XII

THE WILDFOWL REMAIN . . .

SO I MISSED all the excitement at Winter Marsh.

My adventure on the wreck ended, indeed, rather tamely, by walking off at low tide to meet the lifeboat, her coxswain far from pleased at performing what he called ‘a ferry service for a couple of lunatics’. I explained things briefly, and when he learned that I had managed to get on board during the gale he became almost friendly. Andrew Stavanger was near exhaustion, but thankful that his own particular nightmare had ended, though he had, unhappily, still more pain to come.

The lifeboat took us to Clacton, and I went at once to the police station to get in touch with Pusey. They were expecting me, and had more news for me than I for them. Some of their news was already in the papers, and more poured out from the radio. Vivian Carolan, it seemed, had been forestalled in attempting to stage the coup d’état at which he had been hinting in his recent speeches, and what the news bulletin called the Battle of Winter Marsh had gone against him. He was now dead, killed by a bullet in the head, but whether fired by someone else, or by his own hand, was unclear.

Winter Marsh was apparently the depot of his private political group, a weird mixture of extreme left-wing socialism, English, as distinct from Welsh or Scottish, Nationalism, and a kind of Nazism with the Celts replacing the Jews as the enemies of the human race. He seemed to have got many of his ideas from Hitler – there was much contorted socialism mixed with National Socialism – but his plans came nearer lunacy than politics. Nevertheless, he had a following. They were collecting arms at Winter Marsh, and undoubtedly prepared to fight.

The radio news was most unsatisfactory because the facts on which it was based were thin. Even so, it was exciting enough. For reasons left unexplained the police had decided to raid Winter Marsh. They were met by Carolan and about fifty of his supporters, who had opened fire. Things were going very badly for the police when the Royal Naval frigate Onyx, which happened to be patrolling in the area, providentially came up. A landing party from the frigate turned the tables. Casualties were mercifully light. Carolan and three of his men were dead, and half a dozen more injured. Two policemen and a Naval sub-lieutenant were wounded. All the injured were in hospital and reported to be progressing well. Carolan’s party had been rounded up, and would be charged with various offences later in the day.

I had a word with Pusey on the phone, but didn’t attempt any long explanations. I asked him to get a Customs party to the wreck of the Agnes before she broke up – having survived the gale, the wreck would be safe until the next high tide. The gale moderated with the morning, and I thought it even possible that the Agnes might be salvaged. Pusey undertook to see to all this, and the Clacton police provided a car to take Stavanger and me to London.

*

Seddon was with Pusey when I got to the office. ‘The PM is very pleased with us,’ Pusey said.

I had other things to think of. First, I had to get in touch with Henniker. Pusey’s secretary got him on the phone. ‘You can blow up things any time you like now,’ I told him. He wanted to ask me about the extraordinary events at Winter Marsh, but I had to cut him off. I promised him a full account of things when I stood him that dinner I owed him, but said that it would just have to wait. He understood, and didn’t hold it against me – in any case, his own hands were now full.

Then I introduced Andrew Stavanger. ‘Captain Stavanger has confessed to killing Felix Varsov – he is the man whose body was found by Southwark Bridge,’ I said. ‘When you have heard the whole story I’m sure you will agree with me that no court would ever convict him. My own feeling is that he ought not even to be charged with the killing, but I suppose that’s a matter for the Director of Public Prosecutions. Meanwhile, he’s perfectly ready to consider himself under arrest.’

‘I can deal with that,’ Seddon said. ‘If Captain Stavanger will come with me I’ll see to the formalities, and then he can be released on bail.’

‘What he needs most are a good meal, and some sleep. I was thinking of asking Miss Macdonald to look after him.’

‘I can see to that too, if Captain Stavanger agrees.’

*

‘A hell of a lot has happened while you’ve been gallivanting at sea, Peter. I don’t even know what you’ve been doing. How on earth did you find Stavanger?’

‘A hell of a lot more is going to happen,’ I said, ‘The Ingard empire is going to go bust this morning. Ingard himself, and the shipping man Lennis, have got to be arrested. There’s evidence to charge both of them with being concerned in smuggling arms, and I’ve no doubt we can bring other charges as well. Can you send police to Ingard House straightaway? And to their homes, in case they’ve already decided to hop it.’

