Spy’s Honour

24

Their first sight of the Canal came near the bottom of a long slope down through the village suburb of Wik. On the far side, the red roofs of Holtenau glowed like embers amid the fresh summer greenery, but to the right on this side there was a pall of smoke, dust and steam hanging over the ravaged land that would become the new locks.

From ground level it was difficult to see any shape to the project, particularly since the work was going down and not up. But as they turned towards it and the road broke up into a wide trail of ruts and sandy dust, a broad pattern emerged. Two gigantic open-ended brick-and-concrete graves lay side by side, each over a thousand feet long and more than fifty deep. At this end, and presumably also at the other, where the locks would open into the harbour, a great basin had been hacked out to the same depth, its sloping banks lined with rough stonework.

In a few weeks the last bank holding back the waters of the Canal would be blown or chopped through, and the basin and locks would be flooded. But now the excavation floor was still crossed by a light railway track and duckboard walks, and dotted with carts and unrecognisable lumps of machinery.

“And what more,” O’Gilroy asked softly, “would a man see by getting close enough to fall in?”

Ranklin shook his head. Any idea he might have had that Cross had planned to sabotage the locks was crushed by their vast simplicity: it would be taking a hat pin to sabotage a steamroller. “We came here to ask questions. We’d better find someone to ask.”

At that point, the cabbie decided the going had got too rough, so they left him – as yet unpaid – and began walking. The site was far too big and needed too many entrances to be fenced properly, so relied on dozens of those warning notices the Germans do so well. But finally they found a sort of gatekeeper’s hut and Ranklin tried to explain themselves.

The gatekeeper’s suspicious stare turned to: “Ach, die Englander,” which told them that Reimers had telephoned ahead. They were then led up to the lockside and handed over to a man with a complicated title that boiled down to overseer: a muscular body crammed into a black suit, a large moustache on a wind-rouged face topped with a black bowler. If he wasn’t delighted to see them, he was at least resigned.

He spoke loudly and carefully against the cross-rhythms of half a dozen pieces of pumping, digging and hauling equipment. It seemed that the other Englander had fallen over there – from the far side, up towards the harbour end. So they walked along the paved lockside studded with great iron bollards and electric-light poles, past a new and obviously temporary wooden viewing stand, and stared solemnly and pointlessly at the Fatal Spot.

There was still a shallow pool of water on the lock floor, covered with a film of oil that moved in colourful art nouveau swirls as a pump tried to guzzle it up. The far lockside from which Cross had fallen was in effect a free-standing wall dividing the two locks, and Ranklin couldn’t see how he could have got there. It wasn’t until the overseer explained that Ranklin understood how the lock gates worked.

Instead of swinging on hinges, as with smaller locks, these gates were massive slabs of metal that slid across the lock on rails from deep slots in the walls. And there were three of them, one at each end and one not quite in the middle – presumably so that the lock could be used as a smaller, quicker one when handling only a few small ships. At the moment all the gates on both locks were open – slid back into their slots – but over the weekend the central gate of the far lock and the harbour-end gate of this lock had been closed. Cross must have come across the walkway atop that centre gate, then turned towards the harbour-end gate to cross that to where they now stood. But coming from and going to where?

From somewhere not too far off came the boom of a single cannon, and several workmen ran past them towards the harbour end. The overseer gave a half-exasperated smile and began to explain, but Ranklin was already looking: in the middle of the harbour four big yachts, sharp-edged clouds of bulging white sail, were heeling to starboard and heading north in an irregular pack. The day’s big race was on.

The overseer named each one: the Kaiser’s Meteor, the Hamburg II, Germania, and some Englishman’s Margherita. Ranklin recalled his coastal gunner’s experience and estimated them as a mile off – no, 2,000 yards, and only then grasped how big they were. Their simplicity had made them seem no more than models on the Round Pond.

“One hundred and fifty-foot masts on them,” O’Gilroy commented, and he should know: yacht racing had virtually been invented in Cork bay. But for all their size, they were just toy boats, Ranklin thought.

The overseer listened to the workers’ loyal “Hochs!” with mixed feelings. As he explained, he could hardly stop them cheering the Kaiser’s yacht, but he would rather they got on with preparing for the Kaiser’s visit here the day after tomorrow, along with the King and Queen of Italy. Hence the viewing stand, the new duckboarding being laid below, bunting being strung from light poles.

(In the midst of yacht-racing we are in diplomacy, Ranklin noted: Italy, the lukewarm ally, is to be impressed with the seriousness of the German Naval programme).

The workmen finally drifted back to work and the overseer to the events of early Sunday morning. Yes, one of the night watchmen had seen the body and telephoned both the Wik police and himself at the workers’ lodging house. He had -

O’Gilroy had been taking notes from Ranklin’s interpretations as an excuse for a valet being in on the conversation. Now he muttered: “And why did the watchman know to look down into the lock?”

