The Trojan Horse (15 page)

He nodded. ‘He had taken to drinking rather too much.'

‘You've been primed with that.' I spoke sharply and leaned slightly forward. It was a technique I had often used when cross-examining doubtful witnesses, and I had the satisfaction of seeing him flinch. ‘He was on the point of blabbing. He drank because he was scared.' I paused, and then said quietly. ‘He was murdered.'

‘Oh, but—'

I cut him short. ‘He was murdered,' I repeated. ‘Yes, murdered – just as you'll be murdered when the time comes.'

His pale eyes were a little wider now. But I had no chance to press home my advantage. Out of the tail of my eye I caught a slight movement. And as I turned a soft suave voice said, ‘I am sorry to break in upon this melodramatic scene, Mr Kilmartin.'

The bedroom door was open and framed in it was the podgy little figure of Max Sedel. A revolver dangled carelessly from his right hand – an ugly little weapon fitted with a silencer – and in the light from the window I saw the gold of his signet ring glitter. ‘I have been expecting you,' he said quite calmly. I met his eyes, and a shiver ran down my spine. They were narrow, steely slits in the puffy flesh of his face, and
suddenly I knew what he reminded me of – a stoat. Sitting in his office, he had seemed to me essentially a sedentary man. I had thought him dangerous, but passively so. I had thought of him as a man who might prove useful to Germany, a man who could obtain valuable information. Now I saw him for what he really was. It showed in his eyes, in the poise of his small plump, almost feminine figure and in the careless way he held the gun. He was a gangster. Not just a common gangster, but that most dangerous of all gangsters, a fanatic with boundless ambition – a little Napoleon.

He picked up the phone and asked for a number. Cappock had risen to his feet. His sallow features seemed a shade paler, and the boyishness had gone from them so that they now looked sharpened and hard. I remained in my chair, my eyes fixed on Sedel. He was swinging the revolver rhythmically to and fro by the trigger-guard, and with the other hand he moved the mouthpiece of the receiver against his fair moustache with a soft caressing movement. Little silky golden hairs marked the line of the razor across his soft white cheeks. At last he got his connection. ‘We are waiting,' was all he said, and replaced the receiver. Then he turned to me. ‘For a criminal barrister,' he said, ‘you're an incredible fool. Did you imagine that you could go around, openly asking awkward questions, with complete impunity?
Mein Gott!
It is always the same with you stupid English. You never plan ahead. You think you'll always muddle through somehow. Well, this is the end of your muddling.
You're through. The whole lot of you are through. In a few months we shall be running everything for you.'

‘And massacring the people, as you have massacred them in Poland,' I said, my tone bitter with contempt.

He laughed. It was a high-pitched sound, something like a giggle. ‘Maybe,' he said. ‘We don't do things by halves. That's where you people always fall down. You don't plan and you're never thorough. You're too squeamish. If you intend to conquer a race, you must conquer them. And that means that you must ruthlessly subdue them. If you only half do the job, they'll rise against you as soon as your back is turned. But England will not rise again once we have conquered her – never.'

‘And all this just because you've stolen a diesel engine from a defenceless old Jew?' I asked.

‘Defenceless old Jew!' he exclaimed, and for a moment I thought he would spit on the carpet. ‘A damned traitorous swine. That engine belongs to the Reich, and back to the Reich it will go.'

‘And how do you propose to get it there?' I asked scornfully.

He looked at me. ‘You want to know too much, my friend.'

At that I forced a laugh. ‘You talk of organisation,' I said with fine scorn. ‘You have me at your mercy, yet you're so afraid that I shall escape that you daren't give me even the most obvious information. There's only one way you can get it out of the country, and that is in a neutral ship bound for a neutral port. And
that's where you lose. You've no conception of the meaning of contraband control, though you would have if you lived in Germany and faced the pinch with the rest of your country. Germany never had a navy that had the freedom of the seas, so you don't understand the meaning of naval efficiency. You've as much chance of getting that engine through to a neutral country as of flying it there.'

