Jack of Spies (41 page)

“Will people really accept that as a reason for war?”

“Who knows? The government are hoping the Germans invade Belgium and let them off the hook.”

“And will they?”

Dunwood shrugged and helped himself to a grape. “Everything we know suggests they will. They’ve given themselves only six weeks to beat France, and their plan involves swinging round the left end of the French line and enveloping them from the rear. The wider the swing, the better, and the more likely they’ll go through Belgium.”

“But if we know this, so must the French.”

Dunwood smiled. “According to our people in France, it doesn’t fit in with the French generals’ plans, so they’ve decided not to believe it.”

“You’re kidding me.” The older McColl got, the more stupid those in authority seemed.

“The worst thing is—guess who’ll be taking up position on the French army’s left, plumb in front of the German charge?”

“Us.”

“Exactly. According to the plans our generals have drawn up with the French, the British Expeditionary Force is supposed to set sail four days after war is declared and take its place in the line eight days after that. The way it looks at the moment, they’ll arrive in northern France about the same time as the Germans.”

McColl clutched at a straw. “But someone could still stick a spoke in a wheel and stop the whole damn thing in its tracks.”

“It’s too late,” Dunwood said. “Nothing’ll stop it now.”

He was right. Two days later the German army moved into Belgium. McColl was discharged the next day, but not to a place of convalescence. Despite the best efforts of Cumming, Kell, and the regular police, Tiernan and his team were still at large, and McColl was wanted back in London. Only he had clapped eyes on the nine wanted men.

The Arun Bridge

It was only after his ship docked at Holyhead that McColl discovered his country was now at war. His gloomy reaction to this news was not shared by his fellow passengers on the London express, most of whom seemed unreasonably excited by the prospect. He sat there listening to two young men exchanging heroic fantasies and knew that Jed would embrace the same delusions. What better excuse to leave Glasgow?

“Express” proved something of a misnomer. The journey across North Wales seemed to last forever, and every stop-start offered painful reminders of the damage Brady’s gun had inflicted. There were no obvious reasons for the delays, and he could only surmise that the needs of the military were already beginning to gum up the system. The platforms at Crewe were certainly crowded with uniforms, and joining the main line did little to improve their timekeeping—it was midafternoon by the time the train reached Euston.

The terminus was crowded, the atmosphere more febrile than usual. He thought about going straight to Cumming, but his flat was more or less on the way—a quick bath and fresh clothes might raise him from the dead. The taxi ride to Windmill Street
took a couple of minutes, and he managed the several flights of stairs with rather more ease than he expected. Among the small pile of mail waiting on the carpet were two ominous letters, one from his mother and one from Caitlin. Which, he wondered, would be the unhappier read?

Before reading them, he picked up the telephone. There was no reason it shouldn’t be working, but he still felt slightly surprised that it was. He rang Cumming’s office, ascertained from the secretary that the man himself was there, and arranged to see him in an hour or so.

His mother’s letter had been posted on Saturday evening, which confirmed his worst suspicions. He sliced the envelope open with the paper knife and extracted the single sheet of paper. Jed had taken the train to London so that he and Mac could enlist together. The letter, he knew, was a plea for help, but she hadn’t managed to put that in words. Asking things of others wasn’t something she did anymore.

Caitlin’s letter could hardly have been more different. She was coming to England to see him, after stopping off in Ireland to tell Colm “a few home truths.” Her brother’s letters home were worrying them all, and she felt she had to spare the time. But she wouldn’t stay long in Dublin and was really looking forward to seeing him in London. Her letter was dated July 15; he had, he now remembered, assured her he would be back in England by the end of that month.

Maybe the war had changed her plans, he thought. Maybe she was already in London. She would probably have reached Dublin before her brother left; if so, she now knew who McColl worked for and might even think he was dead. If she turned up here, it would only be to shoot him.

He placed her letter on top of his mother’s and stood there for several moments, hands on the table, head bowed down. “No time for regrets,” he eventually murmured, and went to run a bath. Half an hour later, his suit smelling faintly of mothballs, he was hailing a taxi on Tottenham Court Road.

Cumming was waiting in his aerie, where a space had been made for a camp bed—the Service had gone to war. “You look exhausted,” were his first words, which he might equally well have applied to himself. “But I take it you’re sufficiently recovered to lend a hand.” It was a statement, not a query.

McColl had nothing to add to what he’d told Dunwood about the fateful evening, and Cumming had no fresh news of the week-old manhunt. “Special Branch have turned all the Irish neighborhoods upside down, and big rewards have been posted, but not a glimmer.”

“If they have any sense, they’ll avoid the Irish neighborhoods,” McColl thought out loud.

“Perhaps,” Cumming conceded, “but won’t they be conspicuous anywhere else? There
are
eight of them.”

“Eight?” McColl asked.

“The German turned up at their embassy a week ago—he’s on his way home, with all the other diplomats. He was identified from the pictures Kell’s man took—his real name’s von Busch, and he’s a major in the German army. An explosives expert.”

“That makes sense.”

“And it’s not the worst of it. A huge amount of dynamite was stolen from a quarry in Surrey four nights ago. The night watchman had his throat cut.”

“Oh, Jesus. So what do you want me to do?”

“Get a good night’s sleep. Then tomorrow morning start going over the same ground again. You’re the only one who’s seen them all, and you
might
see a face you recognize. I know it’s a long shot, but there’s nothing else. Bar the waiting. I’ll send an automobile to pick you up—the police have loaned us half a dozen.”

McColl took another taxi home and summoned up the energy to call Tim Athelbury. It was Evelyn who answered.

“So you’re back at last,” she drawled, friendly in her usual cold way. She showed no interest in where he had been, simply called her brother to the phone.

