pedestrians moved hesitantly, unbalanced, staying close to the walls and peering at the hotel name to locate themselves. One man was standing under the glow of a street lamp a few feet away, trying to read a guide-book map.

“A true London fog,” Gunther said, as if he were viewing the Taj Mahal. Then he turned to shake hands. “You have come far – in only a year, is it? When I hear of you – I hear very little, I assure you – I think i knew him when he had just begun.’”

“You tried to kill us.”

“I did not see you as a future customer. Also – I think violence is not a proper part of our trade. I gave you a bad example, and I hear . . . But probably I am wrong.” His spectacles gleamed cheerily as the yellow lamplight caught the droplets forming on them. “Au revoir.”

Ranklin took a couple of steps, then paused, professionally interested to see if he could spot the Special Branch man who should be following. Gunther had paused, too, wiping his spectacles under the lamplight.

The man with the guide-book turned, put a pistol to Gunther’s face and fired. The back of Gunther’s head burst and his hat fell off soggily. The man ran, disappearing in three steps.

Ranklin caught Gunther before he hit the pavement, but he was too heavy. Suddenly there was another man, helping ease him down, then blowing a fierce shriek on a whistle, but Gunther didn’t react to the sudden close noise. His eyes were already wide and unmoving in a bloody, sooty mask of gunsmoke. Ranklin felt for the pulse in the thick neck, then stood up.

Already the doorman was gawping, pedestrians were stopping. Ranklin said loudly: “Get him inside, get a doctor, an ambulance. Quick!” And having stirred them into useless babble and motion, vanished himself.

* * *

Ranklin blundered his way back to Whitehall Court, numb, shivering with shock and simple disbelief. Life could seem so strong. A growing plant could crack through stone; men clung to life with the ghastliest of wounds. So how could it be so fragile? You snapped off a flower head, unthinking. A man turned away and died, from just two little bullets.

* * *

They met in a small room in a Pall Mall club, a good place for a private meeting on virtually neutral ground. The rest of the time, it seemed to be the unread part of the library: sets of thick books that must represent lifetimes of patient work. Had they died happy?

He found himself explaining for the umpteenth time: “If I had stayed, the Branch officer would have hung on to me, at least as a witness. I was quite prepared to explain myself, as I did later to Detective Sergeant Dix-” He nodded to a solid, placid and heavily moustached man being self-effacing on the outskirts of the seated group. “But not there and then, not in public.”

“But also,” the man from the Home Office said, “it seems that you made no attempt to catch the assassin.”

“He’d vanished in the fog. I had no more chance of grabbing him than the Branch officer had,” Ranklin pointed out.

“The officer was supposed to be following van der Brock, not protecting him,” Sir Basil Thomson said. On looks alone, his long face kept a funeral parlour and his nose a pub; in fact, he headed the Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department and Special Branch – effectively, all its plainclothes detectives.

The Home Office man frowned. He was young and trying – too hard – to keep his end up in grand and mysterious company. He was also the only one who was going to have to write a report; Sir Basil, the Commander and Major Kell of the counter-espionage service were all their own bosses.

He said: “Nobody seems to have thought to be armed – except the assassin.”

“It has never been Government policy that policemen in Britain should normally wear sidearms,” Sir Basil said. “I cannot, of course, speak for the Secret Service.” His past experience of the Bureau, particularly an occasion when they had certainly been armed, had left him officially Deeply Concerned and privately Bloody Furious.

“Sorry,” Ranklin said, “I hadn’t got a gun, either. Not that I’d have started blazing away in that fog anyway.”

“Delighted to hear it,” Sir Basil said coldly.

“And we don’t even have a proper description of the man, just -” the Home Office man turned a copy of the Evening Standard on the table to read from the front page “- ‘about five feet six tall, long dark overcoat, face obscured by a scarf.”

“Like most sensible people out in that fog,” Kell observed.

The Commander grunted and said: “Professional,” and everyone but the Home Office nodded sagely. He blinked at them and tried another tack: “Then was this van der Brock known to have had any enemies?”

Now everyone smiled; the Commander even chuckled, but left the answer to Kell, who said: “He was a notorious seller of state secrets, so at one time or another every Power in Europe had reason to want him dead. However, I believe he was so even-handed that each Power expected he’d be selling to them next week, so let him live. Until today.”

“Probably your lads who did him in,” the Commander said cheerfully. “We shall miss him.”

“We shan’t, that’s for certain,” Kell said. “But I’m afraid it still wasn’t us.”

The Commander grinned at the Home Office. “Well, that narrows it down for you. Only Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia and a few others to suspect.”

