Dominion (60 page)

‘Your mother will have to fend for herself for now. Your friend David Fitzgerald ran away from the Dominions Office on Friday. The question is, how did he know we were there? I’ve
been thinking, you were the only one in a position to tell him.’

Syme joined in. ‘If you don’t tell us, there are people down here who’ll get it out of you. Afterwards your poor old mother won’t recognize you.’

It was brutal but it worked. Carol said, ‘It was me. I warned him.’

‘Why?’

She put her head down. ‘I love him.’

Gunther said, ‘Did you give him access to secret files? Look at me, please.’

She looked up, her large eyes full of tears. ‘No. I didn’t know anything about all this until you came to the office. I didn’t help David. I never gave him any access to my
files, I wouldn’t have if he’d asked but he didn’t, ever.’

‘You never gave him your keys?’

‘No. I swear. I always used to keep my key in my handbag. And I had to hand it in whenever I went out.’

Gunther thought a minute, picked up a pencil and tapped it on the table. ‘Is the key numbered?’

She looked puzzled. ‘Yes, there’s a number on the tag.’

‘And who makes the keys?’

‘I’ve no idea. The Ministry of Works, I suppose.’

Gunther remembered a case his father had been involved with long ago, a locksmith who made keys for safety deposit boxes at a bank and who, given a number, could make a duplicate. ‘Could
he have seen the number on the key?’

She looked stricken. That was it, Gunther thought, that was why Fitzgerald had befriended her, in the hope he could get a look at the key. He saw that she realized it, too. Syme looked puzzled,
then very interested. ‘There’s someone who makes locks for the government involved in this?’

‘Possibly.’

‘He looked at the number somehow while she was looking between his legs?’ Carol flinched as though she had been hit.

‘Maybe.’ Gunther turned to Carol, who had flushed a deep red. ‘Did Mr Fitzgerald ever mention the name Muncaster?’

‘Who?’

‘A friend of his. Frank Muncaster.’

‘No. The only friend of his I knew of was a Mr Drax.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I swear. In God’s name.’

Gunther saw she was telling the truth. The disappointment must have shown in his face, because Syme said, ‘I want her when you’ve finished, I want to find out more about how
Fitzgerald got hold of that key. We’ll take her to Special Branch HQ.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Please,’ Carol said. ‘Can I make arrangements for my mother?’

‘Fuck your mother,’ Syme replied.

Carol looked at Gunther, desperation flashing in her eyes. ‘There’s something else I can tell you,’ she said. ‘It’s all I know, it’s the last thing I’ve
kept to myself.’

Gunther raised his eyebrows.

‘It’s about Mrs Fitzgerald. I’ve thought about it, if I tell you it can’t hurt her, because it shows she wasn’t working with David.’ She spoke in a rush,
about Sarah’s visit to her, her belief that David had been having an affair with her. ‘I told her about warning him that day. I told her it looked as though he could be a spy. She was
shocked, she didn’t know. So you see, now I’ve told you everything.’

‘You warned her, and before that you warned him,’ Gunther said levelly. ‘If it wasn’t for you we would have got him. The British authorities will deal with your
treason.’ Gunther couldn’t feel sorry for her; this was the sort of woman who wrecked marriages, ruined other people’s lives. ‘How well did you know Geoffrey Drax?’ he
asked.

‘Not well,’ she answered, her voice shaking. ‘I met him a few times. But he’s a reserved man, not easy to know.’

‘Did you discuss politics with any of these people?’

‘No. You don’t in the Civil Service, unless you know someone well. David and I never – never crossed that barrier.’

He asked bluntly, ‘So you and Fitzgerald never slept together?’

She shook her head. Tears had begun to roll down her cheeks.

‘He was almost certainly using you, you know.’

She looked at him with a sudden fierceness. ‘I loved him. I kept hoping he’d – it’s hard for a woman, you know, you can’t make the first move the way a man
can.’ She gave a fractured laugh. ‘Just seeing him, just going to concerts with him, and lunch, it was – almost like a drug. A little makes you want more, doesn’t
it?’

‘Fucking tart,’ Syme said.

She looked down again, spent.

‘Well, Miss Bennett,’ Gunther said heavily, ‘now the scales have fallen from your eyes.’ He thought of his wife. He had loved her, too, right up to his discovery of her
betrayal.

