Authors: Dennis Wheatley
First they walked down the slope to the twin towers that guard the entrance to the fortress proper, through the great arched gate between them and on to the bridge across the wide dry moat. Gregory glanced into it and quickly looked away again. In peacetime soldiers of the garrison played football down in it; but it was there, so he had been told, that on certain grim dawns spies caught during the war had been put
up against the casement wall and executed by a firing squad.
A moment later they passed through a second great gateway, under the Byward Tower, and entered what seemed like a sunken road, as forty-foot walls rose on either side, almost shutting out the dim light of the late October afternoon.
From long habit, his Yeoman guide remarked, ‘The river used to run here once, sir. That’s why it’s called Water Lane. The Normans built only the White Tower and the great Inner Wall on our left. It was Richard I, 1189-1199, who pushed the river back by dumping thousands of tons of earth here taken from widening the moat. The great Outer Wall on our right, with its five additional towers facing the river, was not completed till Edward I, 1272-1307.’
A hundred yards farther on Water Lane passed through an archway between the huge cylindrical Wakefield Tower and, on the river side, an oblong block as big as a small castle in itself, with smaller towers at each of its outer corners. This was called St. Thomas’s Tower and held, perhaps more fascination for visitors than any other. Centrally beneath it ran a high vaulted tunnel which could be reached by a flight of steps down into a part of the moat. The Tower had been built to defend the tunnel, as until Victorian times it had been the entrance by river to the fortress, famous for centuries as Traitors’ Gate.
After a glance at the great ten feet high double gates with their cross-bars of stout timber, Gregory turned with his guide towards the Inner Wall and accompanied him through it by yet another great gate which ran immediately under the Bloody Tower. As they walked up the steep slope on the far side of the gate he could now see the splendid cube of the White Tower to his right front. Unlike the other seventeen towers there was nothing in the least grim about William the Conqueror’s original Palace-keep, yet its battlements and four domed turrets dwarfed all the rest into insignificance.
Turning away from it, his guide led him up a flight of steps set in a wall, to higher ground, and across an open space in which trees were growing, to a half-timbered Tudor building called ‘The King’s House’. Having rung the front door bell he handed Gregory over to another Yeoman Warder, who took his name, asked him to wait in a pleasantly furnished hall, and returned almost at once to say:
‘Colonel Faviell will see you, sir. Please come this way.’ The Yeoman then ushered him into a ground floor office.
Gregory produced his letter. As soon as the Governor had read it, he reached for his cap and said, ‘That is clear enough. I’ll take you across to her.’
As they left the house he went on, ‘I don’t mind telling you, this business has been quite a headache to us. The night of her arrest they put her in Brixton Prison, and why they couldn’t have left her there, goodness knows. Perhaps the Government have some idea of making an example of her for propaganda purposes and feel that “Woman Spy Sentenced after Court Martial in the Tower” would ring a bigger bell with other young women who have an itch to do the Nazis’ dirty work for them. Anyway, fathering her on us presented me with a tricky problem. You see, there hasn’t been a woman prisoner in the Tower since the Lord knows when, and the question was where to put her.’
‘Providing you imported a couple of wardresses to look after her, what would have been wrong with putting her in one of the ordinary cells?’ Gregory asked.
The Colonel laughed. ‘That’s just it. There aren’t any. People still think of the Tower as a State Prison; but it has long since ceased to be used for that purpose.’
‘How about Baillie-Stewart; he was confined here?’
‘Oh, Baillie-Stewart was confined in a first floor tower room in that building over there.’ The Colonel pointed beyond the White Tower at a comparatively modern block in the northeast corner of the great quadrangle. ‘It contains the Officers’ Mess and sleeping quarters. Washing arrangements and so on ruled it out entirely as accommodation for a woman.’
‘How did you solve your problem, then?’
‘We put her in St. Thomas’s Tower. Its interior was converted to modern needs as a residence for the Keeper of the Crown Jewels. There’s a flying bridge from it over Water Lane to the Wakefield Tower where the Jewels are kept. I mean, were kept in peace-time. They were moved out of London for greater safety at the beginning of the war. General Sir George Younghusband was Keeper of the Jewels, but in April ’41 a bomb was dropped nearby and the tower suffered a bit from the blast. In consequence, as there were no longer any jewels here to keep, Sir George decided to move out, and took most
of his furniture with him. But there was enough left to furnish a few rooms, and no difficulty about making the place reasonably habitable.’
