Harriet Hartwell was in the kitchen wearing an apron, standing with her back to the range, on which a large pot seemed to be bubbling. In one hand she held a ladle, in the other a small pistol. As soon as she saw Wilde, the tension in her eyes eased and she slipped the gun into the apron pocket.
For a few moments he wondered whether he had really seen it, but no, his eyes were not deceiving him. ‘You’re armed.’
She shrugged. ‘Did you think I would have picked you up in Cambridge if I weren’t?’
‘It never occurred to me.’
‘That’s because you don’t know who you are dealing with.’
‘And the ladle? Is that a weapon, too?’
‘Dolby and I are old friends. I’m making his jam.’
‘Somehow I hadn’t imagined you in a domestic setting. Smells delicious. Strawberry?’
‘Very perceptive. You could be a secret agent, Mr Wilde.’ She stopped stirring the pot and raised a withering eyebrow. ‘I can’t just sit around doing nothing. Anyway, jam aside, I’m a great deal more interested in the condition of my aunt. What can you tell me?’
‘Not much, I’m afraid. All I know is that she was alive when I got her to St Thomas’ Hospital and they said she had suffered a heart attack. They couldn’t tell me any more than that.’
‘Perhaps we could telephone them.’
‘The phone might be bugged.’
‘Still, I need to know.’
‘Is there a telephone here?’
‘Astonishingly, yes, there is. Dolby is a modern man.’
Dolby was standing in the doorway. ‘I’m going to leave you two, if you don’t mind. It’s going to take me the best part of twenty minutes to walk back to Athelstans. I’m likely to be missed. Help yourself to as much tea and bread as you want. But if you use the phone, I’d be glad if you could leave me a shilling.’
‘Of course,’ Harriet said. ‘Thank you, Dolby. Thank you for everything.’
After Dolby had gone, Harriet removed the jam from the heat. On the table she had a dozen empty jars and she began to fill them from the pot. Wilde watched her work, fascinated at her precision and single-mindedness. When she had finished, and applied caps to each jar, she smiled at Wilde. ‘Now, professor, let’s make that telephone call – and then I will tell you everything, from start to finish.’
‘You have a good friend there in Dolby.’
‘He always looked after us, Peter and me. Made sure we weren’t disturbed.’
‘Does no one else know you are close to him? Might someone suspect that he is helping you?’
‘I don’t think so. Not unless you were followed.’
He shook his head.
‘Well, you pour the tea – the pot’s over there – and leave the hospital to me.’
He found two cups and some milk while she went through to the hall. He could hear her voice, but couldn’t quite make out the words. He heard the click of the handset and then she reappeared.
‘Well?’
‘She’s alive, thank God. They offered to call me back if they had any further news.’
‘You didn’t bite?’
‘Do I look stupid, Tom? No, I didn’t give them this number.’
‘Well, tea’s ready.’ He handed her one of the cups.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘I have a lot to tell you.’
Dolby’s little parlour was a strange room, a bachelor’s space with dull brown curtains tied back with string, bare wooden boards, a hearth strewn with ash and no ornaments save one photograph on the mantelpiece of a man from another rather more starch-collared age. Wilde assumed the man was Dolby’s father.
They sipped their tea in silence for a minute. Through the window, Wilde could see nothing but farmland and trees. If they had to hide, this was a good place.
‘Well,’ Harriet said at last, ‘you seem to have already worked out that I am not a run-of-the-mill secretary. And yes, I was on a mission to Stockholm with His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent – Georgie.’
‘Can you tell me any more than that?’
‘He was meeting his cousin, Prince Philipp von Hessen. It was of course a mission of the utmost secrecy. The words “top secret” don’t come close to doing it justice.’
That was the name Templeman had mentioned. It was beginning to come back to him.
‘Have you heard of him?’
‘Vaguely,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid these German aristocrats mean nothing to me.’
‘Well, this one is a big cheese Nazi. A very close friend of Hitler and Göring. Also quite close to Mussolini and the Italian mob. He works as a liaison between Berlin and Rome. On top of that, he also happens to be a very good friend of our own royal family.’
Of course, the duke had been talking peace with him. The whole drugged evening was coming back to him. God, what had he given away? Her car – he had told them about her car, including its number plate.
Harriet continued. ‘The duke’s mission was simply to find out how desperate Hitler was to do a deal. Get an idea of the morale in the Nazi HQ. But there was always the worry that Georgie – the Duke – wouldn’t stick to the script.’
‘Is that what happened?’
