Troubled Midnight (2 page)

In the morning the air raid warnings warbled and they actually heard some American Flying Fortresses very high and droning south. In the early evening the warnings sounded again.

“It’s how it goes these days,” said Clauswitz. “The Yanks in the mornings and the Tommies at night.”

“No rest for the wicked,” Hindenburg chuckled. “We never get even a stray bomb here. Not nowadays.”

They had lunch in the cool house and it reminded Sadler of being at home for the holidays, coming in from the garden after being in his tree house eating plums and watching people go by on the main road that skirted the copse at the bottom of the neatly striped lawn. He had begun early in his life, watching people without their knowledge, spying on friends, following people.

“They’re coming, you know,” he said, and the two men nodded gravely. Clauswitz told him they knew that well enough, “But with your help we’ll possibly be ahead of the game.”

Hindenburg smiled knowingly and said that General Rommel – “I beg his pardon, Field Marshal Rommel” – was confident that the beaches would be denied to the attacking armies. “I personally heard him say that the beaches will be slaughter yards for the Tommies and Yanks. Heard him say that in Berlin. He will be put in charge here very soon I think.”

Sadler said he was glad to hear it and Clauswitz repeated, “We know they are coming, and we know it will be a substantial attack. All we need now are your reports.” A bleak smile with a coldness behind the eyes. Uncertainty? Sadler wondered.

“When d’you think?” he asked.

“Not this year for sure.” Osterlind shook his head. “They’ve yet to appoint the Supreme Allied Commander. That’s why you’re to do the job. They’ll probably come in the spring. Maybe early summer. It’s far from easy. There are limited times. They can’t pick and chose.” The smile again, then, “It’s up to you, Sadler,” which made him feel terrific, worry pouring in on him.

Then there was the other, almost suicidal, instruction.

“Before it happens, should the opportunity present itself, you should dispose of the Supreme Allied Commander.”

“Kill him,” Osterlind added as though they hadn’t made themselves clear.

Sadler said he hadn’t been appointed yet, and they chorused that it was only a matter of time.

“Before the New Year,” Klampt said.

“Around Christmas.”

The enormity of what they were asking ballooned in Sadler’s mind like some terrible explosion.

“Most of our intelligence comes from Lisbon these days,” Klampt said, almost casually, sealing his deduction that most of their agents had already been swallowed up.

“Who is likely…?” He began and Osterlind jumped in.

“If the British have their way it will be their Chief of General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, failing him, then Montgomery of course.”

“But this is not certain,” Klampt grinning as though he had a special source. “My informer thinks they will have to let the Americans take the lead and in that case it will, of course, be Marshall. General Marshall.”

His job, after supplying them with details of the invasion, would be to remove the Supreme Allied Commander, but only if he had a straightforward chance.
“A clean shot, you might say,” Osterlind told him.
Sadler’s hands were sweating and he could have sworn that he smelled cordite in his nostrils. The very nature of this command consumed him, making his hands tremble. Not that the killing worried him, he had killed before, it was the terrible clarity, the visibility, of the target that concerned him. Would he ever have a clean shot at the SAC?

That evening, about eight o’clock, they put him in a car after giving him a cold meal, salad, tomatoes, cucumber and a wonderful potato salad, with thick slices of ham and crisp crusty bread. Before he went they drank a toast, “To the Russian riders.” Laughed because it was such a good code word, though Sadler frowned because it wouldn’t take a mathematician to work it out. An obvious code word, he considered. Too obvious.

A sergeant accompanied him to the little wayside halt that had no name; and the express stopped specially for him, the sergeant boarding with him, showing him to an empty compartment which had
Reserviert
stickers on the windows and a lock on the corridor side, the blinds pulled down like the one on the previous evening.

The sergeant brought him coffee and checked if there was anything he needed and he remained in the compartment for just over two-and-a-half hours. It was dark when they arrived and the sergeant waited until everyone else had left the station, most of them army stationed at the defences. Then a pair of sailors came up, sent to accompany him to the quayside where a U-Boat from La Rochelle was tied up, a skeleton crew on board: tired men with dead eyes who had just completed two months out in the Atlantic, men from the Grey Wolves.

