15
THE CARRIAGE WAS PITCH DARK. FABER THOUGHT OF the jokes people made, “Take your hand off my knee. No, not you, you.” The British would make jokes out of anything. Their railways were now worse than ever, but nobody complained any more because it was in a good cause. Faber preferred the dark; it was anonymous.
There had been singing, earlier on. Three soldiers in the corridor had started it, and the whole carriage had joined in. They had been through “Be Like the Kettle and Sing,” “There’ll Always Be an England” (followed by “Glasgow Belongs to Me” and “Land of My Fathers” for ethnic balance), and, appropriately, “Don’t Get Around Much Any More.”
There had been an air raid warning, and the train slowed to thirty miles an hour. They were all supposed to lie on the floor, but of course there was no room. An anonymous female voice had said, “Oh, God, I’m frightened,” and a male voice, equally anonymous except that it was cockney, had said: “You’re in the safest place, girl—they can’t ’it a movin’ target.” Then everyone laughed and nobody was scared any more. Someone opened a suitcase and passed around a packet of dried-egg sandwiches.
One of the sailors wanted to play cards.
“How can we play cards in the dark?”
“Feel the edges. All Harry’s cards are marked.”
The train stopped unaccountably at about 4 A.M. A cultured voice—the dried-egg-sandwich supplier, Faber thought—said, “My guess is we’re outside Crewe.”
“Knowing the railways, we could be anywhere from Bolton to Bournemouth,” said the cockney.
The train jerked and moved off, and everyone cheered. Where, Faber wondered, was the caricature Englishman with his icy reserve and his stiff upper lip? Not here.
A few minutes later a voice in the corridor said: “Tickets, please.” Faber noted the Yorkshire accent; they were in the north now. He fumbled in his pockets for his ticket.
He had the corner seat, near the door, so he could see into the corridor. The inspector was shining a flashlight onto the tickets. Faber saw the man’s silhouette in the reflected light. It looked vaguely familiar.
He settled back in his seat to wait. He remembered the nightmare: “This is an Abwehr ticket”—and smiled in the dark.
Then he frowned. The train stopped unaccountably; shortly afterward a ticket inspector began; the inspector’s face was vaguely familiar…. It might be nothing, but Faber stayed alive by worrying about things that might be nothing. He looked into the corridor again, but the man had entered a compartment.
The train stopped briefly—the station was Crewe, according to informed opinion in Faber’s compartment—and moved off again.
Faber got another look at the inspector’s face, and now he remembered. The boarding house in High-gate! The boy from Yorkshire who wanted to get into the Army!
Faber watched him carefully. His flashlight moved across the face of every passenger. He was not just looking at the tickets.
No, Faber told himself, don’t jump to conclusions. How could they possibly have got on to him? They could not have found out which train he was on, got hold of one of the few people in the world who knew what he looked like, and got the man on the train dressed as a ticket inspector in so short a time….
Parkin, that was his name. Billy Parkin. Somehow he looked much older now. He was coming closer.
It must be a look-alike—perhaps an elder brother. This had to be a coincidence.
Parkin entered the compartment next to Faber’s. There was no time left.
Faber assumed the worst, and prepared to deal with it.
He got up, left the compartment, and went along the corridor, picking his way over suitcases and kitbags and bodies, to the lavatory. It was vacant. He went in and locked the door.
He was only buying time—even ticket inspectors did not fail to check the toilets. He sat on the seat and wondered how to get out of this. The train had speeded up and was traveling too fast for him to jump off. Besides, someone would see him go, and if they were really searching for him they would stop the train.
“All tickets, please.”
Parkin was getting close again.
Faber had an idea. The coupling between the carriages was a tiny space like an air-lock, enclosed by a bellowslike cover between the cars of the train, shut off at both ends by doors because of the noise and drafts. He left the lavatory, fought his way to the end of the carriage, opened the door, and stepped into the connecting passage. He closed the door behind him.
It was freezing cold, and the noise was terrific. Faber sat on the floor and curled up, pretending to sleep. Only a dead man could sleep here, but people did strange things on trains these days. He tried not to shiver.
The door opened behind him. “Tickets, please.”
He ignored it. He heard the door close.
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.” The voice was unmistakable.