She looked at him. ‘I still love him. Think of me how you like. I can’t help it.’ It was pathetic, yet said with an odd dignity. Gunther felt a twinge. He looked at Syme.
‘Perhaps you could get the local police to visit her mother, see if they can arrange something. After all, we don’t want the old woman making a public scene.’

Syme shrugged. ‘I suppose so. But I want this one taken to Special Branch HQ.’

‘I’ll get our people to arrange a car.’

Carol cringed back in her chair. ‘I advise you to talk as freely, Miss Bennett,’ Gunther said severely, ‘as you have here.’

Syme smiled. ‘We’ll make sure of that.’

Afterwards he and Syme went up to his office to talk. So far as Muncaster was concerned they had found out nothing. They found nothing the next day either, or the next.
Muncaster and Drax and the Fitzgeralds were gone, vanished, no doubt hiding somewhere in the network of Resistance safe houses. Muncaster’s fellow workers were questioned again, and some of
his old fellow-students at university. Drax’s parents, too. None of them knew anything. Gunther learned from Syme that all sorts of enquiries were going on in the Civil Service; MI5 had been
brought in now. Gunther said he was glad, but he wasn’t really interested in the spy ring.

On Friday afternoon, a week after Fitzgerald’s flight, a thick fog came down, in the afternoon, smothering London. Gunther’s office was at the top of Senate House and from the window
he saw an odd thing; the smog did not quite reach the top of the building, so from his office he could look down on it. He had an extraordinary view of a greyish-yellow sea, stretching to the
horizon. It was like the poisonous atmosphere of some alien planet, with only the very tops of the tallest buildings visible. It was one of the strangest things he had ever seen. Above the smog the
air was milky-white, the winter sun just visible as a pale red orb.

Syme came in; he walked across and joined Gunther at the window. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.

‘I hope it doesn’t last.’ Gunther looked at him. ‘Any news?’

‘Nothing. We’ve plenty of agents in the Resistance, but nobody’s seen or heard anything of these people. And trawling the whole country, it’s going to take a hell of a
time.’

‘Any progress on the Civil Service spies?’

‘A few leads. They haven’t come to anything yet, but they will. I’m not allowed to talk to you about it,’ Syme added, ‘only if something comes up that is relevant
to Muncaster.’

‘I understand,’ Gunther said. ‘We’ll get there, you know. We will.’ He smiled encouragingly. ‘You will get your promotion, your exciting job in the North, a
big house there to go with your new Jew’s one.’

‘And you?’

Gunther shrugged. They both looked down at the fog. It swirled and eddied below them, the top lit by a reddish tinge now as the sun began to set. Gunther smiled. ‘This view reminds me of a
story I learned at school.’ He began to quote from the Bible. ‘
He took Jesus to a high place, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and said,
“All these things I will give thee, to have dominion over, if you will fall down and worship me”.
’ He frowned. ‘That is not quite right. Was it “dominion” or
“power”? Anyway, it was something like that.’

‘Jesus was a Jew, wasn’t he? Who was it who took Jesus to the high place?’

Gunther shrugged. Then he remembered, with a superstitious shiver, that it had been the Devil.

‘My parents never took me to church,’ Syme said.

‘You were lucky.’ Gunther smiled again, sadly. ‘It was very dull.’

When Gunther left Senate House that evening he had to navigate the streets by memory, walking right next to the buildings, a hand touching the walls, bumping into people who
were doing the same. The walls were damp, the fog thick and stinking of sulphur. The fumes made his nose and throat sore. He was relieved when he got back to the flat. He knew that he needed to
think, to try to find some way forward. He had a bath and a meal. After looking out he drew the curtains against the horrible night and sat at the table in his bathrobe, a strong cup of coffee
beside him.

The interrogations, the telephone calls, all the frantic activity had taken them nowhere. They had to find a new way of thinking.

He got up, pacing the thick carpet. He was starting a headache; the fog had brought it on just as the dust gave him headaches in Berlin. He thought, what would the Resistance people do with
Muncaster now they had him? What would
he
do if he were them, had hold of someone with a big secret, who was mentally ill, and unstable? Kill him, surely, to prevent him being captured and
telling all he knew. Muncaster had wanted to kill himself anyway.

