Spy’s Honour

20

DID YOU HEAR POOR RICHARD DIED ACCIDENT KIEL QUERY CROSS SENIOR TRAVELLING VIA HOOK STOP HE WOULD MUCH APPRECIATE YOUR MORAL SUPPORT KIEL STOP CONTACT THROUGH VICE CONSUL STOP REGARDS TO MATTHEW AND CONALL ENDS SIGNED UNCLE CHARLIE

“Bloody hell,” Ranklin croaked sleepily. Then, to the sombre night porter: “Allez reveiller mon domestique, chambre cinque zero quatre, s’il vous plait,” and pushed some coins at him.

They must have been enough because he came back for more, along with a rumpled and dressing-gowned O’Gilroy, and Ranklin sent him for a large cognac. Then he gave O’Gilroy the cable.

“Richard? Would that be the feller we was talking with in Amsterdam?”

“Must be. Died in an accident. Christ. How?”

“D’ye think this is real?” He flapped the cable.

“I do. That ‘Matthew and Conall’ … If anybody else knows as much about us, how much more can we give away by going to Kiel? You get dressed and pack up, then come back and pack for me. I’ll be downstairs feeding francs into the night manager to get us on the next train.”

The cognac arrived as Ranklin was tying his necktie. He swallowed half, pretending it was late yesterday instead of early today, and left the rest to stoke up O’Gilroy. The next half-hour was as fraught as he’d expected, but then they were in a cab and almost galloping through the empty dawn streets to the Gare du Nord. Perhaps no city in Europe becomes so much a fortress against the night as Brussels, but now the heavily shuttered windows seemed deliberately blind to the bright new day. And on the whole, Ranklin’s feelings were with the windows and not the day.

The station platform was barely more wakeful, with hunched sleepy figures standing oblivious to the shrieks, clanks and drifting smoke from the busy shunting engines.

O’Gilroy lit a cigarette. “And what are we doing when we get there?”

“I don’t know yet. Can he expect us to investigate how Cross died?”

“That’d be telling the Germans who we are – if they knew who he was.”

Ranklin reread the crumpled telegram (should he be sure to destroy it or be sure to keep it? – but have a ready explanation for who Uncle Charlie was? Oh Lord, the complications). “‘He would much appreciate your moral support’. How’s your moral support?”

“I forgot to pack it.”

“I wonder if this doesn’t decode as ‘Find out if Mr Cross knew what his son was up to, stop him making a fuss, and pack him off home with the body at the double.’”

“I’d prefer it that way. Speaking of codes, is that the best the Bureau can do?”

“In a rush like this, I imagine it is. We don’t want the hotel getting a cable in five-figure cipher groups. Anyway, the cable companies won’t send them except between embassies and governments. And we were told our worst problem would be communications. ”

“I could’ve told them that meself. But when I was …” then O’Gilroy shut up firmly.

“Europe’s a little bigger than the back streets of Dublin and Cork, but if you’ve any suggestions …?”

It was doomed to be a long, hot, crowded day. The train, second- and third-class only, much to O’Gilroy’s disgust, took four sticky hours to crawl the hundred miles to Cologne. At first, Ranklin just sat and watched Belgium’s industrial towns waking up, step by step, town by town, like heavy smokers rolling out of bed and lighting the first cigarette, then the first pipe … by Liege, the windless sky had a false ceiling of smoke from thousands of kitchen and factory chimneys. After that, he read a newspaper.

There was nothing about an Englishman’s death at Kiel, but after two weeks of frontier incidents and skirmishes, real fighting seemed to have restarted in the Balkans. Who had started it was uncertain, but Ranklin’s money was on Bulgaria. They were fighting the Serbs near Kotchana and the Greeks on the river Mesta. He got angry at the lack of certainty and detail, then remembered how much, much less those actually fighting would know of what was going on. So he tried instead to get angry at the stolid pipe-puffing faces around him who thought of this as a distant peasant squabble and didn’t realise that war could run along a telegraph wire faster than fire along a fuse. But if they did realise, what could they do about it? So he glowered at O’Gilroy for having the good sense to fall asleep again.

They were roused for a long Customs check at Herbesthal, where Ranklin tried to look, casually, for the rumoured signs of preparation for an invasion of Belgium, but saw none.

At Cologne they had to wait an hour between trains, so they had a late breakfast and then Ranklin changed some money, bought tickets to Kiel and a newspaper while O’Gilroy had an early lunch.

“I imagine I’ll know when you’re dead when you’ve stopped chewing, not just breathing,” Ranklin said tartly, not having found any mention of Cross’s death in the German paper.

“How long before we get to this place Kiel?”

“Um … another ten hours.”

O’Gilroy said nothing and Ranklin went to buy himself a tin of Nurnberg teacakes.

They travelled first-class to Hamburg, but even so the last day of June was no time to be going on an unplanned journey. Too much competition with holiday-makers who had booked their campaigns of pleasure months before, and were now spraying chatter and cake-crumbs all around them.

Ranklin passed some of the time by trying to teach O’Gilroy some everyday words and phrases in German. He was a quick learner, though at his age he would never master another language, and his Irishness would always show through. But being Irish was itself a form of disguise for his present job, and Ranklin was ready to exploit it. He assumed O’Gilroy knew that, but it was too delicate a matter to be mentioned aloud.

The rest of the time, Ranklin just grew irritated at the journey and the vagueness of their task. At one stop, when they had the compartment briefly to themselves, he grumbled: “They should have some way of getting more information and instructions to us. Once we’re there, we’re bound to be under suspicion – if they suspected Cross – and difficult to get in touch with safely.”

“Like ye said, the problem of communications.” O’Gilroy was taking it all too equably for Ranklin’s mood.

“If it is just a clearing-up job – well, they should have somebody stationed permanently in a place as important as the German Navy’s headquarters town. Or they could have sent somebody along with Cross senior.”

“Mebbe they just don’t have the men. If they could find better than yeself who doesn’t like the job and me who doesn’t belong in it, d’ye think they’d be using us?”

That, unhappily, was unanswerable.

At Hamburg, where they changed trains and stations for Kiel, Ranklin bought another newspaper and at last found a reference to Cross’s death. At dawn on Sunday – yesterday – he had been found in one of the new and still empty locks at Holtenau, the Baltic end of the Kaiser Wilhelm Kanal (just Kiel Canal to the rest of the world) a mile or so north of Kiel city. He was a retired Royal Navy lieutenant, aged thirty-five, a keen yachtsman and a regular visitor to previous Kiel Weeks who had been staying at the Imperial Jachtklub. Sad, tragic, unfortunate – but no explanation or speculation. Ranklin guessed it was a simple rephrasing of a police statement.

He translated to O’Gilroy, who thought it over and said: “A sea lock, it’d be. Deep. How deep?”

“For the last few years they’ve been dredging the Canal and building these new locks to take the biggest battleships.”

“Forty foot, nearer fifty foot from the dockside, then.” Ranklin had forgotten how close to the sea the Irish lived – closer than the English, since literally every Irish city was a port. And hadn’t there been a hint that O’Gilroy had worked in the shipyards of Queenstown or Kingstown?

“A long way to fall, anyhow,” O’Gilroy observed. “D’ye mind me suggesting something? That ye don’t read nor speak German too well while we’re here. That way ye might be hearing things people don’t expect ye to understand.”

It was a lesson Ranklin seemed to be relearning constantly. His new job could use every skill he had, and many he hadn’t, but use them best in secrecy.