While they were talking, the Colonel had led Gregory back across the open space, down the steep slope and through the arch under the Bloody Tower. Crossing Water Lane, they went up some steps set sideways in the wall of St. Thomas’s Tower that led to a narrow gallery immediately above the great pit in which lay Traitors’ Gate. Some way along the gallery there was an ordinary front door. The Colonel rang the bell and a minute or two later it was answered by a muscular middle-aged woman in a dark uniform.
‘This is Mrs. Sutton,’ the Colonel said. ‘She and her colleague, Mrs. Wright, have been lent to us from Brixton.’ He then introduced Gregory and told her that he was to be left alone with the prisoner for as long as he wished.
Gregory thanked him and asked if he should report back when he had finished his interrogation, to which the Colonel replied, ‘No. All you have to do is to hand back your temporary pass at the gate. That will check you out.’
The wardress conducted Gregory through into a lofty hall in one corner of which a short flight of stairs ran up to rooms on a higher floor. Crossing the hall she took a key from her pocket, unlocked a door, opened it for him, and said in a deep bass voice, ‘When you want to be let out, sir, be good enough to ring.’
He stepped forward into a good-sized room. It had narrow mullioned windows at one end, some of which, owing to bomb blast, were boarded over. That, and the early darkness of the afternoon, shrouded it in deep twilight. Gregory could just make out that it was furnished only near the windows and the vague form of Sabine sitting with her feet up on a sofa. The wardress said from behind him:
‘Gentleman to see you, ducks. Just what the doctor ordered to put an end to you sitting there brooding in the dark.’
Knowing the brutal treatment meted out by women guards to their prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, Gregory could not help contrasting with it the kindness in Mrs. Sutton’s deep voice, and marvelling that she should show such forbearance to an enemy accused of inflicting grievous injury on her country. As the thought flashed through his mind, the wardress
flicked on the light, shut the door and locked him in.
Next moment Sabine was on her feet, crying. ‘Gregory! Gregory! Oh, how marvellous to see you! How clever of you to persuade them to let you visit me in this awful place.’
He took both her hands, smiled at her and pressed them, as he said, ‘There wasn’t anything very clever about it. I would have come sooner if I could; but the only line I had was offering to help interrogate you, and to begin with they thought the experts would get everything out of you that could be got without any help from me.’
She gave a contemptuous shrug. ‘The people they sent tried wheedling and threatening by turns, but I knew that none of them dared lay a finger on me; so I just laughed at them. I stymied them from the beginning by quoting at them your Duke of Wellington. You know his famous dictum. “Never explain”.’
‘I felt pretty certain you wouldn’t go to pieces,’ he said seriously. ‘But you being here is very far from anything to laugh about; and I hope you are going to explain to me, if not officially, anyhow off the record.’
‘Yes. I owe you that.’ She sat down and, as he took a chair beside her, went on, ‘I didn’t like making use of you; but I had no alternative if I was both to save you and keep from failing in what I regard as doing my best for my country.’
‘When you persuaded me to bring you here, then, it was with the deliberate intention of spying for the Nazis?’
‘Yes. It was the outcome of that night when Ribb spoilt our fun by turning up just after I had got into bed with you. During the awful wrangle that ensued with Grauber and the rest of them, I was driven into admitting the truth about how I really did first meet you, that through you I had met Sir Pellinore, and that he was an old friend of my father’s.’
‘I remember that.’
‘But you didn’t overhear what followed; because you were driven from your hiding place by a sneezing fit or something.’
‘That’s right. I missed five or six minutes of the row between Grauber and Ribb, and when I got back Grauber had gone.’
‘Well, Ribb wouldn’t be where he is if he hadn’t a very quick mind. The moment he learned I was
persona grata
with Sir Pellinore, he realised that fact could be used to save him from Hitler’s wrath. I mean if Himmler tried to do him dirt
by reporting to the
Führer
that his mistress had been aiding a British spy. If I could get you to plant me on Sir Pellinore, he would be able to say that I had been working for the Nazis all the time, and at great risk to myself had gone to England to carry on the good work.
