The Best of Our Spies (29 page)

‘So why are you telling me all of this, Edgar? Why didn’t you continue to keep me in the dark like you seemed happy enough to do since you apparently discovered she was a spy a few weeks ago?’

‘We are telling you now because you need to be aware of it. If I am to be absolutely honest with you, Owen, then I would have to admit that we weren’t going to tell you quite so soon. But something unexpected cropped up today that meant we needed to tell you much sooner than we had planned.’

‘And what is that?’

‘There is a German spy loose in London. Elusive chap this one. We’ve prided ourselves on having a pretty outstanding success rate in capturing German spies in this country, but not him. We’ve been after him since 1940, never been able to get our hands on him. From a professional point of view, one has to admire him. He is quite an outstanding operator. Caused us no end of trouble. However, a few weeks ago, we spotted him tailing you, just after we discovered your wife was a spy. What we think happened is this: the Germans wanted to be sure that what your wife was telling them was true, so they got this chap to verify you really do exist – that you work where she was telling them you worked, in the Navy — that kind of thing.

‘A week or so ago, this agent disappeared into the ether again, as he is prone to do. However, this morning we intercepted a transmission he made to Berlin. Couple of hours later he’s spotted near your flat. Had to wait around, of course, but once you left at eleven he followed you all the way to Duke Street. It was important that you came into work.’

Quinn was looking round the park. He had stopped dabbing his eyes now, but they were still red and damp.

‘And what about if he has followed us here?’

‘Of course not, wouldn’t have been so foolish as to bring you here if he had, would I? We watched him follow you to Duke Street then he hopped in a taxi and headed north. My bet is that even as we are speaking he will be making his final transmission from his place in north London then he will head off to a new place. He probably has two or three on the go at any one time. He’ll be back on to you, Quinn. Probably go and check you’re around this evening and then be out there in the morning. Which brings me back to why we need you to play ball with us.’

The younger man huffed and pulled a face.

‘I do understand, Quinn. I daresay that is the last thing you feel like doing. We need you to do this. I am afraid that you really have no alternative – regard it as orders. Please listen carefully.’

Edgar outlined the plan. It was quite detailed. Quinn was surprised that he was able to take it all in. Edgar looked across at Quinn, as if to check that he understood.

‘I’ll have to be heading off soon, Quinn — you know what you have to do then.’

Edgar was leaning forward, his forearms resting on his thighs, hands pressed together in his familiar prayer-like pose and head bowed towards the ground.
Quinn was very still again, speaking in a quiet voice, with no trace of either the anger or the sarcasm that he had shown before.

‘You are certain about this, Edgar — Nathalie and all that?’

‘I am afraid so.’

The younger man stared ahead, the emotion appearing to rise up in him again. He was biting his lower lip and clasping his hands together very tight. Another long spell of silence followed as he sank deep into contemplation. The pair of ducks walked in front of them again, their argument unresolved. Edgar and Quinn watched them as they noisily climbed back into the lake before Quinn spoke again.

‘If ... and I say if ... if it’s true what you say, where do you think that leaves me? Do you think that any of her feelings for me could have been genuine?’

‘I think that only she can answer that, Quinn. We have to assume that her relationship with you was part of her work as a German spy. That doesn’t mean, of course ... that ...’ Edgar stopped. He really did not know what to say.

‘I presume you had ... marital relations? I mean, did you have a healthy physical relationship.’

Quinn blushed and nodded.

‘There we are then. Look, you are a good-looking chap. Good personality, charming. I am sure she had feelings for you.’

When he had finished talking, the major leaned back against the bench, his hands pressed together in his familiar prayer-like pose, looking up at the white clouds picked out against the blue sky. Quinn sat perfectly still. They stayed like that while nearby bells pealed two o’clock. As if on cue, Major Edgar got up and stood awkwardly in front of Quinn, patting him gently on the shoulder before silently walking away.

Quinn waited a moment before turning round to watch Edgar walk back to The Mall. A black car was waiting and as Edgar approached it, a uniformed figure emerged to open the rear door for the major. Within seconds the car had sped off in the direction of Whitehall.

