Authors: Sam Bourne
Now on the steps, with the porter watching them from just a few paces behind, James prepared himself for the moment of expulsion, picturing how it must look, like a drunk turfed out of a saloon bar in a western. His hand still on James’s shoulder, the Assistant Dean leaned in closer. James could feel the man’s breath in his ear, the plosive blasts as he spoke: ‘Meet me tonight. Seven o’clock at Frank Pepe’s. I can help you.’ And with a last, hard shove to his back, the Assistant Dean despatched Dr James Zennor as if he were throwing out a sack of garbage.
London
The afternoon passed slowly, the work laborious. No matter how often Taylor Hastings looked up at the clock, it insisted on advancing with slow, heavy steps. He looked down at the pile of documents awaiting decoding. He could gallop through it, but a new pile would take its place: it wouldn’t make the time pass any quicker.
He needed another excuse to go back into his briefcase. He had already retrieved a pencil sharpener from there; he couldn’t pull that stunt again, not without his beetle-eyed colleague becoming curious. Yet he was desperate to look inside.
Help came in the form of a phone call, the distraction allowing him to bend low and retrieve what he wanted from his case. It was a card in an envelope, the card stiff, both in a rich shade of cream. He slipped it in among his papers, so that when, a few minutes later, the beetle-eyes were averted, he could steal another look at it.
Embossed at the top was the green, portcullis crest of the House of Commons. On the right, in the blue ink of an expensive fountain pen, today’s date, the month rendered in roman numerals. Below that, the time of writing: ten am, an indication, along with the missing postmark on the envelope, that this message had been hand-delivered. Had Reginald Rawls Murray taken a risk by despatching it here, of all places? A calculated risk, Taylor concluded. Using the Royal Mail would have been far riskier, given the likelihood of surveillance and interception: thanks to Regulation 18B, Murray’s mail was surely opened and checked routinely. Hand delivery by courier was much safer. If Murray had delivered it himself, so much the better.
On the other hand, if minimizing risk had been the MP’s objective it would have been better to have dropped off the card at Taylor’s home rather than here. But not if the message was urgent: Taylor wouldn’t have seen it till late this evening. Very late, most likely, since he had ‘dinner’ plans with Anna (though it was not food that was on the menu). It wouldn’t have surprised him if Murray knew as much and so had opted to get this message to him at work. Looking at it again, it certainly seemed urgent.
Meet me tonight, House of Commons terrace. 7.30 pm. RRM.
The evening was close and sticky. Taylor Hastings had known a thousand such humid nights, the air choking with ragweed pollen, in Washington. But the Brits seemed to find it unbearable. Murray was constantly running his finger along his shirt collar, as if breaking a seal formed by the sweat on his neck.
But perhaps it wasn’t just the weather that made him agitated. After ten minutes of chit-chat on the terrace – admiring the view over to the South Bank, eyeing up County Hall, watching the river in the still-bright evening – Murray finally got down to business. What was it with the English, always feeling obligated to pretend that a transaction between parties was really a conversation among friends?
‘The situation’s getting awfully tight for us, Hastings, I’m sure you appreciate that. Awfully tight. They’ve banged up Diana and Oswald under the bloody 18B and they’ve done the same with Norah. Pretty soon, there’ll be more of us inside than out,’ he said, knocking back what was left of his gin and tonic. ‘Which is why we need you.’
‘Me?’
‘Well, they can’t damn well put you in choky, can they? Against the rules. Immunity and what have you. Which is why I have a little gift for you.’
‘That’s very kind, Mr Murray.’
‘You haven’t seen what it is yet,’ the MP said sharply, a hint, Taylor decided, of the boarding school bully in his voice. He was unzipping a slim, leather portfolio case that Taylor hadn’t noticed. Perhaps it had been tucked under Murray’s suit jacket. ’On the count of three, take this from me and put it inside your briefcase, all right? Ready? One … two … three.’
Taylor took the object Murray had removed from the portfolio and put it in his bag, without looking at it. Touch told him that it was leather and had a metal lock on the front. It had the weight of a book and was roughly the size of a large desk diary. He wouldn’t have sworn to it, not in the fading twilight of a terrace with no lamps, but he was almost certain it was red.