Sir Basil’s voice had become grave. “All highly amusing, gentlemen, but his death doesn’t fall to your charge. He’s my unsolved murder – and likely to be a highly publicised one, if the press get any inkling of his true job. They’re already aroused by the way he was killed, assassination-style.” He tapped the Evening Standard.

“Can’t you stifle those bloody editors?” the Commander asked. “I mean, ask for their responsible co-operation? It’s my Bureau which will suffer from this: other dealers getting wary of us, perhaps even blaming us for the murder. So, believe me, we’d very much like to see this solved. Only,” he added, “I don’t think it’s solvable.”

The Home Office consulted his notes. “I believe there was something about him picking up a poste restante letter . . .”

Sir Basil craned his skinny neck to summon the detective sergeant into action. Dix coughed and said: “We didn’t find anything that looked like such a letter on him, sir. One theory is that it might have been an introduction that he could show at the door of one of the ministries in Whitehall. And he left it there or destroyed it after his visit.”

The Home Office added this all up. “Then he could have visited a ministry last night, when you’d lost him in the fog?”

Sir Basil nodded and put on a slight smile. “There is, in fact, other evidence that he did.”

Everybody looked at him, puzzled. Then Ranklin said: “Money. I bet he had a lot of money on him.”

“Over ?200 in gold and bank notes. How big a secret does that suggest to you gentlemen?”

“Then,” the Home Office said, “surely all you have to do is ask around the ministries to find out which-”

“We have already asked the most likely – and they say they will, reluctantly, check. Whether anyone will admit they spent tax-payers’ money on such people . . . Would you?”

There was a silence. Then Ranklin asked: “Are you letting the newspapers know any of this?”

“We haven’t done so, not yet.”

Feigning hesitancy about telling Sir Basil how to run the Yard, Ranklin said: “Publishing the fact that he’d sold us a secret might nullify that secret’s value.”

The Commander nodded firmly. “Quite right. If – as a nation – we’ve gained something from his visit, let’s for God’s sake keep it, whatever it is.” He looked around, collecting agreement. “But does this mean he was killed for revenge?”

“Not necessarily,” Kell said. “It could still have been prevention – if he was killed by a foreign power. They needn’t know he’d already passed the secret on.”

There was another silence – a rather uneasy one on Sir Basil’s part, Ranklin thought. Perhaps he was torn between wishing it were a foreign power – what could he be expected to do against that? – and fearing public outrage that foreigners could do such things in London.

Rather too casually, Kell asked the Commander: “Will you know eventually who it was?”

“Oh yes. In a few weeks or months it’ll seep out on the grapevine. No proof, of course, but we’ll know.” But they were just showing off in front of the young Home Office. Gratifyingly, he gazed at them with horrified awe.

A slight wind had worked up around tea-time, thinning the fog. And although the wind had gone and there were now millions of coal fires adding their mite to the air, you could now see for ten or fifteen yards. The Commander paused on the steps of the club, perhaps calculating whether it was bad enough to excuse not going home. He could, rumour had it, always find somewhere to spend the night.

“Any private theories about Brock?” he grunted.

Ranklin, who had spent half the day trying to have a theory, shook his head. “None, sir.”

“Well, as I say, it’ll come out in the end.”

“I could do with it being a bit sooner. The Standard quoted the waiter as hearing me called ‘Captain’ and quite a good description of me.”

“We don’t have to be invisible in this business.”

“I’m thinking of Gunther’s own firm. They’ll be reading every last comma for hints as to what happened, they might recognise me and then think I was leading Gunther into a trap.”

“Aren’t you being overly imaginative?”

“They’re competent,” Ranklin said, “and they’re widespread. That’s why we have dealings with them.”

“What d’you want to do about it, then?”

But Ranklin, rashly, hadn’t thought that far. “Er. . . nothing dramatic, I suppose . . . But if we do come across any answer, I’d like approval to pass it on to Gunther’s partners.”

“You aren’t developing a sense of justice, are you?” The Commander eyed him closely. “It would be entirely inappropriate in your work. Now, for me, it would be rather suitable. They could say ‘He’s a swine, but a just swine.’ I’d like that. But I’m Chief of this Bureau and you’re not, and my sense of justice is all we need.”

“As evidence of our good faith?” Ranklin suggested. “For good future relations?”

The Commander was still looking at him. “Umm. Well, perhaps. . . Did you like this van der Brock?” he asked casually.

“Like him? I don’t think so, particularly . . . He was more like . . . family. One of us.”

That was just the sort of answer the Commander’s temper had been waiting for. “No he bloody well wasn’t! Only we are us.”