A Gathering of Saints Read online

  During that year he met an old friend, Horst Kapkow. He and Horst had played together during Tennant’s Austrian vacations before the war, forging a childhood friendship based largely on the availability of Horst’s cousin Ingrid, her large breasts in particular. Horst was now a doctor himself and, more importantly, he was also a member of the fledgling National Socialist Party.

  Tennant was converted to the Nazi philosophy almost immediately. Although he’d never practised psychiatry on a clinical level, he had long been interested in the concept of shamanism among uncivilised races and in Nazism he saw the perfect evocation of his own theories on the principle of sacrifice and its use on a practical level.

  An African witch doctor, seeing that his patient was ‘possessed,’ would simply speak the necessary incantations to exorcise the demon, often using some sort of sacrificial object or totem to convince the possessed individual. Just as often the symptoms of illness could be transferred to an object or another individual, thus solving the patient’s problem with a brief and effective ceremony. Here too were the roots of Celtic ritual and the Wagnerian ring.

  If Nazism was the sacrificial ritual, Adolf Hitler was the modern sorcerer utilising it, taking the various ills of his troubled nation, distilling them into ritual and then transferring them away.

  Personally Tennant felt that the führer’s attitude towards the Jews was overstated, but by the same token he saw the practical advantage of making a small and relatively benign segment of the population the sacrificial lamb for millions of others.

  It wasn’t a matter of right or wrong but of practical logic. The world was sick and that sickness had to have a cause. The Jew was the obvious tumor to be excised and Hitler the surgeon demigod wielding the knife. Not pleasant, but Tennant knew instinctively that it would work.

  Over the next three years Tennant saw Nazism take hold in Germany and in Austria. These were exciting times, and through Horst Kapkow he began meeting the men who were the architects of this new world order. One of these was a young ex-naval officer named Reinhard Heydrich, who, by the spring of 1934, had become head of the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, the Nazi Intelligence and Security Service.

  Tennant immediately recognised that Heydrich was a textbook paranoiac and sadist, but that took nothing away from the man’s immense personal power. If Tennant was going to ally himself with anyone within the hierarchy of the Third Reich, he could think of no one better than Reinhard Heydrich.

  Six months later, after a secret meeting in Paris, Charles Tennant went to work for the SD Ausland, or foreign department, acting, as Heydrich put it, to counterpoint the efforts of his chief rival, Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, the Intelligence Department of the German Armed Forces High Command.

  According to Heydrich, the white-haired admiral was not to be trusted and his agents were both inept and amateur. When war came, as both men knew it would, the Reich – and Heydrich in particular – would need at least one competent and intelligent operative in England, even though Hitler, up to that point, had expressly forbidden any such activity. Tennant was to be that secret operative, Heydrich’s personal cat among the pigeons.

  In September of 1934, partially subsidised by Heydrich’s steadily growing treasury, Charles Tennant returned to London and established himself as a practising psychiatrist with offices at 6 Cheyne Walk Mews. Over the next five years he attracted a variety of patients, mainly women, many of them wives, daughters and lovers of the British military, government and industrial elite.

  Following Heydrich’s example, and using an extremely sophisticated wire recorder provided to him by the Telefunken Corporation, he began to amass extensive dossiers on all his patients, spending long hours cross indexing hundreds of small morsels of intelligence to create a larger picture.

  As well as assembling a monumental confessional of sexual peccadilloes, personal quirks and professional secrets, he also managed to collect a great deal of hard information regarding the United Kingdom’s general war preparedness, which he regularly transmitted to Heydrich’s private listening post in Hamburg. Through his work with Masterman and MI5 he had discovered that the Abwehr spies run by Canaris had been prejudiced almost from the start, and just as importantly that the Abwehr itself had been penetrated by more than one of Masterman’s people, including a supposed Welsh nationalist, code-named G. W., who was actually a retired police inspector. Just as important was the knowledge that Masterman, through G. W., had co-opted the long-used method of transmitting important information using the Spanish embassy’s diplomatic bag.