Quinn turned round and started to get up, but his legs felt so heavy that he was unable to move. He was weighed down by his thoughts. Recollections of times he had spent with Nathalie, snippets of what Edgar had said and flashbacks to his childhood, but as these memories evaporated he was left with the stark reality of what Edgar had told him. Although it seemed unbelievable, he kept coming back to the conclusion that Edgar would not have made it up. There would simply be nothing to be gained from telling him something untrue.

He stayed on the bench in a state of shock until three o’clock and when a policeman who had already passed him twice asked pointedly if everything was well, Owen said that it was and got up slowly to leave the park.

Quinn was far too wrapped up in his own thoughts to notice anything that was going on around him. He certainly never noticed the small man watching him from the bridge to the right of where he had been sitting. He might be described as round rather than fat by anyone who looked at him long enough, which few would bother to do. His red face was topped by a bowler hat perhaps one size too small. He effortlessly slipped in some fifty yards behind Quinn.

Quinn never turned round as he left the park and crossed Birdcage Walk, but even had he done so, it is highly unlikely that he would have noticed that same man following him from a careful distance.

ooo000ooo

CHAPTER NINETEEN

London
6 June 1944

His initial thoughts in the first few seconds after he awoke were always about who he was. A few days previously, he had attended a lecture in London on existentialism. ‘Who Are We?’ it was called and he sat amused at the back of the hall, smiling at the thought of the earnest audience worrying about their purpose in life and who they really were.

You want to try being me. You want to know what it is like to have to be a different person every few weeks, to be constantly changing your identity. And try keeping that up for years.

After all that time, the effort of remembering who he was each day was beginning to exhaust him.

He had never before heard the telephone ring in the main hall of the house at that time of the morning. From his bedsit on the first floor the sound reverberated across the hall with its chipped and noisy floor tiles, up the pretentiously ornate staircase with its cheaply varnished banisters and missing balustrades and along the threadbare carpet to his room, the acoustics making it sound as loud as if the phone was ringing outside his door rather than some way below it. The first ring came at six in the morning. Two shrill blasts, then silence. He turned over to go back to sleep and realised he was not alone. Whoever it was, she was fast asleep and did not look nearly as attractive as she must have done the night before, which was usually the case. Through the prism of a glass, they all acquired a flattering sheen at some stage of the evening. Daresay that they thought the same of him. He would not learn his lesson, but from what he could recall and from the state of the bedclothes, it had probably been worth it.

Something beginning with ‘S’, he seemed to remember. Not Susie, not Sheila – though there had been a Sheila not that long ago. Sheila from Stockwell. Sandra? Could be Sandra. Sandra was in a deep sleep, lying on her back, head tilted back on the pillow at an odd angle, mouth slightly open, the make-up which she had not bothered to remove smeared across her face and the pillow case and probably some on him too. The sheets were gathered around the top of her thighs.

He lay there for a moment, contemplating her breasts and the nipples which were somehow still hard. Maybe, if he was very ...

The phone rang again. Just the two shrill blasts. He looked at his watch. Five past six. He wondered. No. Not possible. Impossible, in fact. Only in a dire emergency.

He touched the small strip of flat bone between Sandra’s breasts, though he was now not sure if it was Sandra after all. Maybe Stephanie. It didn’t matter if you couldn’t remember the right name, just so long as you did not use the
wrong
one. He walked his fingers slowly down her body, a light touch at first then firmer. She started to respond in her sleep, writhing at first. His hand was just past her belly button when she began to wake up, trapping his hand between her legs. She opened her eyes and turned over to face him, her wide smile revealing teeth stained with a cheap lipstick. Some of her eyelashes were stuck together with blobs of mascara and she reeked of cigarettes. He had seen better in the hardest bars in Hamburg, but once they started to respond, it didn’t matter. She pulled him towards her.

Three more blasts of the phone.

