“It’s not so bad, once you’re in,” said Arthur.
The entrance sloped down at about forty-five degrees and was only really narrow at the start, where the earth had caved in. After a short slide, Mr. Calder’s feet touched the top of a ladder. It was a long ladder. He counted twenty rungs before his feet were on firm ground. He got out his torch and switched it on.
He was in a fair-sized chamber, cut out of the chalk. He saw two recesses, each containing a spring bed on a wooden frame; two or three empty packing cases, upended as table and seats; a wooden cupboard; several racks; and a heap of disintegrating blankets. The place smelled of lime and dampness and, very faintly, of something else.
A scrabbling noise announced the arrival of Arthur.
“Like something outer one of them last war films,” he said.
“
Journey’s
End
!” said Mr. Calder. “All it needs is a candle in an empty beer bottle and a couple of gas masks hanging up on the wall.”
“It was journey’s end for him all right.” Arthur jerked his head toward the far corner, and Mr. Calder swung his torch round.
The first thing he saw was a pair of boots, then the mildewed remains of a pair of flannel trousers, through gaps in which the leg bones showed white. The man was lying on his back. He could hardly have fallen like that; it was not a natural position. Someone had taken the trouble to straighten the legs and fold the arms over the chest after death.
The light from Mr. Calder’s torch moved upward to the head, where it stayed for a long minute. Then he straightened up. “I don’t think you’d better say much about this. Not for the moment.”
“That hole in his forehead,” said Arthur. “It’s a bullet hole, ennit?”
“Yes. The bullet went through the middle of his forehead and out at the back. There’s a second hole there.”
“I guessed it was more up your street than mine,” said Arthur. “What’ll we do? Tell the police?”
“We’ll have to tell them sometime. Just for the moment, do you think you could cover the hole up? Put some sticks and turf across?”
“I could do that all right. ‘T’won’t really be necessary, though. Now the wooding’s finished you won’t get anyone else through here. It’s all preserved. The people who do the shooting, they stay on the outside of the covers.”
“One of them didn’t,” said Mr. Calder, looking down at the floor and showing his teeth in a grin.
Mr. Behrens edged his way through the crowd in the drawing room of Colonel Mark Bessendine’s Chatham quarters. He wanted to look at one of the photographs on the mantel-piece.
“That’s the Otrango,” said a girl near his left elbow. “It was Grandfather’s ship. He proposed to Granny in the Red Sea. On the deck tennis court, actually. Romantic, don’t you think?”
Mr. Behrens removed his gaze from the photograph to study his informant. She had brown hair and a friendly face and was just leaving the puppy-fat stage. Fifteen or sixteen, he guessed. “You must be Julia Bessendine,” he said.
“And you’re Mr. Behrens. Daddy says you’re doing something very clever in our workshops. Of course, he wouldn’t say what.”
“That was his natural discretion,” said Mr. Behrens. “As a matter of fact, it isn’t hush-hush at all. I’m writing a paper for the Molecular Society on Underwater Torque Reactions and the Navy offered to lend me its big test tank.”
“Gracious!” said Julia.
Colonel Bessendine surged across.
“Julia, you’re in dereliction of your duties. I can see that Mr. Behrens’ glass is empty.”
“Excellent sherry,” said Mr. Behrens.
“Tradition,” said Colonel Bessendine, “associates the Navy with rum. In fact, the two drinks that it really understands are gin and sherry. I hope our technical people are looking after you?”
“The Navy has been helpfulness personified. It’s been particularly convenient for me, being allowed to do this work at Chatham. Only twenty minutes run from Lamperdown, you see.”
Colonel Bessendine said, “My last station was Devonport. A ghastly place. When I was posted back here I felt I was coming home. The whole of my youth is tied up with this part of the country. I was born and bred not far from Tilbury and I went to school at Rochester.”
His face, thought Mr. Behrens, was like a waxwork. A clever waxwork, but one which you could never quite mistake for human flesh. Only the eyes were truly alive.
“I sometimes spent a holiday down here when I was a boy,” said Mr. Behrens. “My aunt and uncle – he’s dead now – bought the Old Rectory at Lamperdown after the First World War. Thank you, my dear; that was very nicely managed.” This was to Julia, who had fought her way back to him with most of the sherry still in the glass.