‘As a matter of fact, we’ve done that already,’ Pusey said. ‘I acted at once, as soon as I got news of Winter Marsh. As far as we know the place belongs to their company, and it was imperative to get hold of them for questioning. They were both picked up at home in the early hours of this morning, and taken to Scotland Yard. They’re there now, both screaming for lawyers, which I suppose they’ll have to have when we start questioning them seriously. This is an appallingly political case.’

‘As far as Ingard and Co are concerned, it’s a straightforward criminal case. Among other things, Stavanger never wrote any letter to the bank authorising the use of his money to pay the Ingard cheque.’

‘What a shrewd old banker Sir Geoffrey Gillington is! But for his suspicions . . . well, I don’t know, I think things were coming to a sort of climax, anyway. I’ve got a lot more to tell you. You were quite right about Belgium, though in a way for the wrong reasons.’

‘So they were getting arms from Belgium!’

‘Yes, but by a most ingenious fraud. When they bought the Winter Marsh site from the Ministry of Defence, they found, or forged, or got hold of somehow, some MoD stationery. Using this, they placed apparently official orders with one of the Belgium ordnance depots for arms and ammunition. They specified which ships they were to be loaded on – all T and T vessels. The Belgians carried out the orders in good faith, but they were getting a bit bothered about payment. They didn’t want to make too much fuss for fear of upsetting the British Government and losing what looked like a valuable contract, but when our Military Attaché began to make inquiries they were delighted to see him. They were less delighted when they realised what had been happening.’

‘So the managing director of that ordnance factory was just wrong.’

‘No, he wasn’t. He traced that batch of cartridges quite properly, and as far as he knew none of it had gone to the UK. What he didn’t know was that the ordnance depot in Belgium which he supplied with cartridges, used them to meet orders which they thought came from the British Government.’

‘Lord, what a tangle! I suppose the Belgians will just have to stand the loss.’

‘I don’t know. It’s quite possible that HMG may make some ex gratia contribution for the sake of good relations – I must say I rather hope so. But that’s not our problem. Tell me about Stavanger.’

Before I could start, Seddon came back. ‘Everything’s fixed up,’ he said. ‘Miss Macdonald is overjoyed. She’s taken Stavanger to her own flat, and he’s agreed to stay there until we get in touch with him. It’s a bit of a risk, I suppose.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think there’s any risk. Andrew Stavanger is an honourable man, and an extremely brave one. From what he told me during the night, and from what we know ourselves, I think we can piece together pretty well the whole story.

‘Miss Macdonald was quite right in thinking that the pressure on Andrew Stavanger to sell his shipping company to Ingard came from his daughter. After his wife’s death he had nothing much to live for, except her. She obviously wanted control of the ships for her own, or her husband’s purposes, but she didn’t want to work through her father because she knew that he’d never do what she wanted. How far back the Ingard relationship goes, we don’t yet know. I suspect some time, and I also suspect that Ingard and Co cheated her all round the clock – I mean, they used the ships and the cash they got with them for all sorts of purposes that Mrs Carolan probably knew nothing about.

‘Stavanger found himself more and more frozen out from anything to do with running the ships. But he was born and bred with ships, and he soon understood that something very fishy was going on. His own crisis came when he began to suspect that the ships were being used for running guns to Ireland, a suspicion that naturally horrified him.

‘But Ingard had a crisis of his own coming up at the same time. He had that huge payment to make to Irwin Osnafeld, and with the collapse of his property empire there wasn’t enough money in the bank. Who suggested using Stavanger’s private money I don’t know – it’s one of the things we’ve yet to find out, if we ever do. I wouldn’t put it past Mrs Carolan. But there’s no doubt that somebody wrote that letter to the bank, and forged Stavanger’s signature. That also meant that Stavanger had got to go. I think Mrs Carolan must have known about it, for otherwise she could hardly have helped showing some concern about her father’s disappearance.

