Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

‘…and set a poor example to the rest of the Empire?’

C put down his cup deliberately. ‘Do you believe that, or is it the cynicism you effect as one of your clever disguises?’

‘Merely an observation, sir.’

‘Do you have views on Ireland?’

‘I’m not very interested in politics.’

He nodded approvingly. ‘It’s enough to be a patriot. We’re at war.’

‘As you say, sir.’

‘Which is why I hope you’ll agree to my proposition.’

‘You haven’t made one yet, sir.’

‘Haven’t I? No, well I know it won’t be easy but we need to know what he’s doing in Berlin, you see. Need someone in his circle.’ He peered at Wolff intently through his monocle as if hoping to force instant acquiescence.

Wolff returned his gaze with a stony face. He wants me to go to Germany . Lifting his cup slowly, he examined then swirled the dregs of his coffee before returning it to the saucer. Really too bitter a blend for his taste.

‘Different from your last assignment, of course,’ C remarked, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. ‘You know Germany. It’s your patch.’

‘We shoot their spies now, don’t we? And they shoot ours.’

‘Everything’s tighter in war, you know that.’

‘Will you explain that to my widow?’

‘Isn’t she somebody else’s wife?’ C enquired tartly.

‘Have you been spying on me?’

Cumming dismissed the question with a wave of the hand. ‘Won’t be easy, I know,’ he repeated, with a little less sympathy, ‘but no one has your experience of operating in Germany. I still trust you to do a good job.’

‘Should I be grateful for your trust? What about Landau or Bywater?’

‘You’re a spy, Wolff. This is what you’re supposed to do. Are you refusing to consider it?’

Am I ? Wolff wondered. Did he have a choice ? The room seemed darker suddenly. He turned his head a little to gaze out of the window. It was a miserable grey January day, miserable. Drops of rain were beginning to trickle down the pane. Sooty London rain. ‘No, I’m not refusing. I’ll consider it,’ he said flatly.

‘It’s all we have on Casement.’ Cumming leant across the desk to push the ‘eyes only’ files closer. ‘Use the scallywags’ room. Speak to Miss Groves if you need anything else. Two days is enough. We’ll meet again on Thursday. But not here — the Clapham safe house. Will you be awake by ten?’

Wolff picked up the files, and rose quickly from his chair. He was almost at the door when Cumming spoke again: ‘Perhaps you’ve no longer the stomach for this sort of work.’ His voice was harder. There was a steely glint in his eye, the old pugilist preparing to lead with his remarkable chin. ‘I could order you to go.’

‘I thought it was a proposition?’

‘You’re not the only one, you know,’ and he lifted The Times and shook it at Wolff. ‘Don’t you read the casualty list? These fellows are only just out of short trousers.’ He glanced away, thin lips white with righteous anger. ‘The thing is, your country bloody well needs you, Wolff, they need you — don’t forget it.’

Bugger Kitchener. Wolff knew he had earned the right to say so. He’d thought nothing of his own safety when he’d accepted his first assignment — nor had anyone else. He’d learnt a lot in ten years.

He was a tall man with the lean, muscular physique of a distance runner. As a boy, he had run in his grandfather’s fields, and as a youth, along fenland dykes to the sea, before him always a seamless Lincolnshire sky. At Cambridge, he’d won a blue; as an officer cadet he’d represented the Navy and earned grudging respect from those who didn’t consider a grammar-school engineer a proper gentleman. Wolff drank too much, he smoked too much, but he was still in good condition. He wore his suits well and took trouble with his appearance, a practical man but not without vanity. Clean shaven, with the Dutch face of his father’s people, women judged him handsome and often mistook him for younger than his thirty-seven years. Something in his demeanour suggested he had seen a good deal of the world and he was often taken for a ‘foreigner’; it was an impression he’d found it useful to cultivate.

He read the Casement files carefully, making notes in his own shorthand as an aide-memoire. After lunch, he spent an hour sheltering from the rain in a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road and bought a handsome edition of Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt . In Trafalgar Square, a recruiting officer and his sergeants were shouting ‘Duty’ and ‘Honour’ at passers-by.

A month before, there had been no need for raised voices; the crowd was five deep at the base of the Column. Now the rush to glory was over. He walked on into St James’s Park, the bare branches drip-dripping on his hat and overcoat, a mist thickening to a late-afternoon pea-souper. Somewhere on the still lake a duck struggled to take flight and from the direction of the Palace, the dreary echo of a regimental band playing an imperial favourite. At the bridge Wolff stopped and leant on the wet rail to consider C’s ‘proposition’, but poisonous memories kept looming in and out of his mind like people passing in the fog.

He had resolved to finish with the Bureau. He’d spent almost a year in the Sultan’s special prison in Istanbul contemplating an escape to something better, a return perhaps to the sub-marine service he had helped to pioneer. But by the time the Foreign Office had decided it was worthwhile negotiating his release he’d recognised the impossibility of settling to his old life again. Then the Kaiser had put paid to other possibilities by marching his armies into Belgium. Wolff ran his forefinger along the rail of the bridge, impatiently stroking raindrops into the lake. ‘Honour’, ‘duty’, ‘sacrifice’ were on everyone’s lips these days. He’d been doing his bit for ten years. He’d made sacrifices. Violet liked to trace some of them on his skin.

Wolff turned and crossed the bridge, strolling back along the lake towards Whitehall. Bowler-hatted civil servants hurried past on the way to Victoria Station and their tidy homes in the suburbs. The lights in the Foreign Secretary’s office were still burning brightly even if they’d gone out in the rest of Europe. Wolff wondered if he’d taken tea there with Casement and listened to his tales of Africa and South America. Casement had been a hero for the new century. Proof in person of Great Britain’s civilising influence on the rest of the world. Knighted by his king, as conquerors were before him, but for his work on behalf of Negroes and Indians. Whitehall didn’t hold Wolff in very high regard and his work was not of the civilising sort. He didn’t give a fig for the Foreign Secretary’s good opinion but the irony of being asked to spy upon a man who’d received so much of his approbation made him smile.

Crossing Horse Guards Road, he walked briskly on up the steps into Downing Street. A group of senior army officers was adjusting hats and sticks on the pavement outside Number 10. He followed them into Whitehall and stood beneath the streetlamp in front of the Foreign Office in the hope of attracting the attention of a passing cab. Parliament was lost in the fog and he could only distinguish a muddy halo of office windows on the opposite side of Whitehall. Am I to risk my life in Germany because Casement has so thoroughly disappointed them all? he wondered. ‘Here.’ The taxi wheezed to the kerb a few yards beyond him. ‘Take me to Devonshire Place.’

The trouble with Sir Roger Casement, he reflected as he swung on to the taxi’s seat, is that he’s no longer the conscience of the Empire but a challenge to its existence.

Mrs Violet Curtis had invited her younger brother and two of his friends to join them for dinner at Rules. A striking figure in pale lavender satin, daringly décolleté, she moved with a graceful swing of the hips that drew the gaze of the gentlemen in the restaurant. There was something carnal in her obvious wish to please.