VIII

WINTER MARSH AGAIN

HENNIKER HAD NOTHING of immediate significance to report when I saw him on Friday morning, though what he did have to say bore out my feeling that what went into the shipping company’s accounts was intended to conceal financial operations rather than to reveal them. ‘I’ve done what I can with the shipping figures,’ he said, ‘but I can’t say that I’ve learned much, because they are considerably mixed up with the group accounts as a whole. There’s a quarterly profit and loss account for the ships, and after meeting running costs the balance – there always is a balance – is handed over to the group. The ships as such would certainly appear to be making money – not enough to render the group solvent, but quite a comfortable amount. Payments, as you’d expect, come in from a variety of sources, freight agencies all over the Continent, and a number of individual firms consigning goods of one sort and another. There’s not much to indicate the merchandise carried, though you can guess some of it from the businesses of the consigners. It would have been easier a couple of years back, when accounts were kept in more detail for each individual ship. But they changed the system to accounting on a fleet basis. Lennis explained that this was to reduce paperwork, and that as the shipping company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ingard Group, with no outside shareholders to satisfy, all that mattered was the total contribution from the shipping side to the group’s funds. He was quite open about it. It’s not a system that I would approve of myself, because in my view it doesn’t give a clear enough picture of trading performance on the marine side – not clear enough for reliable forecasts, anyway. But given that the ships are simply part of the group, one can’t condemn the aim of trying to keep down paperwork. It would be different if the ships were turning in losses – then one would want to know much more about which voyages were profitable, and which were not. But as they seem consistently to make profits the group board is not likely to complain. I should add that there’s nothing in the shipping figures to alter my view that the whole outfit is insolvent, and can’t possibly justify any further support from the bank, nor sustain a quotation of any sort on the Stock Exchange.’

‘Nobody seems to want to buy Ingard shares at the moment, so that last bit is safely theoretical,’ I said. ‘I want you to hold your hand until next Thursday – then you can let the balloon go up as soon as you like.’

‘Well, you seem to have persuaded Sir Geoffrey to support you. In my view you’re simply wasting a bit more of the bank’s money. I hope you’ve got some good reason for the delay.’

‘Obviously there’s a reason, but whether it’s a good one or not, God only knows,’ I said unhappily.

Henniker patted my arm with sudden warmth. ‘You must be going through a hell of a time,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about me – I’m not really as stuffy as I sound.’

‘Thank you for that,’ I said, and meant it. Henniker really is a rather splendid sort of person.

*

I telephoned Seddon at lunch time to find out if my date at Southend police station stood, and he replied that it was all fixed up. He also said that he’d had a meeting with the powers-that-be of the River Police, and that they’d promised full cooperation. ‘What, precisely, do we want them to do?’ he asked.

‘Can you fix a meeting with them for Monday? And can you use the international influence of New Scotland Yard to get the Spanish police to let you know when the Agnes T has sailed from Bilbao? If any of our guesses are right, it must be some time on Sunday, or just possibly before Sunday if she’s going to kill time anywhere. Before we put the River Police to a lot of trouble, we ought to know definitely that she’s sailed.’

‘OK, Peter,’ Seddon said. ‘Don’t forget to take plenty of warm clothes for tonight. Balfour says that it gets damned cold in the telephone-hole.’

*

I wasn’t sure of the approved wear for telephone engineers, but I settled for a pair of dark red sailing trousers, and a heavyweight oiled-wool pullover in dark blue. For my feet I decided on ankle-length rubber sailing boots, which had the double advantage of being waterproof and of enabling me to wear heavy fishermen’s socks. I took a duffle bag with a number of oddments, including my night-glasses and a flask of whisky.

Inspector Balfour had two men with him when I got there. They arranged red lamps round their hole in the road, and soon afterwards departed in the van that had brought me.