He should have waited, but he couldn’t help himself. In the back of a taxi, his briefcase on his lap, safely out of sight of the driver’s rearview mirror, he removed Murray’s gift and let it sit on his knees for a second or two while he gazed at it. Yes, red. Red leather worn through use, the binding grown soft. The sides were ragged, like a diary stuffed with scraps of paper and odd receipts. There were so many extra leaves inserted into this book that it appeared to have bloated to what Taylor guessed was twice its regular size.
He probed inside his breast pocket, feeling the outline of the tiny metal key that Murray had given him as they said goodbye. ‘I am not only trusting you with my life, Mr Hastings. I am trusting you with the lives of many others. Don’t let us down.’
Taylor took his time, examining the Bramah lock on the side of the book. Little more than a small brass tab, it would surely not be too hard to break – though Murray had assured him that appearances were deceptive, that the mechanism was tougher than it looked. Gingerly he inserted the key, no bigger than a coin, and turned it.
To any observer, including the cab driver, it would have looked like an ordinary address book. Pages and pages filled with names. Instantly his eye picked out the familiar ones: the Blackshirt propagandist AK Chesterton and the fascist agitator Arnold Leese were, he knew after just a few short months in London, permanent fixtures in the country’s Jew-hating scene. Lord Redesdale he had already met and there was Lord Lymington. Taylor had heard about him: an eccentric by all accounts, who yearned to turn back the clock and dreamt of an England populated solely by ruddy-cheeked farmers and blonde-haired milkmaids, tilling the land and eating only the purest food. ‘Organic’, he called it. Anna had laughed, deliberately mishearing, and had declared that she quite liked the sound of ‘orgasmic food’.
He flicked through the pages until one caught his eye. The name – Colonel GG Woodwark of Kings Lynn – was new to him, but there was an intriguing scribbled note in the margin: judge of the Führer’s Special Prize for Best of Breed at the Cologne Dog Show in November 1938. Another annotation appeared by the name of Captain George Henry Drummond of Pitsford Hall: Diana M.’s bank manager, bottom of swimming pool decorated with swastika.
Diana M, he thought. Must be Diana Mitford, now Mrs Oswald Mosley. The pair of them were legendary: they’d got married four years ago in Goebbels’s home and Hitler had been a guest.
Such elevated company. And to think that he, Taylor Hastings, had been entrusted as keeper of their secrets. He would take one more peek, then close and lock the book, leaving plenty of time before the cab reached his home.
He had come across what he presumed was a list of affiliated organizations. A few leapt out: Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was there, obviously, along with the Anglo-German Fellowship, the Imperial Fascist League and the Nordic League. He strained to read Murray’s handwriting before deciphering something called the January Club, followed by the White Knights of Britain and an outfit that seemed to be called the English Mistery, whatever that might be. And now an individual’s name, though it was included in the list of groups: Lady Alexandra Hardinge.
Then he spotted a name that surprised him. He read it twice to make sure he had it right, but there could be no doubt. How interesting.
He closed the book and locked it carefully, looking up to see the driver, his head turned, staring at him. Only then did he realize the cab was still. It was parked outside his building, on Cadogan Square.
‘How long have we been here?’
The driver made a show of consulting his watch. ‘’bout five minutes. I tried to tell you, but you weren’t listening. Immersed in your book, weren’t you? Good one, is it? One of them murder mysteries?’
‘Not quite,’ Taylor said, handing him a few coins, kicking himself for his mistake. How long had the driver been watching him like that? What if he could read upside down?
Asked to guard the membership list of the Right Club, he had failed his first test. To be worthy of these people’s trust, he would have to do better. He would have to curb his curiosity, no matter how intense. He would have to be vigilant, watching out for anyone nosing around. Above all, and this would be hardest, he would have to be discreet. That meant no bragging to Anna when he saw her later tonight.
He walked up to his apartment, strode into his bedroom and pulled the empty suitcase from under his bed. He placed the red book at the bottom, then placed two blankets on top. He closed the lid and locked it, returning the key to his night table, then put the suitcase inside his wardrobe, behind two pairs of boots. Tomorrow he would buy a lock for the cupboard.
Three separate locks, three separate keys, standing between any would-be spy and the information he had sworn to protect. He looked around his apartment – his ‘flat’ as Anna called it – and headed for the bathroom. He found his box of shaving cream, lifted the lid, and popped the red book’s small key inside.