“In those days, your school,” he said to the girl, “was a private house. One of the great houses of the county.”
“It must have been totally impracticable,” said Julia Bessendine severely. “Fancy trying to live in it. What sort of staff did it need to keep it up?”
“They scraped along with twenty or thirty indoor servants, a few dozen gardeners and gamekeepers, and a cricket pro.”
“Daddy told me that when he was a boy he used to walk out from school on half holidays, and watch cricket on their private cricket ground. That’s right, isn’t it, Daddy?”
“That’s right, my dear. I think, Julia—”
“He used to crawl up alongside the hedge from the railway and squeeze through a gap in the iron railings at the top and lie in the bushes. And once the old lord walked across and found him, and instead of booting him out, he gave him money to buy sweets with.”
“Major Furlong looks as if he could do with another drink,” said Colonel Bessendine.
“Colonel Bessendine’s father,” said Mr. Behrens to Mr. Calder later that evening, “came from New Zealand. He ran away to sea at the age of thirteen, and got himself a job with the Anzac Shipping Line. He rose to be head purser on their biggest ship, the Otrango. Then he married. An Irish colleen, I believe. Her father was a landowner from Cork. That part of the story’s a bit obscure, because her family promptly disowned her. They didn’t approve of the marriage at all. They were poor but proud. Old Bessendine had the drawback of being twice as rich as they were.”
“Rich? A purser?”
“He was a shrewd old boy. He bought up land in Tilbury and Grays and leased it to builders. When he died, his estate was declared for probate at £85,000. I expect it was really worth a lot more. His three sons were all well-educated and well behaved. It was the sort of home where the boys called their father ‘sir,’ and got up when he came into the room.”
“We could do with more homes like that,” said Mr. Calder. “Gone much too far the other way. What happened to the other two sons?”
“Both dead. The eldest went into the Army: he was killed at Dunkirk. The second boy was a flight lieutenant. He was shot down over Germany, picked up and put into a prison camp. He was involved in some sort of trouble there. Shot, trying to escape.”
“Bad luck,” said Mr. Calder. He was working something out with paper and pencil. “Go away.”
This was to Rasselas, who had his paws on the table and was trying to help him. “What happened to young Mark?”
“Mark was in the Marines. He was blown sky high in the autumn of 1940 – the first heavy raid on Gravesend and Tilbury.”
“But I gather he came down in one piece.”
“Just about. He was in hospital for six months. The plastic surgeons did a wonderful job on his face. The only thing they couldn’t put back was the animation.”
“Since you’ve dug up such a lot of his family history, do I gather that he’s in some sort of a spot?”
“He’s in a spot all right,” said Mr. Behrens. “He’s been spying for the Russians for a long time and we’ve just tumbled on to it.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it at all. Fortescue has had him under observation for the last three months.”
“Why hasn’t he been put away?”
“The stuff he’s passing out is important, but it’s not vital. Bessendine isn’t a scientist. He’s held security and administrative jobs in different naval stations, so he’s been able to give details of the progress and success of various jobs – where a project has run smoothly, or where it got behind time, or flopped. There’s nothing the other side likes more than a flop.”
“How does he get the information out?”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to find out. It’s some sort of post office system, no doubt. When we’ve sorted that out, we’ll pull him in.”
“Has he got any family?”
“A standard pattern Army-type wife. And a rather nice daughter.”
“It’s the family who suffer in these cases,” said Mr. Calder. He scratched Rasselas’ tufted head, and the big dog yawned. “By the way,
we
had rather an interesting day, too. We found a body.”
He told Mr. Behrens about this, and Mr. Behrens said, “What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ve telephoned Fortescue. He was quite interested. He’s put me on to a Colonel Cawston, who was in charge of Irregular Forces in this area in 1940. He thinks he might be able to help us.”
Colonel Cawston’s room was littered with catalogues, feeding charts, invoices, paid bills and unpaid bills, seed samples, gift calendars, local newspapers, boxes of cartridges, and buff forms from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.
Mr. Calder said, “It’s really very good of you to spare the time to talk to me, Colonel. You’re a pretty busy man, I can see that.”