The hole was more commodious than I’d expected. It was also deeper, going down a good six feet. You climbed into it by a vertical aluminium ladder, which hooked over the rim. The ladder also provided a step for keeping observation through a slit in the canvas manhole-cover, which effectually concealed everything that went on underground. There was room to sit on a couple of wooden stools, and Inspector Balfour had thoughtfully provided cushions for them. A metal toolbox contained our rations for the night. One problem that I hadn’t thought about was that although it was not yet dark outside, it was deep night at the bottom of the hole. The only light allowed was one of the red roadside lanterns, which suffused everything with a dim and rather sinister red glow. ‘It’s a nuisance about the light,’ Inspector Balfour said, ‘but I reckoned that we ought not to risk anything to suggest that the hole was occupied at night. The red light doesn’t penetrate the canvas cover, and even if there is a chink somewhere any light there is would be taken as coming from one of the red warning lamps in the road.’

‘You’ve done very well,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to have given you such a rotten job.’

‘Well, it’s all in the day’s, or rather the night’s, work,’ he replied philosophically. ‘Just what do you want to do, sir, now that you’re here?’

‘I want to see if I can find some empties,’ I said.

‘Some what, sir?’

‘Sorry – it’s a phrase going back to my army days. I mean empty cartridge cases.’

*

I couldn’t get the Southwark Bridge cartridges out of my head, and while there was nothing at all to link whatever activities went on at Winter Marsh with the body found in the Thames, my thinking about the cartridges found in the pockets led me to think of the two rounds that had been fired at me. If I could recover one of the empty cases it might help to trace the origin of the ammunition that had undoubtedly been used against me. I’d thought backwards and forwards about it to try to decide if there was a reasonable chance of finding anything after a week, and I’d come to the conclusion that the effort was just worth making. Of course I could have asked Inspector Balfour and his men to search for me, but two things inhibited this. First, whoever had fired at me had been quite prepared to kill, and I didn’t want to risk policemen’s lives; and secondly, I knew much better than anyone else just where to look. I’d had my back to the guard when he fired at me because I was walking away from him, but I had a sharp picture in my mind of our relative positions before I’d begun to walk away. The man with the pick-handle had been standing a few yards to one side. I’d been facing the man with the rifle – I standing on the road, he just on the coarse marsh grass of the verge. I reckoned that he let me go about fifty yards before he fired. He might have moved a few yards towards me, but although I had my back to him I was keenly sensitive to his presence, and he was certainly not close behind me.

And he’d fired twice. The empty case from the first round must have been ejected before he could fire again. Had he picked it up? Here I had nothing to go on but what I had sensed of his personality in our brief encounter. The impression I had of him was of casual brutality – ready to shoot without caring whether he hit me or not, slack and rather slouching in his manner. After his second shot, when I’d gone into the ditch, he’d come up and made a distinctly casual search. It was easy to accept that I must have gone under the water in the ditch, and he’d accepted it easily – he’d made no attempt to search the ditch. Then he and his mate had gone off to look for my car. Had he come back to recover an empty cartridge case? They had not come back while I remained hiding in the ditch, and after that it was dark. On the whole I thought it unlikely that anyone had bothered to look for the empty case, and that in all probability it was still lying where it had fallen. Whether I had any hope of finding it in the dark was another matter. I should have to hunt in the dark, without being able to use even a masked torch, but I thought it worth trying. I calculated that I could narrow the area of search to an area of between thirty and forty square yards – a big area of rough grass to scrabble in but, I thought, not impossibly large for a systematic search, crawling across it on tracks that overlapped. Anyway, I made up my mind to have a go.

I explained all this to Inspector Balfour, with some difficulty, for he was halfway up the stepladder keeping watch, and although there was nobody to be seen we talked in whispers.

When he understood what I wanted to do, he didn’t like it. ‘I shan’t be able to see you from here,’ he said. ‘If anything happens to you I shan’t even know.’

‘You’d hear a shot all right. If you do hear a shot, you’ve got a direct link with police headquarters on your phone. If there’s any shooting, or anything else that strikes you as an emergency, call for an armed police party straightaway and search the place. It’ll be hard on you, just waiting, but there’s nothing else we can do. We don’t want to disturb them yet if we can possibly avoid it.’

‘Well, sir, I understand that you’re in charge. I don’t like it, but I’ve been trained to obey orders.’