That done, he felt a sudden rush of pride. He had been in this country less than a year and already he was at the centre of things. He held the fates of some of the most important men in England in his hands. He would prove himself deserving of their faith; he wouldn’t let them down. And yet, thrilling as this was, he longed to do more than merely safeguard their secrets. He wanted to help their cause.
The clock in the hallway chimed nine. Anna would be waiting for him. He wondered if he should stop off somewhere to get something to eat first. There would be no food on offer from Anna. Just martinis and …
The thought aroused him, sending a surge of blood to his groin. He made one last check of the apartment and headed out into the London night.
James Zennor spent the afternoon in the Sterling Library. He knew what he was looking for, but this time decided he would speak to no one and ask no questions. He would search on his own.
It did not take him long to get used to the place. Fifteen storeys high and as imposing as a Gothic cathedral, the library nevertheless felt familiar, solid and rooted, the stone as dull and pitted by age as if it had stood there for centuries, like one of its Oxford counterparts. But it turned out that the Sterling Library was a kind of confidence trick and he had fallen for it. An information booklet set him straight: work on the library had only finished in 1931, just nine years earlier. The aged appearance was an act of artifice. The booklet explained that, before construction began, the stones from which the library had been built had been deliberately buried in soil for two years, pulled out only once they looked suitably eroded and weather-beaten. As for the stained-glass windows, with their jagged strips of black leading, some of those panes had been deliberately cracked and then leaded to get that ancient monastery look. James could only marvel at the mentality that would go to such lengths: the university of a young country spending a fortune pretending to be old. Who would have thought youth, energy and vigour could be so unsure of itself? He had never before diagnosed a building, but he concluded that the Sterling Library had a distinct case of what his fellow psychologists referred to as an ‘inferiority complex’.
He found what he was looking for: the newspaper reading room. It was full of deep leather armchairs and tables piled with papers clasped in long, wooden binders. He ignored the stacked copies of the
New York Times
and
Wall Street Journal
and pounced instead on the
New Haven Evening Register
. He had already worked out the edition he wanted: the Antonia had left Liverpool on the tenth of July, arriving into Quebec on the nineteenth. there would have been a few days in Canada with arrival at Yale on or around the twenty-second. There, he had it: the paper for July 22nd 1940.
He scanned the front, turned to the inside pages, then back again. Nothing. Maybe they had stayed in Canada longer than he had estimated. He went to the twenty-fourth, riffling through the paper. Still nothing.
Then on an inside page of the
Register
of July the twenty-fifth, he saw it: a photograph showing the window of a railway train, the frame filled with the faces of six children, one a baby on the lap of her mother. The caption read ‘Refugees Find New Haven in Land Holding Promise of Peace’ – but the woman was not Florence.
His eye combed the story, searching for names. There was a Spokes, a Handfield-Jones and a Phelps-Brown, but no Zennor and no Walsingham. Still, this at least was written confirmation that he had not gone on a wild goose chase, that he had been right to cross the ocean and come to Yale. The Oxford children were here. Then he spotted another, smaller photo lower down. Was that Harry, a blurred little face in the corner? He desperately wanted it to be, but now that he looked closer, he doubted it.
Of course there were two dozen mothers and five times as many children; it meant nothing that his wife and child had not been mentioned in the article. And yet he had never met any man with a camera who had been able to resist taking photographs of Florence. Half of the press stories about the People’s Olympiad seemed to be accompanied by a shot of the beautiful British swimmer Florence Walsingham. As a result, he had all but assumed that if the New Haven papers had made any mention at all of the Oxford arrivals, his wife would feature prominently.
But there could be other stories. He advanced to the editions for the subsequent days, eventually finding this: ‘Dress of British Refugees Here Sets Them Apart From US Youth’. There was another picture, of older girls, and a story about the long outer coats and long ‘short pants’ of the younger boys – but no photograph and no mention of Harry. There were references to the sandals and school blazers, with insignia ‘emblazoned on the pockets’, and much excitement over the ‘natural color straw hats to protect them from the rays of the sun’, especially the hat worn by one little girl on top of her pigtails. Back numbers of the
Yale Daily News
served up similar offerings, but of Florence and Harry there was not a trace.