‘What happened was this. The day the letter went to the bank, Lennis was particularly friendly to Stavanger, said they weren’t making enough use of his vast experience of the sea, and that it would be nice if he could get to know some of the new skippers who were taking over as the old men retired. There was a chance that evening – the Agnes would be lying at the old T and T berth in Gallions Reach and a new master, Captain Lemming, was taking her over from there. Could Stavanger go down to Gallions Reach and have dinner on board with the new man?

‘Stavanger agreed readily enough – he had his own reasons for wanting to find out anything he could about the new masters.

‘The Agnes was not berthed – she was lying to a buoy just off the T and T line jetty. Captain Lemming met him on the jetty, and they went out to the ship in the Agnes’s launch, which was at the jetty stairs. Captain Lemming was not in uniform, but there was no particular reason why he should be. He drove the launch himself, explaining that there were only his steward and a couple of men on board, since the new crew would not be joining till the morning.

‘It struck Stavanger as a little odd that they were going out to dine on an almost unmanned ship – why not meet for a meal in a restaurant ashore? But he said nothing, and when they got on board it seemed all right. There was a table laid for dinner in the master’s day-cabin off the bridge, and if the steward had cooked the meal himself, he was clearly a good cook. They had a pleasant dinner together, Lemming proving an attractive host with a fund of interesting stories about the sea and ships he’d sailed in. After the steward had brought coffee, Lemming told the man that he could go – he, too, was being relieved for the next voyage, and as he was a Londoner he could get home that night. Stavanger thought this considerate of Lemming. The steward was told to get one of the men still on board to take him to the jetty in the launch, and to bring back the launch. A few minutes later Stavanger heard the motor start.

‘The next thing was that Lemming suddenly got up and left the table. Some instinct prompted Stavanger to look round, and he saw Lemming standing behind him with a knife raised to stab into his back.

‘Stavanger had a tough war, and he’d kept himself fit – the stories about his heavy drinking are all poppycock. He doesn’t know exactly what he did, but he squirmed and struck upwards with his fist. Lemming had already started to deliver his blow, but somehow Stavanger diverted it, and the knife struck the table. For what it’s worth as evidence, I’ve seen the table, and there’s certainly a deep knife-cut in it.

‘Lemming came at him again. They’d had a bottle of wine at dinner, and there was another, which they hadn’t opened, beside it. Stavanger grabbed the full bottle and hit as hard as he could. Lemming got it on the head, and it must have been a tremendous blow, for it finished him. The bottle didn’t break, and there was no blood. Stavanger can’t remember exactly, but he thinks there may have been a napkin round the bottom of the bottle, which would account for the medical view that something like a heavy sandbag had been used to kill the man.

‘At first Stavanger was appalled, and his instinct was to shout for help. Then he thought that the whole business of his being brought on board the ship could have been intended to provide an opportunity for murdering him, and that the other men on board might be in the plot. In fact, they probably weren’t – the murder was to be a one-man job – but Stavanger couldn’t know that at the time. He was satisfied that Lemming was dead – he’d seen death often enough in the war – and he decided to stay where he was, while he worked out what to do about the body. There had been very little noise during the struggle, and no one came near the bridge deck. It was dark, and he thought of throwing the body overboard, but was frightened of attracting attention by the splash. There was no wound on Lemming except for the bruise on his head, and Stavanger next had the ingenious idea of putting the body in the bath, in the hope that when it was found it might look as if he’d slipped and hit his head while having a bath. Stavanger himself would then go ashore in the launch – he could say that he’d gone off after dinner leaving Lemming on board, and that he’d had to take the launch himself because after the steward’s departure the other men on board seemed to have turned in.

‘There was a small bathroom opening from the master’s sleeping cabin, and Stavanger filled the bath, undressed the body and put it in. While the body was being undressed a wallet and a couple of letters fell out of one of the pockets.

‘Stavanger – or so he says, and for myself I’m prepared to believe him – had no particular thought of snooping at the time: he just wanted to get the body in the bath, and go away. But he thought it would look more natural if the letters and wallet went back in the pocket. When he was putting back the letters, he noticed that neither was addressed to Captain Lemming, and that both were for Felix Varsov. This made him think again, and think hard. He had, of course, heard of Varsov and Varsov International, because the agreement about attempting to start an oyster farm at Winter Marsh had come up at several board meetings, Ingard painting the scheme in glowing colours. I have the letters here.

