Letters for a Spy (4 page)

So, to some extent, it was only a spur-of-the-moment thing. Mold had no real relevance to my mission; was merely the small Welsh town where the major’s father had been staying when he had written to his son. I didn’t even think of this as a coincidence: consulting my atlas during the flight I had noted that Mold was close to Holyhead—noted it, but certainly not lingered over it.

Yet the very fact of my having been sitting beside this woman on the boat made me feel that I was being guided; that I had just been offered a sign—along with a timetable. The major’s father had written:

“My dear William,

“I cannot say that this hotel is any longer as comfortable as I remember it to have been in pre-war days. I am however staying here as the only alternative to imposing myself once more upon your aunt whose depleted staff & strict regard for fuel economy (which I agree to be necessary in war time) has made the house almost uninhabitable to a guest, at least one of my age. I propose to be in Town for the nights of the 20
^th
& 21
^st
of April when no doubt we shall have an opportunity to meet. I enclose the copy of a letter which I have written to Gwatkin of McKenna’s about your affairs. You will see that I have asked him to lunch with me at the Carlton Grill (which I understand still to be open) at a quarter to one on Wednesday the 21
^st
. I should be glad if you would make it possible to join us. We shall not however await luncheon for you, so I trust that, if you are able to come, you will make a point of being punctual.

“Your cousin Priscilla has asked to be remembered to you. She has grown into a sensible girl though I cannot say that her work for the Land Army has done much to improve her looks. In that respect I am afraid that she will take after her mother’s side of the family.

“Your affectionate

“Father.”

It had been addressed from the Black Lion Hotel, Mold (telephone number 98), North Wales.

And dated April 13
^th
, 1943.

I didn’t think I should care much for Mr Martin. ‘We shall not however await luncheon for you, so I trust that, if you are able to come, you will make a point of being punctual.’ This, to a man who had been commissioned in the Royal Marines and, on top of that, had been so warmly endorsed by Lord Louis Mountbatten. And there was nothing like: ‘How is everything? I hope you’re well. This comes with lots of love.’ No best wishes, even. No mention of Sybella. To me, he sounded both pompous and imperious.

Cold.

And the enclosed copy of what he had written to the solicitor—although of course that was a business letter and couldn’t be so readily assessed—did little to soften this impression.

“My dear Gwatkin,

“I have considered your recent letter concerning the Settlement that I intend to make on the occasion of William’s marriage. The provisions which you outline appear to be reasonable except in one particular. Since in this case the wife’s family will not be contributing to the Settlement, I do not think it proper that they should necessarily preserve, after William’s death, a life interest in the funds which I am providing. I should agree to this course only were there children of the marriage. Will you therefore so redraft the Settlement as to provide that if there are children the income is paid to the wife only until such time as she remarries or the children come of age. After that date the children alone should benefit.

“I intend to be in London for the two nights of the 20
^th
& 21
^st
of April. I should be glad if you could make it convenient to take luncheon with me at the Carlton Grill at a quarter to one on Wednesday 21
^st
. If you will bring the new draft with you we shall have leisure to examine it afterwards. I have written to William & hope that he will be able to join us.

“Yrs. sincerely,

“J.G. Martin.”

Addressed to F.A.S. Gwatkin, Esq., McKenna & Co., 14 Waterloo Place, London, SW1. Written on the 10
^th
of April and clearly marked ‘Copy’.

I could almost
hear
the man saying: “I should be glad if you could make it convenient…!”

And what a fibber! It had occurred to me yesterday, on my second reading of these letters, that in fact he
hadn’t
written to William—and wouldn’t indeed be doing so for a further three days. But, again, this had appeared to me such a piffling point that I hadn’t even mentioned it to Mannheim. At twenty-five, I had no wish to sound as fussy as the old fellow I was finding fault with. (I assumed Mr Martin to be well into his sixties.)

But now, come to think of it, wasn’t it perhaps slightly surprising that he had allowed himself this small inaccuracy? Small, yet so unnecessary. Didn’t it seem to go wholly against type?

