It is interesting to compare, in the light of after events, the results obtained by systematic police work and the fruits of beginner’s luck and to reflect that McCann’s notebook contained at that moment more accurate and relevant information on the activities of Folder 26 than all of Inspector Hazlerigg’s filing cabinets.
Glasgow breathed affectionately into a glass which had contained a half-and-half of gin and grapefruit essence, and said: “But why do you want to follow this man, dearie?”
Miss Carter nodded in vigorous agreement. The three were seated in the cheerful chintzy living room at the Leopard.
“Secret Service,” said McCann promptly.
He had made his mind up on this a few minutes before. It was true that his knowledge of Secret Service men was limited. On one occasion, previous to the Sicily Landing, he and other officers in his Battalion had listened to a security lecture from a stout Major from M.I.5. He had been very impressed by the lecturer’s manner, and had surmised that his rather stupid façade must conceal a brilliant and ruthless intellect. Later, on the same day, in Mess, he had played poker with the gentleman in question, and doubts had crept in.
However, his present audience were not critical.
“Coo!” said Glasgow. “Secret Service, eh. That’s the stuff.”
“Show us once again where the house is,” said Miss Carter, poring over a street map.
“It’s the corner one, in that block, between the Square, Flaxman Street, and Flaxman Mews.”
“I see—and that block opposite is the one where the V2 landed.”
“That’s it—now I thought that between you—well—dash it, you know almost everybody round here.”
The two ladies looked at each other speculatively. What Major McCann was seeking was an observation post. He had argued, and rightly, that loitering in the street was out of the question. And there were no public houses, restaurants, or shops within a hundred yards of the place he wanted to watch.
“Miss Plant,” said Miss Carter.
“Lulu, eh? Yes, she might do it.”
They again looked thoughtfully at each other and back at the Major.
“What’s Lulu got that would interest me?” he asked.
The two ladies appeared to find this remark highly diverting.
“You say,” went on the Major, “that she’s got a room which overlooks this corner. But do you think she’d fancy the idea of me sitting about her flat all day? It would be embarrassing for both of us.”
The ladies regarded him with unconcealed scorn. They considered, their looks said, that he ought to put his duty to his country before his personal feelings in a matter of this sort.
“If Lulu doesn’t mind, I can’t see what you’ve got to beef about,” said Miss Carter frankly.
“Lulu’s a high-class girl,” said Glasgow. “Works in a milk bar. Quite the lady too. She always coughs before coming in the door.”
“It’s not myself I’m thinking about,” said the Major weakly. “I’m considering Miss Plant’s feelings. She won’t want me sitting round in her room all day.”
“Lulu’s patriotic,” said Glasgow. “She’ll do her duty.”
Actually the transaction caused surprisingly little embarrassment to either party. That evening, by appointment, McCann went to the Leopard and met Miss Plant, a coruscating brunette of the Bacall school; she shot him the stock look which brunettes usually shoot at prominent members of the British Secret Service, and then became severely practical. She presented him with a key of the front door, of which she appeared to have quite a number – and a key of her room, with careful directions as to how he was to reach it; gave him instructions for dealing with the landlady, should she appear on the scene, and a number of tips concerning the functioning of the electric kettle and the whereabouts of various small stocks of tea and sugar.
Accordingly, ten o’clock the next morning found McCann propped up in an easy chair at a window overlooking the corner of Flaxman Street. The back of his chair tilted conveniently against the wall, a steaming cup of tea on the what-not beside him, his binoculars handy on the window ledge and a pile of Blackwood’s magazines on the floor.
He was wondering where the catch came in. From his knowledge of detective stories and films he had understood that the watching of suspects was habitually done by stern men in trilby hats who stood in doorways in the pouring rain (usually at an interesting camera angle). The great thing, of course, being that they never had to wait more than thirty-five seconds for the object of their attentions to appear.
The Major waited for a week.