That off his chest, we discussed planning. Balfour had been instructed that a twenty-four-hour watch was to be kept on the old camp, and nothing was to be allowed to interfere with that. Not knowing what this odd bit of top brass – me – wanted to come to Winter Marsh for, he’d been fully prepared to take the whole night’s watch himself. I told him this was ridiculous. The moon was in the first quarter and not likely to worry us, and it was an overcast night, anyway. I decided to make my expedition between midnight and 2 a.m., promising that I should not be away for more than two hours: if I couldn’t finish my search by then, I’d report back to let him know that I was all right, and go off again. He could keep watch until eight o’clock, and then I’d take over until midnight, so that he could get whatever rest was possible on a wooden stool, even with a cushion. At midnight, he would go on watch again while I went off on my expedition. ‘We can arrange the morning watch when I get back,’ I said. ‘Now let’s see what they’ve offered us for supper.’

*

The police canteen hadn’t done at all badly. There were generous helpings of cold chicken with two cartons of coleslaw, a loaf of crusty bread cut into convenient slices, and some massive pieces of cheese. There was also a flask of hot tomato soup, and, for the small hours, two flasks of hot cocoa. We ate and enjoyed the chicken and some bread and cheese, and decided to keep the soup as well as the cocoa for later in the night.

Inspector Balfour ate his supper perched on the ladder to maintain his lookout. When I’d tidied up things and put the plates back in the toolbox, he came down, and I took his place. Unpromising as conditions seemed, he contrived to make himself quite comfortable at the foot of the hole, arranging the two stools and the cushions so that he could almost lie across them. He couldn’t stretch out fully, but with a cushion to support his shoulders, and a stool and another cushion to take his legs, he folded himself up remarkably neatly. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, ‘but I’ve even managed to get some sleep like this. Learned how to do it in an anti-aircraft dug-out command post during the war.’ He’d had a long day, and soon he actually was asleep, and snoring slightly.

I found my watch extremely tedious. It was impossible to get really comfortable on the ladder and there was nothing to be seen through the spyhole in the canvas cover to provide interest. Apart from the soft red glow of the road lamps it was pitch dark outside. It was too dark to make out even shapes of buildings, but I could see where the camp was by a lighted window in one of the huts. From time to time a shadow passed across it, indicating that a guard or sentry was on duty. No car turned up, and there was no other sign of movement.

I thought I must have been on duty for at least two hours when I glanced at my watch and was horrified to find that I had been at my post for precisely twenty minutes. That wouldn’t do at all – I should be an exhausted wreck by midnight. To make the time pass, I concentrated on thinking hard about the job ahead, trying to visualise every yard of ground I should have to cover to get to the area I proposed to search. The distance, I reckoned, was about a quarter of a mile, maybe a little less. If the sentry stayed fairly near the lighted window, I should not be badly placed, for it was in a hut some fifty yards or so to the right of the road leading to the camp. I didn’t have to go as far as the camp, for the man had been well along the road, or rather the side of it, when he had shot at me. I should conduct my search on hands and knees, presenting only a low silhouette, and I could drop down on hearing the slightest sound. The road lamps by our telephone-hole, and the lighted window in the camp, got over one problem for me – there would be no difficulty in finding my way to the camp, or in getting back.

This mental exercise did help to make time pass, but it still went slowly, and I was thankful when my watch told me that it was five minutes to midnight. I woke Inspector Balfour, and we each had a cup of cocoa. Then, instead of climbing down into the hole, I went up and over the top. The Inspector followed me up the ladder to take post at the spyhole. ‘Good luck,’ he said, and that was that.

*

It was an infinite relief to be out of the telephone-hole. I was on hands and knees as I crawled out of it, and I stayed down until I’d crawled beyond the range of the red road lamp. Then, after listening intently for a moment, and hearing nothing, I stood up, fairly confident that I couldn’t be seen by anybody more than a yard or two away. I walked quickly to the road leading to the camp, my rubber boots making next to no sound.

On the road there was no cover of any sort, but kindly low cloud prevented any hint of moon, and when I reached the area crisscrossed by marsh drains or ditches there was a comforting slight mist. With a dark blue Balaclava to hide the whiteness of my face, dark blue pullover and my sailing trousers in dark Breton red – a good colour for not showing up at night and, being different from the colour of my pullover, helping to break the effect of monochrome mass – I felt that short of having a searchlight turned on me I was as near invisible as could be contrived.