This time there could be no mistaking it. Two normal rings then the phone cutting off halfway between the next two. Three rings. And exactly five minutes after the last call. He could hear Mr Fraser come out of his downstairs flat and talk angrily as he answered the phone.

‘Hello? Hello ... anyone there?’

There wouldn’t be.

She was working hard on him now. No subtlety but plenty of experience to compensate. She made him respond soon enough. He was already inside her and could be finished in a minute if he wanted. He always could in the morning. Two more minutes and he could even satisfy her, which was not necessary but always a bonus nonetheless. Helped ensure a return visit was how he liked to put it. But the phone calls had signalled something more urgent. He did not even have one minute.

He pulled out of her quickly, roughly pushing her hands away as she tried to coax him back in.

‘You have to leave now.’

‘What! At this time of the morning? Who was it who was all over me a minute ago? You woke me up for it!’

‘You have to leave. You must go now.’

He was out of bed now, naked.

‘I can see you still want it ...’

He walked round to her side of the bed and hauled her out of it, quite roughly. He picked up her clothes from the pile by her side of the bed and thrust them at her.

‘I am sorry. I suddenly realised I was late for something. You must go. Here, take this.’ He had picked up his wallet from the desk and handed her a one pound note.

‘What kind of a girl do you take me for?’

‘I take you for a very nice girl who I would like to see again and take out for dinner. This is for a taxi.’

‘Crikey. I could buy a taxi with that. Where am I going to get a taxi at this time in the morning?’

‘Please be quiet on your way out. Look ...’ He wondered whether to try using the name Stephanie, but in the circumstances it was too great a risk getting her name wrong. ‘... I promise I will come and visit you at the bar tonight and I promise I will take you to dinner at the restaurant of your choice.’

‘You promise?’

‘Of course.’ The easiest thing in the world was making a promise that you had no intention of keeping. You just ... promised. It was what he did.

He waited until she was out of the front door and watched her disappear down the street. Of course, Mr Fraser would not be happy about this. Even now he would be writing down what time she had left in his little notebook in his spidery handwriting (‘I have the evidence here, Mr White, in my own fair
hand
’). He preferred landladies, he could always count on being able to charm his way around any woman. But Mr Fraser and charm lived in different worlds.

‘You know it is quite against my rules for you to have visitors ...’ he would say.

So far, a pound or two pressed into Mr Fraser’s bony hands had worked. Probably wouldn’t again, but it didn’t matter. He would have to be out of this place before noon anyway. That was the procedure: if you get the emergency signal, get out within six hours. The sooner the better.

He checked that the door was locked, then slid the extra bolt into place, used his overcoat to cover the gap at the bottom of the door and moved the dresser away from the window. The floorboards opened easily enough, as he had made sure they would. The transmitter was on the dresser now. He hooked the aerial high inside the window, just inside the net curtains and turned the transmitter on. He was connected surprisingly quickly. He scribbled the coded message on a pad on his right. The transmission only lasted a minute. He decoded it even before he stored the transmitter away, which was the wrong way round.

‘Large-scale invasion Normandy underway. Clarification urgently required on first sector. Urgent you check Nero to confirm movements.’

The best advice he had ever received in this business was not to panic. It was easy to say that, everyone did. It was an obvious thing to say. But the man who had taught him had been an intelligence officer in the Great War and had survived an interrogation by the British by convincing them he was a deaf mute. His advice was this: when you find yourself in a really difficult position: stop. Have a cigarette and think. Five minutes.

So he stopped for five minutes, had a cigarette and thought. He would have to leave the flat, too risky to stay. Of course, he already had somewhere to go – he would never be in the position of not having a fallback position. But the message was clear. Check on Nero. That meant being in Pimlico sometime around eight and following him again. He was always having to do that. Nero was not bad, he always varied his route, but for someone in his mid-twenties he was slow, which must be because of his injuries. Not quite sure of the whole business, not that it was his business to be sure anyway. When he had first come here the work had been more varied. Travelling around the country. More excitement. Now it was just following this man and until a few weeks ago his wife. But it was what Berlin wanted and what Berlin wanted ...