SS-GB

‘I doubt if there will be workmen available at this time of night,’ said Douglas.

Huth tipped his head back and looked from under his heavy-lidded eyes. Soon Douglas learned that this was a danger sign. ‘Are you making another of your jokes? Or is this some new kind of provocation?’

Douglas shrugged. ‘I’ll phone.’

‘I’ll be in the number three conference room with Major Steiger. Tell the SS officer I want all this furniture out of here before I get back. And I want the new furniture installed.’

‘Where do I get metal desks?’ said Douglas.

Huth turned away as if the question was hardly worth answering. ‘Use your initiative, Superintendent. Go along this corridor and, when you see the sort of thing you need, take it.’

‘But there will be a terrible row in the morning,’ said Douglas. ‘They’ll all be here moving it back again.’

‘And they will find an armed SS sentry preventing them taking anything out of this room on the orders of the Reichsführer-SS. And that includes metal furniture.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘In my brief-case you’ll find a cardboard tube containing a small painting by Piero della Francesca. Get it framed and hang it on the wall to hide some of this ghastly wallpaper.’

‘A real painting by Piero della Francesca?’ said Douglas who’d heard amazing stories of the artifacts plundered during the fighting in Poland, France and the Low Countries.

‘In a policeman’s office, Superintendent Archer? That would hardly be appropriate would it?’ He went out without waiting for an answer.

Douglas phoned the SS guard commander, and passed on Huth’s message with the friendly rider that Standartenführer Huth was in a great hurry.

The guard commander’s response was one of consternation. Kellerman’s briefing about the arrival of the new man was obviously taken seriously by the security force.

Douglas stepped across to the window and looked down at the Embankment. The curfew ensured that few civilians were on the street – Members of Parliament, and shift workers in essential industries and services, were among the exceptions – and the street and bridge were empty except for parked lines of official vehicles and an armed patrol who visited the floodlit perimeters of all the government buildings.

A motorcycle and sidecar combination stopped at the checkpoint where Victoria Embankment met Westminster Bridge. There was a brief inspection of papers before it roared away into the dark night of the far side of the river. From across the road there came the loud chime of Big Ben. Douglas Archer yawned and wondered how people like Huth seemed to manage without sleep.

He opened Huth’s briefcase to get the Francesca reproduction for framing, but before he had time to unroll it he saw, inside the pocket of the case, a brown manila envelope sealed with red wax and bearing the unmistakable heraldic imprint of RSHA – the Central Security Department of the Reich, and holy of holies of Heinrich Himmler and all he commanded. The envelope had already been opened along the side and a folded paper was visible.

Douglas could not repress his curiosity. He pulled out a large sheet of paper and unfolded it to find a complex diagram, as big as the blotter on the desk. It was drawn in black indelible ink upon handmade paper that was as heavy as parchment. Even Douglas Archer’s fluent German did not equip him to comprehend fully the handwriting of the German script, but he recognized some of the symbols.

There was a reversed equilateral triangle, inscribed within a double circle. The triangle contained two words, written to form a cross – Elohim and Tzabaoth. Douglas Archer’s successful investigation of a series of Black Magic murders in 1939 enabled him to recognize this as a ‘pentacle’ representing ‘the god of armies, the equilibrium of natural forces, and the harmony of numbers’.

A second pentacle was a human head with three faces, crowned with a tiara and issuing from a vessel filled with water. There were other water signs too. Handwritten alongside it was ‘Joliot-Curie laboratory – Collège de France, Paris’. And close against another water sign was written ‘Norsk Hydro Company, Rjukan, Central Norway’.

Heaped earth, spades and a diamond pierced by a magic sword ‘Deo Duce, comite ferro’ was an emblem of the Great Arcanum representing, according to the chart, ‘the omnipotence of the adept’ and here the runic double lightning of the SS was lettered, and followed by ‘RSHA Berlin’.

The third symbol was the spiral marked ‘Transformatio’ which became a spinning toy top with ‘Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, England’ written there, and the words ‘Formatio’ and ‘Reformatio’ arranged over ‘Transformatio’ to make a triangle. Below it ‘German army reactor in England’ was written against a spinning device. In another hand, ‘Peter Thomas’ appeared here in pencil, as if added hurriedly at the last moment.