Every night at six o’clock, having watched the last of the inhabitants of 63 Flaxman Street depart, he would tilt his chair to the ground, wash out the tea cup, pack his few belongings tidily away, and depart to play squash with the professional at the Lansdowne Club over the way.
He was a man who did not mind waiting if there was a prospect of something to wait for, as many of his late opponents in Africa and Northern Europe could have testified.
On the sixth evening, something rather unexpected happened.
It was already quite dark. The reason for the Major’s staying so late was an obstinate light in the Cherubim Employment Agency. Being on the first floor their windows were conveniently at eye level and much of his leisure had been beguiled in watching, through his glasses, the remarkably pretty girl who reigned in their outer office. In his mind he had already christened all the inhabitants of the building, and she was Laura. Laura had gone home at six o’clock sharp. Mrs. Mop had come and gone. Maida Grannit, however, executive chief of the Agency, seemed to be making a night of it. She had come out of her sanctum, into the outer office, and had spent almost an hour searching through the drawers and pigeon-holes of Laura’s desk. Now she was telephoning.
At that moment a car turned into Flaxman Street from the intersection at the further end. Its headlamps were on, but dimmed.
Quite unexpectedly, and possibly by accident, the driver touched off his off-side spotlight. It went out as swiftly as it had come on. The car gathered speed, turned into Berkeley Square, and disappeared.
The effect had been as if a searchlight had been flicked for a moment into the dark recess of the court opposite No. 63.
In that brief second it had illuminated a man, standing in the recess.
And McCann had recognised him.
His mind flicked back over the months. It was the hot August of 1944, and the German Armies were falling back sullenly from Paris. The pace was still quick, but the first mad rush was over. The — Armoured Division was heading for Belgium, with its Reconnaissance Regiment in the lead. In front of the Reconnaissance Regiment, for reasons quite unconnected with this story, was Major McCann in a Sherman tank. The drivers of the tank were both bad types from the — Commando, and the turret gunner was a Canadian Brigadier. They were approaching the township of Marevilly-sur-Issy. Both on the map and from the lie of the ground it was perfectly evident that German opposition, when it next hardened, must centre round Marevilly. The town dominated the Issy Route (known inevitably to the soldiers as the Easy Route) into Belgium. The only practicable road cut sharply into the embanked hillside, before turning under the lee of the hill shoulder. It was a defensive “natural”, probably first used by Caesar when he troubled the Gauls, and subsequently improved on both by nature and man.
Surprised and relieved to find the redoubt empty and the road unbreached, McCann had driven on into Marevilly. The Canadian Brigadier was speechless with rage and mortification. He had been looking forward all day to firing the turret gun. It was just like the Goddammed — — Heinies, he opined, to walk out on them like that.
Marevilly was
en fête;
and one name was on all lips. Ulysse. He was of that select and formidable band of men, the real heads of the Resistance, responsible directly to General Koenig himself. Hector, Achille, Ulysse, Diomede, Nestor.
What Ulysse had done at Marevilly was, of course, part of history. A Panzer Grenadier group, about two hundred strong, as yet almost unused in the fight, had been given the job of holding the Issy Approaches. Their commander was a careful soldier with a penchant for spandaus sited in pairs and firing diagonally. Unfortunately for himself he had been carried away by the great strength and convenience of the redoubt. At intervals round its hundred-yard perimeter he had placed most of his men and all of his automatic and anti-tank weapons.
He had completed his dispositions the night before McCann arrived, and since Marevilly was notoriously a difficult township he had taken the added precaution of rounding up fifty hostages, including the wife and children of the Chef de Commune. He had then taken up his headquarters in the town hall and awaited the coming of the British with some confidence. At first light Ulysse, from his command post in a cellar in the main street, had depressed two electric detonators. These detonators were connected with ten separate charges of cordite, thoughtfully buried by him the month before in the redoubt. The resultant explosion had left very little of the German detachment or its automatic weapons.
Ulysse had then gathered his picked fighters round him and gone down the main street in the growing light of day with a gun in either hand, openly, like the true gangster he was. He had shot the German Commander with his own hand and the nerve of the remaining Germans had broken. There had been no coherent resistance. Individual soldiers went for shelter and were hunted out like rabbits from a threshed field.
