Ealing Broadway faded as soon as the shops closed for the day. Because of blackout regulations, the street lights hadn’t come on. Yet Jago felt it was more than the coming of the dark that made the suburb invisible. There was a hush in the soul of Ealing, a respectability that abhorred the raucous. As a spy on a mission, Jago adored its shadows and slumbers.
Blakey’s the opticians had closed promptly at five-thirty, as witnessed by Lavender and reported to Jago in the Royal Oak lounge bar, where he waited with Austen. ‘He locked up, walked a couple of yards down the road to another door between his premises and Meldrum’s Gramophone Emporium. Let himself in and retired to his flat above the shop. Mine’s a gin and orange if you’re asking.’
Jago supplied the drink. He was still early for his dinner invitation and the pub was warm and seemed to have a supply of spirits.
‘Sir…’ began Lavender, with less assurance than when she usually addressed him, Jago noted. ‘Me and Austen was thinking, if you needed another place to hole up, if Nicky’s place got rumbled, well…’
Her brother finished the invitation. ‘We got to thinking you could move in with us. In Lambeth. It’s not big…’
‘But it’s ours,’ said his sister.
‘Thanks to Nicky.’
Lavender shot Austen a warning look. ‘He doesn’t need to know our business.’
Jago started to agree, when Lavender had a change of mind. ‘Perhaps you’re right. After all, he’s almost one of us.’
Almost, he thought.
Lavender leaned forward and touched his hand with the tips of her fingers; a moment of contact that signalled what was to come was confidential.
‘We don’t mind you knowing, but I don’t think Nicky would like it getting around. It might embarrass him; you know what he’s like.’
Jago did.
‘He said we’d had a shitty start, pardon my French, and we deserved something better. He took us out of the slum we were renting and put us in a house he bought outright for us.’
‘Gave us the deeds; it’s in our name, hers and mine.’
‘You see, sir,’ said Lavender, ‘we don’t have landlords come snooping. It’s a safe house if you need it.’
Jago didn’t know what overwhelmed him the most: Nicky’s generosity or the offer from Austen and Lavender. He thanked them and offered to buy another round.
‘Best not,’ she said, ‘you’re on an operation. Keep a clear head.’
Lavender, ever the professional, Jago thought ruefully, while he was as amateur as a vicars’ cricket team.
He left the brother and sister and went down the street to Blakey’s door. Jago went over his story again, in his head. The letter had been found in the dead man’s pocket, the man Nicky had dispatched. Major Donald Chamberlain had received an invitation to visit Blakey when his business in Scotland was done. The letter-writer had reminded Major Chamberlain that he’d been a comrade of Blakey’s late son, Captain George Blakey. The final part of the letter had caused most interest at SOE; it referred to the fact that both the writer and reader were entitled to wear the PJ badge.
The optician was obviously another member of the Link, and from the contents and tone of the letter, he’d never met the major. Therefore, Jago had decided to substitute himself and take up the invitation.
‘To what end?’ Mrs Cambridge had asked.
‘The Link has had a number of pops at ending my life, so I’d rather like to know if there’s another attempt in the pipeline. Besides, we need to crack this organisation. Realistically we can’t infiltrate our sister agency MI6, but we are aware from Chichester that certain members of the Link know more about the Three Graces than we do. We need any information we can lay our hands on to see if it’s possible to deduce the identity of this agent or agents. Then we need to feed it to Foxley, so they can take appropriate steps on Obersalzberg. Somehow I have to infiltrate the Link, and this man Blakey might be the way in.’
Jago had telephoned Blakey and introduced himself. As he’d hoped, the late major had indeed not met the optician. Jago had been invited to dinner and told, on the date selected, that a little after-dinner sport might be on offer. What this meant Jago had no idea but he knew the evening would reveal its secrets.
Jago was finally trying to be the agent he’d trained to be, not in deadly occupied Europe, but in leafy Ealing Broadway. The enemy wasn’t the Gestapo but a middle-class network of suburban men. The danger would be to underestimate types who played golf and sipped sherry, and forget they’d murder him as happily as they’d pat a spaniel. He took a breath and pressed the doorbell, which buzzed with the intensity of an ack-ack gun.
Jago’s Aunt Esme would have despised the room he was shown into. The large proportions had been wasted in the pursuit of clutter. There was a vulgar display of status via a parade of possessions. The walls were covered with framed reproductions by Lady Butler depicting heroic moments in battle; The Royal Scots Greys charged at Waterloo, and a British infantry square held their ground at Quatre Bras.
At odds with the unrealistic military glory, there were two poignant photographs of the optician’s late son. One was of the young man, still in his teens, in the dress uniform of the King’s African Rifles. His uniform snowy white, up to the khaki solar pith helmet on his head. The other image showed him, still young, except in the eyes. Less posed than the first, and a scruffier uniform of desert fatigues with a tin helmet up top.
‘My son George, my only son,’ said Blakey. ‘That one was taken the day before he lost his life during Operation Compass. The papers were full of the victory – it was one of the first; pictures of the enormous number of Italians who surrendered. They barely mentioned our own casualties, the fallen who made victory possible.’
Hector Blakey poured them both a sherry from a cut-glass decanter with a silver label bearing the legend Sherry. There was a line of identical decanters standing shoulder to shoulder like soldiers on parade, each bearing the name of their regiment in silver. Armed with his sherry, Jago was led through a maze of ornament-loaded occasional tables to a pair of colossal wing chairs in aggressive chintz. They were set too close to each other and Jago and Blakey had to organise knees.
