The House of Rumour (5 page)

‘Political are being rather insistent on this one, I’m afraid,’ he told her.

‘I see.’

‘But I wouldn’t want to order you on a job like this, Joan,’ he said.

There was an odd expression on his face. She couldn’t tell if he was smiling or baring his teeth.

‘M—’

‘You will volunteer, won’t you?’

There seemed a soft threat in his words, as if he was implicating her in something unknown. She had come to know all his little prejudices. He had toned down his anti-semitism, at least for the duration, but he often voiced his vehement dislike of homosexuals. It seemed part of his brutal and ruthless side, which included a strange insistence that she conspire in his own self-loathing. He seemed to be goading her, testing her to discover whether she knew the truth or not. He stared at her.

‘Well?’ he demanded.

She knew now that he feared blackmail, disgrace. It would be unendurable for such an arrogant man to be in another’s power. He would do anything to protect himself.

‘Of course, M,’ she said. ‘Just concerned about security, that’s all.’

‘Good,’ he rejoined, with a cold smile.

There had been the odd business with the chauffeur who had been hastily dismissed. That time she had spotted him hanging around a cinema tea room. And, of course, the young bus driver from Leicester who had come up to Camberley to help fix M’s motorbike. He had once pointed out with disdain the particular demeanour of male prostitutes in Piccadilly, yet as Joan had been shocked to observe when she spied M from the bedroom window, he had walked towards the garage, and the bus driver, in precisely the same manner. From then on many things about her boss had become clear to her.

3 / ROOM 39

Room 39 was a vast office on the ground floor of the Admiralty, crammed with desks and filing cabinets, resounding with telephone bells and the constant clatter of typewriters. Fleming sat at the far end of it, next to the glass door that led to the inner sanctum of Naval Intelligence. He had called up NID’s file on the Magician and was shuffling through the pile of papers in front of him. He glanced at an old memorandum of his that had finally been returned to him. ‘Operation Ruthless’ had been a plan of his to seize one of the new high-speed German launches that patrolled the Channel, to overpower its crew and steal its code devices.

I suggest we obtain the loot by the following means:

1 Obtain from Air Ministry an airworthy German bomber.

2 Pick a tough crew of five, including a pilot, W/T operator and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German air force uniforms, add blood and bandages to suit.

3 Crash plane in the Channel after making SOS to rescue service in plain language.

4 Once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring boat back to English port.

He had even volunteered to lead the operation personally. Anything to get out of Room 39, to prove himself more than a mere staff officer. And there was, after all, a desperate need to crack the enemy’s codes. The Government Code and Cypher School was building a mechanical brain somewhere in the Home Counties. His project had eventually been rejected.

Fleming had begun to see himself as merely a component in a vast thinking machine. So much of intelligence seemed to be about generating obscure ideas and intellectual exercises. Departmental subsections and research units were springing up everywhere. Operation Mistletoe had emerged from this arcane world of speculation and second-guessing.

The Magician’s file made for fascinating reading. The subject had worked for Naval Intelligence in New York during the last war, posing as an Irish Nationalist and a German sympathiser, disseminating scurrilous and extreme propaganda that was aimed at discrediting both these professed causes. This was, as M said, what was now being called ‘black propaganda’. The Magician also had significant contacts with German occult organisations and individuals. He was just what they needed at this point in the operation. Fleming had heard of him, of course, from bohemian gossip circles and newspaper exposés. Intrigued, he arranged to visit him the next day at his rooms in Jermyn Street.

The mournful wail of the air-raid siren was giving its nightly call to prayers as he got back to his own house in Ebury Street, a converted chapel with a book-lined gallery – a special library containing his dearest possessions, which, despite all his years in the City, were also his wisest investment. He had started his collection over five years before but instead of merely buying first editions of literary novels, he sought out works of social and scientific significance that the rare-book dealers often overlooked. He had one of the few remaining copies of Madame Curie’s doctoral thesis of 1903; Koch’s paper on the tubercle bacillus; first editions of Freud’s
On the Interpretation of Dreams
and Nils Bohr’s
Quantum Theory
. But the strangest volume he possessed was splayed out on the dining table where he had left it the night before.

The book’s red dust jacket was stamped with the provocative motto:
LEFT BOOK CLUB EDITION. NOT FOR SALE TO THE PUBLIC
. Not an imprint he would usually subscribe to; indeed, he was outspokenly conservative (though in private far more liberal than he seemed). It was titled
Swastika Night
by Murray Constantine and it contained a premonition of the plan that he was forming, shaped by the meetings he had had with M, the rumours that had come to light from a German anti-fascist underground organisation known as the Red Orchestra, and his rendezvous at the Café Chiado in Lisbon. It was a faint glimpse of the scheme that had been unfolding over the past few weeks, which might turn the course of the entire war.

The setting of the book was peculiar enough: a dystopian tale, though quite unlike the playful satire of Huxley, it presented a dark, horrible vision of what might lie ahead. A stark warning from a possible future, in which the Nazis had won, the Jews had been exterminated and the Christians were then being rounded up. Women were considered subhuman and kept in camps for the purposes of breeding. But amid this scenario of doom was a storyline far more disturbing to Fleming, involving a high-ranking Nazi called Hess who leaves the inner circle and travels far to the north, to Scotland. Somehow the author seemed to have predicted Operation Mistletoe. He would have to find out who this Murray Constantine was. Someone in the Political Warfare Executive might know. They had more contact with left-wing circles than any other department.