I saw the flush spread from his neck to his white cheeks, and I knew I had succeeded. He strode up to me and struck me across the face. I did not move, but sat watching his eyes. ‘Your navy!' he sneered. ‘Where does your precious navy look – why, in the hold of a ship. You smug, foolish little lawyer! In three days that engine leaves the country. A day later it will be in Germany. Everything is ready – the materials, the skilled workers, everything. In six months from now our planes will be bombing your towns with impunity.'

He was interrupted by a knock at the door. He motioned Cappock to answer it. The man crossed the room. His stoop was very noticeable. He opened the door slightly and peered out. Then he pulled it wide open and two men came in, dressed in a dark-brown livery and carrying a large tin box between them. It was black and had the name A. Cappock painted in white on the lid. It was a deed-box of the type you see trundled in and out of banks in the City. But it was a good deal larger than the ones I was accustomed to seeing. ‘Cappock's deed-box and your coffin,' Max Sedel told me.

Until that moment, I think the whole scene had appeared somewhat unreal to me. I had seen much of the seamy side of London and other big cities. I knew that strange things happened behind the quiet façade of these places. But those who live in London never fear it. The strange happenings they read of never touch them, never break the daily routine of their lives. My eyes turned to the window. I could see the bare black branches of the trees in the park. Soon they would be green, with the bright fresh green of spring. My heart overflowed with the longing to see that spring green again. The cold wretched winter was a thing of the past. Ahead lay the spring, with promise of new things. And in that moment it was of Freya I thought. My eyes travelled from Sedel's revolver to the tin box and back again to the revolver. But my brain scarcely registered what my eyes saw, for my mind was occupied with a picture of that oval face, with the slender arch of the eyebrows and wide dark eyes above the finely chiselled nose. I saw down the whole corridor of my life, and where I had before been satisfied with it, with my success as a criminal barrister, with my wide circle of friends, with the pleasant times I had had, I now found it empty and lifeless. And the park would soon be green again! Yet I was to end my life inconspicuously, murdered because I knew too much. I felt a sudden rage. Was I to let life be taken from me just as I had found something that made it so precious?

I had risen to my feet and stood facing Sedel. ‘You fool!' I said. ‘Do you think I haven't prepared for
this? You have burgled my club to get a statement of mine that I left with the secretary. But do you imagine that that was the only statement?'

He smiled. He had recovered his self-possession. ‘So, you have another statement? That was to be expected. But I do not think your friend Crisham will pay much attention to it. By describing this tin box as your coffin, I fear I have given you a wrong impression. You will live – for a time. And during the next few weeks you will send Crisham a number of statements. You will accuse various public men of crimes against the State, and each accusation will be more fantastic than the last. By the time he has checked up on a few of these accusations he will not be inclined to pay much attention to the original statement when it is placed in his hands. Nor will he be altogether surprised when he hears that you are an imposter and that the real Kilmartin is dead. You will be regarded as a madman.'

‘And who is to sign these false statements?' I asked.

‘Why you, of course.'

‘You know I shall not,' I replied hotly.

‘Oh, but I think you will, Mr Kilmartin.' There was a gleam in his eyes, and the relief, which I had felt at realising that my death was deferred for the time being, vanished and my heart sank. The rubber truncheon, the steel-cored whip and all the other horrors of the concentration camp filled my mind. I had heard about these things so often. But they had been something remote, like a flood in China or an earthquake in South America. They had not touched me. I
tried to think that torture was no longer a weapon used by civilised nations. I tried to persuade myself that this sort of thing could not possibly happen in the middle of London. But I knew it could. I knew that though I was in a well-known hotel in Piccadilly, I was as far beyond the pale of legal protection as I should be in Germany itself.

My eyes suddenly met Sedel's and I braced myself. The little blighter was watching me with a faint smile on his lips. The gleam was still in his eyes, and at that moment I think I understood him. Germany is essentially an athletic country, and this man was no athlete. Physically he was weak. There is nothing so deadly as a man whose ambition is spurred on by an inferiority complex. Sedel's absorbing interest in life, as I saw it then, was power. Not power in the big sense. But physical power. The power of life and death. The power to torture. For seven years he had laboured in a hostile country to build up a position that would give him the power to kill men. Now he was realising the first fruits of those labours. And as I looked into those eyes I saw stark bestial cruelty. The man was a sadist, and I had a horrible fear that his sadism would take a mental as well as a physical form. He might even drive me mad.