Sadler said goodbye to the sergeant who remained stiff and formal, surprised that his special package was relaxed and friendly.

The U-Boat captain shook hands but did not speak and Sadler went below where he changed back into his uniform, then stretched out on a bunk and waited – twelve hours, then more time with the U-Boat submerged, waiting for nightfall again. A petty officer rowed him ashore in a rubber dingy. An hour later he was on a London train, crowded, dirty, filled with smoke and uniforms. In the corridor a woman crouched down saying she was searching for cleaner air, and a drunken soldier fell over as the train swayed on a bend.

He had been away for four days. Nobody missed him. That was the kind of man he was. The kind who was never missed and had difficulty summoning a waiter.

On the August Sunday when Sadler was briefed by the Abwehr in France, so Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Livermore and Woman Detective Sergeant Suzie Mountford spent the day in the market town of Wantage which lay under the Berkshire Downs, where the Roman Ridgeway once echoed to the tramp of marching legions.

Chapter Two

“YOU EVER WANT to be me?” Tommy asked.

“Be you?” the question puzzled Suzie, lifting her voice just short of a screech.

“Yes. Ever feel you’d like to be me?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Read it in a book.”

“In a book?”

“Yes – lovers often want to be the other person. Love’s known for it, heart.”

“I’d never want to be you. God, no. I wouldn’t want to have to shave every day, and I wouldn’t want your body either, not with…”

“Not with what?”

“Never mind.”

“You’ve never complained about my body before.”

“No, but I wouldn’t want to
wear
your body.”

“Oh.” Tommy sounded disgruntled, turning down the corners of his mouth.

“Poor darling.” Suzie reached over and kissed him on the cheek, realising that she hadn’t done that – shown that kind of spontaneous affection – for quite a long time.

They had been in the Coffee Room of the Bear Hotel having tea because it was almost four o’clock, beautiful view, looking down on the cobbled courtyard at the back of the hotel shimmering in flat sunlight as they drank their tea and ate the little triangular cucumber sandwiches.

“Let’s go have a nose round, eh?” Tommy said and she smiled at him, took his hand and let him lead her down the narrow stairs and onto the cobble stones that went right to the gates at the back and out in front of the building, all the way to the pavement, what the American GIs called the sidewalk, along the east side of the Market Place.

“Oh, a bear,” she said, still a shade high-pitched, looking up at the black bear, chained and with a bunch of grapes in its mouth, high on a plinth on top of a pole that made up the extraordinary inn sign.

“Name of the hotel, heart. Bear Hotel.”

Suzie Mountford felt extraordinarily happy because they were on what Tommy called ‘a frivol’.

When they had first become lovers, on her posting, in 1940, to the Reserve Squad – Tommy’s elite unit inside the Metropolitan Police Force – he was forever surprising her with trips here and there at a moment’s notice. Recently all that seemed to have come to an end: after she’d refused to agree a date for their planned marriage.

Until now.

They had been working hard – the pier murder last month, 26
th
July. Pier Murder was what the papers called it, at one of East Anglia’s best-known watering places: a girl, Angela Williams, who sometimes looked after two roundabouts for small children, the little merry-go-rounds squeezed in between the full-sized carousel and the Pier Theatre where a scratch company was playing to good business, Rookery Nook one week followed by Noel Coward’s Hay Fever the next, the theatre right out at the end of the pier. In fact this year, 1943, was the first year the pier had been back in business since the start of the war in the autumn of 1939. The girl, Williams, turned a big wheel that made one of the roundabouts work, the little kids sitting in small cars, miniature London taxis and racing cars. Grinning fit to bust. Pleased as Punch.

It was Angela Williams looking after the small children’s roundabouts who was found dead between the two machines, neck broken, clothing disturbed – police jargon for knickers removed so you’d know what else had happened. Unsavoury. July 26
th
1943.

The combined wisdom of Scotland Yard had it that: first, murders were usually perpetrated by members of the victim’s family or very close friends; and, second, that if you didn’t nab the killer in the first forty-eight hours you were in for a long, and possibly fruitless, haul.