  In keeping with his straightforward, well-ordered nature he had chosen the simple code name The Doctor for his transmissions. Only Heydrich knew Tennant’s real identity. After learning about G. W. he had stopped using his Spanish contact, a buffoon named Del Pozo, who passed himself off as a journalist and who had access to the regular pouch to Lisbon. Over time Tennant developed his own system of getting information directly to Heydrich and, as far as he could tell, it had yet to be compromised.

  The train from the Scrubs finally reached Victoria Station and from there he hailed a taxi, settling back in his seat as the cabbie picked his way through the deserted streets heading for Whites, the ancient and relentlessly Conservative – with a capital C – gentlemen’s club on St James’s Street just off Pall Mall, which Jonathan Swift had once called ‘the common rendezvous of infamous sharpers and noble cullies.’

  As well as being a discreet home away from home for half of Churchill’s cabinet and most of the War Office, the bar at Whites was also a favourite watering hole for many of the euphemistically titled ‘junior Foreign Service officers’ who worked for MI5. One, a handsome, cleft-chinned young man named Donald Maclean, was particularly interesting, but tonight it was dinner with a junior minister who worked with Beaverbrook and whose wife was completely indifferent to sex and just what the bloody hell was he supposed to do about it? Tennant smiled to himself in the dark interior of the taxicab. A spy’s work, it seemed, was never done.

  Chapter Four

  Tuesday, September 10, 1940

  10:00 a.m., British Summer Time

  There was an ordinary name on his National Registration Card but he had more than one of those and in his heart he called himself only The Number. He sat alone at a small table in the tea shop on the corner of Carter Lane and Burgon Street, polishing his glasses with one corner of his dark blue tie. This was the heart of The City, scores of small, cramped buildings leaning over a thousand lanes and alleys and unnamed byways, all of them huddled around the glories of Wren’s churches, most in the overwhelming shadow of the great dome of St Paul’s.

  The Book was on the table in front of him, carefully kept to one side, out of the way of any possible spill. He’d ordered tea and scones but had tasted neither. From experience he knew that the tea would be thin and the scones stale but it didn’t matter; they were only an excuse to occupy the table.

  Standing at the counter on the far side of the narrow room, the hugely fat woman who ran the shop was preparing sandwiches for the elevenses crowd who would soon be coming down from the Criminal Courts, Fleet Street and the Government Post Office. She snarled as she chopped and spread, browbeating the Italian cook, invisible in the kitchen, and ignoring her only customer.

  ‘I told you, I don’t give a flaming shit if the bloody milk’s gone off! Use the powdered like I told you!’ The woman glared into the aluminum bowl in front of her and dug into its contents, bringing up several large sections of pale, boiled chicken. She threw the pieces down onto the counter and began to chop them into salad, gripping the broad-handled carving knife with small, wet fingers, muttering under her breath as she worked.

  The Number put his glasses on again, blinked, and looked out across the narrow street. Directly across from the Jo Lyons and occupying the other corner was the side entrance to a small public house, the Rising Sun. A tall, red metal sign had been wrapped around the corner bricks above the door, emblazoned with the name and adverti
sing Truman’s ale in even larger letters.

  The pub, he knew, was owned by one Doris Luffington, a widow in her sixties who had inherited the business from her late husband. Sgt. Maj. Charles Luffington had died a slow, miserable death in Chelsea Hospital from the after-effects of mustard-gas poisoning, leaving his wife to raise their only daughter, Jane, by herself, as well as operate the Rising Sun. Jane Luffington, twenty-two, was a member of the Women’s Royal Navy Service, a ‘Wren,’ presently attached to a Motor Transport unit of lorry drivers and dispatch riders based in London.

  It was all in The Book. Her unit number, commanding officer, even the licence plate and Royal Navy serial codes of the side-valve Triumph 350 she rode and maintained with such loving care. All recorded in the small, precise hand he’d developed years ago at City and Guilds College.