An awful horror surged through me at that thought. It centred itself upon the deed-box. I always had a horror of being shut up in a place with no means of getting out. It was a mild form of claustrophobia. It was sheer terror more than anything else that gave me courage. With a sudden movement, I
sprang at him, swinging my fist as I came. He was not prepared for this sudden rush. He had no time to use his gun. I am a fairly heavy man, and he caught the full force of the blow on the mouth. I felt his teeth splinter. I swung my left to his stomach and dived for the door.

But the two men in livery cut me off. I turned back and flung myself on Sedel's gun, which he still held in his hand as he sprawled, writhing across a table. My fingers closed on the steel barrel and I wrenched it from him. Then I turned, and I knew the game was up. I have a very vivid picture of that split second before I passed out. It remains in my mind like a still from a film. I can't remember anyone moving. All I remember is one of the liveried men stooping forward towards me, his right hand half-raised and clutching the soda-water siphon by the neck. Across the knuckles of his hand ran a thin white scar. I also remember quite clearly that on the lapels of his jacket were eagles, swooping on their prey, emblazoned in gold. And then I knew nothing more until I awoke to the gentle movement of a car going slowly.

A great pain in my head came and went, came and went, in agonising rhythmic waves. Like a gentle murmur at the back of my brain I heard the engine of a car, and there were voices, too, but they sounded very far away. For a moment everything went blank again. Then I noticed that the car had stopped. And almost immediately started again. And alongside it
was the pulsating roar of a diesel-engined vehicle gathering way.

For a time I could not think what had happened. Consciousness kept coming and going with the hammer strokes in my head. For a moment I thought I must have been involved in a street accident, for I had guessed that the diesel-engined vehicle had been a bus. I could hear faintly the sound of the London streets all about us and I felt certain that I was in an ambulance, being taken to hospital. Then, suddenly, I remembered the blow. It was not the actual blow that I remembered, but the picture I had seen as I turned, the man with his upraised arm, the little white scar and the eagles on his lapels.

And then an awful terror came upon me. Had I been blinded? I could see nothing. Yet I knew it should be daylight. Or, at any rate, there should be a gleam of light in the car. But though I opened my eyes wide, everything was as black as pitch. Men's voices sounded quite close to me, though muffled. I tried to put out my hand to attract their attention. But I could not move. I tried to speak. But something seemed to stifle the words in my throat.

A sudden panic seized me. I cried out. I screamed. I struggled. It was like one of those awful nightmares in which you cannot move. At length I lay still, exhausted. And it was only then that I realised that I was bound and that there was a gag in my mouth. I tried to move my head, but found I could not. And then I remembered the tin box, and for hours it seemed I struggled with a terrible hysteria. But though
I eventually calmed myself, I had a horrible fear that I might never be let out. And then I began to develop cramp. I don't know which was worse, the physical pain in my joints or the mental horror of being shut up in that tin box for ever. And the strange thing was that I could not move my arms, legs or head the fraction of an inch. I was fixed to that tin box as though I were a dummy clamped into position.

At length the car stopped and there was much scraping of boots on the floor. The doors were opened just near my head and the familiar sounds of the London streets became suddenly clear. I heard a news-vendor crying the late night final and the murmuring shuffle of countless feet. I guessed that it must be rush-hour. My box shook violently and I heard the sound of a man's breathing. And then I toppled over on to my side. Instinctively I tried to break my fall. But I could not move my hand. And anyway there was no fall. A second later I was on my head. The tin box grated on the road surface, and then I was righted and laid down on a little trolley. The iron wheels rang as it was pulled up the kerb. For a moment we were held up on the pavement. Quite plainly I heard one passer-by saying, ‘I was just speaking to old Jessop in the House and he told me …' The rest was lost. But the word ‘House' had given me a clue to my whereabouts. And this was confirmed when I heard another voice say, ‘… you were coming. You're going to Liverpool Street, aren't you? Well, I'm going to the Bank. Cheerio.' I was in the City. ‘House' meant the Stock Exchange.