I’d scaled off distances on the Ordnance map and now counted my paces to estimate the two hundred and thirty yards that I reckoned would bring me to my area of search. When I got there, I knelt down, and stayed quite still, for a long minute. I was a good couple of hundred yards from the lighted window, and far beyond the range of the unshaded electric light bulb which I could see inside it. I saw something else, which comforted me greatly – the shadow of a man apparently sitting at a table. I couldn’t see the man himself, because he was to one side of the field of view offered by the window, but I could see his shadow on the wall behind him. Feeling safe for the moment, I began my systematic search.

*

The walk had taken me just over twenty minutes. Allowing half an hour for the return trip, to have something in hand to keep my promise to Inspector Balfour to be back within two hours, I had a good hour for my hunt. I calculated that I was probably within six yards of where the man had been standing when he fired at me. To allow a margin for error I moved back a yard, and then crawled forwards an estimated eight yards, thus putting a yard on at each end of my six yard line of search. Having crawled my eight yards I felt round for a stone or something to mark the end of the line, something that I could feel, because it was too dark to see. In that marshy ground there were no stones, so I uprooted a tuft of grass and turned it earth upwards. Then I crawled back to my starting point and went another eight yards at ninety degrees to my first line, and again turned up a tussock of grass. That gave me two sides of a square, and I began crawling up, and down, moving my line about half a yard each time. Prodding in the grass with my hands as I went forward, and extending the search to my full reach, I was confident that I overlapped each time, so that the whole area of my square would be covered thoroughly.

*

I’d used up half an hour of my time without achieving anything when I had a bad fright – the door of the hut opened, and what seemed a blinding shaft of light came out. I dropped flat on my face, and lay at full length. The grass was long enough to hide me fairly well, and I breathed a bit more freely when I realised that what seemed a blinding light to my dark-adjusted eyes was no more than ordinary room lighting, and could not penetrate the night as far away from the hut as I was. I heard rather than saw, for I kept my face down, someone come out of the hut and walk round the building. Then I heard the door shut, and the light that had momentarily dazzled me disappeared. I waited a couple of minutes in case the door opened again, but it didn’t, and I returned to my search.

I was not doing well – more than half my time gone, and considerably less than half of my area covered. The whole enterprise seemed suddenly ridiculous – looking for a needle in a haystack was likely to be more rewarding than scrabbling in long marsh grass in the dark in the hope of coming on a cartridge case that probably wasn’t there, anyway. The thought of the telephone-hole was like the thought of going home. I pulled myself together – I’d come to hunt in the long grass, and I’d damned well go on hunting.

My hour elapsed, but I’d left myself half an hour for getting back, and I thought I could knock ten minutes off this safely enough. With five minutes to go the fingers of my left hand touched something cold. Another snail? No, it was round and smooth – about the right length, too. Using both hands I disentangled it from the grass. I couldn’t see what it was, but it surely felt like a cartridge case. Yes, I was certain that it was! Well, whatever it was, I had no time for any more looking. I put it in my pocket, and with a sense of infinite thankfulness, I stood up – and at once almost fell down again because I was so cramped from spending over an hour on my knees. Grateful that there was no one to see how ridiculous it must have looked, I bowed ceremoniously from the waist a couple of times, and the stiffness passed off. As quickly as I could I made my way back to the road lamps, and our hole.

*

I tapped lightly on the canvas cover, and whispered, ‘Friend!’

‘Thank God,’ replied an extremely anxious Inspector Balfour. ‘In another two minutes I was going to telephone for a rescue party.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t. I think we may have had a bit of luck. Let me get in, and then we can both have a drink.’

*

The Inspector moved to let me climb down the ladder, but insisted on returning to his post at the lookout slit. Installed on the floor of our home, I got my whisky flask from my duffle bag, opened another flask of cocoa from our food box, and mixed cups of hot cocoa and whisky fifty-fifty for the Inspector and for me. I handed his up to him. The drink relieved tension for both of us. ‘I don’t doubt you know what you’re doing, sir, but I don’t want to go through another two hours like that again,’ the Inspector said.