Douglas straightened as he heard the sound of German boots on the mosaic stone of the corridor. He folded the diagram too quickly to be sure that it showed no sign of being tampered with. Then he tucked the envelope away into the red-lined pocket of the case and closed it.

There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ said Douglas as he unrolled the Francesca reproduction.

‘One sentry and six men for duty,’ reported the SS officer.

‘Standartenführer Huth wants this furniture removed,’ explained Douglas. ‘Replace it with metal furniture from offices on this corridor.’

The SS officer showed no surprise at the order. Douglas had the feeling that this farmer’s son from Hesse – as Douglas accurately guessed him to be – would have obeyed an order to jump out of the window. The officer took off his jacket to work with his six brawny lads while their armed comrade stood on duty in the corridor.

The job was almost finished by the time Harry Woods arrived at 2 A.M. He’d been at the reception at the Savoy. Douglas noticed, with some apprehension, that Harry was slightly drunk.

‘Talk about a new broom sweeping clean,’ said Harry as he watched furniture being moved. ‘I haven’t seen this kind of activity since that night when the invasion started.’

‘Do you know where we can get this picture framed?’ Douglas asked him.

Harry Woods held the edge of the picture and looked at it. It was ‘The Flagellation’. Douglas knew the painting – a fine colonnaded piazza, flooded with overhead sunlight from a blue sky. In the background Christ is scourged. Three magnificently attired men – the Count of Urbino and his two advisers – turn their backs upon the scene and converse calmly together. In real life, the advisers depicted in the painting were suspected of complicity in the murder of the Count. For centuries art experts have argued about the hidden meaning of the picture. Douglas found it appropriate as a decoration for the office of this hard-eyed emissary from the Byzantine court of the Reichsführer-SS.

‘Funny bugger, isn’t he?’ said Harry, looking at the painting.

‘We’d better learn to live with him,’ said Douglas.

‘He’s down in number three conference room,’ said Harry, ‘talking to that squeaky-voiced little police Major that he took along to the mortuary. Who is he?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Douglas.

‘They’re talking together as if the world was about to come to an end.’ Harry brought out his cigarettes and offered them to Douglas, who shook his head. It was no longer done to accept a friend’s tobacco ration. ‘What’s it all about, chief?’ said Harry. ‘You understand all this double-talk. What’s it all about?’

‘I thought you might be able to tell me, Harry. I saw Sylvia today. She told me that you have a finger in everything that’s going on in town.’

If Harry guessed what Sylvia actually said, he gave no sign of it, but he didn’t seem surprised that Sylvia had turned up at Scotland Yard. Douglas wondered if she’d seen Harry too.

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ said Harry. ‘That little Major is nothing to do with pathology or medicine or anything like that. I’d like to know why he was at the mortuary. Do you think this bloke Huth let him come along just for a laugh?’

‘You’ll soon find out that our new Standartenführer is not that keen on laughs,’ said Douglas.

‘There are some bloody peculiar people about, you know that. I mean, letting that little wireless mechanic come along there was wrong. And I’d tell Huth that straight, and to his face. I’d tell him it was all bloody wrong. You think I wouldn’t but I’d tell him.’ Harry swayed slightly and steadied himself by gripping the desk.

‘Wireless mechanic?’

‘Hah!’ said Harry with the arch smugness of the slightly drunk. ‘I saw his file. He’s got a police uniform but that’s just for show. I phoned Lufthansa, and got his number from the flight manifest, then I went upstairs and looked up his record.’

‘You got his file?’

‘Just his card. Say you work for the Gestapo and you can get any bloody thing. Do you know that, Douglas?’

‘You don’t work for the Gestapo,’ Douglas pointed out.

Harry waved his hand in front of his face as if trying to remove a speck from a dirty windscreen. ‘Wireless mechanic, it said, a doctor of wireless theory. They’re all bloody doctors these Huns, have you noticed that, Douglas?…Studied at Tübingen. Only came into the police service one year ago, straight from lecturing at Munich.’

‘Wireless mechanics don’t study at Tübingen and lecture at Munich,’ persisted Douglas.

‘All right, all right, all right,’ said Harry. ‘I haven’t got your command of the German language but I can find my way through a record card.’ Harry gave Douglas a sly smile and, like a stage conjurer producing a rabbit from a hat, he pulled a record card from his inside pocket. ‘There you are, old lad, read it for yourself.’

Douglas took it, and read it in silence.