‘You can imagine Stavanger’s feelings when he read them. Both are from Lennis. The first says briefly, “Everything about your taking over as Captain Lemming is now fixed up. It’s foolproof, and nothing can go wrong. There was a real Captain Lemming, but he went East, worked for a small Hong Kong shipping company, and apparently died of drink last year. I’ve got hold of all his documents, and they’re safely in my file. I must say, it’s a great relief to know that the Agnes will be under you for this important voyage, and as it also suits you, so much the better.”

‘The second is a much longer document, Lennis’s confidential instructions for the voyage.

‘The Agnes was to go first to Antwerp, to load cases of machine parts for North Africa. But she would also take on a consignment of small-arms and ammunition – quite respectably, for the Belgian Ordnance people had what looked like an official order from the Ministry of Defence, instructing the consignment to go by the Agnes. Once at sea the crates of machine parts were to be opened, the contents – concrete rubble – thrown overboard, and the crates refilled with arms. These were to be delivered, ostensibly as machine parts, to various consignees in North and West Africa. Then she was to go back to Antwerp for another cargo of arms, and also a certain amount of general cargo for Santander and Lisbon. The legitimate cargo was to be delivered, and she would also pick up small amounts of ordinary commercial cargo for the UK. This would ultimately be brought to Tilbury, but there’d be a quick secret call at Winter Marsh on the way. She would not be coming directly from Antwerp to Winter Marsh, and the arms, of course, would not show on her manifest, so that to all intents she was a normal small freighter going about her business.

‘The dates in the document were all provisional, and we know that the call at Winter Marsh was in fact put back for a week, while she was diverted to Bilbao. It looks as though she was originally due at Winter Marsh a couple of days after my first visit – which would explain the highly suspicious attitude of the guards towards me.

‘Having read this document, Stavanger had another idea. Varsov was a new skipper, and there was to be largely a new crew. Some of the crew – possibly all of them – were doubtless in the plot, but there was no reason to suppose that they knew Varsov personally. Why shouldn’t he, Stavanger, take over? He was entirely capable of skippering the ship. He’d have to deliver the African consignments to avoid raising suspicions, but at least he could make sure that arms destined for Britain never got there.

‘There were several problems: he had to dispose of the body, he had to get back to his flat to collect some uniform, and he badly wanted to call at the office to have a look at the papers relating to Captain Lemming in the crew list file.’

‘I thought Felix Varsov was a financier,’ Pusey interrupted.

‘He was, but he was a good many other things besides,’ said Seddon. ‘Peter’s story makes sense. Various countries have been after him through Interpol, and we’ve a considerable dossier on him. Whether he was born in the United States or somewhere in Europe is unclear, but he seems to have gone to sea in his early years, and served his time in some Greek shipping line. He is, or was, a qualified master mariner all right, and in a number of his shadier enterprises later he ran his own ships under a variety of flags. To get hold of the papers of a dead British ship’s captain would have suited him well. And one can see his value to the Ingard outfit.’

Sir Edmund nodded, and I went on, ‘To get back to Stavanger’s story, the obvious place for the body was the river, but he didn’t want it to go in at Gallions Reach – if it was found, and he couldn’t count on its not being found, he wanted it somewhere where it couldn’t possibly have come from the Agnes. And he wanted it to remain unidentified for as long as possible.

‘He took everything out of the pockets, and cut off all maker’s labels from the clothes.

‘Stavanger decided that the best way to get to his flat at Stepney was by river. It wasn’t all that far – about ten miles – and he could do it comfortably in the launch. He made a quick recce of the ship, and all was quiet. In spite of the tension he was under he was quite shocked to find that nobody was bothering to keep an anchor watch – old standards of discipline die hard. Half of Stavanger wanted to rouse the couple of men on board and give them a rocket, but the saner half of him was profoundly thankful. He had the ship virtually to himself – as Varsov would have done had things gone the other way.

