Death on the Lizard (30 page)

Andrew was frowning now, almost completely at sea. “The Royals?” he asked blankly. “Why should the Royals pay any attention to a death on the Lizard?”

Sheridan cocked an inquisitive eyebrow. “You're not aware that the Prince and Princess of Wales will be here in a fortnight? The plan is for them to visit the station, have a look at the electrical works, and trade wireless hellos with the Tsar of All the Russias, or something like that.”

Andrew stared. The Prince and Princess,
here?
Then perhaps he was wrong about the reasons for Wolf's presence on the Lizard. Perhaps there was more to it than he had thought. Perhaps—

Sheridan was grinning. “I didn't really think you were here as an advance scout for the Royal party, Andrew, but it did seem a plausible explanation for your presence.”

Andrew grimaced. “Smashing,” he said, with a gloomy sarcasm. “Just smashing.” The personal protection of Royal persons was no longer up his line, and the Admiralty didn't know he was here, so he'd not known of the plan. “A fortnight, you say?”

Well, with any luck, his business would be over and he would be out of here by that time. Unless of course, there was some connection between Wolf and the Royal visit. He shivered. Good God, now
that
would be something, wouldn't it?

“Yes, it's to be Saturday the eighteenth,” Sheridan said. “I'd like, if I could, to get this unfortunate business at the wireless station wrapped up before then, but it's beginning to look doubtful.” He paused, eyeing Andrew. “I take it, then, that you have nothing to do with the Royal visit?”

“Hardly.” Andrew regarded him, feeling rather more comfortable. “And you have no Royal commission?”

“None at all,” Sheridan said, and chuckled. “Well, then. Now we've cleared that up, we can be straight with one another. Why
are
you here, Andrew? Does it have anything to do with the fellow you were watching in Gillan Harbor today?”

The thunder rumbled again, and the rain beat harder against the window.

Well, if he knew that much, Andrew thought with resignation, there was no point in trying to dodge the rest of it. “Yes, it does,” he said. “I have reason to suspect that the man may be somehow involved with that ‘unfortunate business,' as you put it, at the Poldhu station. After the fact, perhaps.”

Sheridan leaned forward, pipe in hand, elbows on his knees. “And I have reason to believe that Daniel Gerard's death might not have been an accident, although I have no proof. Gerard was developing a new tuner, you see—a rather critical piece of wireless apparatus, designed to solve the problem of interference and interception. He'd been working on the device in the laboratory in the Poldhu Hotel, adjacent to the company office, where he also kept a diary of his designs and experiments. Both the tuner and the diary are gone. And last night, somebody broke into Gerard's hotel room and ransacked it.”

“Gone!” Andrew exclaimed, sitting forward. His equilibrium, which seemed to have steadied over the last few moments, took on a precipitous tilt. “You don't mean to tell me that the tuner . . .” He stopped. He hadn't intended to go that far.

“Ah,” Sheridan said. “You know about the tuner, then?” When Andrew bit his lip and did not reply, he took one or two more puffs of his pipe and went on. “Of course, it's possible that Gerard died accidentally, and that someone who knew about the existence of the tuner and the diary took them for his own purposes. But it is also possible—quite possible, unfortunately—that Gerard was deliberately pushed into the electrical works, either to put an end to the tuner project, or to steal the tuner itself.”

“Well, then,” Andrew said, feeling that he had better tell all he knew. “I think I might be able to offer you a bit of help. I suppose you know about Jack Gordon—the Marconi operator who went over the cliff at Lizard Point about a fortnight ago.”

If Sheridan was curious about the connection, he didn't reveal it. “Yes,” he said. “I spent part of the day at the station. As I understand it, nobody saw the accident, if that's what it was. But I've spoken with the other wireless operator, who disallows the possibility of Gordon's walking off the cliff in a drunken state.”

“He didn't,” Andrew said simply. He emptied his Scotch and got up to pour another. “I know, because I saw what happened.” He turned, lifting the bottle. “Another for you?”

Sheridan replied by holding out his glass. Andrew filled it and sat down on the bed again, settling himself to his story.

