Brighton Belle (23 page)

‘I’d hope so,’ McGregor said. ‘So, let’s get this straight, shall we? Do you know where Sandor is?’

‘No,’ Mirabelle shook her head.

‘As far as you’re aware, who last saw him?’

‘Vesta and Manni – Manni was the one who kidnapped both of them, on Lisabetta’s say-so. Then he let Vesta go to legitimise the claim at the insurance company.’

‘And who else is involved?’

‘Dr Crichton, Lisabetta – I don’t have a last name – and Bert Jennings. And Manni Williams. That’s all I know.’

‘Dr Crichton? At the head of it? And that woman who is staying at his house?’

‘No, the other way round – Lisabetta is in charge. I think Crichton fell foul of her. Last night she drugged him and she may have driven his car off a cliff along the London Road. I
couldn’t stop her. She’s pulling out – I heard her phone London and arrange for her things to be sent down to Brighton on the first train this morning. She’s going to leave
the country. Soon.’

‘Right.’ McGregor held out his hand to stop Mirabelle saying anything else. He was thinking. He stood up and paced backwards and forwards beside the bed. Then he turned and stared at
Mirabelle. It seemed unlikely that an elegant and rather fetching woman like Miss Bevan would know about these things but you could tell straight away that she was at home in this environment.
There was something impressive about her. And, his senses tingled, if what she said were true, this would be the biggest case he’d ever handled. He could shine but he had to be careful to
qualify what was and wasn’t accurate. Women, after all, tended towards the vibrant imagination and some of these ideas were, well, vibrant in the extreme.

There was one thing Mirabelle and Vesta were definitely right about, though. Whatever he did, he’d have to use men he could really trust. Then it came to him. McGregor smiled. For once it
would be easy. Anyone he wasn’t sure of he could send to Fairfield Road and then he’d put together a small team to verify Mirabelle’s information. They could work down here, to
start with. Out of the way. He’d only speak to the guys he knew were absolutely straight. There could be no leaks and no backhanders. Too many criminals had got away with too much in
Brighton. That was set to change. And now he could prove that his men could be effective despite the corruption – the Sussex Constabulary was already miles ahead of the shambles it had been
in when he first arrived.

‘So,’ he said, ‘if I’m understanding you correctly, priority number one is to find Father Sandor and then arrest Lisabetta, Dr Crichton if he’s alive, Manni of
course and this ...’

‘Bert Jennings,’ Vesta chipped in helpfully.

Mirabelle nodded.

With a stern expression McGregor banged for the door to be opened. He called for the duty sergeant who’d worked at the station for twenty-five years – one of the few men who
hadn’t been implicated in the scandals. He’d suffered for it, too – McGregor had heard he’d been beaten up a couple of times for refusing to turn a blind eye.

‘Simmons,’ he said, ‘I’d like the file on that missing priest – everything we’ve got. I need a uniformed officer to go over to the train station and find out
everything that came down on the early train from Victoria by way of cargo. I want a comprehensive list. Early papers, the lot. Check out any complaints or disturbances on the Hangleton Road over
the last few months. And I’ll need Gourlay Michaels and Richardson down here, please, but first everyone else can go to the racecourse. Get them on the case up there, and then we’ll get
cracking.’

‘I think you should run Lisabetta’s details through the ICPC,’ Mirabelle said.

McGregor looked up. ‘Bit young,’ he pointed out, ‘but then, if this is all true, she started young, didn’t she?’

‘What’s the ICPC?’ Vesta piped up. Ever since Mirabelle had said the word ‘Nazis’ she had sat on the bed feeling rather shellshocked.

‘International Criminal Police Commission,’ McGregor told her. ‘I suppose it would do no harm.’

‘I’m sure she’ll have changed her name several times,’ Mirabelle conceded, ‘but you never know.’

‘Good idea. And we can try this other identity – Romana Laszlo – too. Who knows which name Lisabetta was using first. Simmons, could you get Gourlay to do that? And send down
some tea and bacon rolls, would you? Miss Churchill appears to be on the verge of starvation, poor thing.’

As the door closed he turned to the women. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll send you home soon and we can get on.’

‘Don’t you need our help?’ Vesta insisted.

‘We need information, Miss Churchill, but this isn’t a job for amateurs. There is no point in you sitting in the station all day.’