‘Stavanger had a hell of a job getting Varsov to the launch. He dressed the body again, and he had to carry it upright, so that if anyone did chance to see them it might look as if he was helping a companion who had had too much to drink. Fortunately he was starting from the bridge deck so he had only to go downwards – even so, it was a heavy, horrible job.

‘In the launch he had no particular problems. He propped up the body so that it seemed to be sitting normally, and went upriver to Stepney. He contemplated dumping the body off Stepney, but decided against it, partly because it might be carried down too near Gallions Reach, partly because he himself lived at Stepney, and if the body caught on something and was found near Stepney he was afraid that somebody might relate it to him. This was pretty unlikely in the circumstances, but you can understand it, I think.

‘He knew some steps between two blocks of warehouses at Stepney, and he took the launch in there. Then his troubles began again. The steps were fairly secluded, but he couldn’t be sure that nobody would come along while he was getting to his flat, and he was afraid that someone might see the man sitting in the boat and, perhaps, call out to him. So he decided to put the body in the river, where it would be out of sight, securing it to the launch with a line. But that didn’t work very well at first, because the body wouldn’t sink properly. To make sure that it stayed under water and out of sight, he had to weight it in some way.

‘He looked round the launch to see what he could find, and at first he couldn’t find anything that would serve. Then, rummaging in one of the after-lockers, he came across a heavy box – and found it full of ammunition. Presumably the launch had been used some time to help in getting arm and ammunition ashore – anyway, there it was. Using his handkerchief to handle the cartridges – thinking back he was puzzled at how coolly his mind seemed to work, and he remembers that he didn’t want fingerprints on the cartridges – he stuffed the pockets with ammo and put the body over the side. He hurried off to his flat – Yardarm Square is quite close to the river – changed into his skipper’s uniform, collected a few clothes, and remembered to pick up Volume III of the North Sea Pilot, giving pilotage directions for the Crouch – Stavanger is a sane seaman, and although he knows the Thames Estuary like the back of his hand he’d not so far taken a seagoing ship through the creeks of Winter Marsh. He also picked up his old sextant, but remembered in time that it had been a presentation to him by one of his wartime crews, and had his name inscribed on a silver plate. So he put it down again. When he got back to the launch he was thankful to find everything unchanged, and the body still in the water beside the boat.

‘He’d done all right in getting to Stepney by river, and he reckoned that the best way of getting to the offices in Upper Thames Street was to go on by water. He had to take the body with him, but that was all right because he wanted it to go upstream – the higher up it finally went in, the better. In getting the body back on board one of its shoes came off. He decided that the other might as well follow it, and threw it in the river.

‘All went well through the Pool and he made good time to London Bridge. He could have got ashore there, or by the bridge running into Cannon Street railway station, but he reckoned that some steps near Southwark Bridge would be nearer to the office. He put in there, but this time he couldn’t hide the body in the water because of the tide – it was now so low that there wasn’t enough water at the foot of the steps to cover it properly. So he had to leave the body sitting up in the boat.

‘It was only a few minutes to Ingard House. He had his own keys, and found the crew list file quickly. It didn’t give him much, but he got the number of Captain Lemming’s master mariner’s ticket, and some brief details of his career, including the names of various ships he’d sailed in. He also got the names of the other officers in the new crew. He hadn’t time for any more research, but at least he’d collected a few useful facts to equip himself for his new job.

‘Things were still undisturbed when he got back, but it was beginning to get light, and he decided that he’d got to get rid of the body as soon as possible. But he was now afraid that somebody might see him tipping it in. He saw some lighters moored off the other bank, and thought he might do the job screened by those. He took the launch across to them, but just as he was getting ready to tip in the body, he saw some early morning workers on the Southwark bank, and lost his nerve. Then he decided to use one of the lighters. He was born and bred by the river, remember, and he reckoned he could still scull one all right. He got the body in the water between the launch and the lighter, trusting that no one would notice what he was doing. But he didn’t want to risk its being snagged, so he kept a line round the body with a hitch that he could release while sculling, put the launch on the lighter’s mooring, and unmoored the lighter. The body was still weighted, so it stayed under water. He sculled across the river, let go the body near the other bank, took the lighter back, recovered the launch and went off down river back to Gallions Reach. He was in uniform now, took the launch first to the jetty so that it looked as if he’d come from there, and motored out to the Agnes just about breakfast time. Since the steward had gone off he got no breakfast, but he had too much on his mind to be bothered about that. He tidied up everything, found and went through the ship’s papers, and was ready to berth the ship when the crew turned up. She wasn’t due to stay at the jetty long – only for final orders, and the other bits of paper that have to be dealt with before a ship’s departure. She sailed that afternoon for Antwerp.