‘I really don’t know. I was with him at the first, formal meeting because I not only have a very good shorthand note but I also have a quite remarkable memory. Perfect, when I set my mind to it, like an actor learning lines. In school plays I could learn a large role in a fraction of the time it would take anyone else. In this case I took a full note in my head and then transcribed it on to paper at the end of the meeting. There was only one copy made, and I gave that personally to Georgie. So the only people who know what was said were the Duke, myself, Prince Philipp – and his own aide. That should have been the end of it, but then Georgie strayed from the script and agreed to meet his cousin later in the day, man to man, no aides. I don’t know what was said, and now that Georgie is dead we may never know. But as far as I’m concerned that’s all a side issue. Something far more important happened in Stockholm.’
‘You went missing.’
She looked shocked. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Philip Eaton. Perhaps you know him?’
‘Of course I know him. When did he tell you this?’
‘Last night. He wanted to know your whereabouts.’
‘I damn well bet he did. Why were you talking with him? I thought I could trust you.’
‘Lord Templeman was there, too.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘You know him, don’t you? From the Dada Club.’ They had been together in the newspaper photograph.
‘Of course I know Dagger.’
‘They had me abducted and questioned me.’
She looked alarmed. ‘What did you tell them?’
‘I’m pretty sure I was doped, but it’s starting to come back to me – and I have a horrible feeling I gave them details of your car. I’m sorry. Apart from that, there wasn’t a great deal I could actually reveal because I didn’t know where you were or what you were up to. But I’m sure it’s you they are after.’
‘I don’t believe it. Dagger’s not an Athel…’
‘Well, he’s trying to find you.’
‘We’ll have to ditch the car. But how do you know they didn’t follow you to Clade?’
‘Visibility was clear. Very little traffic – I’d have seen anything pursuing me.’ He said the words, but now he wasn’t certain.
‘I think we need to get out of here.’
Wilde had just kicked the Rudge into life when he spotted the black car at the end of the track. It hadn’t been there when he arrived with Dolby. He turned to Harriet, who was about to get on the pillion. The black car started to move; someone was hanging out of the passenger side window.
‘See that? Is there another way out of here?’
They heard a crack-crack. Two puffs of debris flew from the brickwork at the side of the house, six feet from the bike.
‘There’s a track through the woods. It’ll be rough, but no car will be able to follow us.’
‘Where does it lead?’
She hit him with her fist. ‘Just go!’
Wilde turned the bike, the rear wheel spinning away in the dusty path. He looked back and saw that the black car was accelerating up the track towards them, and he saw the pistol in the passenger’s hand. As he twisted the throttle, he heard another crack-crack, two wisps of smoke leaping from the man’s pistol. The Rudge was digging up dirt in the pathway as he accelerated towards the woods behind Dolby’s house.
The track Harriet had picked was no track at all. He rode on instinct, ducking below overhanging branches, swerving past windfall logs, stopping at impassable undergrowth and re-tracing their path until he came to another way, driving deeper and deeper into the woods. He stopped and turned to her. ‘I think we’re lost,’ he said.
‘We’re fine,’ she said.
‘So long as we’re not circling back.’
‘I thought men were supposed to have a good sense of direction.’
‘You’re very amusing, Miss Hartwell.’
‘Well, now you know I am also armed, so don’t forget it.’
Wilde carried on, taking half-path after half-path. They came to an edge of the wood. From the sun, he reckoned they had made their way south and west of Dolby’s house, perhaps a mile and a half. There was no road; they were in farmland, at the corner of a field lying fallow. In the distance they saw a farmhouse and outbuildings.
‘I think we should wait here until dark, then make our way to London,’ Wilde said. ‘We’ll find a road beyond those buildings.’
He leant the Rudge against a tree and they settled down on the perimeter of the field, just inside the trees.
‘You were telling me about Stockholm, Miss Hartwell.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, my name’s bloody Harriet. And by the way, was that your wife I spoke to last night? Does she trust you?’
‘I thought we were talking about Stockholm.’
‘Well?’
‘Yes, she does, I think. I hope so anyway.’
‘More fool her. I’ve seen the way you look at me – the same way all men look at me.’
Wilde shook his head. ‘Can we get back to the subject of Stockholm now? How did it come about – the meeting between the two princes?’
‘By way of a middleman, name of Axel Anton. Have you heard of him?’
‘No. Who is he?’
‘I’m pretty sure he’s Swedish. Certainly Scandinavian. He’s elusive. Usually he contacts us when he has something to offer. Getting in touch with him at other times is more difficult.’