‘Come on, Super, give us a smile. You’re wrong and you know it.’

‘The Major,’ said Douglas, speaking slowly so that he could think about it himself, ‘is a physicist, an expert on radioactive substances. He was a lecturer on nuclear physics.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ said Harry, rubbing his nose.

‘Those burns on the dead man’s arm,’ said Douglas. ‘Sir John didn’t mention those last night. Perhaps the little Major went there to examine them.’

‘From a sun-lamp?’

‘Not from a sun-lamp, Harry. Those burns were bad ones, the sort of skin damage a man would suffer if he was exposed to the rays that come from radium, or something like that.’

There was another knock at the door. The SS guard commander came to say that SS Signals wished to report that four new telephone lines were connected and tested. No sooner had he said so than Huth’s direct line rang. Douglas picked up the phone on his desk and said, ‘Standartenführer Huth’s office, Detective Superintendent Archer speaking.’

‘Archer – oh, splendid. General Kellerman here. Is the Standartenführer with you?’ Douglas looked at his watch. That Kellerman should be telephoning here at this time was amazing. He was not noted for his long working hours.

‘He’s in number three conference room, General,’ said Douglas.

‘Yes, so I understand.’ There was a long pause. ‘Unfortunately he’s left orders that no calls should be put through to him there. That doesn’t apply to me of course but I don’t wish to make the operator’s life too difficult, and there seems to be something wrong with the phone in the conference room.’

Douglas realized that Huth had given the phone operator the ‘direct orders of the Reichsführer’ stuff, and then left the phone off the hook, but he had every reason to help the General save face. ‘The phone is probably out of use because the Signals staff have been changing the phone lines.’

‘What?’ shouted Kellerman in shrill alarm. ‘At this time of night? What are you talking about?’ He changed to German and became more authoritative. ‘Look here. What is this about changing phones in my office? Explain what’s been happening. Explain immediately!’

‘Purely routine changes, General,’ said Douglas. ‘The Standartenführer preferred that Sergeant Woods and myself were accommodated in the clerk’s office next to his. This meant putting in extra lines for us and bringing our outside line up here – it’s usual to keep an outside number unchanged during the process of an inquiry…informants and so on.’

From somewhere near the General’s elbow there came the petulant murmur of complaint. It was youthful and feminine, and Douglas found no resemblance to the voice of the General’s wife, who had flown from Croydon to Breslau to see her mother the previous week.

‘Oh, routine, you say,’ said Kellerman hurriedly. ‘Then that is in order.’ He paused with the phone capped at his end. Then he said, ‘Have you been with the Standartenführer this evening?’

‘I have, sir,’ said Douglas.

‘What exactly is the problem, Superintendent? He never arrived at the Savoy, you know.’

‘The Standartenführer has a great deal of urgent work outstanding, General,’ said Douglas.

At that moment Huth entered the room. He looked at Harry Woods who was resting against the desk with his eyes closed. Then Huth looked at Douglas and raised his eyebrows quizzically.

At the other end of the phone, General Kellerman said, ‘Do you think I should come over there, Superintendent Archer? I can rely upon a loyal and conscientious officer like you to assess the situation.’

Huth had walked over to his desk and now stood with head bent towards the earpiece of the phone.

‘I’m sure that the General…’ Huth tried to grab the phone but Douglas held on to it long enough to say, ‘The Standartenführer has just come in, sir.’

Huth took the phone, cleared his throat and said, ‘Huth here, General Kellerman. What is it you want?’

‘I’m so pleased to locate you at last, my dear Huth. I want to tell you –’

Huth interrupted Kellerman’s greeting. ‘You’re in a nice warm house, General, in a nice warm bed, with a nice warm woman. You stay there and let me continue my work without interruption.’

‘It’s simply that my switchboard couldn’t seem –’ the phone clicked as Huth dropped the earpiece back on to its rest.

Huth looked at Douglas. ‘Who gave you permission to discuss the workings of this office with an outsider?’

‘But it was General Kellerman…’

‘How do you know who it was? It was just a voice on the phone. I’m reliably informed that your drunken friend here…’ he jabbed a thumb at where Harry Woods was blinking at him, ‘…can manage a fairly convincing imitation of General Kellerman’s English.’

No one spoke. Any of Harry Woods’s previously stated intentions to tell Huth straight about the decorum of having the little Major along to the mortuary had been put aside for another time.