McGregor took out a pen and paper and began to chart Lisabetta’s operation. ‘They’d need a lot of people to pull all this off, you know. Are you sure that Lisabetta is capable
of being at the head of it?’

Mirabelle nodded. ‘Pretty sure.’

‘I met her at the Grand, you know. She
cried
,’ McGregor recalled. ‘She was crying about the Spaniard who died. Friend of the family.’

Mirabelle stared at him with naked derision. ‘You think there’s a man in the background? You think that with a pretty girl there has to be. When I worked in the service some of our
best spies were women. Don’t guess what a woman is capable of by the front she shows you, Detective Superintendent. There may be a man behind Lisabetta, I have no idea, but there
needn’t be just because she’s young and pretty. God knows what she has done. By my reckoning she was in her mid-teens towards the end of the war – looking like she does, stuck
somewhere near Poland, if my reckoning is right on her accent, when the Russians rumbled through. If she got out of the country, that alone makes her very tough. No, she’s more than capable
of running this on her own and I’m sure the ICPC will have a file on her.’

McGregor nodded curtly. He had to admit it. He’d never met a woman like Mirabelle Bevan before – she was quite remarkable. Inspiring, even.

He turned around his notebook and showed Mirabelle what he’d sketched – a charge sheet in the form of a flow chart with money coming from prostitution, sale of false papers,
insurance fraud, laundering of illegal currency and valuables, involving murder, kidnapping and blackmail.

‘You’ll find the proof. You’ll see,’ she said. ‘There are lists of missing Nazis where I used to work at Whitehall and there are agencies still looking for them. I
worked on the files for Nuremberg. Velazquez will be on one of those lists. You can track him down from there.’

There was a sharp knock on the cell door. Sergeant Simmons entered with a plate of bacon rolls in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. Behind him three men were waiting in the narrow
passageway.

McGregor acknowledged them and then cast his eye over the notes.

‘We’re going to work down here, sir?’ one man questioned. ‘In the women’s cells?’

‘For now,’ McGregor said sternly. ‘Yes.’

Vesta took a bacon roll from the pile and chewed it methodically, perched on the edge of the bed.

‘Looks like you’re right,’ McGregor said to Mirabelle as he carefully checked his notes. ‘The ICPC is sending two officers from St Cloud. They have a couple of possible
pseudonyms for Lisabetta. Nothing arrived on the early train from London though apart from newspapers and a couple of deliveries from Selfridges – furniture and such. Oh, and there have been
several complaints over the last few months about hammering noises at your premises on Hangleton Road. Claims to be a foundry making iron railings that opened in January. Originally they were
working at night. Looks like they’ve been at it for some time. Do you have any idea where else she might have been operating?’

‘I know she was in Amsterdam, and she said she had been shopping in Paris, but she comes from Eastern Europe, though probably not Hungary, where she claims. I can’t tie down her
accent, but it seems more Austrian or Eastern German – maybe somewhere on the Polish border. My guess is that her background will be in prostitution – it’s a way into this whole
world, isn’t it? It would only take one client to make her realise she can charge through the nose. She seems obsessed by money – and, well, that’s prostitutes for you.’

Vesta looked at her feet and Mirabelle thought she detected a blush.

‘Right, well, I’m just about ready to brief everyone, I think. First priority will be to find the priest.’

‘We want to help, you know ...’ Mirabelle offered. ‘You’re short-handed, and both Vesta and I would willingly volunteer.’

McGregor shook his head and a dark look crossed his face. It was similar to the look Ben McGuigan had when he last left the office, Mirabelle thought. Perhaps McGregor was trying to protect her,
just like Ben.

‘You’re two ladies,’ McGregor said.

‘Two ladies who figured the whole thing out and handed it to you on a plate,’ Mirabelle remonstrated.

‘You never heard of Mata Hari?’ Vesta chipped in. ‘She’s got nothing on Mirabelle. Didn’t you hear where she used to work?’

‘No,’ McGregor repeated, ‘and I’m sending you two home. You’ve done enough. You could have got yourself killed last night, both of you – housebreaking and God
alone knows what else. It’s too dangerous. I won’t be responsible for civilians. And I need to get to the racecourse if we want to get Manni in the cells. Simmons, send these two home,
would you? We’ll call if we need you, ladies. And we will need you – only later.’