‘To his relief, Stavanger-Varsov-Lemming found himself completely accepted. There was no reason why he shouldn’t be, for none of the new crew had met the new skipper. But I think he was a bit lucky there. For the first week or so he lived in terror of the radio. There was a brief report in one of the news bulletins of the finding of a man’s body by Southwark Bridge, but it didn’t attract all that much attention, and it didn’t seem to be followed up. No signal came inquiring about either Captain Lemming or Andrew Stavanger. After a bit he got less nervous, and began to enjoy being back at sea.

‘The signal ordering him to Bilbao and the delay there puzzled him, but he couldn’t know what was happening at the other end, and he just assumed that things weren’t quite ready at Winter Marsh.

‘On the last leg of what had been a longish voyage – the passage from Bilbao to Winter Marsh – he had the hardest of all his decisions to make. He was determined that the arms and ammunition would not be landed in England. He thought of making for Plymouth, anchoring in the Sound, and hoisting a signal saying that he required immediate assistance, but he didn’t trust his crew. For the same reason he rejected the idea of sending out a radio request for help. In the end he decided that the only thing to do was to wreck the ship. The weather helped him here. He was far and away the best navigator on board, and it was reasonable enough for him to take over the navigation himself after going through the Strait of Dover. Nobody questioned his judgment when he laid a course for the Ray Sand channel instead of the Whitaker, even if anyone else realised just what he was doing. For the last half hour he was standing by the helmsman giving him minute by minute instructions, and he just put the ship hard and fast on the Buxey bank. When the lifeboat came he helped to get the crew off, then cut away the cable from the breeches buoy and stayed on board. He had intended to go over the side himself. I stopped him – I said it wasn’t necessary any longer – and he told me the whole story instead.’

*

‘What a man!’ Seddon said. ‘I agree with you that no court would convict him of Varsov’s murder. But that case has got to be tidied up.’

‘I think that he’ll probably have to be charged,’ Pusey said, ‘but when he appears in court the Crown can offer no evidence, which will mean his immediate release. There are a lot of technicalities, though, and I’ll have to see the DPP. But that can wait. What about the crew? Can Stavanger say how many of them were involved in the arms business? Gun-running into England to support an armed rebellion, even if it was a pretty crazy rebellion, is damned serious.’

‘The crew are all being held at Clacton,’ I said. ‘One of them is in hospital, the others are being looked after by the police. Stavanger’s view is that the Chief Engineer, the First Mate and a couple of deckhands, are real villains. The others, he thinks, are just a bit corrupt – offered money for not noticing what went on, and prepared to keep their eyes shut.’

‘They’ll all have to be arrested and charged,’ Pusey said. ‘There are a variety of charges, some serious, some less so, they can be held on. It’s more a matter for the Special Branch and the established counter-espionage people than for us, now. I’ve been in touch with the Commander of the Special Branch, of course, and he’s dealing with the MI people and all the rest of it. It’s rather a good thing they’re in Clacton and not in London. The Cabinet is meeting now to decide what to do. The last thing they want is any sort of mass trial.’

‘There’s one thing that particularly interests me, and that’s the position of Irwin Osnafeld,’ Seddon said. ‘You’ll remember I told you that we’ve tried to get him for a number of financial frauds, but he’s always slipped out of the net. What was he being paid all that money for? If you approve, I’d like to set some wheels in motion there.’

‘Fine,’ Pusey said. He glanced at his watch. ‘There’s a news bulletin on the radio in about half a minute. I wonder if the Stock Exchange balloon has gone up?’

