It was a pity they could not run to a two-way mirror. Stilton had never seen a two-way mirror. The FBI had them in the flicks. A two-way mirror would really make him feel like a spy rather than just a policeman. Not that he was not utterly proud to be an officer of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch – it just lacked a whisper of romance, that dark hint of adventure.
He sat in the next room with the lights out. Watching Thesiger and his quarry through the inch-open door. Thesiger was talking to a Dutchman – Jeroen Smulders. It was the third time he’d had him in since he was picked up in a dinghy off the coast of Essex. He was Dutch – Stilton was satisfied of that – and neither he nor Squadron Leader Thesiger had been able to find a codebook among his effects – a Dutch/English pocket dictionary, a Lutheran bible, a collection of half a dozen worn, well-thumbed love letters – but he was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a German spy. Thesiger had had the man checked out by the M.O. ‘Just for your own sake – no communicable diseases, that sort of thing.’ And the M.O. had confirmed everything Stilton had suggested. Smulders was nearer thirty than the forty his papers claimed – his hair had been taken up at the roots over the frontal lobes to age him – his sideburns treated with peroxide – two teeth pulled recently – and fifteen pounds of flab added by stuffing himself over a matter of a few weeks to disguise a hard core of underlying muscle. He could take it off as easily as he had put it on with a dash of will-power. Smulders was young, fit and probably trained.
‘Trained what?’ was the question Stilton had put to himself. Your run-of-the-mill spy (was there such a thing?) didn’t need to have the physique of a Spartan warrior. Your run-of-the-mill spy more than likely was a forty-two year old Dutch printer, hotfoot from Delft, telling you he was fleeing the enemy. The Germans had gone to a lot of trouble with this man. But too quickly, the new body, the new persona, sat atop the old too loosely.
Stilton saw the two men rise. Saw Thesiger shaking hands with Smulders, wishing him good luck. Smulders gathering up his papers, walking out into his new life, safe in Britain, an island haven in an occupied Europe.
Thesiger lit up a fag. Stilton took his hat and his macintosh off the back of the door and pulled it wide. Thesiger perched on a corner of his desk, the epitome of calm. He was not one of those officers for whom ‘on duty’ required a stiff upper lip and a ramrod backbone, any more than it seemed to require a regulation uniform. Thesiger was frequently to be found in corduroy trousers or a rough woollen pullover or with a tatty old cravat tucked around his neck – the blue battledress with its insignia of rank the only concession he made. Most of the time he was to be found with his feet up – and on cold days this winter he’d sat with his feet in the bottom drawer of his desk for warmth, until the day a Wren came in without knocking and he’d stood too sharply in the presence of a lady and shot through the bottom of the drawer.
‘Have you got a few minutes?’ he said.
‘O’ course. He gets a lift to the station. One of my blokes gets on the London train with him. Another picks him up at Fenchurch Street. Routine stuff. Doesn’t need a Chief Inspector.’
Thesiger held out a packet of Craven A.
‘No thanks, sir. I’ve given up. Strictly a pipe man from now on.’
‘Given up?’ Thesiger could not keep the astonishment out of his voice. People didn’t give up cigarettes. They either smoked or they didn’t. ‘Ah well . . . tell me, Chief Inspector. Do I detect a sour note in your use of the word “routine”?’
‘All I meant was that anyone could do it. I meant no offence.’
‘And I took none. But it does seem to me that you think all this is a bit beneath you.’
‘Not exactly. But it’s hardly using me to the full, is it? When I was seconded to the unit I thought it was because I’d fluent German, because I knew Germans . . . and I’ve picked up more than a smattering of Polish and Czech in the last four years.’
‘Anyone could do what you do?’
‘Doesn’t take what I know to tail a few blokes around London.’
‘Then we must see if we can’t make better use of your talents.’
It was the kind of remark Stilton had become used to from the toffs. Three years a serving Tommy and almost thirty as a copper had rubbed in the deferential nature of the Forces. Merit had little or nothing to do with it. You were born to lead or you weren’t. And Stilton wasn’t. It all came down to class. Age – he was fifteen or more years older than Thesiger – and experience – he’d been in the last war, when Theisger was still a schoolboy – counted for little. It was the sort of thing that took a war to change. The first year of Walter Stilton’s war had been routine. The second year, since Dunkirk, had been one of the best of his life – working for Thesiger as a ‘spycatcher’. He and Thesiger got on very well. He’d rarely met a toff less strait-jacketed by his class. They understood one another very well. Thesiger could drop the upper crust habitual allusions and ellipses of speech to talk plainly when he had to. And still it left Stilton frustrated. Thesiger’s generosity of spirit was sincere, as sincere as his material generosity (he was the sort of bloke who’d share his flask and sandwiches with you), but it was unlikely to be followed up by any action. He’d interrogate Jerry – Stilton and blokes like Stilton would traipse after them in the pouring rain noting their movements in little black notebooks.
Thesiger sat down again – stretched out his legs, heels resting on the edge of his desk, talked through a puff of smoke, the cigarette waggling in his lips as he did so.
‘While we’re on the subject, Walter, I wanted to ask you – what news of our Jerry in Derby?’
This was a man professing to be a Belgian refugee. Thesiger and Stilton had spotted him at once and decided to turn him loose. Let him find his place in Britain and then use him to feed back misinformation.
‘He’s snug as a bug in a rug at the Rolls Royce works. We’ve got him making up parts for what he thinks is a new fighter engine. It’s about as likely to fly as a pig. Most of it’s made up from the plans for my wife’s sewing machine, blown up to twenty times the scale. At worst we might inadvertently give Krupps the idea for a two-ton Singer.’
Thesiger grinned. Class notwithstanding, Stilton liked the man. It was largely thanks to him that MI5 could boast that there was not a single German spy in Britain they did not know about.
‘We can’t afford to lose Smulders. Not for a day. He’s not here to stay. He’s not a sleeper. He’s on something quite specific. If I knew what it was I’d not have turned him loose. As soon as we know you’ll have to pull him in. There’s a risk of course – if Jerry has some way of communicating with him, then the minute he goes active he’ll try and vanish. We must be ready for that, really we must.’
‘Do you mind if I stick in me two-penn’orth?’
‘He’s a twitchy sort of a bloke. One of the nurses came up behind him a bit too quiet like during his medical, and he rounded on her faster than a ferret after a rabbit. He’d grabbed her by one arm before he checked himself. All smiles and apologies. She’d dropped her kidney dish. He helped the lass pick it up – was so charming to her he made the poor girl bright red with embarrassment. But it was enough. A dead giveaway. He’s what you’d call Commando trained. A bare-handed killer.’
‘Perhaps we are wasting your talent. An assassin indeed. I’m inclined to agree. Assassin of whom, one wonders? They’d hardly send him across and expect him to take a crack at Winston now would they?’