Spy’s Honour Page 15

“Here’s a double crown, then. It’s worth about a pound and I expect plenty of change, And don’t go off boozing in the waterfront bars. They may speak English, but they’re no place for you while you’re in my service. How you behave reflects on me just as much as the state of my shoes does. I shan’t need you until 8.30 tomorrow, but I expect you on the dot and sober. Good night.

  “These Irish,” Ranklin complained, once O’Gilroy had gone off with Lenz, “they’re completely lost once they’re abroad. Or they behave as if they’re in the jungle.”

  “You have not had him long?”

  “I haven’t been home long.”

  A Club servant picked up Ranklin’s bags and Reimers led the way out: the room, it appeared, was next door in a large annexe covered with gable roofs, turrets, bay windows, wooden-railed balconies and all the other trimmings of a grand German guesthouse.

  The room itself was high-ceilinged if not very big, with heavy curtains hiding the view east across the Harbour. And there were enough of Cross’s belongings scattered about to give it an occupied look.

  “Put them down anywhere,” Ranklin told the servant. “Don’t bother to unpack.” He wanted nothing disturbed until he could do it himself.

  Reimers dismissed the servant but showed no sign of following. In fact, he promptly sat down in a comfortable flowered-chintz chair and took out a small cigar. “Do you mind? Thank you. You don’t live in London, then?”

  “Oh, no. India. Lahore.”

  “And you work for the Government?”

  “I was in the Civil Service until a few years ago. D’you know India?”

  “I’m sorry to say, no. Only America.” Since Germany’s few colonies were all in Africa or the Pacific, Reimers’s sea-going career sounded rather misdirected. “And what do you work at now?”

  “I supply stuff to the Government,” Ranklin said casually, knowing how that would strike Reimers, although James Spencer probably wouldn’t have. He had confessed to being a Kaufmann, a merchant, definitely not of the officer class. No matter that Krupp himself had been a Kaufmann, nor that this Club, the whole sport of yachting, existed only because of rich merchants obeying the Kaiser’s drang nach the sea. The Prussian officer class wanted no part of such nonsense.

  And absurdly, Ranklin wanted to wink and confide: “I’m only pretending; really, I’m an officer.” Perhaps Prussian and English attitudes weren’t all that different.

  To his surprise, Reimers just nodded. “Government contracts? A good foundation for any business. If you don’t rely on them too much.”

  Turning to the corner washbasin to scrub off the day’s travel, Ranklin felt unsettled by Reimers’ refusal to be a typical officer. And increasingly wary of him. As he dried himself, he looked around the room: there was a large sealed envelope on the table by the window.

  “That is what Hauptmann Lenz took off the body,” Reimers said. “Mr Cross senior had it sent up here.” He stayed where he was as Ranklin opened the envelope, so presumably he’d seen it all before.

  Anyway, there was very little to see: some coins, a packet of cigarettes, a box of matches, a broken watch, some bank-notes and a restaurant bill. Clearly, all the papers had got wet: they were crumpled and stained and the cigarettes had dried to a solid cake.

  “Damp? In a dry lock?”

  “No lock’s ever really dry. The bottom is thirteen metres below the sea, and with rain and seepage … They keep pumping it out, but …”

  Ranklin nodded. Just a few inches of water would do nothing to cushion a fifty-feet fall, just add the final touch of asphyxiation to a fast-dying body.

  The watch appeared to have stopped at 1.45 (wasn’t that about the time the night watchman had spotted Cross’s body?) but when he picked it up, the minute hand swung loosely all round the dial. So much for the watch as a clue: that would never have happened to a proper detective, he thought sourly.

  There were two 100-mark notes, the bill was from the local Ratsweinkeller for three dinners on the Saturday night – and that was all. No passport, card case, wallet, keys – none of the innocent freight that cluttered his own pockets. He was about to ask if this were really all, but then didn’t. Reimers wouldn’t like the implication.

  While he was there he opened the table drawer – and found the answer: passport, wallet and all the rest. But it was an answer that posed a new question: had Cross stripped for action, as it were, on his last night?

  “What was Lieutenant Cross wearing when he was found?” he asked casually.

  “I can’t say.”