‘I don’t either. I feel as if I’ve served a sentence of the severest form of pack-drill. I wish we had a better light, but if I get close to this red lamp I daresay it will do. I’ll tell you in a minute if we’ve got anywhere.’

I took the object from my pocket and held it against the glass of the lamp. It was a cartridge case all right, but what mattered were the markings on the rim. The photographs of the Southwark Bridge cartridges in Inspector Redpath’s file were vividly in my mind. It was damnable to have to study my find in dim red light, but it was good enough. There was a bit of mud to be rubbed off, and then I could make out the markings. I’d have to check them against the photographs later, but I was quite sure in my mind that they were the same.

*

‘Do you know anything about the Southwark Bridge case, back in the summer?’ I asked Inspector Balfour.

‘Not much. It didn’t come my way. I do know that it was never solved.’

‘Well, I told you that I wanted to look for a cartridge case that might have come from the bullet fired at me a week ago, in the hope of tracing where the ammunition came from. I’ve found a cartridge case – and it seems to have the same markings as the cartridges that were mysteriously in the pockets of the dead man found by Southwark Bridge.’

The Inspector was interested, but only politely so. ‘Funny, that,’ he said. ‘But there must be millions of those rifle bullets around. This place was a training area not long back, and I expect the army did a lot of practice firing around here.’

‘Yes, but these are Belgian cartridges, and as far as we know the British Army has never used ammunition of this particular make.’

‘That certainly makes it more puzzling. But what on earth can be the connection between a dead man found in the Thames by Southwark Bridge and this God-forsaken place? Must be all of fifty miles from here to Southwark.’

‘The cartridge case is a connection of some sort. But what it means only God knows.’

*

It was past three o’clock, a dismal hour of early morning, a kind of last-of-the-ebb of life, when the human spirit is at its lowest. Even if I possessed Inspector Balfour’s skill in stretching out across two stools, I knew that I could not sleep. Balfour had endured a trying watch, so I suggested that he should turn in again while I kept post at the spyhole. I doubted if there would be anything to see, but I wanted to sort out my thoughts. Balfour protested, but he really was tired, and he was glad enough to go below when I insisted. I stood myself another mug of cocoa and whisky, and resting as comfortably as I could on the parapet to which the ladder was hooked – which was not at all comfortable in fact – I gazed out into the night.

I listed in my mind what I called ‘points of coincidence’. Top of the list was the Belgian-made cartridge case – not used in the British Army, but now found twice in England. The Inspector’s comment that the cartridges in the dead man’s pockets and my cartridge case from Winter Marsh had turned up fifty miles apart did not much bother me: if there was a link between them, it would not be a direct geographical one. What sort of link could there be? Well, there could be a link of supply – that cartridges of the same brand were supplied for whatever was going on at Winter Marsh and to whoever was concerned in the death of the Southwark Bridge man. Did that link the Southwark Bridge death with Winter Marsh? Not necessarily – there was nothing to indicate any other connection at all. Wasn’t there? Surely there was another ‘point of coincidence’ in death – someone had tried to kill me at Winter Marsh (and thought he had succeeded) and someone had certainly killed the man at Southwark Bridge. Wherever those cartridges turned up there was a link of death. Of course rifle bullets are inherently engines of death, but not this sort of death – there is a world of difference between death in battle and murder or casual killing. The attack on me seemed casual in the extreme. I had no evidence to show whether the death of the Southwark Bridge man was casual or long premeditated, but stuffing his pockets with rifle bullets had a suggestion of improvisation about it: anyone who planned in advance to dispose of a body in the river could reasonably be assumed to arrange for something more practical than live ammunition to weight the body. And he hadn’t weighted it very competently. The Redpath theory of weighting the body sufficiently to float it below the surface without sinking to the bottom was ingenious, but I didn’t believe it – to make it work properly would have called for a degree of cold-blooded weighing and accurate calculation that didn’t go with the other features of the case. The cutting-out of tailor’s labels from the clothes was cold-blooded enough, but that didn’t need any particular calculation: it would take only a few minutes, and needed no advance preparation. Yes, there were elements of similarity in the manner of death for the Southwark Bridge man and the attack that at least two people believed had finished off me.