McCann had seen him that morning, a tall man, but so thick that he looked almost short, with a remarkable shock of hair and a florid, Gascon face. When the British arrived he was almost the only person respectably dressed and not visibly carrying arms.
A dangerous, passionless, disciplined man.
This was the face which had looked up for a second in the glare of the spot lamp.
Another car, turning the corner from the Square, had thrown a more subdued light into the courtyard recess. It was, of course, by this time, empty.
Next afternoon, about three o’clock, Curly White appeared. McCann recognised his pin-toed walk before he came near enough for him to verify the unlovely face. Curly, as the Major had once told him in a fit of confidence when they were sharing a slit-trench together, not only acted like a bar-room gangster, he even looked like one. He walked down the pavement with the exaggerated dancing walk of a dog looking for a fight. He even had his right hand traditionally in his coat pocket. He turned into the doorway of No. 63.
McCann moved to the telephone.
An hour later, when Curly White again stepped out into Flaxman Street, he found it empty. A woman was in sight across the far side of the Square, deep in conversation with the postman.
Curly turned westwards. The street remained quiet and empty in the evening sun. At the Park Lane corner he almost bumped into a middle-aged lady.
Park Lane seemed to contain nothing more than its normal evening crowd. After a moment’s hesitation Curly crossed the road and boarded a bus which was on the point of moving The Major had guessed that his quarry would be especially alert at the moment of leaving the house, and had waited at the wheel of his car, safely out of sight in Flaxman Mews.
Presently Miss Carter, from across the Square, gave him the signal he was waiting for, which indicated that his quarry was turning west.
He pressed the self-starter. A minute or two later a second signal gave him the all-clear and he was racing up Flaxman Street. Glasgow stopped him short of the corner.
“He’s not far ahead of you,” she said. “Don’t turn the corner yet. He’s getting on to a bus. All right now, come on – and good luck.”
Actually McCann found that a bus was not a difficult thing to follow from a private car. He kept well behind it as it moved, only drawing near enough to see who got out at the stops.
In this manner they proceeded up Park Lane, half-circled the Marble Arch, and turned left into the Bayswater Road. As they passed the bottleneck of Notting Hill Gate the traffic got thicker, and from the lee of a brewer’s dray the Major was able to watch Curly dismount from the bus and turn left into Holland Park Walk, that long and aristocratic thoroughfare which divides the blue-blooded sheep of Holland Park from the lower income group goats of Kensington Gardens.
Some rapid thought was necessary.
The Major decided to stake high on his knowledge of that quarter of London. He turned his car skilfully in front of a blaspheming bus driver, went back a hundred yards and took the sharp right hand corner into Campden Hill. A minute’s run and Kensington High Street was ahead. He ran his car into the cul-de-sac behind the town hall, stopped, and got out, locking the car door quickly behind him.
A brisk walk of fifty yards brought him to the corner of Phillimore Gardens and he stepped into the door of a conveniently placed tobacconist’s shop.
His manoeuvre, he reckoned, had put him a minute or two ahead of Curly. Provided, of course, that Curly came straight on.
Minutes passed and his heart sank.
The lady who owned the shop was fortunately engaged in gossip with a regular customer and took absolutely no notice of him. He abandoned any pretence of being interested in her scanty stock of empty sales cartons, and peered through the misted window.
At that moment Curly appeared.
Two things were obvious at a glance. The first was that his man was getting very near his destination, and the second thing, as a corollary to the first, was that he had been absolutely right in not trying to follow him directly down Holland Park Walk.
Curly would have spotted him at once. Indeed, he had stopped now, on the pretence of lighting a cigarette, and was looking sharply back over his shoulder.
He was so near that McCann could see the boot-button eyes and the greasy black hair grown long in the few months’ release from the army.
At last Curly seemed satisfied.
He straightened up and crossed the Kensington High Street which lay ahead of him.