It had. He switched on the radio on his desk and we heard a calm voice – I think the BBC would announce the end of the world with impeccable lack of excitement – saying, ‘The extraordinary events at Winter Marsh early this morning have affected the City. All dealings in the shares of the Ingard Group – among the biggest property companies in Britain – have been suspended by the Stock Exchange. Two officials of the group are understood to be helping the police with their inquiries . . .’

Later that day, Irwin Osnafeld was arrested at London Airport, and charged with complicity in smuggling arms into Britain. He was about to board a plane for South America, but the police were waiting for him.

*

While the national press was having a nine days wonder of sensation, and the police were getting pats on the back from the Prime Minister and even from leader writers of the most diverse political hue, only a weekly paper in Southend reported a case in which the police were rapped over the knuckles. This was the matter of the young man who had been arrested for the alleged theft of a car from Winter Marsh. On his third appearance before the magistrates the police, instead of asking for his commital for trial, apologetically withdrew all charges against him, saying they were now satisfied that there had been a grave error of identification, and the young man couldn’t possibly have committed the offence. Remarking that it was high time there were more satisfactory procedures for identification, the chairman of the bench awarded the young man costs against the police, and £10 for himself out of the poor box.

*

We had little to do with the collection of evidence for the trials of Ingard, Lennis, Osnafeld and half a dozen of their various associates. Once they had been arrested they were so busy trying to accuse each other that they convicted themselves. The abject failure of Vivian Carolan’s Neo-Fascist Socialism left none of the conspirators with any hope of a political swing in their favour, and the evidence of financial fraud was damning. Carolan’s movement simply fell apart – there was a healthy upsurge of national feeling against way-out movements committed to violence, and the minuscule blood-letting at Winter Marsh brought a lot of people to their senses. Recognising this, the Government wisely pursued only the major conspirators, and was content to let the small fry go. Mrs Carolan was never brought to trial. Among the practices which she and her husband copied from the Nazis was the precaution of equipping themselves with tiny capsules of hydrocyanic acid, which could be concealed in their teeth. Carolan had not needed his. When it became clear that she was going to be charged and removed to less comfortable quarters in prison, Mrs Carolan did use hers. She had full access to lawyers by then, and she did one more extraordinary thing: she added a codicil to her will, leaving the Cezanne in her drawing room to me!

*

I knew nothing about this until I had a letter from the lawyers some months later – it came on the day that Ingard and his gang were sentenced at the Old Bailey to terms of imprisonment that would keep them in gaol for most of the rest of their lives.

Pusey had invited Seddon and me to a small dinner party at his flat – the others were Sir Geoffrey Gillington, the Foreign Office man, and, I was delighted to see, James Henniker. Sensitivity in things like this is among Sir Edmund’s nicer characteristics.

Inevitably we discussed the case. ‘I thought at one time they would probably be hanged – there is still capital punishment in Britain for treason,’ said the Foreign Office man. ‘I’m a little surprised they weren’t charged with treason.’

‘I am not privy to the Cabinet’s discussions,’ said Sir Edmund, ‘but I understand that some Ministers were in favour of invoking the law of treason, and of letting the law take its course. I think the final decision not to was wise. I believe it was the late Sir Winston Churchill who observed, “The grass grows quickly over the battlefield – over the scaffold, never.” Ingard and Co would have been distasteful as martyrs – and if they’d been hanged they’d certainly have been seen as martyrs by some people. As it was, they were properly shown up for the nasty bunch of crooks they were. I thought counsel for the Crown did well in emphasising all the time that it was a criminal trial, not a political one.’

‘Would you regard the Carolans as just plain crooks?’ I asked.

‘The Carolans, perhaps mercifully, were not on trial. There was plenty of crime in what they did – Mrs Carolan was undoubtedly prepared at least to acquiesce in her father’s murder, if the suggestion didn’t originally come from her. But I would agree that they are not quite in the same galley as Ingard and Co. Vivian Carolan, I think, was mad. He hadn’t really any deep political ideas – he had a sort of guilt-complex about his own family’s place in the sun, he was a powerful orator, and I think he just loved to have people cheering him. He wanted power, and the claptrap he preached seemed to help in getting it. Some people will always respond to the primitive call, “Here’s a stranger – knock him on the head” – it’s one of the nastiest of our atavistic human inheritances.’