  “Then probably he’s still wearing it. I hope you cleaned it up a bit before his father saw him.”

  “The Club gave the police a suit and other things for the body,” Reimers said stiffly.

  “What a good idea.” One of the papers, when unfolded, turned out to be a 200-mark bond for a local land development company. What would Cross want with such a thing? He hurried his thoughts, trying to think if there was an incriminating aspect to it, in which case he shouldn’t mention it, or … He recognised that the moment for showing surprise had passed, so just dropped it back into the drawer and went around the room collecting other bits and pieces.

  There were only a couple of shilling-edition English novels (neither of them on the popular German-invasion-of-Britain theme, thank God), British and German yachting magazines, a new Baedeker Guide to Northern Germany (which he planned to keep for himself), and a hectographed list of visiting big yachts on Club paper.

  He also wondered how to get rid of Reimers. He considered asking if Mrs Reimers had run off with the window-cleaner, or whether the bailiffs had taken the bed, but before he could think of something more diplomatic, Reimers asked: “Have you visited much of Europe?”

  “Not on this trip, not yet. Just Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels so far. I thought of going on east, Vienna and so forth, unless there looks like being a war down there.”

  “Do you think there will be?”

  “Me? – haven’t a notion, old boy. But Emperor Franz Josef doesn’t seem to have much grasp on his Empire, these days.”

  “I think all Empires of many races have problems today.”

  That was probably a jibe at India and the rest of the British Empire, but Ranklin just said: “Very profound. Wise of you to have an Emperor and no Empire.”

  Reimers’s politeness became controlled. “I do not advise you to say that to Hauptmann Lenz, who served His Imperial Majesty in the Schutztruppen of the Cameroons.”

  It was no surprise that Lenz had been an army officer – just about all German police officers had to have been – but few came from the tough school of African soldiering. He asked: “What’s his job here?”

  “Lenz? He is head of the detective bureau – and, at this time, most concerned with the safety of His Imperial Majesty. And,” he added, “other royal visitors, of course.”

  Ranklin had quite forgotten that the Kaiser would have to be around, Kiel Week being his own invention. Probably his steam yacht was parked out in the harbour right now. And had there been a whisper of warning? – that anything happening in Kiel this week was serious?

  Ranklin started piling Cross’s clothes on the bed and sorting through the pockets. “And what’s your job?”

  “Lieutenant Cross was found on Imperial property that is not open to the public.”

  “And what do you make of that?”

  “I do not know. Do you?”

  “D’you think he was spying?” James Spencer was turning out to be rather tart and blunt. Which might be useful, as long as he didn’t get Spencer thrown into jail.

  “Why should we think an officer and a gentleman was spying?” Reimers asked smoothly, if a little belatedly.

  “Wasn’t that what you were hinting at? You can’t have thought Dickie was trying to steal your locks. Not even pick them.” He chuckled at Spencer’s wit.

  Reimers stood up, walked to the window and pulled aside a curtain to show the fairground lights of the steam yachts moore
d in the harbour. “It is Kiel Week. There are ships from all Europe and America also. They are all welcome, and welcome to this Club and this city. Why should we think they are spying?”

  Ranklin stared out. “Impressive. No, I dare say they aren’t all spying. Sorry I brought it up. Captain Lenz thought he’d been drinking.”

  Reimers let the curtain fall back. “Perhaps. But you know him better than Hauptmann Lenz: what do you think?”

  Ouch. Then, airily: “Oh, Dickie could take a jar or two, but in company … I say!” he grabbed for the restaurant receipt. “Look, it says Abendessen for three. So he ate his last meal with two other chaps. Now, why didn’t Lenz find who they were and ask them what happened?”

  “Their names were Younger and Kay, both young Englishmen and small yacht racers. They say they all stayed drinking at the Ratsweinkeller until eleven o’clock. Then Lieutenant Cross went to the lavatory – and did not come back. They waited, they looked for him, then they went back to their hotel – the Deutscher Kaiser, very close. That is all they know.”

  “Oh.” Spencer’s triumph was only matched by his despondency. And now truculence: “Then why the devil didn’t Lenz tell Mr Cross?”

  “He told him before you arrived.”

  “Oh. Well – didn’t he have any other friends around as well?”

