The Titanic Secret (2 page)

He didn’t wait for the second shot, just bolted through the open doorway and out into the street.

He glanced quickly in both directions as he did so. Mittelstraße appeared deserted, apart from the lone watcher opposite, but he knew that appearances could be deceptive. He also knew that the shot the policeman – he presumed that was who he was – had fired would have been heard, at the very least by the watcher on the opposite side of the street.

As he started to run, he looked in that direction, and saw the red firefly of the cigarette fall suddenly to the ground. The watcher stepped into view and then began to run after him.

Curtis reached for his own weapon, the heavy Webley revolver that he’d collected from the British Embassy the day he’d arrived in Berlin, turned his body slightly as he ran down the street, and pulled the trigger. The bullet probably passed no closer than within twenty feet of the watcher, but immediately the man stopped running and began unbuttoning his own coat, clearly intending to draw a weapon.

There was another shot from behind Curtis, the bullet ricocheting off the pavement several yards in front of him. He risked a quick glance over his shoulder. The man who’d fired at him in the bar was now out on the street as well, but about fifty yards behind him, well outside the accurate range of any pistol, no matter how expert the shooter.

Curtis kept running, holstering the pistol as he did so. The conditions were so treacherous he needed both hands free to help him keep his balance.

Two more shots rang out. One missed him completely, but the other smashed into the stone wall of the building beside him, sending stone chips flying. A third ripped across the right-hand side of his forehead, opening up a jagged cut that felt as if it had gone right down to the bone. Blood poured out of the wound and ran down his cheek.

He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it against the cut, trying to staunch the flow of blood. The wound was more numb than painful, though Curtis knew it would sting later. He kept running.

He headed west towards the T-junction at the end of the road. If he could just get round the corner, and out of sight of the two men now running after him, he could turn left into Schadowstraße and then get to Unter den Linden. And then he’d be about four hundred yards from his destination. And safety.

He was still about a dozen yards short of the junction when he heard louder shouting from behind him. He risked another quick glance back. A group of men, some wearing police uniforms, others in civilian clothes, were coming out of the bar he had just left, Klaus Trommler a struggling figure in their midst. Even as he registered that, one of the uniformed men brought his truncheon down in a vicious arc onto the back of Trommler’s head, and the clerk slumped to the ground.

Curtis looked ahead again, trying to move faster over the ice-covered pavement, the surface slippery and treacherous. He took another glance back, and saw that a third man was now running down the centre of Mittelstraße towards him, carrying what looked like a club in his right hand.

Curtis reached the corner with Schadowstraße and stopped for a few brief seconds, again pulled the Webley from his holster and fired a single shot in the general direction of his pursuers. That might, just might, slow them down a bit.

Then he holstered his pistol again and ran on. The lime trees of the Unter den Linden – the rows of trees which had given the wide street its name – were only about a hundred yards in front of him. Perhaps because Schadowstraße ran north to south and received more direct sunlight than Mittelstraße, more of the snow seemed to have melted from the pavements, and Curtis was able to run faster.

He’d just reached the end of the street when another shot came, the bullet exploding into the wall of the building a few feet to his right. The crack of the rifle was very different to the noise of the pistol shots, and that changed the odds. The third man, the one he’d seen running down the middle of the street, had obviously been carrying a rifle, not a truncheon. Curtis knew that if that man got a clear shot at him he’d be dead.

He dodged to the right as soon as he reached the end of the street, then ran over the central reservation with its parallel lines of lime trees, across to the south side of Unter den Linden. He knew that the tree trunks would offer him some protection from the bullets of the pursuing men. As he ran past a few late-night drunks, they stared at him, open-mouthed, transfixed by the blood covering his face, and a couple reached out to try to grab him. But Curtis ignored them all. Getting to his destination was all he cared about.

He stuck close to the line of trees on the south side of the wide boulevard, to make himself a more difficult target.