Huth tossed his peaked cap on to the hook behind the door and sat down. ‘I’ve told you once, and now I’ll tell you for the last time. You’ll discuss the work of this office with no one at all. In theory you can speak freely with the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler.’ Huth leaned forward with his stick and jabbed Harry Woods playfully. ‘You know who that is, Sergeant? Heinrich Himmler?’

‘Yes,’ growled Harry.

‘But that’s only in theory. In practice you won’t even tell him anything, unless I’m present. Or if I’m dead, and providing you’ve satisfied yourselves personally that my life is extinct. Right?’

‘Right,’ said Douglas quickly, fearing that Harry Woods was working himself up to a physical assault upon Huth who was now waving his stick in the air.

‘Any breach of this instruction,’ said Huth, ‘is not only a capital offence under section 134 of the Military Orders of the Commander-in-Chief Great Britain, for which the penalty is a firing squad, but also a capital offence under section 11 of your own Emergency Powers (German Occupation) Act 1941, for which they hang offenders at Wandsworth Prison.’

‘Would the shooting or the hanging come first?’ said Douglas.

‘We must always leave something for the jury to decide,’ said Huth.

Chapter Eight

Long ago Seven Dials had been a district noted for vice, crime and violence. Now it was no more than a shabby backwater of London’s theatreland. Douglas Archer got to know this region, and its inhabitants, during his time as a uniformed police Inspector, but he little thought that one day he would live here.

When Archer’s suburban house – situated between two prongs of the German panzer thrust at London – had been demolished, Mrs Sheenan had offered him and his child bed and board. Her husband, a peacetime policeman, was an army reservist. Captured at Calais the previous year he was now in a POW camp near Bremen, with no promised date of release.

The table was laid for breakfast when Douglas Archer got back to Monmouth Street and the little house over the oil-shop. Mrs Sheenan’s son, Bob, and young Douggie were being dressed in front of a blazing fire, in a room garlanded with damp laundry. Douglas recognized the striped towel that cloaked his son. It was one of the few items he’d managed to salvage from the wreckage of his house in Cheam. It brought back happy memories that he would have preferred to forget.

‘Hello, Dad! Did you work all night? Is it a murder?’

‘It’s a murder in an antique shop, isn’t it, Mr Archer?’

‘That’s right.’

‘There, told you so, Douggie,’ said young Sheenan. ‘It said so in the newspapers.’

‘Hold still,’ said Mrs Sheenan as she finished buttoning her son’s cardigan. Douglas helped her dress young Douggie. That finished, she reached for a pan on the hob. ‘You like them soft-boiled, don’t you, Mr Archer?’ She kept their relationship at that formal stage.

‘I’ve had my eggs this week, Mrs Sheenan,’ said Douglas. ‘Two of them fried on Sunday morning –remember?’

The woman scooped the boiled eggs with a bent spoon and put them into the egg cups. ‘My neighbour got these from her relatives in the country. She let me have six because I gave her your old grey sweater to unravel for the wool. All the eggs should be yours really.’

Douglas suspected that this was just a way of letting him have an unfair share of her own rations but he started to eat the egg. There was a plateful of bread on the table too, with a small cube of margarine, the printed wrapper of which declared it to be a token of friendship from German workers. What about a gesture of friendship from German farmers, said the wags who preferred butter.

‘Suppose there was a murder in a French aeroplane flying over Germany, and the murderer was Italian and the man murdered was…’ Bob thought for a moment ‘…Brazilian.’

‘Don’t speak with your mouth full,’ said his mother. On the radio the announcer played a Strauss waltz, requested by a German soldier stationed in Cardiff. Mrs Sheenan switched the music down.

‘Or Chinese!’ said Bob.

‘Don’t pester the Superintendent. You can see he’s trying to eat his breakfast in peace.’

‘That would be for the lawyers to decide,’ he told Bob. ‘I’m only a policeman. I just have to find out who did it.’

‘Mrs Sheenan is going to take us to the Science Museum on Saturday,’ said Douggie.

‘That’s very nice of her,’ said Douglas. ‘Be a good boy and do as she tells you.’

‘He always does,’ said the woman. ‘They both do; they’re both good boys.’ She looked at Douglas. ‘You look tired,’ she said.

‘I’m just getting my second wind.’

‘You’re not going back there again, without a rest?’