Faber pretended to stir, then got to his feet, keeping his back to Parkin. When he turned the stiletto was in his hand. He pushed Parkin up against the door, held the point of his knife at his throat, and said, “Be still or I’ll kill you.”
With his left hand he took Parkin’s flashlight, and shone it into the young man’s face. Parkin did not look as frightened as he ought to be.
Faber said, “Well, well, Billy Parkin, who wanted to join the Army, and ended up on the railways. Still, it’s a uniform.”
Parkin said, “You.”
“You know damn well it’s me, little Billy Parkin. You were looking for me. Why?” He was doing his best to sound vicious.
“I don’t know why I should be looking for you—I’m not a policeman.”
Faber jerked the knife melodramatically. “Stop lying to me.”
“Honest, Mr. Faber. Let me go—I promise I won’t tell anyone I’ve seen you.”
Faber began to have doubts. Either Parkin was telling the truth, or he was overacting as much as Faber himself.
Parkin’s body shifted, his right arm moving in the darkness. Faber grabbed the wrist in an iron grip. Parkin struggled for an instant, but Faber let the needle point of the stiletto sink a fraction of an inch into Parkin’s throat, and the man was still. Faber found the pocket Parkin had been reaching for, and pulled out a gun.
“Ticket inspectors do not go armed,” he said. “Who are you with, Parkin?”
“We all carry guns now—there’s a lot of crime on trains because of the dark.”
Parkin was at least lying courageously and creatively. Faber decided that threats were not going to be enough to loosen his tongue.
His movement was sudden, swift and accurate. The blade of the stiletto leaped in his fist. Its point entered a measured half inch into Parkin’s left eye and came out again.
Faber’s hand covered Parkin’s mouth. The muffled scream of agony was drowned by the noise of the train. Parkin’s hands went to his ruined eye.
“Save yourself the other eye, Parkin. Who are you with?”
“Military Intelligence, oh God, please don’t do it again.”
“Who? Menzies? Masterman?”
“Oh, God…Godliman, Godliman—”
“Godliman!” Faber knew the name, but this was no time to search his memory for details. “What have they got?”
“A picture—I picked you out from the files.”
“What picture? What picture?”
“A racing team—running—with a cup—the Army—”
Faber remembered. Christ, where had they got hold of that? It was his nightmare: they had a picture. People would know his face. His face.
He moved the knife closer to Parkin’s right eye. “How did you know where I was?”
“Don’t do it, please…the embassy…took your letter…the cab…Euston—please, not the other eye….” He covered both his eyes with his hands.
Goddam. That idiot Francisco…. Now he—“What’s the plan? Where is the trap?”
“Glasgow. They’re waiting for you at Glasgow. The train will be emptied there.”
Faber lowered the knife to the level of Parkin’s belly. To distract him, he said, “How many men?” Then he pushed hard, inward and upward to the heart.
Parkin’s one eye stared in horror, and he did not die. It was the drawback to Faber’s favored method of killing. Normally the shock of the knife was enough to stop the heart. But if the heart was strong it did not always work—after all, surgeons sometimes stuck a hypodermic needle directly into the heart to inject adrenalin. If the heart continued to pump, the motion would work a hole around the blade, from which the blood would leak. It was just as fatal, but longer.
At last Parkin’s body went limp. Faber held him against the wall for a moment, thinking. There had been something—a flicker of courage, the ghost of a smile—before the man died. It meant something. Such things always did.
He let the body fall to the floor, then arranged it in a sleeping position, with the wounds hidden from view. He kicked the railway cap into a corner. He cleaned his stiletto on Parkin’s trousers, and wiped the ocular liquid from his hands. It had been a messy business.
He put the knife away in his sleeve and opened the door to the car. He made his way back to his compartment in the dark.
As he sat down the cockney said, “You took your time—is there a queue?”
Faber said, “It must have been something I ate.”
“Probably a dried-egg sandwich.” The cockney laughed.
Faber was thinking about Godliman. He knew the name—he could even put a vague face to it: a middle-aged, bespectacled face, with a pipe and an absent, professional air…that was it—he was a professor.