Ach, that was simple: they had been pumping throughout the night and every hour he went around topping up the pump engines with petrol and looking down to see that they weren’t sucking dry.

O’Gilroy gave a faint nod, satisfied.

So, the overseer arrived to find the body had been brought up and searched but no identification found. So he himself had telephoned the Kiel police to say they had found the body of a seaman, so if any were reported missing …

“But, mein Herr,” Ranklin interrupted, “what made you think it was the body of a seaman?”

The way he was dressed, naturally.

“But the pink blazer?”

He saw no pink blazer.

Mystified, Ranklin protested: “But surely you must have known it was the body of a gentleman?” He knew he was sounding pompous, but this final humiliation in Cross’s damp and undignified death riled him.

The overseer’s voice easily drowned out any construction noise. The corpse was just a muddy, bloody, oily wreck and all it had in its pockets were some money, a watch, cigarettes, a restaurant bill and a meaningless bit of radical writing. Any seaman could be carrying such things and so he told the Kiel police he’d found the body of a seaman, that was all. And he was a busy man with a lock both to build and keep clean enough to be inspected by the All-Highest on Thursday, so …

They parted with feathers ruffled on both sides. When they were almost back to the cab, O’Gilroy asked: “So what did we learn?”

“That Cross wasn’t wearing his blazer, and that he probably came from the Holtenau side. So I suppose we go over there.”

To reach Holtenau they had to go back nearly a mile along the Canal and cross by the new high-level bridge, higher than the masts of the newest warships. From up there they could see the layout of the locks plainly, the old smaller ones nestled up against Holtenau village and separated from the new locks by what would become a man-made island once the water was released through the locks themselves.

Going from Holtenau, Cross must have passed through the clutter of constructors’ huts, dumps of building material and half-built structures of the “island”. But why? To look at – or sabotage – the one finished building, the power station needed to shunt those great gates to and fro?

Far behind, an old car with its hood up against the sun and moving no faster than their cab, turned onto the bridge behind them. It was still behind and only reaching the crest of the bridge when they turned right into Holtenau and Ranklin told the cabbie to drive them through the village along the Canal side.

Here, the solid old houses and equally solid trees were a calm contrast to the racket and rawness of the site they had left on the other side. The old locks were busy, but nobody can rush a lock. Cargo steamers, schooners, barges and their tugs all oozed gently in and out with no more fuss than a few hoots and commands and some deft rope-handling.

“A big business,” O’Gilroy commented. “Must cost a mint.”

“They must charge tolls,” Ranklin said, “but the Canal was really built for the Navy. Probably they could shift the whole fleet from the Baltic to the North Sea in twenty-four hours. In two days, a dreadnought could go from harbour here to bombarding London – our Navy permitting.”

Abruptly, they were past the locks, through the village and with the wide inlet of Kiel harbour ahead. The land ended in a slight knoll topped by a stubby lighthouse and a statue of Wilhelm I, just as shown in the engraving on the bearer bond. Ranklin also remembered the two-storey mock-medieval building alongside, which turned out to be a cafe-restaurant. The cabbie had assumed that was where they were heading, and since it was never too early for O’Gilroy …

They ordered coffee – perhaps O’Gilroy was still recovering from last night – and sat on a sunny terrace overlooking the inlet. Around them, a small crowd of expensively dressed race-watchers stared through binoculars at the four big racing yachts, now slow-weaving white triangles on the northern horizon.

“Ye know,” O’Gilroy said softly, “if’n I was a spy, which thank God I’m not, I’d mebbe set here and watch everything that happened with the German Navy.”

He had a point: without moving more than his head, Ranklin could see every ship that came in and out of Kiel harbour and of the Canal as well – and as far as Britain was concerned, it was the Canal that mattered; a fleet ignoring the Canal and sailing out into the Baltic would only be bad news for the Russians. But you could watch the Canal itself more easily and less conspicuously from elsewhere along its 60-mile length: perhaps rent a room in Rendsburg, just a few miles inland, right on the Canal bank.

He nodded and asked: “But how would you get the information out? By letter? In wartime when it mattered?”

“The old problem,” O’Gilroy agreed.

“Of course,” Ranklin remembered, “Cross was a signals specialist in the Navy, his father said.”

O’Gilroy raised his eyebrows. “Was he, now? Wireless?”

For once, Ranklin had some technical knowledge that O’Gilroy hadn’t picked up. “Somebody told me that most ships can’t send wireless signals for more than a hundred and fifty miles. I doubt you could have secret equipment for sending over twice that range.”

“And he wouldn’t have laid a secret cablewire, neither.”

“No – but,” Ranklin remembered the cablegrams, “the public cable from Denmark would still be working in a war. From Korsor, just five or six hours by ship.”

O’Gilroy’s eyes widened, then narrowed as a wide shadow fell across the table.

“Is frei?” Gunther Arnold asked, but sat down anyway.