‘That doesn’t really explain his role.’
‘You’ve very demanding, Tom. OK, let’s put it this way – I suppose you’d call him a fixer or a go-between, used by everyone, trusted by no one. He’s in it for the money, but he has astonishing contacts. He can get a message from Whitehall to Berlin or vice versa without involving neutral embassies.’
‘Why would you want to get messages to Berlin?’
‘Well, on a day-to-day basis, we want to warn them to play nice. Let them know that whatever unpleasantness they choose to visit on our citizens or PoWs will be repaid in kind. That if they drop gas on our cities, we will drop gas on theirs. It’s the reason no phosgene bombs have fallen on London. They just need a friendly reminder now and then of what awaits them if they don’t observe the rules of the game.’
‘So Axel Anton fixed up the Stockholm meeting – but at whose behest?’
‘The Nazis. Churchill would never have allowed us to approach them. As far as he was concerned, this was nothing but a fact-finding mission.’
‘Was Axel Anton there?’
‘Yes, he was at Drottningholm – that’s the King of Sweden’s summer palace – but not at the actual talks. Anyway, forget about him for the moment. I was about to tell you why I went missing. There’s the other man I mentioned – Rudi Coburg. I was about to tell you about him in Mimi’s house when we were rudely interrupted by someone hammering down the door.’
‘Go on.’
‘Rudi was Prince Philipp’s aide – my opposite number in the initial meeting.’
‘And?’
‘We knew each other from way back. For one year in the mid-thirties, he was a pupil at Athelstans – which is how I became acquainted with him. He was a chum of Peter Cazerove’s.’
‘Very convenient.’
She glared at him. ‘Don’t take that tone, Tom.’
‘Forgive me – it’s just that I’m not very keen on coincidences. It’s my job as a historian.’
‘Well, this isn’t a bloody archive, so infer nothing. Just listen.’
‘But he knew you would be there, yes? Too big a coincidence otherwise…’
‘That’s enough. All you need to know is that he got a message to my room to slip away and meet him. He had something to tell me – something extremely important. But first, let me tell you a little bit about him. Rudi used to be a ferocious Nazi. All Blut und Boden – blood and soil. To be honest, I rather went off him towards the end of his year at Athelstans because he was forever ranting about how wonderful Herr sodding Hitler was and how the Aryan race would rise again. Not that he was the only anti-Semite at the school! But anyway, I was rather pleased when his father had him taken away from Athelstans at the end of the year and plonked him into one of those Nazi schools. Napolas or Ordensburgen, I think they’re called – training the future SS in arrogance and the finer points of cruelty.’
‘You said he used to be a Nazi? That sounds as if he’s changed his mind.’
‘He says his eyes have been opened. He saw something so terrible that even he was shocked. And now he is desperate for the world to know about it.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Right, here goes. He told me that the Nazis have built abattoirs to slaughter the Jews – Rudi has seen one of them with his own eyes. Men, women and children are herded like cattle into sealed rooms where they are gassed with carbon monoxide, pumped from an infernal engine, and then their corpses are relieved of gold teeth and wedding rings before being tossed, naked, into enormous pits.’
Was he hearing this? The words were plain enough, but the vision they conveyed was outside his comprehension.
‘Thousands upon thousands of them are being murdered in this way, deep in the forests of Poland, away from prying eyes. Production line murder.’
He was silent for a few moments, trying to compute this information. Was this some sort of metaphor? ‘You don’t mean this literally, do you? You mean he is rounding them up in ghettos and keeping them short of food, with devastating consequences?’
‘No, I mean he is killing them, choking every last one of them to death with poison gas. Every woman, every child, every baby, every man.’
‘That’s preposterous!’
‘Yes, it is. But it happens to be true.’
‘No. I don’t believe it. Human beings don’t do things like that to each other.’
‘Of course you don’t believe it – no one decent could believe such a thing. I didn’t believe it either, because it’s totally insane and disgustingly obscene. But now I do believe it and I wake up in the morning in a cold sweat. I think of it by day and dream of it by night. I am cursed with this photographic memory, so I recall every single word Rudi told me and I recall the fear and horror in his eyes and in his voice, and I know that he was telling the absolute truth. He would have to be an Olivier to be acting. But he isn’t – and anyway he doesn’t have the imagination. Every word he told me was the truth – and he will tell you exactly the same things.’
Wilde shook his head again. ‘No, Harriet, I can’t buy this. It’s anti-Nazi propaganda.’