It was coming back. In his first couple of years in London Faber had had little to do. The war had not yet started, and most people believed it would not come. (Faber was not among the optimists.) He had been able to do a little useful work—mostly checking and revising the Abwehr’s out-of-date maps, plus general reports based on his own observations and his reading of the newspapers—but not much. To fill in time, to improve his English, and to flesh out his cover, he had gone sightseeing.
His purpose in visiting Canterbury Cathedral had been innocent, although he did buy an aerial view of the town and the cathedral that he sent back for the Luftwaffe—not that it did much good; they spent most of 1942 missing it. Faber had taken a whole day to see the building: reading the ancient initials carved in walls, distinguishing the different architectural styles, reading the guidebook line by line as he walked slowly around.
He had been in the south ambulatory of the choir, looking at the blind arcading, when he became conscious of another absorbed figure by his side—an older man. “Fascinating, isn’t it?” the man said, and Faber asked him what he meant.
“The one pointed arch in an arcade of round ones. No reason for it—that section obviously hasn’t been rebuilt. For some reason, somebody just altered that one. I wonder why.”
Faber saw what he meant. The choir was Romanesque, the nave Gothic; yet here in the choir was a solitary Gothic arch. “Perhaps,” he said, “the monks demanded to see what the pointed arches would look like, and the architect did this to show them.”
The older man stared at him. “What a splendid conjecture! Of course that’s the reason. Are you an historian?”
Faber laughed. “No, just a clerk and an occasional reader of history books.”
“People get doctorates for inspired guesses like that!”
“Are you? An historian, I mean?”
“Yes, for my sins.” He stuck out his hand. “Percy Godliman.”
Was it possible, Faber thought as the train rattled on through Lancashire, that that unimpressive figure in a tweed suit could be the man who had discovered his identity? Spies generally claimed they were civil servants or something equally vague; not historians—that lie could be too easily found out. Yet it was rumored that Military Intelligence had been bolstered by a number of academics. Faber had imagined them to be young, fit, aggressive and bellicose as well as clever. Godliman was clever, but none of the rest. Unless he had changed.
Faber had seen him once again, although he had not spoken to him on the second occasion. After the brief encounter in the cathedral Faber had seen a notice advertising a public lecture on Henry II to be given by Professor Godliman at his college. He had gone along, out of curiosity. The talk had been erudite, lively and convincing. Godliman was still a faintly comic figure, prancing about behind the lectern, getting enthusiastic about his subject; but it was clear his mind was as sharp as a knife.
So that was the man who had discovered what Die Nadel looked like.
An amateur.
Well, he would make amateur mistakes. Sending Billy Parkin had been one: Faber had recognized the boy. Godliman should have sent someone Faber did not know. Parkin had a better chance of recognizing Faber, but no chance at all of surviving the encounter. A professional would have known that.
The train shuddered to a halt, and a muffled voice outside announced that this was Liverpool. Faber cursed under his breath; he should have been spending the time working out his next move, not remembering Percival Godliman.
They were waiting at Glasgow, Parkin had said before he died. Why Glasgow? Their inquiries at Euston would have told them he was going to Inverness. And if they suspected Inverness to be a red herring, they would have speculated that he was coming here, to Liverpool—this was the nearest link point for an Irish ferry.
Faber hated snap decisions.
Whichever, he had to get off the train.
He stood up, opened the door, stepped out, and headed for the ticket barrier.
He thought of something else. What was it that had flashed in Billy Parkin’s eyes before he died? Not hatred, not fear, not pain—although all those had been present. It was more like…triumph?
Faber looked up, past the ticket collector, and understood.
Waiting on the other side, dressed in a hat and raincoat, was the blond young tail from Leicester Square.
Parkin, dying in agony and humiliation, had deceived Faber at the last. The trap was here.
The man in the raincoat had not yet noticed Faber in the crowd. Faber turned and stepped back on to the train. Once inside, he pulled aside the blind and looked out. The tail was searching the faces in the crowd. He had not noticed the man who got back on the train.
Faber watched while the passengers filtered through the gate until the platform was empty. The blond man spoke urgently to the ticket collector, who shook his head. The man seemed to insist. After a moment he waved to someone out of sight. A police officer emerged from the shadows and spoke to the collector. The platform guard joined the group, followed by a man in a civilian suit who was presumably a more senior railway official.