That didn’t necessarily mean that there was the same mind at work in both cases – indeed, from what I knew of things it probably wasn’t the same mind: the casual way in which I was left either dead or drowning in a ditch did not match with the intelligence that at least tried to do something about weighting the genuinely dead body. But there did seem a similarity of circumstance – a short-notice killing, and the use of whatever happened to be around, ditch, river, rifle ammunition to dispose of the body. That seemed to imply that somebody felt himself threatened unexpectedly by something or other, and threatened sufficiently seriously to decide to kill. In my own case the only thing I could think of was that my mere arrival carrying field-glasses at Winter Marsh constituted some sort of threat. It seemed little enough, and it wasn’t at all clear that the man with the rifle had actually intended to kill me: what was important was that he didn’t baulk at killing, and when he thought he had killed me he shrugged it off as if it didn’t matter, and, from what I overheard of his remarks to his mate, even expected approval of his action. ‘We did all right,’ he said. What, or whom, could the man found dead by Southwark Bridge have threatened? Why should it have the remotest connection with events at Winter Marsh? I didn’t know, but the cartridge case was real evidence of at least the possibility of some connection.

Having something real to think about made the time pass much more quickly than on my earlier watch, and when Inspector Balfour sat up from his ingeniously contrived sleeping position I was delighted to find that it was past six o’clock. We shared the last of the cocoa, and were glad of the hard-boiled eggs thoughtfully provided by the police canteen for breakfast. The telephone van turned up promptly at seven thirty, and our vigil was over. The two officers who had come to relieve us took our place in the hole and we went off in the van to Southend where a couple of police cars were waiting, one to take Inspector Balfour home, the other to take me to my temporary quarters at Peel Square.

A hot bath got rid of most of the night’s stiffness. I thought of turning in for a few hours, but although I’d had no sleep during the night I was too worked up to want to rest and I took a taxi to Sir Edmund Pusey’s flat. He was having breakfast, and invited me to join him. I didn’t feel like eating on top of the hard-boiled eggs, but I was glad of a cup of coffee, and we talked.

‘It’s an extraordinary story,’ he said when I’d finished recounting the night’s adventures. ‘Have you got the cartridge case?’

‘Yes. And I’ve brought the Southwark Bridge file, too, so you can compare it with the photographs of the others. The maker’s marks and the batch marks seem to me identical. Of course my case will have to go for laboratory examination, but I’m satisfied that it belongs to the same lot as the ammunition found in the Southwark Bridge man’s pockets.’

Sir Edmund studied the photographs and the rim of my case with a magnifying glass. ‘There doesn’t seem any doubt about it,’ he said. ‘Where does that get us?’

‘It gets us back to Belgium. The police in the earlier inquiry traced the ammunition to the manufacturer, who explained quite reasonably that it had gone off to various military depots on the Continent. I think we’ve got to try to find out how it was distributed from the depots – that’s where I hope our military diplomat can get to work.’

‘Do you want to go over to Belgium?’

‘I don’t know the ropes in Belgium, and I’m sure that inquiries there are best left to the people at our embassy in Brussels, who can work through the Belgian Army and police. I do want to have another talk with the Foreign Office man who came here, to stress the urgency of things. Presumably he won’t be working on a Saturday – I wondered if you could get hold of him at his home.’

‘I can certainly do that. I’ll get my little book. Yes, he lives at Putney. I’ll ring him now.’

Sir Edmund telephoned from his study, and was back in a few minutes. ‘Just as well you keep these extraordinary hours, Peter,’ he said. ‘He was going off for the day to play golf, but I caught him before he started. So he’s changed his plans, and instead he’s invited you to lunch. Is that all right?’

‘Fine.’

‘As a matter of fact, I’ve already accepted the invitation for you. He is expecting you about twelve fifteen.’

Taking people for granted is one of Sir Edmund’s disconcerting and sometimes less than charming habits. But it does save time – his time, anyway.

I now wanted to use the telephone myself. ‘Has Seddon notified the City of London police that we are officially interested in the Southwark Bridge case?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Can I use your phone? There’s something I want to ask Inspector Redpath.’

‘Of course. Use the phone in my study.’

Redpath was off duty, but I had his home number at Ilford. ‘I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday morning,’ I said, ‘but I’d be awfully grateful if I could see you some time today.’

