‘It’s all positively Byzantine,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘But what have your chaps found?’
‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’ he said, and began to read the documents he had taken from the envelope. ‘Tum-te-tum…’ he said, as he scanned for items of interest. ‘Ah, here we are. It seems there is no Günther Ehrlichmann on the payroll of German intelligence. He simply doesn’t exist.’
‘No, dear, he doesn’t,’ said Lady Hardcastle, testily. ‘I killed him nine years ago.’
‘No, sorry, I paraphrased badly. I should have said that there never has been a Günther Ehrlichmann. Ever. The man never existed.’
‘Then who...?’
‘Let me have a read, this is fascinating stuff.’ Harry sat down distractedly and began to work his way through the long memorandum. It seemed to be taking him ages so I went and made some more tea.
While I was in the kitchen, the telephone rang and I heard Lady Hardcastle say that she would answer it. It was clearly a brief call, though, because by the time I brought the tea tray through, she was back in her chair.
‘Who was that on the telephone, my lady?’ I said as I set the tray on the small table.
‘Sir David,’ she said quietly, trying not to break Harry’s concentration.
‘What did he want?’ I said.
‘It was very sweet. He just wanted to check that all was well and that we were still comfortable at Harry’s.’
‘How odd,’ I said.
‘A little odd, certainly. But quite charming. Who would have thought that the Home Office had real gentlemen in it?’
I remained unconvinced that Sir David was either charming or a gentleman, but I said nothing. Meanwhile, Harry had finally finished reading.
“Righto, Sis, let’s see if I can get this straight. It seems that the man who killed Roddy and then met his own end in the hallway of your rented house in Shanghai, was called Jakob Gerber. He and his brother Karl – his twin brother Karl, it says here – were, “the German government’s most feared assassins. They carried out their international mischief-making under a shared alias: Günther Ehrlichmann.” Apparently Ehrlichmann’s true double-identity was the best-kept secret in recent memory at least partly because the possibilities it opened up were both lethal and terrifying. He was a killer who could seemingly be in two places at once. He could distract with his left hand and kill with his right.’
‘Well I’ll be blowed,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘And so the man pursuing us now is twin brother Karl.’
‘So it would very much appear,’ said Harry. ‘You only half-killed Günther Ehrlichmann; you left the other half very much alive.’
Lady Hardcastle turned and looked at me. ‘I said I was going to be disappointed. Twins! How terribly ordinary.’
‘Ah, but ordinary goes out the window with the next bit. Our chaps in Berlin have been all of a flap since all this came out and have worked like devils to find out what they can. They couldn’t figure out why he should suddenly come after you now, after all these years. And it’s been puzzling me, too. As much as trying to work out why a dead man should be after you, why now? I know a fair few people capable of holding grudges, but to hold one for nine years without making the slightest move… And then when you consider that Karl was alive and well all this time, why did no one see him until early this year? The identity of Ehrlichmann died with his brother, and Karl Gerber hasn’t been seen at all from that day to this.’
‘And do we now know what happened?’
‘Naturally, Sis. There was some amount of chaos in Shanghai at the time of the… incident.’
‘There was a certain degree of local unpleasantness,’ said Lady Hardcastle drily.
‘A few days of spontaneous Boxer activity, yes. Not quite the main event, but enough to make life disagreeable for Westerners and an ideal opportunity for the Chinese to round up undesirables.’
‘Undesirables?’ I said.
‘Anyone they didn’t much like, essentially. One class of person they most especially didn’t like was the European spy. Word had reached them that Ehrlichmann was already targeting Diamond Rook, so they left them both to it and positioned themselves to pick up whoever was left standing. Sorry, Sis. But you know what I mean.’
She waved his concern aside.
‘They saw Karl Gerber later, walking healthy and free, and they and recognized him at once as being Ehrlichmann. They presumed he had eliminated Diamond Rook, and so they seized him. Ehrlichmann had taken care of one of the key European spies and now they had the other. Obviously they missed the fact that you were Diamond Rook, and that they only had half of Ehrlichmann, but it gave them something to play with. And play with him they did. Even after they worked out the truth of what had happened and you were long gone, they held on to Gerber. The Germans had disavowed him, and with his brother dead, there was no one to come looking for him. He disappeared into a Chinese gaol in 1899 and was never seen again. Until earlier this year.’
‘And what happened then?’ asked Lady Hardcastle.
‘No one is quite certain exactly what happened, nor how, but one day an older, thinner Gerber turned up in Berlin and asked to be taken back into the fold.’
‘And did they? Take him back, I mean.’
‘That’s all a bit hazy,’ said Harry, thoughtfully. He leafed through the memorandum again, but didn’t seem to find anything helpful. ‘I can’t believe they would find themselves able to trust an operative who had been under the control of a foreign power for almost nine years, but they do seem to have found a mutually beneficial purpose for him: they let him loose on you.’
‘It does make a little more sense now,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Even just knowing that he’s not a ghost. And revenge is understandable, especially if the thought was what was keeping him going in that Chinese gaol.’
‘But what are we going to do now?’ I said.
‘That, my dear Florence, is a very good question,’ she said, and lapsed into silence.
We got nowhere the previous evening after the revelations from Harry’s contacts in Berlin. It was obvious that Lady Hardcastle was rattled and was just putting on a brave face, and the anxiety was blunting her usually sharp mind. The conversation just went round and round in circles and I’m ashamed to admit that I got a little testy with it all and went to bed early.