And I didn’t much like the way, either, that he referred to ‘the wife’ both times, rather than attempting to personalize things by using Sybella’s name—although maybe this was more or less standard practice between a client and his solicitor.

But would it have been standard practice, I wondered, even when the client and the solicitor were on sufficiently friendly terms to be meeting each other for lunch?

On the other hand, however, at least he had written
William’s
marriage,
William’s
death. (Which succinct phrase, ‘after William’s death’, repeatedly gave me pause. The sanguine expectation would have been of something approaching forty years. The cruel reality had turned out to be a mere fortnight. That made me feel—but only temporarily each time—almost as sorry for the father as I had felt for the son, and for Sybella too. I had the idea that Mr J.G. Martin was a widower, and that William must have been his only child. The old man became less cold and imperious, therefore, and more simply a suffering human being, whenever I paused for a moment to think about the full picture.)

The hotel in which these letters had been written was Georgian. It stood in the High Street and had an ivy-covered portico. On coming out of the railway station, I had found myself in New Street, which was only a short distance from the Black Lion.

There, I pressed the bell on Reception, put down my suitcase—a large blue leather one of my mother’s—and rested my trilby near the handle.

The woman who answered my summons had greying hair pulled back in a bun. She wished me good morning and asked if she might help.

“Yes. Thank you. I’m wondering if you have a Mr J.G. Martin staying with you at present?”

On the way, of course, I had worked out what line I would follow if she answered yes.

“No, I’m afraid we haven’t. Nor are we expecting anyone of that name.”

I smiled. “Well, I recognized it as a long shot. But he stayed with you last month, you see, and therefore I was hoping…” My query petered out when I noticed her expression.

“Really?”

Before this, I had been tired, aware of how very little sleep I had procured either on the plane or in the garden of remembrance.

But now—suddenly—I was awake.

“Excuse me?”

“I think, sir, you’re mistaken. I don’t recall any Mr Martin staying with us last month.”

Just then, not even the Admiral at his most mistrustful could have considered me
too
articulate.

She added: “This isn’t a large hotel and I’m thought to have a good memory.”

“But I mean…”

She waited.

“I mean, it just never occurred to me. I felt so certain that…”

“You’re sure it was the Black Lion?”

“Yes. Quite sure. Positive.”

The hotel register lay on the counter. I watched her run her finger down the two appropriate pages. Even at such a time as this, it struck me that her pink nail polish seemed at variance with her scraped-back bun and with her lack of make-up.

“No,” she said. “No, I’m afraid not. Nothing.”

Naturally I had facsimiles of the two letters Mr Martin had written. Facsimiles of the facsimiles. I reached through my raincoat and extracted these from a pocket of my suit. The woman studied them.

“Yes, this stationery is certainly ours. And April 10
^th
, April 13
^th
—there’s no mistaking the dates. But just the same … I really don’t understand it.”

“Perhaps you could take a look through March? Maybe he simply got the month wrong? Wrote April when he meant March.”

“What—and did it twice? With a gap of three days in between?
I’ve
never done that. Have you?”

“No.”

“And in any case,” she repeated, “I should be certain to remember him; we’re not quite the size of Claridge’s, you know.”Nevertheless—though with a faintly disapproving air—she did turn back a further page.

“You don’t suppose, do you, he might have been travelling incognito?”

She answered me in the same dry tone. “Well, if he was, one can only hope his ration book was also travelling incognito.”

I bit my lip; abandoned all flippancy.

“But there’s another thing. He’s clearly stayed here in the past.” I read out the sentence about the hotel’s being less comfortable than he remembered it from pre-war days. “I’m sorry about that,” I said.

“No need to be. The same must be true of almost anywhere.”

“May I ask: were
you
here in pre-war days?”

“Yes, I’ve been here since ’thirty-two.” Frowningly, she absently scratched at some imperceptible mark on the counter before she looked up. “You know, there’s bound to be a very simple solution to all of this. Do you mind waiting here a moment?”