‘Did he go personally to Winter Marsh because he couldn’t get in touch with his wife?’

‘We can’t know. Certainly it may have been one reason – that’s why it was so vitally necessary to prevent Mrs Carolan from being able to answer the telephone. But I think he’d probably have been there anyway. It was the headquarters of his private army, and if the Agnes had delivered her load it would have been quite a formidable armed force. There must have been other deliveries to Winter Marsh – they had a substantial arsenal there as it was.’

‘From which they supplied anyone who was ready to pay for guns. It was a horrible business.’

‘From which Ingard and Co were prepared to supply guns – I doubt if Carolan was mixed up in that side of the business.’

‘Mrs Carolan?’

‘God knows. Personally, I’d give her the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t know. She was far cleverer than her husband. I think her real tragedy was not being born a boy, to succeed to the Stavanger ships. She’d have been a good master mariner. In a generation or so when women have achieved more real equality of opportunity, society will probably benefit from women like her. As things are, she had to work through other people. She certainly wanted power – more passionately, I suspect, than her husband.’

‘Do you know that before she killed herself, she added a codicil to her will, leaving me the Cezanne in her drawing room?’

‘Peter! You certainly have a way with women! Is the bequest legal?’

‘It appears to be – I had a letter about it from her lawyers this morning. Of course I’m not going to take it – I’m going to give it to the National Gallery. But I don’t like your bit about my having a way with women. You know perfectly well that I was about the world’s most unsuccessful husband.’

‘That’s not quite the same thing . . . but I’m sorry, Peter, it was a remark in poor taste.’

‘I find it more pathetic than anything else.’

‘Yes, but psychologically it’s interesting. It fits in with what I feel about her character – a thoroughly ruthless woman who had to work through men, and who despised most of them. You knocked all her plans to pieces – and in a way she respected you for doing it.’

Seddon, bless him, came to my rescue. ‘They were coming unstuck, anyway, because of the collapse of the Ingard empire,’ he said.

‘Yes, there’s not enough gold in Fort Knox to finance a big property company once it starts to lose money,’ observed the banker. ‘The profits from the arms deals were huge, but still not enough to make up for the decline in property values. Irwin Osnafeld chose a bad moment to put in his demand for money.’

‘I’ve never been quite clear what it was actually for,’ Henniker said.

‘No, and it didn’t come out at the trial, because in the nature of things it would have been very hard to prove,’ Seddon said. ‘Actually, I’m quite sure it was for nothing – just plain blackmail. Fortunately there were enough earlier dealings to convict Osnafeld – he undoubtedly financed arms deals before they got onto the fraud on the Belgians. As we know, they never paid for those arms, and didn’t intend to pay. I suspect that Osnafeld found out what was happening, and demanded his cut as the price of silence. And that was why his demand had to be met.’

‘I wonder what would have happened if the plans for building a new London airport on Foulness had gone ahead?’ asked the banker. ‘Buying Winter Marsh was a reasonable investment at the time.’

‘Thousands of suburban boxes on the marshes instead of a depot for gun-running . . . I’m not at all sure that the outcome might not have been worse. As things are, at least the wildfowl are undisturbed,’ Pusey observed.

‘What happens to Andrew Stavanger?’ asked the Foreign Office man. ‘He did well by his country, and he seems to have lost everything.’

‘The death of his daughter must be a permanent scar – for the rest, he may even begin a rather happier chapter of his life,’ I said. ‘Thanks to Sir Geoffrey’s vigilance, he doesn’t lose his £300,000. The bank acted on a forged signature, and has made no bones about accepting full responsibility. It has other claims against the wreck of the Ingard empire, of course, and what it will recover in the end, I don’t know. Stavanger himself, and the country generally, owe a lot to Sir Geoffrey. The Ingard liquidator has agreed to sell what’s left of the shipping company back to Stavanger. He has that splendid Miss Macdonald to comfort him – I understand that they are going to be married. It’s good to see her loyalty rewarded. They’ll have only three ships to start with, but Stavanger and Miss Macdonald between them can make a go of anything.’