‘Mrs Harris is doing us a pie,’ he said with schoolboy relish, then added, ‘She doesn’t live here.’
Jago wondered if Blakey was protecting his housekeeper’s honour with this declaration.
‘Once she’s gone, we can speak freely.’
When the pie was ready, they moved from the furniture showroom to a depressingly similar dining room. The problem wasn’t clutter but one enormous table that was just too big for the space. Jago had to wriggle past a carver at one end to make his way to what Blakey called Midships. The pie and vegetables were served by Mrs Harris who, Jago thought, could have escaped from a Beatrix Potter illustration – a stocky hamster called the Widow Pie-Crust.
‘I’ll be off,’ she said, ‘I’ll clear in the morning.’
The pie was good, Jago discovered.
‘All done in Scotland?’ Blakey asked.
Was this a loaded question, Jago wondered? Did he know of the plan to kill the awkward intelligence officer? But Hector Blakey cast no knowing look with the query; his attention was all on the pie.
‘All done. Family affairs.’
‘It must be difficult for you bods with two roosts, homes on two continents.’
‘To a patriot, home is anywhere in the British Empire,’ said Jago pompously.
Hector Blakey smiled. ‘Ah yes, of course. I remember that from when I had brown knees.’
The old soldier’s definition of service in the tropics.
‘You’ve served?’ Jago asked.
‘The first show, in the West Surrey’s, The Queen’s Regiment. Nothing to brag about; truth to tell, I never heard a shot fired in anger. Did my time in India guarding a military hospital. But India; all those natives, millions of the buggers, kowtowing to the white man, to the British. It gave me a sense of our own specialness, our destiny. But that said – I didn’t experience the trenches. I’ve not really done my duty to God and the King Emperor.’
Duty to God and the King? Jago wondered if the young Hector had been a Boy Scout. ‘Nonetheless,’ he said, ‘I’m sure you would have served with distinction and gallantry if so called upon.’
The optician gave a small smile of gratitude and then spoke modestly. ‘I have no delusions; my son George was the warrior in this family, not Hector.’
Jago suddenly felt immensely sad for the little man opposite. He was deluded; he’d bought into the South Sea Bubble of destiny. He’d been involved in the great British trek up the class system as surely as Nicky was trying to catch an elevator down. Keep trying, keep plugging away, from trade to profession to gentleman, then all it needed was one outstanding man to make that jump into the peerage. But it was all over for Blakey; he’d made it to profession, his son had been an officer and a gentleman, but now he was dead and so was the family.
‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ said the optician, breaking Jago’s thought, ‘you’re younger than I expected, from all George wrote about you in his letters.’
Jago dismissed his sympathy for the man and got on with the business of lying. ‘Commanding colonial troops in Africa ages one. It’s not the same as leading white troops; you have to be a father to them, see to every detail. They’re not civilised enough, or intelligent enough, to manage on their own. It can be wearing.’
Blakey nodded in understanding. ‘For the sake of the poor benighted black races, we mustn’t lose the empire, must we? As far as I’m concerned, George didn’t die in Churchill’s war, he died to save one of our African possessions from the wops. We can’t lose them or give them up, as the Reds and the Jew Roosevelt want. My son must not have died in vain.’
His knife went down, and Blakey leaned across the sea of mahogany. ‘Major Chamberlain, you’re Jew-wise. You know what the Yids are up to. When the dust settles, it is their dearest wish to see European civilisation destroyed, our world reduced to rubble and us the rats. The Hebrew will then fill the vacuum.’
‘It’s what I fear,’ said Jago, meeting his eyes.
‘We have to, just have to, make peace with our German cousins before it’s too late. I admire Adolf Hitler, but in war sacrifices must be made and he has to go as a sop to the confused. Without him, Churchill and his Jew-lovers won’t have an excuse to prosecute this pointless war any further. Then the great alliance can be formed, a reunification of the Anglo-Saxon people; then beware Russia and the United States of Yids, for we will come on!’
It was mid-week and there was to be no pudding, not even a slice of cheese.
‘I’m doing my bit for the crusade,’ said Blakey. The optician tapped the side of his nose to signal secrecy and whispered, ‘Sub rosa.’
‘Sub rosa,’ said Jago back.
Beneath the rose, the Roman symbol that meant whatever was discussed beneath the dangling flower was secret and not to be repeated.
The small man’s eyes glittered with excitement. ‘I’ve been singled out to serve the Link. Top brass has commissioned me to make a very special lens. It’s for the telescopic sight of a sniper’s rifle. I have to get it off to Stockholm – but I suspect it’s not stopping there. Back door to the Reich, know what I mean?’
Jago did and gave him all his attention as the little man prattled on.
‘Apparently, the shooter has, at some time in the past, suffered optical damage, a detached retina I expect. He has a cast in his right eye, so the lens has to be ground accordingly. I have a copy of his medical record so I know what I’m doing. With this lens he’ll have A1 vision and God help his target.’
Jago wanted to get away, to take this information back to Baker Street, but he fought this desire. Blakey was garrulous and who knew what he might reveal before the night was over. ‘Now, I promised you some hunting,’ he said.