‘I wish it was, but it’s not – and I will prove it to you. Or, rather, Rudi will.’
‘Then he’s here in England?’
‘No, he’s in Sweden. He wanted to come back on the flying boat with us. Georgie agreed, but he was advised against.’
‘By whom?’
‘His aides. Perhaps they were right. Anyway, Georgie said he would arrange a special flight for him once we were home. But of course he never made it home, so now it falls to me. I am going to get Rudi Coburg to England, along with his evidence. He is an eyewitness to the greatest atrocity the world has ever known – perhaps the only witness who will ever have the chance to talk because all the others will be dead. What’s more, he has physical evidence – official documents – to back him up. And those papers are vital, because without them the Nazis would laugh off his testimony – just as you are now. And the world wouldn’t believe it.’
‘How does he know all this?’ Wilde demanded, still refusing to believe it but fearing deep in his heart that it might just be true. ‘What is his evidence? You said he saw something.’
‘He knows it because he was directly involved in it.’
‘You’d better explain.’
She had been sitting against a tree. Now she got to her feet and began to pace about. Wilde watched her, entranced. The afternoon was dry and sunny, but he felt a chill in the air, the first intimation of summer’s end and the long descent into autumn and winter.
Harriet stopped right in front of Wilde. He could not take his eyes off her. Beauty can fade with familiarity; hers just grew. And as it did, so did the contrast with the depravity of her message. He looked away, aware of what she had said earlier, about the way men looked at her.
She didn’t seem to have noticed this time, because she continued telling him about Coburg. ‘He worked in a senior capacity in the department that is organising the logistics of the slaughter. The RSHA Referat IV B4, to be precise – that’s the office of Jewish affairs and evacuation in the Reich Main Security Office. It is run by a man named Adolf Eichmann, who is answerable to Heinrich Müller, the Gestapo chief, and then upwards to Himmler and Hitler himself. The department organises the trains in which these poor people are conveyed to their doom. Scores of trains, each one packed with thousands of innocent Jews, clattering day and night from the cities and towns of Poland and the other occupied territories, through the forests of Poland to lonely outposts which have but one purpose: slaughter. Total annihilation of a whole race.’
‘And your friend Coburg was doing this?’
‘Yes, and now he is in despair. He was always an anti-Semite and he wanted the Jews out of Germany, but he denies that he wanted them murdered. He insists he didn’t know what they were doing when they organised these trains. He thought these places were transit camps before the Jews were resettled in the East. But now he has been there and he has seen one of the camps in operation – and so he knows the truth. These places – these slaughterhouses – are the end of the line. And he has the evidence: names, maps, official written orders… if the Nazis do one thing well, it’s bureaucracy. They keep records of everything.’
‘Good God.’
‘I must be honest with you, Tom. I still don’t like Rudi very much. And I certainly loathe his politics. But in a way, that makes his testimony all the more believable. That and the fact that having betrayed his masters he knows he is a dead man.’
‘You say he is in Sweden – but where exactly?’
‘He has been concealed on a small island, one of thousands, in the middle of nowhere. Only Axel Anton knows its precise location, and so I must contact him. But before I do so, I need to get to Churchill to organise a safe way to get Rudi to England, to testify to the world and hand over his evidence. With Georgie dead, there is no other way. No one else I can trust.’
‘I still don’t really understand why you’re being hunted in this country and what the Athels could have to do with it all.’
She laughed without a trace of humour. ‘The Athels want a deal with Hitler, don’t you see? This is the way they protect themselves from the threat of revolution or conquest. It has been the same for almost 150 years. They weigh up the threats – Nazism or Communism – and see Stalin as the greater danger. And so to preserve themselves, they decide on a joint Anglo-German enterprise against the Bolsheviks. They have but one policy – preserve themselves.’
‘No political allegiance then?’
‘Maintain the status quo. Whatever it takes. Nothing else. And so they can’t allow the Nazis’ reputation to be damaged by Rudi’s testimony. I suspect, too, that they will have been contacted by Berlin to do their dirty work. Rudi must die, so must I. And I fear, Tom, that you will now be added to their list.’
‘And you think it is the Athels hunting you?’
‘Of course.’
‘And the plane crash – they thought Rudi Coburg was aboard and they were trying to kill him?’
‘They wanted to kill both of us – all of us. That’s why I need to get to Churchill. I trust no one else. I have made that mistake once already, you see.’
‘Peter Cazerove?’
She nodded. ‘I contacted him from Sweden. I confided in him. He betrayed me.’