  Without taking his eyes off the entrance to the Rising Sun, he reached out with his left hand and put his palm down on the worn buckram cover of The Book. In the daylight his power was greatly diminished but The Book and its contents was a constant source of strength.

  It told him, for instance, that Jane Luffington had a sometime lover, a handsome lieutenant commander (Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve) who worked for Admiral Godfrey in Naval Intelligence. Her numbers also told him that her menstrual period was almost exactly aligned with the lunar cycle and, that without the clandestine visits she made to the Rising Sun, she would not be able to afford the flat in Bayswater she shared with three other Wrens.

  Without thinking, he removed his glasses and began to polish them again, smiling vaguely to himself. Sometimes he wondered if The Names really mattered at all, since they were nothing more than false constructs without any true value in a world where numbers meant so much. Numbers had no emotion and told no lies. A Number was, or it was not, without equivocation.

  He heard the motorcycle well before he saw it, the powerful engine echoing off the brickwork as she thundered onto Burgon Street from Ireland Yard. Without undue haste, knowing he had time, The Number replaced the glasses on his nose and took his watch from his waistcoat pocket. One-handed, he flipped open the engraved silver case and checked the time. A little early but well within the limits he’d established. The extra minutes meant she’d almost certainly spend more time with her mother, which would make it all the easier. He closed the watch and slipped it back into his pocket then turned towards the window once again.

  The motorcycle appeared, a dark blue, heavy-chassied beast, brightwork painted flat grey, the bulbous eye of the headlamp shielded by a blackout cover. Below the pillion seat, steel-framed pannier baskets contained large canvas dispatch bags, strapped tightly shut.

  Leading Wren Jane Luffington braked in front of the entrance, switched off the engine and climbed down from the Triumph. She was dressed as usual in her full dispatch-rider uniform of dark blue jodhpurs, high, tightly fitted boots, short serge riding jacket and long, flared gauntlets. She stood by the motorcycle for a moment, lifted up her goggles and snapped them down over the brim of her old-fashioned tricorn hat. Stripping off the gauntlets, she tucked them under the strap of her gas-mask bag. She was pretty in a boyish way, oval faced, dark eyed, with short, dark hair.

  Jane leaned over the motorcycle, grasping the handgrips, and wheeled the machine into the narrow passage between the Burgon Street side of the Rising Sun and the neighbouring building, a small office block. She reappeared a few seconds later and vanished into the pub.

  The Number watched her go from his vantage point across the street. He’d witnessed her routine seven times in the past three weeks. She never spent more than eleven minutes with her mother, or fewer than seven. Calmly he tucked The Book into the side pocket of his jacket, picked up his large, civil-service-issue briefcase from the floor beside the table and left the tea shop.

  Four and a half minutes later, his task successfully accomplished, The Number reached the Blackfriars underground station and began his long journey back to Dollis Hill. Three minutes after that, as he began to choose new numbers for the night ahead, Jane Luffington climbed back onto the Triumph, tramped down hard on the kick-starter and prepared to complete her own journey, turning the motorcycle down the hill to New Bridge Street, then wheeling it north towards New Fetter Lane and the Public Record Office.

  * * *

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to get through.’ Dick Capstick slowed as they drove down Middlesex Street and eased the ten-year-old Fordson van to a stop in front of a makeshift timber barrier. A warehouse on the left of the wooden barricade was a charred ruin, while a smaller shed on the right appeared to have weathered the previous night’s bombing unscathed. The barrier blocked the entrance to Strype Street, a narrow lane of row houses running a single despairing block between Middlesex Street and Bell Lane on the border between Spitalfields and Aldgate. Another slum slowly easing west into The City, a cancer unnoticed for the moment, but growing with time.