‘He tried his utmost to sell the idea to Grauber that there was far more to be gained by letting us escape to England than by cutting you up in little pieces and trying to have me put in a concentration camp. But Grauber wouldn’t hear of it. He was obsessed with the idea of getting his own back on you. He went off still in a towering rage, vowing that he would stop at nothing to get you, and that if the Hungarian Police refused to co-operate he would demand that special pressure should be exerted on the Regent by Berlin.
‘After all the admissions I had been forced to make, Ribb took it for granted I was concealing you somewhere in the house. As it was against his interests to give you up, when Grauber had gone I ceased to deny it. And I told him how we had planned for you to drive me across the frontier using Mario’s passport. Ribb agreed that the plan offered the best chance for us to escape, and said that he could get the Regent to prevent any official attempt being made to stop us for twenty-four hours, but that any time after that Grauber might get the upper hand.
‘Then he tackled me about working as a spy when I got to England. He said that apart from getting him out of the mess I had landed him in, and helping to defeat the Russians, it was in my own interests. If I wouldn’t play, then there could never be any worthwhile future for me. I wouldn’t be able to get my fortune out of Hungary, or ever go back there, or live anywhere in Hitler’s Europe, after the war was over; and I’d be publicly branded as a traitor to my country. Whereas, if I could only get one really valuable war secret out of Sir Pellinore, and send it back to him, that would not only clear him with Hitler, but make me a privileged person in the Greater Reich for the rest of my life.’
Gregory nodded. ‘It must have been just after you had agreed that I got back to my hiding place. I remember his saying that he would brief you next day, and wondering what he meant; but you told me afterwards that it was about getting across the frontier.’
‘There was no need for him to do that; my passport and Mario’s already carried special visas enabling us to cross any frontier controlled by the Reich without going through the usual formalities. I had to see him so that he could give me particulars of the people to contact in London, who would pass anything I could get hold of back to him.’
‘So that’s how it was. It was certainly a clever scheme—if it had come off.’
‘But it hasn’t. Where I slipped up, I don’t know; but they caught me red-handed.’ A sudden note of anxiety came into her voice. ‘What will they do to me, Gregory? What will they do to me?’
‘My dear, I don’t know. You’ll be tried
in camera
, and by a military court, I suppose. But let’s not talk of that for the moment. Tell me about your contacts. I want to hear all you can tell me about the Moldavian Embassy.’
Sabine shook her head, ‘No, my dear, no. I’ve told you my personal part in the story; and if you care to pass that on I’ve no objection. I see no reason why it should make my case worse. But I’m not giving away other people. As far as my activities since I’ve been in London are concerned, the Duke’s dictum still stands: “Never explain”.’
‘That’s all very well, but I’m afraid you’ve got to if I’m to help you.’
‘Help me!’ She made a little gesture of despair. ‘I’m sure you want to. But with the best will in the world, how can you. Having brought me here must have made you to some extent suspect. I take it that they regard you as having been completely fooled by me; but now I’ve been caught anything you may say on my behalf could only make them doubt your veracity, and it wouldn’t do me any good.’
He stood up and took her hand. ‘I don’t intend to say things but to do them.’
She looked up at him with a puzzled frown. ‘Do? What can you do?’
‘God knows! But no sentence they can inflict on you would be half as bad as what Grauber would have done to me if you hadn’t saved me from him in Budapest. So I’ll still owe you something if I can get you out of this. I mean to gamble everything on planning your escape.’
‘Oh, Gregory!’ Sabine came quickly to her feet. She laid her free hand on his shoulder and tears started to her eyes. ‘How wonderful of you! But do you think it’s really possible?’
He looked away from her, a shade uncomfortably. ‘Honestly, I don’t know. In some ways it should be easier to escape from a place like this than from a modern prison. In them they have all sorts of checking systems—cells that can be looked into at any hour of the day or night without the doors being opened, electric rays which if broken by anyone passing through them instantly set off alarm bells, and that sort of thing—whereas in the past they simply relied on big locks and thick bolts and bars. If this were an ordinary old fortress I’d back myself to get you out of it; but the trouble is, it’s not. It’s the size of a small town. To pull the wool over the wardresses’ eyes and pinch the key to your room would be only a beginning. I’d still have three gates to get you through before we reached the street. At night they are locked, and as the Tower is now closed to the public any strange woman going through them during the daytime would be certain to be challenged. Perhaps it was wrong of me to rouse your hopes prematurely. I can only say that I mean to try.’