His breath was coming in short gasps as he reached the crossroads with Wilhelmstraße, and he glanced behind him again. There now seemed to be only two men chasing after him and they were about a hundred yards back.

Even as he looked, one of the men stopped abruptly and raised a rifle to his shoulder.

Curtis dodged and weaved, and then sprinted left into Wilhelmstraße just as the man fired. He heard the flat crack as the bullet passed close to him, and then the thud as it impacted on the wall of one of the buildings on the opposite side of the road.

And as he turned the corner, Curtis could see his objective right in front of him. On the right-hand side of Wilhelmstraße, about a hundred yards ahead, and dominated by four massive stone columns in its centre, stood the imposing stone facade of the former Palais Strousberg, the building which now housed the British Embassy.

Lights blazed from windows on two of the floors, and Curtis knew that tonight there would be at least two armed sentries guarding the main door.

He tried to run faster, but these pavements were more treacherous, and several times he slid, once almost losing his footing. He was drawing ever closer, but now he could hear the sound of the running men behind him, and then, quite clearly, he heard them stop. That was bad news; the only reason they would have for halting the pursuit was to end it, by shooting him down.

Curtis had nowhere to hide. All he could do was dodge and weave. And maybe distract them a little. He pulled out his Webley again. With an effective range of about fifty yards, even firing the heavy .455 cartridge, he knew he had no chance of hitting his pursuers.

Without bothering to aim, Curtis pointed the pistol up Wilhelmstraße, back the way he’d run, and squeezed the trigger. The heavy revolver kicked in his hand, the loud bang of the pistol firing a sudden assault on the silence of the night. Without looking behind, he pulled the trigger again.

At that instant, he felt a massive blow on the left-hand side of his back, and a split second later the sound of the shot. The pistol tumbled from his hand to land with a clatter on the pavement as he fell forward, a terrible numbing pain paralysing the left side of his body.

Desperately, he staggered to his feet, his left arm hanging uselessly by his side, and tried to run forward. The best he could manage was a clumsy, drunken gait, barely faster than a walk.

In front of him, the figures of two armed men – the sentries he had been told would be on duty – emerged from the doorway of the embassy and stared down the street towards him, obviously alerted by the sounds of the shots. Both had rifles slung over their shoulders, but Curtis knew they had probably been ordered not to shoot, because of the diplomatic implications if they did.

Behind him, he heard an ominous metallic clicking as the man with the rifle reloaded his weapon, the empty cartridge case tumbling out of the breech to land with a clatter on the cobbled street.

Twenty yards to go. Blood was pouring from a gaping wound on his left shoulder, leaving a crimson trail in the fresh snow.

‘Help me,’ he gasped, reaching out with his right hand as if he could grab one of the men a few yards in front of him.

One sentry was just standing there in the street, his mouth open and eyes wide as he stared at the drama unfolding in front of him. The other man had stepped off the pavement and into the road, moving away from the entrance to the embassy, and was unslinging his rifle.

Ten yards, maybe less.

Then Curtis felt another solid, crashing blow. A shaft of agony speared up his left leg and he collapsed onto the unyielding surface of the pavement, his scream of pain a counterpoint to the flat crack of the rifle shot. And this time he knew he wouldn’t be getting up again. The bullet had ripped through his left thigh, smashing the femur and tearing apart his flesh. Thick, dark arterial blood erupted from the wound.

He heard another shot, but much, much closer. Through his tears of agony, he saw that one sentry had raised his rifle to fire a warning shot over the heads of the pursuing men.

The other sentry ran over and knelt down beside him. Curtis grabbed the lapel of the man’s jacket, his bloodied right hand leaving dark smears on his uniform. He had to pass on what he knew.

‘Three men. Voss. You—’

And then a third bullet smashed into Curtis’s ravaged body, ploughing through his skull and killing him instantly.