  ‘A little walk won’t hurt you.’ Morris Black smiled at his companion. Capstick was thirty-seven, three years younger than Black, and at least two stone heavier. He looked more like a circus strongman than a detective and the effect of his broad shoulders and heavy, square-jawed face was intensified by his dapper, Savile Row suits and the trademark white rose he wore in his lapel. Black had known the burly, expansive man since joining the Metropolitan Police. Capstick was one of the very few people at the Yard whom Black considered to be a friend. Even at that the relationship was a distant one, almost exclusively confined to work. Fay had been both best friend and lover and Black had long ago come to the conclusion that he would never have either again.

  Capstick set the handbrake on the Flying Squad vehicle and both men climbed out into the smoky, late-morning sunlight. Black’s nostrils were instantly assailed by the heavy stench of wet ash and sodden, charred wood. Much more of this, thought Black, and the entire city would stink like a crematorium. The drifting shroud of smoke hanging over London was becoming a permanent part of the landscape.

  ‘Hold tight, Morris, we’ve got a little Hitler to contend with this morning.’ Capstick poked his broad chin in the direction of the barrier. A slight, round-faced man in his early forties was parading back and forth in front of the obstruction dressed in a long greatcoat and a tin helmet with the letters W.R.P. stencilled in white on the front. A War Reserve Police constable.

  He was carrying a long truncheon in one hand, smacking it lightly against one leg as he walked. Capstick and Black moved towards the barrier and the constable stepped forward. He was wearing lightly tinted glasses and Black noticed that his complexion was flushed; a drinker, or someone with very high blood pressure.

  ‘You can’t stop there. Police business.’ His voice barely rose above a whispered squeak. He gestured with the truncheon, almost threateningly.

  ‘Oh, bugger off,’ Capstick growled. The red-faced constable stepped in front of the much larger detective and held up one imperious hand. His colour heightened even more; Black thought he was going to have a stroke.

  ‘That’s enough of that. You’ll have to move along.’

  Capstick dug into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out his warrant card. He thrust it under the man’s nose.

  ‘Detective Inspector Capstick, CID.’ He gestured towards Black. ‘This is Detective Inspector Black.’ Capstick scowled. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Special Constable Christie.’ Seeing the warrant card, the man had come rigidly to attention. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Inspector, I…’ The squeaky voice faded into silence.

  ‘Bloody right you’re sorry,’ snarled Capstick. ‘Now step aside.’ Special Constable Christie did as he was told and the two men went by, stepping over the low barrier.

  ‘A bit hard on him weren’t you?’ said Black as they headed down the street.

  ‘Drives me right round the twist,’ Capstick answered, sidestepping a pile of rubble. ‘We’re fighting a bloody war, with bloody bombs raining down out of the bloody sky, and they go out and hire a
thousand silly buggers like that one. Officious little shits. All they do is get in the way.’

  Black said nothing. Capstick was perfectly right. The worst of it was that almost no care was taken in vetting the hordes of new recruits, so God only knew whom they were actually hiring on. One man, using his newly acquired authority, had taken to testing tap beer in public houses to see if it had been tampered with by fifth columnists. He’d managed to get away with it for the better part of a week before someone saw fit to check up on him.

  Only the first few houses in the block had actually been hit by high explosives but evidence of incendiary activity was all the way along: puddles of fused tar where incendiaries had fallen into the road and burned unchecked, sooty streaks above shattered, burnt-out window frames, scatterings of charred bedding and furniture lying in the street. No children anywhere; that was the most disconcerting thing.

  The address they’d been called to by Central Dispatch was the last house in the row, with nothing beyond but a high wrought-iron fence that separated the house from a small piece of waste ground opening onto Bell Lane. The foundations of what had once been a school stood at one edge of the waste, weeds growing up around the tumbled stones. Black paused for a moment and gazed around; this place had been a ruin long before the bombings began.

  Several uniformed coppers were standing around the entrance to the house, as well as a pair of plain-clothes types from Records, their cumbersome Speed Graphic cameras in hand. Black caught a quick, flicking motion and a tiny arc of sparks as one of the constables surreptitiously tossed away a cigarette, seeing them approach.