“I've had this fellow—the man who appeared in Gillan Harbor this morning—under surveillance for some time. He's known as Wolf, although of course that's not his real name. He came to the Lizard around the middle of June. He's a sailor, you see. Has his own boat, which has posed a bit of a challenge for me. I caught him up the first time among the Frisian islands—how that came about is a rather long and involved tale, and I shan't bother you with it now. Enough to say that I got onto him when I was in Kiel, doing a little job for the Admiralty.”

“But not in cryptography?” Sheridan asked.

“No, that's become rather a sideline, although I do keep my hand in.” Andrew took a swallow of Scotch. “Anyway, when I connected with the fellow again, his yacht was berthed in Mullion Cove, and he was spending most of his time hanging about the village. It was not, as I learned, his first visit to the area—he had been here back in the winter, while I was cooling my heels in London with a different assignment. On the night Gordon died, Wolf went down to the pub in Lizard Village, and the two of them—Wolf and Gordon—shared a pitcher of ale.”

“Was this the first time you'd seen them together?” Sheridan asked.

“Yes, but Wolf had been here for a few days by the time I arrived, and it's possible they'd met during that time. But as I say, it was a new connection for me.” He crossed his legs. “Anyway, I followed Wolf to the pub, and got as close as I could to the pair of them. He and Gordon—I found out his name by asking the barman—talked for a while, amicably at first, and then they seemed to get into a disagreement. I got the idea that Wolf wanted Gordon to do something he wouldn't, or couldn't do. After a bit, Wolf shrugged—the sort of disgusted shrug that says, ‘I'm done with it'—and left the pub.”

“And you followed him?”

Andrew nodded, remembering that night, and the feeling that he'd had about it, the feeling of something about to happen, and of wanting to watch it, and not wanting, at the same time. “It was a bit of a delicate business. I went out to the privy and watched through a crack. Wolf hung about behind a nearby shed, and waited until Gordon came out. Then he followed him, trailing not far behind. I kept to the shadows behind the both of them. When Gordon got to the high point of the cliff, Wolf caught him up and they talked for a moment or two. The discussion seemed to be entirely friendly, but then—” He swallowed. He didn't like telling this. “One shove, and that was it.”

“You didn't try to stop it?” Sheridan asked.

No, he hadn't tried to stop it, because interfering would have put himself in the picture—the last thing he wanted to do. At the time, that had seemed right. Now, he wasn't sure. But now, it was too late for anything except explanations, excuses.

“I'm sure you understand the circumstance. If I had intervened—well, the game would've been up, wouldn't it?”

“I suppose that was the reason you didn't attempt to have Wolf arrested for murder.”

Now they were getting a little closer to the uncomfortable truth, and Andrew spoke more cautiously. “My eyewitness testimony would've been the only evidence against him at inquest. He would've been bound over for trial, of course, which would have put my quarry out of my reach. And when the case came to trial, his defense council would surely have uncovered my interest in the matter.” He grinned ruefully, although not altogether honestly. “That would be the end of my usefulness as an operative, and I'm not quite ready to quit.”

“Yes, I suppose that news of your activities would get back to Wolf 's colleagues here in England, and to the person they're working for.” Sheridan paused. “Do you know who that is?”

“I have some suspicions,” Andrew said evasively. In the end, of course, that was the chief issue. “You're right. Convicted of murder, my man would be out of the game, and so would I. And his associates would know we are on to them and I . . . we should have to start all over to ferret them out.” He shook his head. “I . . . we must keep an eye on them, so that in the event of hostilities, they can all be swept up together.”

“I suspect that Gordon was working for your man Wolf, in one capacity or another,” Sheridan said. “I was told that he had been planning to take a holiday—to visit family in Bavaria.”

Bavaria! That explained a great deal, didn't it? But it also pointed to the weakness of his own methods. He should have thought to look into Gordon's background for a clue as to how Wolf might have been using him. “But I thought the Marconi Company refused to employ Germans,” Andrew said, as if to explain to himself why he hadn't dug any deeper. “That's what I heard after the Germans tried to break into the Nova Scotia station last summer.” And that's what they had told the Admiralty, he added to himself.