This one had taken Tommy over three weeks of intensive sleuthing, and even then the unmasking of the murderer had been almost an accident: a young lad working among the stage staff at the Pier Theatre, a lad called Pearse who was almost the invisible man as far as Tommy and his squad were concerned. Suddenly they spotted him and Tommy did the algebra and geometry, fixed him in their sights and they got him – blubbering and confessing in some terror once accused.

“Poor boy,” Tommy said, “not a real killer but a stupid mistake he’ll regret for the rest of his life.”

Nobody said he probably didn’t have much of a life left and they all went back to London to see what would be thrown up next, but on the Saturday morning Tommy suggested that they drive up to see Suzie’s mum and stepfather – the Galloping Major.

They were welcomed with huge excitement and plenty of food. Suzie’s mum, Helen, had a deal going with a butcher in nearby Wantage so they had a nice piece of beef on the Saturday night. “I was saving it for Sunday lunch,” Helen told Suzie, “but Tommy says you can’t stay to Sunday lunch.”

Tommy hadn’t told Suzie, so she got quite shirty with him, over in the Coach House. “Why can’t we stay to lunch, tomorrow?” she asked, face twisted up in her not so convincing impression of anger.

“Because we can’t,” Tommy smooth but firm. “We can not.” Three words equally spaced.

“Bugger it, Tommy, why the blazes not?”

“I have other plans.”

And that was that. When Tommy had his mind made up there was no gainsaying him, so they slept pleasantly in the Coach House that was the last thing Suzie’s father had accomplished with their property before his fatal accident: did the old place up, two bedrooms and a wide open room with a kitchen off on the ground floor: very smart, a lot of exposed pine and nice carpets. Her mum put them in there, of course, because she didn’t really want them sleeping together in the main house: didn’t like to think of her daughter having a bit of nookie with Tommy under her roof, without the benefit of a priest as she would probably say.

In the end it was a lovely surprise when instead of taking the London Road, Tommy drove them to the little market town of Wantage that seemed, from The Bear Hotel, to be a nice and interesting place – nestling in the Vale of the White Horse, as all the guidebooks said, with the ancient Roman roads nearby, the Portway running through the town and the Ridgeway just above them on the Berkshire Downs; and the great King Alfred’s birthplace, Alfred King of Wessex, the one who burned the cakes.

Now they were standing, looking across the square, outside Arbery’s haberdasher, big windows and white paint, barley-sugar twists at the corner of the windows, when there was a snarl from above and they glanced up to see a North American Harvard aircraft in the all-yellow livery of RAF Training Command turn on its back about fifteen hundred feet above them, its big Wasp engine grumbling as it completed the roll and disappeared over the rooftops. For Suzie the noise seemed to score a tangible trail against the great bowl of deep blue sky.

“Silly bugger,” Tommy still looked up, craning his neck. “Don’t think they’re supposed to do that. The engine can cut out inverted. Not supposed to do it over built-up areas.”

“Showing off?”

“’Course.”

“And that’s King Alfred over there?” nodding towards the grey-white statue that stood on a rough stone plinth in the centre of the Square.

They danced around a red Oxford bus just leaving from outside Gibbs – printer & stationer – then threaded their way over to take a closer look.

“Like his frock,” Tommy chuckled.

“And the hat,” Suzie agreed.

Alfred wore a belted robe that ended just above his knees, and a long enveloping cloak, an elongated pudding basin helmet perched on his head, a scroll in the left hand, while the right rested on the haft of a long-handled fighting axe, single-bladed with the curved head by the king’s right cross-gartered boot.

“How do they know he was born here?” Suzie asked.

“Biographer says so. Geezer by the name of Asser. Born here in the ninth century.”

She thought bloody Tommy’s a know-all. “When the years had only three numbers, right?”

“Absolutely: measured in the hundreds. Axe signifies his warlike reputation, scourge of the Vikings, and the scroll has to do with his dedication to learning and education.”

“So he’s a Saxon king?”

“Known for it, heart. That and the legend of the burned cakes.”

“Fleeing from the Vikings; took shelter in a cottage. Lady of the house told him to look after the cakes she was baking. He didn’t, cakes burned and the woman boxed his ears. Right?”