The engine driver and his fireman left the locomotive and went over to the barrier. There was more waving of arms and shaking of heads.
Finally the railwaymen shrugged, turned away, or rolled their eyes upward, all telegraphing surrender. The blond and the police officer summoned other policemen, and they moved on to the platform.
They were obviously going to search the train.
All the railway officials, including the engine crew, had disappeared in the opposite direction, no doubt to seek out tea and sandwiches while the lunatic tried to search a jampacked train. Which gave Faber an idea.
He opened the door and jumped out of the wrong side of the train, the side opposite the platform. Concealed from the police by the cars, he ran along the tracks, stumbling on the ties and slipping on the gravel, toward the engine.
IT HAD TO BE bad news, of course. From the moment he realized Billy Parkin was not going to saunter off that train, Frederick Bloggs knew that Die Nadel had slipped through their fingers again. As the uniformed police moved onto the train in pairs, two men to search each car, Bloggs thought of several possible explanations of Parkin’s nonappearance; and all the explanations were depressing.
He turned up his coat collar and paced the drafty platform. He wanted very badly to catch Die Nadel; and not only for the sake of the invasion—although that was reason enough, of course—but for Percy Godliman, and for the five Home Guards, and for Christine, and for himself….
He looked at his watch: four o’clock. Soon it would be day. Bloggs had been up all night, and he had not eaten since breakfast yesterday, but until now he had kept going on adrenalin. The failure of the trap—he was quite sure it had failed—drained him of energy. Hunger and fatigue caught up with him. He had to make a conscious effort not to daydream about hot food and a warm bed.
“Sir!” A policeman was leaning out of a car and waving at him. “Sir!”
Bloggs walked toward him, then broke into a run. “What is it?”
“It might be your man Parkin.”
Bloggs climbed into the car. “What the hell do you mean, might be?”
“You’d better have a look.” The policeman opened the communicating door between the cars and shone his flashlight inside.
It was Parkin; Bloggs could tell by the ticket inspector’s uniform. He was curled up on the floor. Bloggs took the policeman’s light, knelt down beside Parkin, and turned him over.
He saw Parkin’s face, looked quickly away. “Oh, dear God.”
“I take it this is Parkin?” the policeman said.
Bloggs nodded. He got up, very slowly, without looking again at the body. “We’ll interview everybody in this car and the next,” he said. “Anyone who saw or heard anything unusual will be detained for further questioning. Not that it will do us any good; the murderer must have jumped off the train before it got here.”
Bloggs went back out on the platform. All the searchers had completed their tasks and were gathered in a group. He detailed six of them to help with the interviewing.
The police-inspector said, “Your man’s hopped it, then.”
“Almost certainly. You’ve looked in every toilet, and the guard’s van?”
“Yes, and on top of the train and under it, and in the engine and the coal tender.”
A passenger got off the train and approached Bloggs and the inspector. He was a small man who wheezed badly. “Excuse me,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” the inspector said.
“I was wondering, are you looking for somebody?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, if you are, I was wondering, would he be a tall chap?”
“Why do you ask?”
Bloggs interrupted impatiently. “Yes, a tall man. Come on, spit it out.”
“Well, it’s just that a tall chap got out the wrong side of the train.”
“When?”
“A minute or two after the train pulled into the station. He got on, like, then he got off, on the wrong side. Jumped down onto the track. Only he had no luggage, you see, which was another odd thing, and I just thought—”
The inspector said, “Balls.”
“He must have spotted the trap,” Bloggs said. “But how? He doesn’t know my face, and your men were out of sight.”
“Something made him suspicious.”
“So he crossed the line to the next platform and went out that way. Wouldn’t he have been seen?”
The inspector shrugged. “Not too many people about this late. And if he was seen he could just say he was too impatient to queue at the ticket barrier.”
“Didn’t you have the other ticket barriers covered?”
“Afraid I didn’t think of it…well, we can search the surrounding area, and later on we can check various places in the city, and of course we’ll watch the ferry—”
“Yes, please do,” Bloggs said.
But somehow he knew Faber would not be found.