‘Any time you want, sir. I’ll come into the City – or shall I come to your office?’

‘No, don’t do that – I’m not going to interfere more than I must with your day off. I was wondering if I could come out to see you? I won’t keep you long.’

‘Well, sir, if you care to come out to Ilford, I’d be delighted to see you. But it’s a long way out for you.’

‘Not a bit. I’m tied up for lunch – could I come around six o’clock?’

‘Of course. And would you stay for some supper?’

Two free meals in one day – I felt as if I were on the make. But I liked Redpath, and there was a lot to be said for developing personal relations with him. So I accepted his offer and was given directions for getting to his house.

*

The Foreign Office man had a charming Regency house near the river at Putney. If he was irritated at giving up a day’s golf he had the diplomatic manners not to show it and introduced me to his wife as if I were a long-awaited guest. ‘You’ve heard so much of Colonel Blair – he was the man who pulled off all those remarkable things in Carminia,’^* he said. ‘It’s a great honour that he should actually come to our house.’

Denise – his wife – had obviously had a diplomatic training, too. We discussed the world pleasantly over some excellent sherry, and had a most agreeable lunch, including a bottle of a truly admirable Montrachet. After lunch Mrs Forrest excused herself, and her husband asked if I would care for cognac. I don’t like drinking brandy at midday, so I declined and settled for some more coffee. Over coffee, he said, ‘Sir Edmund told me that you had something you particularly wanted to discuss.’

‘Yes.’ I told him of the discovery of the Belgian cartridge case at Winter Marsh. ‘Now these are not twelve-bore cartridges, or sporting ammunition that could come into the country in some normal commercial way. They are for military weapons, and one would expect them to be used – and properly guarded – only by the army, or conceivably by the Royal Navy or the RAF. Yet, according to the Ministry of Defence, they come from a factory that has never supplied the British Forces. So how do they come to turn up in England twice – and on both occasions in circumstances that suggest some criminal activity? It seems to me imperative to go into the distribution in Belgium – and perhaps elsewhere on the Continent – of cartridges from that particular batch far more thoroughly than has been done so far. And it’s a job that wants doing quickly. Of course, we can act through the Belgian police, and I could go over to Belgium easily enough. But with various military authorities involved it would be far better – and certainly quicker – for inquiries to be made through diplomatic military channels. I know that weekends are bad times for getting things done, but I know enough about the reality of our foreign service to know that the popular view of diplomats as nicely dressed people who spend all their time in country houses is not the whole truth. So I wondered if you could prompt inquiries forthwith – I mean really now, this afternoon if possible.’

‘I’ve already sent the request you made the other night. What more, exactly, do you want done?’

‘Well, I’d like the director of that factory run to earth at his home, and asked for the fullest possible list of ordnance depots, or other military agencies, to which ammunition from that batch may have gone. And I’d like the people in charge of those depots to make an immediate check of their stores, to account for all the rounds that have been issued, and to discover if any can’t be accounted for. It’s a big job – just how big I don’t know, for a lot depends on the fullness and efficiency of records. Maybe we’ll be lucky, and find that records are well kept and reasonably centralised. Maybe we’ll be unlucky, and learn precious little. But however it turns out, I think we ought to have a go, even if it means upsetting the weekend.’

Forrest reflected for a moment. Then he said, ‘What you’re asking involves rather more than an approach to the Military Attaché. I should have to invoke the ambassador, to seek the Belgian Government’s authority for the inquiries you want made. I don’t say it can’t be done – but we’d need some very good reason for making such a request.’

‘You could say that there is prima facie evidence suggesting the diversion of military weapons for some unlawful purpose. Surely that would justify urgent action by the authorities.’

‘Yes, I think it would.’ Once convinced of the need for action, Forrest could make up his mind quickly. ‘Right – I’ll get back to the office at once. Where can I get in touch with you if we need you over the weekend?’

‘I’m not sure of my own movements, but that doesn’t matter. If you want anything more from us, get in touch with Sir Edmund Pusey. And I’d like to say how grateful I am for the way you are rallying round. I really am sorry about the golf.’

‘Get away with you! And – good luck.’

* See Death in the Desert (Gollancz).