“We shall get on famously,” said the old man, “if you’ll remember two things. The first is that I’m deaf in my left ear. The second, that I’m no longer a colonel. I stopped being that in 1945.”
“Both points shall be borne in mind,” said Mr. Calder, easing himself round onto his host’s right-hand side.
“Fortescue told me you were coming. If that old bandit’s involved, I suppose it’s Security stuff?”
“I’m not at all sure,” said Mr. Calder, “I’d better tell you about it. . .”
“Interesting,” said the old man, when he had done so. “Fascinating, in fact.”
He went across to a big corner cupboard, dug into its cluttered interior and surfaced with two faded khaki-coloured canvas folders, which he laid on the table. From one of them he turned out a thick wad of papers; from the other, a set of quarter- and one-inch military maps.
“I kept all this stuff,” he said. “At one time, I was thinking of writing a history of Special Operations during the first two years of the war. I never got round to it though. Too much like hard work.”
He unfolded the maps and smoothed out the papers with his bent and arthritic fingers.
“Fortescue told me,” said Mr. Calder, “that you were in charge of what he called ‘Stay-Put-Parties.’”
“It was really a very sound idea,” said the old man. His frosty blue eyes sparkled for a moment, with the light of unfought battles. “They did the same thing in Burma. When you knew that you might have to retreat, you dug in small resistance groups, with arms and food and wireless sets. They’d let themselves be overrun, you see, and operate behind the enemy lines. We had a couple of dozen posts like that in Kent and Sussex. The one you found would have been – Whitehorse Wood you said? – here it is, Post Six. That was a very good one. They converted an existing dene-hole – you know what a dene-hole is?”
“As far as I can gather,” said Mr. Calder, “the original inhabitants of this part of the country dug them to hide in when
they
were overrun by the Angles and Saxons and such. A sort of pre-Aryan Stay-Put-Party.”
“Never thought of it that way.” The old man chuckled. “You’re quite right, of course. That’s exactly what it was. Now then. Post Six. We had three men in each; an officer and two NCOs.” He ran his gnarled finger up the paper in front of him. “Sergeant Brewer. A fine chap, that. Killed in North Africa. Corporal Stubbs. He’s dead, too. Killed in a motor crash, a week after VE-day. So your unknown corpse couldn’t be either of them.”
There was a splendid inevitability about it all, thought Mr. Calder. It was like the unfolding of a Greek tragedy, or the final chord of a well-built symphony. You waited for it. You knew it was coming. But you were still surprised when it did.
“Bessendine,” said the old man. “Lieutenant Mark Bessendine. Perhaps the most tragic of the lot, really. He was a natural choice for our work. Spoke Spanish, French and German. Young and fit. Front-line experience with the Reds in Spain.”
“What exactly happened to him?”
“It was the first week in November 1940. Our masters in Whitehall had concluded that the invasion wasn’t on. I was told to seal up all my posts and send the men back to their units. I remember sending Mark out that afternoon to Post Six – it hadn’t been occupied for some weeks – told him to bring back any loose stores. That was the last time I saw him – in the flesh, as you might say. You heard what happened?”
“He got caught in the German blitz on Tilbury and Gravesend.”
“That’s right. Must have been actually on his way back to our HQ. The explosion picked him up and pushed him through a plate-glass window. He was damned lucky to be alive at all. Next time I saw him he was swaddled up like a mummy. Couldn’t talk or move.”
“Did you see him again?”
“I was posted abroad in the spring. Spent the rest of the war in Africa and Italy. . . now you happen to mention it, though, I thought I did bump into him once – at the big reception centre at Calais. I went through there on my way home in 1945.”
“Did he recognise you?”
“It was a long time ago. I can’t really remember.” The old man looked up sharply. “Is it important?”
“It might be,” said Mr. Calder.
“If you’re selling anything,” said the old lady to Mr. Behrens, “you’re out of luck.”
“I am neither selling nor buying,” said Mr. Behrens.
“And if you’re the new curate, I’d better warn you that I’m a Baptist.”
“I’m a practising agnostic.”
The old lady looked at him curiously, and then said, “Whatever it is you want to talk about, we shall be more comfortable inside, shan’t we?”
She led the way across the hall, narrow and bare as a coffin, into a surprisingly bright and cheerful sitting room.