The First Casualty (18 page)

THIRTY-TWO

At the heart of the SIS

The building was extremely shabby, which did not surprise Kingsley overmuch; long experience had taught him how penny-pinching the British government could be when it came to the working conditions of its employees. The waiting room into which he was shown boasted one or two goodish pictures and the furniture, what there was of it, was either Georgian or excellent reproductions, but it was cramped, the carpet threadbare and the walls in need of new paper and paint. Kingsley was to discover that the whole department consisted of little more than the reception area in which he sat, Cumming’s office, a map room and a small library. That this should represent the heart of the British Empire’s overseas intelligence and espionage network surprised even Kingsley, a man well versed in the often amateurish, public-school manner in which the affairs of a great nation were conducted. It was so ridiculously inadequate to the needs of the modern world, Kingsley half expected a bookcase suddenly to slide back and reveal a stairway leading to a vast subterranean nerve centre bustling with telegraph operators, code-breakers and photographic laboratories.

‘Yes, we don’t put on much of a show, do we?’ said Sir Mansfield, when Kingsley was ushered into his office. ‘Budget, you see. Always budget. I swear if I want to feed a carrier pigeon I must first draw up a special seed requisition order, in triplicate, copy it to the War Office
and
the Foreign Office and then await authorization from both! By which time of course the poor bird has died from hunger.’

Kingsley nodded sympathetically but said nothing. His host was a man of whom he had heard much during his time with Special Branch but about whom he knew little of any substance. He imagined Sir Mansfield took trouble to keep things that way. The foreign intelligence supremo was, Kingsley judged, in latish middle age but still looked very active. His grey hair was cut short and he was clean-shaven. He wore naval uniform and sported a monocle, which gave him a slightly flippant appearance. Kingsley felt quite certain there was little else that could be considered flippant about Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming.

‘The Cabinet doesn’t like spies, you see,’ Cumming went on. ‘The Civil Service like us even less. Don’t think it’s the
done thing
, think it’s something that
foreigners
get up to, which is of course precisely the point.
They do
. Which is why we have to. Do you know, I’m supposed to run an overseas intelligence operation and yet our own bloody
ambassadors
won’t have us in their embassies! They don’t think it’s
British
to spy on your host. Where else are we to stay? Can’t afford hotels, not on our allocation. Need whatever we’ve got to bribe the locals. Anyway, enough of that, not your problem, eh? Expect you had similar constraints at Scotland Yard. No bore like a budget bore, eh? Tea?’

Kingsley accepted the offer and was only slightly surprised when Cumming went to a little gas ring set up in the corner of the office and started to make the tea himself.

‘They would give me a girl, I suppose, but I’ve neither the time nor the resources to vet one. It’d be a poor lookout if my tea lady turned out to be a Boche Brünnhilde who sneaked all our secrets back to Germany in hollowed-out biscuits, wouldn’t it? Less trouble to make the tea myself. Condensed milk all right?’

‘That would be fine. Thank you.’

Cumming opened a can using a little multi-tooled scouting knife which he produced from his pocket.

‘No sugar, I’m afraid, but this stuff’s tooth-rottingly sweet anyway…I’ve got Camp coffee if you’d prefer it?’

‘No, thank you. Tea is fine.’

‘I rather like Camp — only the British could have invented it. Tried it on Marshal Foch’s liaison chap last week, the fellow thought I was trying to
poison
him! Of course coffee’s a positive
fetish
for the French, which isn’t healthy in my view. Took me ages to explain that we British simply do not set the same store by the stuff. Tea’s the thing, eh?’

Kingsley was in fact one of those Englishmen who did take his coffee seriously, roasting and grinding his own beans, which he bought wholesale from an Italian café owner in Wardour Street. But that had been in another life and he had not come to Whitehall to discuss refreshments.

‘Tea is fine,’ he repeated.

‘Good. Excellent.’ Sir Mansfield carefully warmed the pot, emptying the spent water into a dead aspidistra. ‘First and foremost I must apologize for the unorthodox manner in which you have been brought to us — although from what I hear it’s lucky we
did
get you out. Apparently you had been beaten almost to death?’

‘Things are never going to be comfortable for a policeman in prison.’ Kingsley shrugged, not wishing to appear in any way in the debt of people who might have saved his life but who had done so by abducting him and certainly not as a favour. ‘Why have I been brought to you?’

‘Ah-ha. The rub…Well, no doubt Captain Shannon has explained that it has to do with the death of Viscount Abercrombie.’

‘That is what he told me, although I only believe it now I hear it confirmed by you, Sir Mansfield. Captain Shannon is not a man whose uncorroborated word I would ever be minded to accept on any subject at all.’

‘Yes,’ Cumming said, opening a tin of biscuits. ‘I’d heard you were a good judge of character. Garibaldi?’

‘Captain Shannon is an unbalanced sadist and a dangerous lecher,’ Kingsley said, declining the biscuit. ‘It takes no great leap of judgement to see that.’

‘Mmm. A bastard indeed, but
my
bastard, which is all that matters really, isn’t it?’

Cumming sat down in one of the two armchairs that stood before the mean little unlit fireplace and indicated that Kingsley should take the other. Above the mantel hung a rather fanciful painting of Napoleon’s surrender at Waterloo. The spymaster stared at it for a few moments as if seeking to draw inspiration.