4 / THE RUSSIAN TEA ROOMS

They had met in the Russian Tea Rooms in Kensington. Joan Miller had got there first and was glad to find the place crowded. With its polished wooden furniture, panelled walls and open fireplace, it was the sort of café a woman could visit unescorted without drawing attention, or raising questions about her reputation. But Joan had felt awkward and uncomfortable as she waited for her contact from Political. Shifting in her seat, she pondered what seemed a foolish plan: to revisit the haunts of the fascist network she had helped to expose last summer.

It had been easy to spot Marius Trevelyan when he arrived. A bookish type in a tweed jacket, with a mop of straw-coloured hair and heavy horn-rimmed spectacles. In his early twenties, Joan had estimated, though he could almost pass as a schoolboy. There was something not quite fully formed about him.

He had ordered vodka and potato piroshki in flawless Russian. He had studied modern languages at Cambridge, he explained.

When the bill arrived he turned it over and discreetly showed her the address that had been scribbled on the back. The Tea Rooms were run by White Russian émigrés, known to have connections with fascist sympathisers.

‘That’s where the party’s being held,’ he said with an awkward wink.

He paid up and they left together, making their way along Harrington Gardens.

‘Look, Trevelyan.’ Joan came to the point now that they could talk openly. ‘I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to be doing here.’

‘Didn’t M brief you?’

‘He just said that Political wanted me along.’

‘Oh no. It was his idea that you become part of this operation.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. He was quite insistent.’

‘But—’

She thought better of what she had been about to say.

‘Did he tell you why?’ she asked instead.

‘Not really. You know M. Likes to play things his own way. Said you made a plausible fascist.’ Trevelyan laughed. ‘Think he meant that as a compliment.’

‘But you know I was at the trial last year. Someone might recognise me.’

‘Don’t worry. We’ve got them under control.’

‘Control?’

‘Oh yes. Political’s been running a little group. Saving them up for a rainy day. Look, we’re nearly there. We should get into character.’

He told her that they would be pretending to be a Mr and Mrs Fairburn from Tufnell Park, with Blackshirt connections, who had been members of the Anglo-German Fellowship in 1938.

‘I expect you can remember the patter you learnt last June,’ he added. ‘Oh, and you’d better take one of these.’

He took two silver buttons from his jacket pocket and handed her one.

‘Got them from Special Branch evidence store.’

It was a badge depicting an eagle swooping on a viper, with the letters PJ embossed below.

‘Under the lapel, I suppose,’ said Trevelyan. ‘By the way, what does the PJ stand for?’

‘It means “Perish Judah”,’ she replied.

‘Oh, I say.’

The meeting was in the basement of a terraced house in Earl’s Court. Twelve people, Joan counted, crowded into a candlelit room. A short man in a three-piece suit and watch-chain stood before them. He raised his hand and began to speak.

‘I want to talk to you tonight about peace,’ he announced.

The flickering light gave a mesmeric ambience to the assembly. The speaker’s voice began in a soft drone like an incantation. Peace was coming, he assured them solemnly. He had heard it from the highest authorities. So many well-placed people in the Establishment were now determined that this futile and unnecessary war must end. If it continues we will lose the Empire, we will lose everything. We will become a pauper nation forever in debt to the Americans. The people do not want this war. They know in their hearts that as Anglo-Saxons we share so much with our German brothers. Soon it will come, he went on. The white races will unite against the true barbarism that inhabits this earth. We will rise up against the traitors in our midst. Soon it will come, he promised. Peace.

For a moment the word sounded soothing and plausible. Joan suddenly realised how tired she felt. How exhausted everybody was by the endless bombings and privations. Then the man’s voice began to rise to a higher pitch.

Churchill will be deposed. Yes, he insisted, this is certain. People that I know of in government are ready and waiting. People like us who share our feelings are waiting in the wings. Germany is willing to make terms, we know that. An honourable peace that will leave us our Empire while they bring order to the Continent. Only one group of people want this war, and we know who they are, don’t we?

There were murmurs of agreement and a shiver of agitation in the room. She felt someone prod her in the back and she shuffled forward. The speaker started an extended harangue against the Jews. They will be made to pay for all of this, he promised. The audience gleefully hissed its agreement. A woman called out: hang them from the lamp-posts! Joan felt a quickening within her as the anger began to rise in the basement. The suburban voices that found such relish in hatred and horror were familiar and English.

Later, as she and Trevelyan walked back from the meeting, she still felt shocked that these ordinary-seeming people could be so virulent. She remembered that this was what had disturbed her so much when she had spied on the Right Club for M the previous summer.

‘Recognise anyone?’ Trevelyan asked her.

‘No,’ she replied.

‘And what did you think of our speaker tonight?’

‘A thoroughly ghastly little man.’

‘Convincing, wasn’t he?’

‘You mean—’

‘Yes. One of ours.’

‘Good God.’

‘Yes. It’s been quite a project for Political. I trust you’ll give a glowing report to M. Come to think of it, I’m having a drink with Commander Fleming at the Dorchester later. Maybe you should come along. I sure he’d be interested in your impressions of our little nest of vipers. Would it be terribly churlish to leave you here? If I’m lucky I can get a bus back to my digs from around the corner.’

‘Don’t worry about me. I can walk to my flat.’

They shook hands clumsily and Trevelyan wandered off. Joan started to walk home through the blackout. The streets looked empty but she had the uneasy feeling that she was being watched. Everything seemed confused in her mind. All the double games that were being played. The evil little rabble-rouser was an agent provocateur, on their side. Yet he had talked so persuasively of peace. The word now appeared as a taunt to her. Soon the sirens would come, and a sleepless night lay ahead. M had given her some pills but they didn’t do much good.