But the man calling himself Ben Hall could easily have killed him at the hospital. No, they wanted him alive. Why? It had to be because of the Americans. It had all started with them. They must
have put the British Resistance up to this. He thought, they’re going to try and get Muncaster to America.

He went to the window and pulled aside the curtain again. Outside, thick, gluey darkness, the faintest fuzzy glow from a streetlight below the flat, car horns breaking the silence –
distant, muted, like sounds from a ship out at sea. Was that how they would try to get Muncaster away, on a merchant ship going to America? Descriptions and photographs had already been circulated
to the ports. He thought, in his mental state, and with his damaged hand, Muncaster would be easy to spot. No, they wouldn’t risk a ship.

An aircraft? He dismissed that, too. Security at the airports would be even tighter than at the ports. A submarine, that was surely the most likely option. An American military submarine. It was
known they sometimes came into the Channel.

He crossed to the bookcase. He pulled out an atlas and looked at the map of England. Birmingham, where they had started from, was right in the centre of the country. They would have to get
Muncaster to the coast, but probably have to hole up somewhere for a while first. If a submarine were picking them up it would have to be from a southern or western port. The Welsh coast? Devon or
Cornwall? Certainly nowhere too near the Isle of Wight, under German control. Sussex or Kent? He thought, if it were me I’d set it up so they could go due south, the shortest way via London.
He ran his finger down the long straight line of the motorway from Birmingham to London. They could hide up in the city. They would have to wait for the right weather, a calm sea and a moonlit
night – then travel from there to the Sussex or Kent coast.

He thought, if it was a submarine it would communicate with the coast by radio. But how to find the wavelength, the code? He took a slug of coffee. He thought of Muncaster, that piteous little
man, led down a beach somewhere. A picture of his own son, playing on the sand in Krimea, came unexpectedly into his mind. He thought it all through again, looking for holes in his theory. Then he
went to the telephone. He would call the embassy, tell Gessler the German authorities on the Isle of Wight should be told to watch for a submarine, listen for radio signals. First, though, he
telephoned Syme, at home. He took a little while to answer, and he sounded sleepy. It was past one o’clock; Gunther had lost track of time.

‘I have been thinking, William. I believe Muncaster and his people may be in London. How many agents inside the Resistance do you have in the city?’

‘A good few.’

‘I think you should concentrate here. Try to sweep up as much of the London Resistance as you can. Do you think that would be possible?’

Syme said, ‘Usually we only do that if we’ve hopes of netting some big fish.’

‘Muncaster is a very big fish. And his people have killed one of yours in the city.’

‘This weather won’t make it easier.’

‘It won’t help them either. It’ll make it harder for them to move around. Can we meet early tomorrow? First thing? I’m at home now, but I’m going to the embassy
straight away.’

‘In this fog? It’s the middle of the night.’

‘Justice never sleeps,’ Gunther said.

D
AVID WOKE NEXT MORNING
to the sound of voices downstairs and the smell of frying bacon. He heard the quick murmur of Eileen’s voice, Sean’s
slow one. Only a dim grey half-light penetrated the thin curtains of the room. Geoff was still asleep. He didn’t look well; several times in the night David had woken to hear him
coughing.

He got up and dressed in the change of clothes he had been given the day before. Geoff sat up, coughed again and took a drink. David pulled aside the curtains. In daylight the smog was a dense
greyish-yellow, pressing against the windows, which were dotted with greasy smuts of soot. He could make out, dimly, a brick wall surrounding a little yard. ‘It’s as bad as ever out
there,’ he said to Geoff. ‘How are you?’

There was a sheen of sweat on Geoff’s forehead. ‘Not brilliant. My throat’s still sore. I’ve a headache. God, how that filthy stuff seeps in, I can smell it. Sorry if I
woke you last night.’

‘You couldn’t help it.’

‘Funny, I had a dream I was back in Africa. I was going to see Elaine. Her husband was away and I was walking up the steps to her bungalow but it was my parents who opened the door, Mum
and Dad. They looked young, like they were when I was a child.’ He lay staring pensively up at the ceiling. David had never before heard him talk with such lack of reserve.

‘They’ll be all right,’ he said.

‘It’s just the thought I’ll probably never see them again.’