It was more than an hour before the train started to move. Faber had a cramp in his left calf and dust in his nose. He heard the engineer and fireman climb back into their cab, and caught snatches of conversation about a body being found on the train. There was a metallic rattle as the fireman shoveled coal, then the hiss of steam, a clanking of pistons, a jerk and a sigh of smoke as the train moved off. Gratefully, Faber shifted his position and indulged in a smothered sneeze. He felt better.
He was at the back of the coal tender, buried deep in the coal, where it would take a man with a shovel ten minutes’ hard work to expose him. As he had hoped, the police search of the tender had consisted of one good long look and no more.
He wondered whether he could risk emerging now. It must be getting light; would he be visible from a bridge over the line? He thought not. His skin was now quite black, and in a moving train in the pale light of dawn he would just be a dark blur on a dark background. Yes, he would chance it. Slowly and carefully, he dug his way out of his grave of coal.
He breathed deeply of the cool air. The coal was shoveled out of the tender via a small hole in the front end. Later, perhaps, the fireman would have to enter the tender when the pile of fuel got lower. But he was safe for now.
As the light strengthened he looked himself over. He was covered from head to toe in coal dust, like a miner coming up from the pit. Somehow he had to wash and change his clothes.
He chanced a look over the side of the tender. The train was still in the suburbs, passing factories and warehouses and rows of grimy little houses. He had to think about his next move.
His original plan had been to get off the train at Glasgow and there catch another train to Dundee and up the east coast to Aberdeen. It was still possible for him to disembark at Glasgow. He could not get off at the station, of course, but he might jump off either just before or just after. However, there were risks in that. The train was sure to stop at intermediate stations between Liverpool and Glasgow, and at those stops he might be spotted. No, he had to get off the train soon and find another means of transport.
The ideal place would be a lonely stretch of track just outside a city or village. It had to be lonely—he must not be seen leaping from the coal tender—but it had to be fairly near houses so that he could steal clothes and a car. And it needed to be an uphill grade of track so that the train would be traveling slowly enough for him to jump.
Right now its speed was about forty miles an hour. Faber lay back on the coal to wait. He could not keep a permanent watch on the country through which he was passing, for fear of being seen. He decided he would look out whenever the train slowed down. Otherwise he would lie still.
After a few minutes he caught himself dropping off to sleep, despite the discomfort of his position. He shifted and reclined on his elbows so that if he did sleep he would fall and be wakened by the impact.
The train was gathering speed. Between London and Liverpool it had seemed to be stationary more than moving; now it steamed through the country at a fine pace. To complete his discomfort, it started to rain: a cold, steady drizzle that soaked right through his clothes and seemed to turn to ice on his skin. Another reason for getting off the train; he could die of exposure before they reached Glasgow.
After half an hour at high speed he was contemplating killing the engine crew and stopping the train himself. A signal box saved their lives. The train slowed suddenly as brakes were applied. It decelerated in stages; Faber guessed the track was marked with descending speed limits. He looked out. They were in the countryside again. He could see the reason for the slowdown—they were approaching a track junction, and the signals were against them.
Faber stayed in the tender while the train stood still. After five minutes it started up again. Faber scrambled up the side of the tender, perched on the edge for a moment, and jumped.
He landed on the embankment and lay, face down, in the overgrown weeds. When the train was out of earshot he got to his feet. The only sign of civilization nearby was the signal box, a two-story wooden structure with large windows in the control room at the top, an outside staircase and a door at ground-floor level. On the far side was a cinder track leading away.
Faber walked in a wide circle to approach the place from the back, where there were no windows. He entered a ground-floor door and found what he had been expecting: a toilet, a washbasin, and, as a bonus, a coat hanging on a peg.
He took off his soaking wet clothes, washed his hands and face and rubbed himself vigorously all over with a grubby towel. The little cylindrical film can containing the negatives was still taped securely to his chest. He put his clothes back on, but substituted the signalman’s overcoat for his own sopping wet jacket.
Now all he needed was transport. The signalman must have got here somehow. Faber went outside and found a bicycle padlocked to a rail on the other side of the small building. He snapped the little lock with the blade of his stiletto. Moving in a straight line away from the blank rear wall of the signal box, he wheeled the cycle until he was out of sight of the building. Then he cut across until he reached the cinder track, climbed on the cycle and pedaled away.