As Mac had suggested, Tim Athelbury felt no real resentment at being left in the lurch, by either McColl or his chosen replacement. “Mac quit this morning,” he said. “He and your brother went down to the enlisting office together.”

They talked for a few minutes more, but McColl was hardly listening, and his first port of call after hanging up was a dust-covered bottle of whiskey. He poured himself a generous shot, stared at it awhile, then carefully poured it back. In the bedroom he tore the blankets off the bed, gingerly undressed, and stretched himself out on the sheet. Tomorrow was another day, and it could hardly be worse than the one he’d just had.

Next morning he had just finished shaving and dressing when someone knocked on the door. Cumming’s lift, he assumed, but the face that confronted him was hers. She looked lovely as ever, but the frozen expression told him she knew.

“Jack,” she said coldly, and walked past him into the flat. “Once upon a time, I was looking forward to seeing this.”

He could think of no response.

She continued on into his living room, then turned to face him, anger glittering in her green eyes. “When I got to Dublin, there was a letter waiting for me. From Colm. He said you’re a British agent and that you used me to infiltrate my family. Are you? Did you?”

“I do work for the British government.”

“As a spy.”

“Other countries have spies—we have agents.”

The joke fell predictably flat. “And you used me?”

“Yes, but …” He fell silent. The buts had felt real at the time, but now they seemed utterly spurious.

“Is that all you’ve got to say?”

He shook his head. “I fell in love with you long before that.” He hesitated. How much could he tell her? Why not everything? “In China I was spying on the Germans. In San Francisco I was
investigating the links between the Germans and their Indian revolutionary friends when I found out that both had links to the local Irish republicans. It was pure coincidence that your chaperone turned out to be one of the couriers they use, but once I’d found a letter in his suitcase containing details of an Irish-German plot … well, my boss already knew that I was involved with you”—McColl couldn’t bring himself to admit that he had asked London to check up on her—“and once he found out who your father was …”

“He asked you to spy on me and my family.”

“More or less. I didn’t think I’d discover anything incriminating, and I wanted to keep my job. And then I met Tiernan and discovered he was involved. After that they sent me to Mexico.”

“But not to sell automobiles,” she said acidly.

She was standing only four feet away, but it could have been four thousand miles. It was utterly hopeless, but he kept on talking because he knew if he stopped, she would leave. “I was sent to prevent the Germans stealing our navy’s oil. And when that was done, they brought me home. Tiernan was supposedly in Dublin, but they couldn’t track him down, and I was the only one who’d actually met him. You thought there was something wrong with him,” he added, and realized how pathetic it sounded.

She gave him a long look, and there was no love in it. “I can’t believe what a fool I’ve been,” she said, unconsciously echoing Colm.

“You haven’t,” he said quietly. “You thought I loved you, and I did. I still do.”

“No,” she said vehemently. “You haven’t behaved like a person in love behaves.”

Excuses came to mind—several of them—but she was right. “Is there anything I can say or do to make you forgive me?”

She almost laughed. “No,” she repeated. “But if you’re feeling guilty—and by God you should be—there’s one thing you can do by way of atonement, and that’s to help me save my brother.”

“How?” he asked, feeling a ridiculous surge of hope.

“Help me find him. I don’t know my way around this city.”

“At this moment half the police in London are looking for him and his friends.” And if they found them, he thought, then some would probably die.

For the first time, there was something in her face besides anger. “Then you do know he’s here?”

“We’re pretty certain. A large amount of dynamite was stolen a few days ago. The night watchman was killed.”

“But Colm couldn’t …”

Her brother obviously hadn’t told her that he’d left McColl to be executed. She was, he realized, still thinking of Colm as the boy she’d helped bring up.

“If he’s caught,” she was saying, sounding uncertain for the first time, “will you let me know? Will you do what you can for him?”

“Yes, for your sake. But you must realize—he’s put himself in a very dangerous position. I know he’s young, but now there’s a war, no one will want to take chances.”

“I understand,” she said.

He had never seen her so close to tears. “Tell me where you’re staying.”

She gave him the name of her hotel. “It won’t change my mind about us,” she warned him. “Apart from anything else, I could never trust you again.”

“I know.”

She looked him straight in the eye, as if determined to prove her resolve. “I shall go now.”

“Caitlin …”

“No, we’re finished here.”

He opened the door and watched her walk out, listened as the sound of her feet on the stairs slowly gave way to silence, heard the distant click of the street door closing. She was gone.

It might have been ten minutes later when Cumming’s
policeman arrived; it might have been an hour. McColl’s brain registered the news that the Irish gang’s hideout had finally been found, but he spent the drive across London staring dumbly out at the hurrying crowds, replaying his conversation with her, obsessing over all the things he should and shouldn’t have said. It was only when they drew up outside the house in Lambeth that he managed to shake himself free and bring himself back to the job in hand.

The three-story house was brimming with police. There were constables on every floor, pulling out drawers and lifting up carpets, searching through wardrobes and bedding. One was even tapping the walls, presumably in hopes of finding a secret passage, while out in the small backyard two men were staring at the flagstones, presumably with an eye to lifting a few.

The evidence that mattered, as the inspector in charge informed him, had already been discovered. The remains of several unmarked crates had been dumped in the coal bunker outside, along with a fair quantity of the packing material used for wrapping sticks of dynamite. And one of the neighbors had confirmed that a group of Irish laborers had been staying in the house for over a week. She’d spoken to one man across the back fence, and he’d told her they’d all come over from Dublin to work on one of the new Tube extensions—she couldn’t remember which. But she had seen four of them that morning, walking down the street in the direction of the river, all carrying large canvas bags.