25

X2: the counterintelligence and agent-manipulation branch of the Secret Service

I
n the back of the car on the way to the Lawns Mirabelle couldn’t stop thinking about Jack. He always said you couldn’t predict
what was going to happen for one simple reason: people. ‘If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we’d have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are
involved it becomes much more problematic because they’re erratic. People do crazy things that don’t make sense.’

Mirabelle had only been seeing Jack for six months and that night, back at his quarters, they had been drinking Campari. It was dreadful stuff but the whisky had run out. Jack promised
he’d cook dinner and then arrived home with a brown paper bag containing six precious eggs. He’d planned to whisk them into an omelette with an onion and some thyme, which grew
plentifully in a herb box outside the window. He often came back ‘all thinky’ from work and as he spoke Mirabelle presumed he was trying to explain some of the acts of bravery that had
helped the Allies. She sipped the vivid red drink in her highball glass sparingly.

‘People fall in love, you see,’ Jack continued with a cheeky grin, ‘and then they don’t behave logically. Have you ever heard of David Hume?’

She was taken aback. Jack hadn’t said anything about love before. Mirabelle shook her head.

‘Hume’s a Jock philosopher,’ Jack continued as if this wasn’t a landmark. ‘He said that you can see a thousand white swans but you still don’t know that white
is the only colour of the swan. You can see white swans all your life, and the more you see, the more you’re sure, statistically, that all swans are white. It’s logical. You think you
can rely on it. But all it takes is one black swan and everything changes. It’s a bolt from the blue. Something you aren’t expecting and you have to start from scratch. You’re my
black swan, Belle. I love you. And now things will never be the same for me.’

She hadn’t been able to speak. She’d just wrapped her arms around him and, as far as she could remember, they ended up having the eggs for breakfast the following morning.

‘We’re short a black swan,’ Mirabelle mumbled as they went up the stairs and Vesta scrabbled in her pocket for the key.

‘God, I hope they get him out alive,’ Vesta whispered as the police car pulled away.

It was a grey overcast morning. Mirabelle squeezed her hand. The desk sergeant had promised he’d keep them informed: ‘All you have to do is wait by the phone, Miss Bevan.’

‘There’s nothing for it but to sit it out now,’ she said, sounding downhearted, as Vesta put the key in the lock. ‘He seems competent enough.’ She checked her
watch.

‘I need a bath,’ Vesta said.

‘Now that is a good idea. I think I have some bath salts. Orange stuff. It would be good to relax.’

They were only just moving over the threshold when out of nowhere the man appeared. At first what was happening didn’t register properly. Mirabelle felt herself being pushed forcefully
through the doorway and bundled into the hall. Vesta cried out and was shoved in behind. Mirabelle fumbled for the flick-knife in her pocket. And then, in a second, they both saw with a flood of
relief who the unshaven figure in worn work clothes was.

‘Sandor! Sandor!’

He was safe. They flung their arms around him, buoyed up with joy. It seemed too good to be true.

Mirabelle’s face flushed as she breathed in the smell of burning embers and sweat from his skin. If Sandor was alive everything would be all right. ‘Thank God,’ she whispered
and she felt the tension in her shoulders release.

It was only when Mirabelle and Vesta drew back that they noticed there was another man – rough-looking and carrying a heavy bag.

‘Ah, yes,’ Sandor grinned, proud at the reaction he’d provoked, ‘Waclaw helped me escape. We have been waiting here for you for hours – almost all night! We watched
until you came home. We did not want to show ourselves to the uniformed officers. Just in case.’

Vesta burst into tears. ‘I was so worried,’ she sobbed, ‘so very worried. It’s wonderful to see you, Sandor.’

‘I’m fine, my child.’ Sandor comforted her, putting an arm around her shoulders. ‘All safe now. And I come with news for your operation.’

Mirabelle shook Waclaw’s hand enthusiastically. ‘Polish?’ she asked.

He nodded.

‘You’re very welcome here. Come upstairs,’ Mirabelle said. ‘Follow me.’

Inside, the men inspected Mirabelle’s drawing room without saying a word, Vesta mopped her tears and went to put on the kettle, and Mirabelle rang the station from the telephone in the
hallway. McGregor was in a radio car, the desk sergeant said. He’d make sure the message was passed on.