“So I understand,” Sheridan said with a shrug. “But if a man can pass himself off as British, I imagine whoever is doing the hiring takes him at face value.”

Andrew stared at the opposite wall, thinking. “So Gordon was in league with Wolf,” he muttered. “I suppose he was killed because he knew too much, or was threatening to reveal it, or wouldn't do as he was told.” He could think of a dozen other reasons, none of them pretty, why one spy might murder another.

Sheridan puffed on his pipe. “And what about this chap Wolf?” he asked after a moment. “Is he of great importance to . . . to whoever you're working for at the moment?” He eyed Andrew. “And who is that? Army Intelligence?”

Andrew shifted uncomfortably. This was the tricky part. “If you must know, I've been seconded to Naval Intelligence. Unfortunately, the Admiralty by and large don't seem to think that intelligence is vital to the defense of the realm, and they behave as if wireless were no more important than any other technology. They don't view Wolf and his sort as significant enough to warrant attention. In fact, they don't seem at all concerned about spies. Somehow, German agents just are not on the horizon.”

“I've encountered that attitude,” Sheridan remarked. His gaze lingered on Andrew. “French, Russians, but not Germans.” He grinned around the stem of his pipe. “Probably has to do with the Kaiser being Victoria's grandson, and her commissioning him as an honorary Admiral of the Fleet. I understand that he told the British ambassador in Berlin that the thought of wearing the same uniform as St. Vincent and Nelson made him positively giddy.”

The old queen's grandson, Andrew thought with bitter amusement. As if blood relations had never in the history of the world gone to war. As if the men who worked in Steinhauer's German Intelligence were all gentlemen, and wouldn't dream of spying on British soil. Steinhauer—who had previously been a private detective for the Pinkertons!

“Of course,” he said sarcastically, “it might be a different story entirely if one of Steinhauer's fellows were caught copping the key to Jackie Fisher's office, or passing design details out of the Portsmouth shipyard. That might make our side wake up and take notice.”

Andrew's move to Naval Intelligence had come not long after Jackie Fisher was promoted from Second Sea Lord to Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth—assignments which were established stepping stones to the office of First Sea Lord. It was common knowledge that Fisher viewed Germany as Great Britain's most probable naval opponent, and that he was already developing a strategy to combat the Kaiser. He had raised the Home Fleet—now called the Channel Fleet—from eight battleships to twelve by withdrawing four ships from the Mediterranean Fleet, and instructed his commanders to think in terms of fighting alongside France, rather than against her. And there were rumors that as soon as he was officially named First Sea Lord (surely no more than a matter of months), he planned to build a ship so formidable that it would strike terror into the heart of any nation which dared to challenge Great Britain on the high seas. Fisher already had a name for it:
Dreadnought
.

“Wake up our side indeed,” Sheridan remarked thoughtfully. “Still, the Admiralty are very much worried about keeping the tonnage and gunnery secret, not to mention the potential speed. They wouldn't like any of that sort of information to somehow get to the Kaiser.”

Andrew pounded his fist on his thigh. “But all the
Dreadnought
s in creation won't be worth a bloody farthing,” he burst out, “if we don't have some better means of communication! I've been studying wireless, and it seems to me that Marconi's system offers our best hope of developing a reliable ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communication. I'll be damned if I'll let the Germans steal it from us, whatever the Admiralty thinks!”

There. It was out, and the devil take it.

Sheridan gazed at him for a moment. “Ah,” he said finally. “So this is your own private patch, is it? Your own bit of personal espionage?” He paused. “I suppose that's really why you couldn't report Gordon's death as murder. You were afraid that word of your doings might get back to the Admiralty.”

“I've taken furlough for three months,” Andrew muttered. “They bloody well can't tell me where I can go or what I can do on my own time. If I want to keep an eye on one bloke or another, or track down a few leads of my own, that's my bloody business, and none of theirs.”