  “Sure. He had one other friend.” Reimers took out his pocket-book and passed over a folded piece of writing paper, crumpled and stained like the banknotes and restaurant receipt. It said in large script:

  Kiel, June 28

  Ich bin gekommen im Namen der Freiheit von der Tyrannie

  Dragan el Vipero.

  The writing was slow and careful, perhaps uneducated. “And who is this Dragan who comes in the name of freedom from tyranny?”

  “You haven’t heard of Dragan el Vipero? But it is clear that Lieutenant Cross had – no?”

  Ranklin shrugged. June 28 had been Saturday, Cross’s last day. “And this was on his body, too?”

  Reimers nodded. “But we did not show it to his father. We did not want him to know his son knew such a monster.”

  Dragan the Viper certainly sounded monstrous, but: “What sort of monster? Have you caught him?”

  Reimers frowned quickly. “No, he has not been caught yet. I suggest you don’t try to catch – or meet – with him.” He tucked away the note. “This may be evidence, but – we hope not. Good night, Mr Spencer.”

  When the door had closed, Ranklin grabbed a pencil and wrote down the names Kay and Younger of the Deutscher Kaiser hotel. Then he sat back and thought. Reimers was almost certainly Naval Counter-intelligence. And he suspected Cross of something, and by now suspected Ranklin/Spencer, too, though that transfer of suspicion had been inevitable. But most of all, Reimers suspected Dragan el Vipero – and who the devil was he!

  22

  There can hardly be such a thing as a “feeling” that you are being followed – except for nervous people, who are usually wrong. For O’Gilroy it was an awareness, tuned by experience, that close behind him in the babbling patchily lit streets there were footsteps and a shadow that copied his own. He shrugged mentally, knowing he would pinpoint the follower eventually, and strolled on whistling ‘The Wearin’ of the Green’.

  The old town was a tangle of short narrow streets overhung by decrepit old houses, and to prowl it O’Gilroy had changed his “pepper-and-salt” valet suit for his oldest clothes, with an untied handkerchief in place of collar and tie. In such streets, he wanted no slip-knots round his neck.

  He had turned perhaps half a dozen corners at random when the whistled tune worked as bait. A soft, slightly blurred voice asked: “Are yez lookin’ for comp’ny or jest a fight wid an Englishman?”

  “Me stomach’s empty and me pocket’s full and not a word of the lingo to change one for t’other.”

  “Ah, ye’ve come to the right man.” He had the short squat build of a seaman, a rolling gait due more to an evening in town than a life at sea, with dark smelly clothes and a knitted cap – unlike everybody else on the streets, who seemed to be wearing peaked sailor’s caps no matter what their trades. “Is it yer first voyage to Kiel?”

  “Me first time anywheres in Germany,” O’Gilroy said, letting him lead the way. “And I’m no sailor.”

  “I t’ought the clothes was wrong, but ye might be, a nancy-boy of’n Lord Arsehole’s yacht.”

  “I might throw ye in the harbour,” O’Gilroy said pleasantly, “but it looked too clean to be fouled wid Galway men.”

  The tavern or café or whatever – just a single room with a bar and furniture too heavy to break easily – was kept by a Wicklow man named; at least professionally, Paddy, and his German wife. O’Gilroy introduced himself as Terence Gorman.

  Paddy nodded and started drawing two Pils. The Galway man said: “I knew a Gorman oncest,” to begin the ritual of swapping names until they found one they both knew or had heard of.

  “So did me mother,” O’Gilroy said, stopping the ritual dead. Then to Paddy: “Me passin’ acquaintance here sez ye can feed me.”

  “Me wife can.”

  “And a fine job she makes of it,” O’Gilroy said with true respect. Indeed, he had never seen a fatter Irishman. That apart, Paddy was about sixty, with thin white hair and a barman’s way of asking inoffensive questions that you could answer or ignore according to mood.

  Such as: “Are yez in town for Kiel Week?”

  “He’s a nancy boy off’n a yacht,” Galway said.

  “Shut yer mouth or buy yer own. I’m valet to an English gent – ”

  “Jayzus! Ye are a nancy boy!”

  O’Gilroy ignored him. “And we was touring about and heard of a man – we’d seen him just a week gone in Holland – was killed in an accident here. Did ye hear of it?”