6 April 1912
East Anglia

Alex Tremayne shifted position slightly to relieve the strain on his elbows and lowered the binoculars to the ground. He’d been lying prone in the hedgerow watching the farmhouse at the edge of the fens for over three hours, and he still hadn’t seen what he was looking for. Not for the first time he wondered if he was right, if the trail he’d followed was the correct one.

He glanced down at his watch. It was late afternoon, the pale light of the early spring day already shading into the grey of evening. Quite soon, he hoped, the lamps in the farmhouse would be lit and then, perhaps, he might be able to see what was happening inside the building.

Tremayne lifted the binoculars again and resumed his scrutiny of the windows, and particularly those on the upper floor. And while he studied the dark oblong shapes, he mentally reviewed the steps he’d taken, the clues which had led him to this isolated and desolate spot. The trail had started, of all places, outside a jewellery shop in London’s West End, but the men involved had then seemingly vanished from sight, and it wasn’t until the letter had arrived at the Whitehall address that Tremayne had had any hard information to work with.

The single clue had been the name of the post office from which the letter had been sent. A tiny piece of evidence that was indicative, no more, of where his quarry might be found. Even then, Tremayne hadn’t been particularly hopeful, reasoning that the letter would have been dispatched from a village some distance away from where the men were staying. But at the very least, the postmark had given him a starting point, and for almost a week he had been haunting the public houses and shops in the area, listening to local gossip and asking the occasional discreet question.

The previous afternoon, a chance remark overheard in the street had led him to a tiny hamlet, far too small to be dignified by the term ‘village’, and from there to the long and unmade track which ended at the small, grey stone farmhouse. But still he wasn’t sure. Since he’d started watching the building, he had seen nobody in it or near it, and had heard nothing. The place appeared to be deserted, but it was clearly not derelict. Both the front and rear doors were in place, closed and probably locked, and there was glass in all the windows. And somehow the house conveyed a sense of occupancy, of cautious watchfulness, as if whoever was inside the building was paying just as much attention to Tremayne as he was to the farmhouse.

That was ridiculous, he knew, because his approach to the property had been so circuitous and had taken him so long that he was absolutely certain he’d been unobserved at all times, just as he was sure that he was effectively invisible in his present position. His clothing was brown and green, the colours of the hedgerow and the soil around him, and he was still almost 100 yards away from the house.

Then the faintest of movements caught his eye. A darker grey shape had just moved past one of the upstairs windows. At least, that’s what Tremayne thought he’d seen, and he concentrated hard, straining to make out any detail. That window remained dark, but at that moment the other window on the top floor of the farmhouse flared with light.

A man appeared on the left-hand side of the illuminated window, and beside him Tremayne saw the figure he’d been hoping to spot ever since he began his vigil. The girl – she looked about twelve years of age – had blonde hair cut in a distinctive style, and was wearing a dark-blue dress that Tremayne had seen before. She was struggling in the man’s grip as the two figures moved from one side of the window to the other, and just after they moved out of sight, he heard a shrill scream from the house, the sound abruptly cut short.

Tremayne’s grip tightened involuntarily on the binoculars. Seconds later, the man appeared at the window again and roughly pulled the curtains closed. Moments later, one of the downstairs windows was also illuminated, but all Tremayne could see was a thin vertical sliver of light between closed curtains.

For perhaps a minute he remained immobile, studying the house. Then he eased slowly backwards out of the hedgerow until he was able to stand upright and still not be seen from the farmhouse. He had already planned the route he was going to take to the property, and now he had seen all he needed to confirm his suspicions. He knew the girl was in the house, and in which room he was likely to find her.

He tucked the binoculars into one of the capacious pockets of his shooting jacket, and then began walking away from the property, following the line of the hedgerow to the point where it terminated in a small copse. He stopped at that point and stared back towards the house. It looked exactly the same as it had minutes before, with two lighted windows and no sign of movement.

Tremayne picked a path carefully through the copse, trying to avoid treading on any broken branches or anything else that could make a noise and give away his position, although he was still far enough away from the farmhouse for that not to be a problem.