‘It’s a murder inquiry,’ said Douglas. ‘I must.’

‘Told you so, told you so, told you so!’ shouted Bob. ‘It’s a murder! Told you so!’

‘Quiet, boys,’ said Mrs Sheenan.

‘I have a car here,’ said Douglas. ‘I’ll pass the school – in about half an hour – will that be all right?’

‘A car. Have you been promoted?’

‘I have a new boss,’ said Douglas. ‘He says he likes his men to have the best of everything. His own car has a wireless in it. He can send messages straight to Scotland Yard while he’s driving along.’

‘Listen to that!’ said Bob. He pretended to use the phone. ‘Calling Scotland Yard. This is Bob Sheenan calling Scotland Yard. Like that, Superintendent? Does it work like that?’

‘It’s morse code,’ explained Douglas. ‘The wireless operator has to be able to use a morse key but he can receive speech messages.’

‘What will they think of next?’ said Mrs Sheenan.

‘Can we see your car?’ said Bob. ‘Is it a Flying Standard?’

‘The police have all sorts of cars, don’t they, Dad?’

‘All sorts.’

‘Can we go to the window and look at it?’

‘Finish your bread and then you can.’

With whoops of joy the two children went into the front room and raised the window to look down into the street at the car.

‘The bath water is still warm,’ said Mrs Sheenan. ‘Only the boys have used it.’ She looked away, embarrassed. Like so many people, she found the social degradation of the new sort of poverty more difficult to bear than its deprivations.

‘That would make a new man of me,’ said Douglas, although in fact the new changing rooms at the Yard had baths, and hot water in abundance.

‘There’s a bolt on the scullery door,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you won’t get into trouble taking us to the school?’

‘It will be all right.’

‘The regulations about the misuse of fuel are horrifying. That manager in the coal office in Neal Street was sentenced to death. I read that in the Evening News last night.’

‘It will be all right,’ said Douglas.

She smiled contentedly. ‘It’s more than a year since I was in a motor-car. My Uncle Tom’s funeral. That was before the war – seems like a hundred years ago, doesn’t it?’

Mrs Sheenan came and sat near the fire, and looked at it as it burned. ‘The wood is almost finished,’ she said, ‘but the oil-shop man will lend me a few more logs until the new ration period starts next week.’

Her voice made Douglas start, for the food, the hot tea and the warmth of the fire had caused him to close his eyes and nod off.

‘There’s something I have to bother you with, Mr Archer,’ she said.

Douglas reached into his pocket.

‘Not money,’ she said. ‘I can manage on what you give me, and the supplementary ration card you get makes a wonderful difference.’ She put out a hand and mechanically felt the heat of the teapot under its knitted cosy. ‘The two boys have an extra hour’s music lesson on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s only a shilling a week and they seem to like it.’

Douglas knew that she’d originally started to say something different but he didn’t press her. Instead he closed his eyes again.

‘More tea?’

‘No thanks.’

‘It’s the German ersatz. They say it’s made for them to have with lemon. It’s not very nice with milk is it?’

She disappeared behind the hanging gardens of damp garments, touching each of them to see how they were drying. She turned some of the garments round. ‘The woman down the street saw an ambulance train going through Clapham Junction last Monday. Carriages crowded with wounded soldiers – dirty looking and with torn uniforms – and two red cross coaches on the back, the sort they have for stretcher cases.’ She put the pegs in her mouth while she rehung a child’s pyjama top. ‘Is there still fighting?’

‘I’d be careful whom you tell that to, Mrs Sheenan.’

‘She wouldn’t make up stories – she’s a sensible woman.’

‘I know,’ said Douglas.

‘I wouldn’t tell strangers, Mr Archer – but I always feel I can say anything to you.’

‘In the towns it’s just bombs and murdering German soldiers. In the country districts there are bigger groups, who ambush German motorized patrols. But I doubt if they will survive the winter.’

‘Because of the cold?’

‘You can’t light fires, because of the smoke. The leaves come off the trees, and so there’s no concealment, no cover. And in winter the spotting planes can see a man’s tracks better on the ground – and if it snows…’ Douglas raised his hands.

‘Those poor boys,’ said Mrs Sheenan. ‘They say it’s terrible in the unoccupied zone now, with the winter not even started. Shortages of everything.’ She hovered over Douglas and he knew she had something to tell him. Like any good policeman he let her take her time about it.