‘The problem is,’ he said finally, ‘the death of Viscount Abercrombie is making waves. Damned fellow got murdered, you see, and what with him being who he is, HM Government decided to lie about it. Probably a mistake as it’s turned out but at the time it seemed a good idea. This is a modern age, you see, an age of celebrity. And in particular just now, the celebrity
poet
. You’ve probably heard about the trouble that blighter Sassoon has caused with his damned anti-war letter to the press. If he hadn’t been a poet, a
celebrity
poet,
The Times
would never have published it.’

Cumming had been dunking his garibaldi in his tea for too long and half of the biscuit broke off, falling back into the cup. He swore creatively for a moment while fishing about in his cup with a teaspoon.

‘Where was I?’ he said, having retrieved most of it and eaten it off the spoon, a process which Kingsley found rather unpleasant to witness.

‘Celebrity poets,’ Kingsley prompted.

‘Ah yes, more popular than cricketers these days. They’ll be putting them on cigarette cards next. Brooke started it, of course, with all his Little Englander romantic tosh:

‘
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?
’

‘Bloody rot if you ask me. I’ve been to Grantchester and, let me tell you, it’s boring. Not surprised the clock stopped, lost the will to carry on, I imagine.’

Kingsley sipped his tea and kept silent. No doubt the master spy would get to the point eventually.

‘Well, anyway, here’s the thing. At first Abercrombie’s death looked like an open-and-shut case: the Military Police arrested one Private Hopkins and charged him with the murder. The obvious thing to do was to keep it all as quiet as possible and let the people’s memory of their fallen hero remain pure. Unfortunately, certain circumstances and witness statements have emerged which must at least give us reason to doubt Hopkins’s guilt, and some people here in London —
influential
people — got wind of it. Lord Abercrombie, the dead chap’s father, had been happy that Hopkins be quietly shot and his son’s reputation remain unscathed. However, the other side started crying foul and now
everybody’s
clamouring for further explanations. If things develop unchecked, either one side or the other is bound to start talking. It will all come out, including the government’s original lies, and we shall have a scandal and a trial on our hands to rival the bloody Dreyfus case. Divided nation and all. Working man pitted against aristocrat, Labour fighting Tory, with the poor old Liberal government stuck in the middle. What we need, and need quickly, is for the thing to be properly investigated and, if humanly possible, for the truth to be established. If that could be achieved and the evidence placed privately before the warring parties, the matter might yet be quietly laid to rest.’

Of course Kingsley could see where all this must be leading. He was not, after all, being told this for nothing, but he could not understand why they needed him.

‘Surely this is a job for the Military Police?’

‘Well, you’d have thought so, wouldn’t you? But of course the Labour lot won’t have it; they don’t trust the police at all. They say they’ve already been compromised by leaping to judgement.’

‘Then surely your department…’

‘Ha! If Labour and the unions don’t trust the police, they trust us less. I have been told that when the War Office suggested that the SIS take over the investigation, Ramsay MacDonald actually laughed. I can see his point, of course; we do have something of a reputation for harassing revolutionaries. The funny thing is, the Conservatives don’t really trust us either, convinced we’ve been infiltrated by Bolshies. Who’d be a spy, eh? No, I’m afraid neither the police nor the SIS will do. What is needed here is a
disinterested party
, a figure of proven
integrity
and high moral credentials who also happens to be a brilliant criminal detective.’

The fact that this was flattering did not make it any less astonishing. ‘You mean that Bonar Law and Ramsay MacDonald have been discussing
me?
’

‘Oh, don’t be so modest, Inspector, you know damn well that you were the Yard’s best man.’

‘Well, yes, I was but…’

‘And all this conchie business, hateful though it may be to most people, has shown that you are a man of unassailable principle. Honestly, you couldn’t be better suited to help break this deadlock if we’d designed you ourselves. It didn’t take long for your name to come up. In fact, looking at the secret minutes, it seems to have been the Prime Minister himself who suggested you.’

Kingsley sipped his tea, pretending to take this with a pinch of salt but secretly rather thrilled.

‘Well, well. The Prime Minister, eh?’

‘Yes, although that may simply have been him trying to take the credit. He is rather prone to that, you know. Great men often are, I find.’

‘So the Prime Minister himself asked for me?’

‘Absolutely. There was, however, one problem.’

‘My being in prison.’

‘Exactly. There was talk of granting you a pardon or at least a stay of sentence but that was scarcely practical, given the notoriety of your offence and the public opprobrium in which you were held. More to the point, people would have wanted to know
why
you had been released and then the whole thing would have come out anyway. We needed your skills and your reputation, but we did not need
you
.’

‘Hence my death.’

‘Exactly. There was a meeting in camera
at the highest level
where the proposal was put to those politicians who have currently taken such an interest in this case. They were asked whether,
if
a way could be found whereby you, a brilliant ex-police officer, proven to be of high moral integrity, could conduct an investigation
anonymously
, those politicians would abide by the conclusions you drew. They agreed.’

Despite all his troubles, Kingsley could not avoid a feeling of satisfaction.

‘I’m most gratified.’

‘And so we were briefed to produce you anonymously and here you are. Dead, but all present and correct to do an enormous service to your country. Solve this murder mystery before it drives a bloody great wedge right down the middle of our fragile wartime consensus.’

Kingsley lit a cigarette. It was an astounding story and yet he could see the logic.

‘Well,’ he remarked, after he had exhaled the deep draught of tobacco smoke, ‘it is true that both the police and the intelligence service are hopelessly compromised.’

‘
Hopelessly
. We might as well all pack up and go home.
Only you
can do this, Inspector.
Only you
can serve your country in this matter.’