  Paddy nodded, his eyes looking over O’Gilroy’s shoulder at someone who had just come in. “Up in one of the new locks. Bin in the Royal Navy, they said.”

  “He’d be a spy, then,” Galway said firmly. “And who’s yer gent? – a detective?”

  “Does he ever,” O’Gilroy asked Paddy, “spread the story that somebody’s normal, or would that be too wild at all?”

  Paddy said and expressed nothing, just picked up a tin tray and bar-rag and went over to the new customer. Casually, O’Gilroy turned to watch. The man was youngish, heavyish, in rough longshoreman’s clothes and well-kept boots. He had brought a newspaper along so that he could look self-contained and unaware; they usually did.

  Paddy came back and started drawing a mug of beer. “’T’would seem yer good for me trade.”

  Galway looked puzzled, O’Gilroy just shook his head sadly. “Ah, sounds like me gent’s bin asking questions. And him taking the dead boy’s room at the Club to pack his things, and shoving me in a stinking guest-house.”

  “Ye prefer the Adlon or the Ritz, do ye?” Paddy wore a wisp of a smile as he poured spilt beer from the tray into the mug.

  “I’ve slept hard in me time, but I prefer soft and someone else doing the paying. And ye can spread that wild story about me,” he told Galway.

  “Ye should try sleepin’ in a wet bunk in a North Sea gale wid a cargo o’ timber creakin’ in yer ear,” Galway said sullenly.

  “Yer a secret recruiting sergeant for the Merchant Navy. I knowed it all the time.”

  Before packing Cross’s clothes, Ranklin pretended he was Cross himself, getting up in the morning and going through the day, to see if there was anything missing. He was sure that, on one excuse or another, Lenz or Reimers had searched the room: had they taken anything? But apart from clothes and shoes that Cross had died in, or that he now wore in the coffin, nothing was obviously lacking.

  He sat down and stared at the meagre paperwork – particularly the bond certificate. The Wik Landentwicklungsgesellschaft had issued it in 1905 promising to pay four per cent on a scheme to develop the land on the south side of the new locks in the district of Wik (Holtenau was a village on the other side
of the Canal, beside the existing locks). The plan was shown in an elaborate and imaginative engraving – doubly imaginative, since it was from a bird’s or balloon’s viewpoint some distance up in the air, and showed the new locks and attendant buildings finished and ships busily shunting to and fro – which wouldn’t happen until some time next year. In the lower foreground was a small lighthouse and a building fronting onto the long inlet of the harbour.

  All very picturesque, but why should Cross want four per cent per annum of 200 marks-worth of it – an income of just eight shillings?

  Baffled, he rustled the papers and magazines and came up with the list of visiting yachts and their owners. That at least made one thing clear: that a hurricane in Kiel that night would leave Lloyd’s of London sleeping on a park bench wrapped in newspaper. Looking up, he realised that what he saw through the window was a city of floating palaces, belonging to kings, emperors, princes as well as mere Kaufleute such as Krupp von Bohlen, Pulitzer, Armour, Sharing … What name? But there it was: SY (for steam yacht, presumably) Kachina, registered at Newport, owner Reynard Sherring.

  Instinctively, he leant to peer harder at the harbour, but had no idea what the Kachina looked like even by day. Well, well. There was a good chance that Mrs Finn would be on board, unless Pop left her to mind the bank whilst he went boating. He wondered if, and how, he could approach her as James Spencer. It would do no harm for Lenz and Reimers to know he had a powerful friend at hand – and he could use her financial knowledge in the matter of that baffling bond.

  O’Gilroy had chosen the one hot dish that Frau Paddy had to offer. “Now what d’ye call that again?” he asked, helpfully bringing his empty plate back to the bar. The Galway man had drifted off when he found he wasn’t being offered a free meal.

  “Labskaus,” Paddy went on rinsing beer mugs in what looked like harbour water. “Pickled meat and pickled herring and beetroot and fried egg.”

  “Sure, I recognised the egg. Very nourishing. What would I drink to keep it down?”

  Irish whiskey turned out to be far too expensive for Terence Gorman’s pocket, so he tried the local Korn. And left his mouth open to cool.