Thereupon she went into an adjacent office to check through the hotel’s filing system. On her return she enquired whether I actually knew the person we were searching for.

I slowly shook my head. “Why?”

“I was only wondering if you might have misread the signature … is there any chance of that, do you think?” There was a note of apology in her tone which further belied her appearance of severity. “We have a Mr Barton who visits us regularly—also a Mr and Mrs J.Wharton. And on several occasions we’ve had a
Miss
Martin staying here.”

But when I again handed her the Gwatkin letter she smilingly conceded the surname couldn’t be anything other than Martin; and that the initials J.G. couldn’t really be twisted into standing for Edith Mary Rose.

Indeed, for a couple of preposterous seconds I
had
actually played with the notion that we might have got the sex wrong. Could we only have
assumed
the major’s parent was male? But Edith Mary Rose, although she might well have sent her son a little more in the way of love and tender reassurances, would scarcely have signed herself ‘Your affectionate father’, nor would she—in all probability—have registered as ‘Miss’.

I asked: “How hard would it be for someone to acquire samples of your stationery?”

“Not hard at all. There’s always a supply of paper and envelopes on the writing table in the lounge—as well as a few sheets in each of the guests’ bedrooms. Even now,” she added, with some pride.

“And the firm of printers which you use? I suppose that virtually any one of its employees…?”

I hoped I wasn’t alarming her. But her reaction was to laugh.

“Oh, the plot thickens! I can see we’ll have to call in Scotland Yard!”

“Absolutely!” I thanked her and picked up my hat and suitcase before it could occur to her to pursue her own line of enquiry.

Out in the street again, however, my bonhomie vanished. I reflected on how unfortunate it was that already I was faced with an obstacle of this size. Hell, it looked as if I’d need to get in touch with Berlin a lot sooner than any of us had expected. The Abwehr hadn’t used me a great deal up till then. Wouldn’t it seem a little unimpressive to have to go running back at such an early stage in search of further guidance? Please help me, Uncle Franz.

And rather more important—no,
altogether
more important—I didn’t mean to go calling into question the Martin papers until I knew that such an act could be fully justified. Even if my superiors
had
sent me over here to play the devil’s advocate I’d still have to be extraordinarily cautious with regard to that. Obviously.

Although, on thinking about it, how much justification did I reckon I was going to need? It was a truism, surely? If you couldn’t trust the messenger you couldn’t trust the message. End of story. Nothing more to say.

All right. I understood that. But … oh, for Pete’s sake! The
father
of the messenger?

I knew it was inconsistent of me to be feeling so frustrated by this odd behaviour of the parent. I had come to Mold entirely of my own volition and practically
despite
my section head’s instructions—and if it hadn’t been for that woman on the boat I should never have set foot inside the Black Lion.

But all the same.

From now on, was our trust in the messenger truly going to have to concern itself with genealogy?

I hurried to the public library.

7

There was no J.G. Martin included in the Cardiff telephone directory. No J.G. but certainly no shortage of others—which would be relevant if I had to ring them at any stage to enquire about unlisted relatives. So I went between two high and well-stacked bookshelves to tear out the requisite pages (coughing to cover the sounds of my defacement) and told myself I shouldn’t be surprised that William’s father wasn’t on the phone: in Germany there’d been extensive waiting lists even before the war so why should it be different here? Anyway, he sounded very much a fellow of the old school who might still regard this modern means of communication—well, relatively modern—as just some new-fangled nonsense, loud and peremptory and often inconvenient.

Of course, on the other hand, it was also conceivable that he no longer lived near the city in which his son had been born. A person could many times move house over a period of thirty-six years.

Also … Sitting at a table in the reference section of the library, with a large English dictionary opened randomly in front of me, I managed to formulate a theory which might (just) explain his non-appearance at the hotel. As I say, I had been assuming he was a widower. He could have been deserted or divorced but the main point was he seemed to be alone. So might he not, despite his age (and unappealing personality), have been conducting a clandestine love affair? Staying at the home of some woman whose good name had to be consistently protected?