Gavin Lyall - Spy’s Honour

There was a tap at the door and the butler trundled over to bring the message up the chain of command: from housemaid to butler to General, who announced: “Mon Capitaine, M’sieu, your baths have been prepared. A small repas will be waiting on your return.”

“That is most kind, but we do need to get to Paris …” They might already have failed in their task, except in distracting Gunther away from Spiers and the true codes, but there was an interview in London to think about (“And what did you do then, Captain?” “Well, sir, we wallowed in hot baths, had a bite to eat and toddled on our way …”)

“I quite understand, mon Capitaine. By then Sergeant Clement will have prepared the car to join the express at Rouen.”

Resigned, Ranklin let the butler lead the way upstairs.

In a first-floor bedroom, with the same view over the lawn, their small travelling bags had already been half-unpacked. Ranklin waited until the door was closed behind them, then let fly: “What the devil were you up to getting us stuck out here? Didn’t you realise that fat German was just the man we were supposed to watch out for, get caught by? So now we’ve lost …”

“Ah, calm down, Captain, dear.” O’Gilroy was quite unruffled. “Could ye not see they’re all in it together?”

Ranklin gaped.

“Sure, the fat German was to spot ye on the boat – and did – pretending to be drunk on beer before noon. And him the size of a garrison sergeant that could drink beer the day round without it touching him. And getting word of yer name ahead … Now, that I can’t tell how he did at all …”

“Wireless,” Ranklin said reluctantly.

“Ah, sure, I was too bothered with me stomach to see the boat had an aerial on it. And using yer name in a message so we miss the train, then him coming round being pushy on the dockside so when a nice general turns up with a nice motorcar, if ye’d been the officer with the real code, wouldn’t ye think him, another army man, was an angel sent from Heaven?”

Ranklin wasn’t about to agree that O’Gilroy was right. Lucky, perhaps, but … but at least he seemed to have guessed how a real courier might think. Or, perhaps more importantly, how their opponents assumed a real courier would think. He shivered to recall how instinctively he had been drawn to the General.

And if they were still in the trap they had sprung, he could relax and look around as he undressed. It was a high-windowed room with white-painted panelling edged with gold, a pink and green oriental carpet and a couple of elegant pre-Empire chairs beside the beds. But the whole had the dullness of old varnish on a painting, at the brink of becoming shabby and grimy.

Putting on his dressing gown and picking up a bath towel, he peeked at the parcel in his bag. “They surely can’t be planning to copy the code while we’re in the bath?”

“Not even while I’m in me bath.” Constant hot baths were the high point of O’Gilroy’s new life, and no nonsense about leaving them half-finished.

Ranklin’s natural pessimism caught up with him and he was back in the bedroom sooner than he’d intended, leaving O’Gilroy sluicing in suds and folk song. The bathrooms had all been built in a clump around the recently installed main drainage, which made sense but gave a rather barracks-block effect.

He dressed slowly, putting on a fresh collar, puzzling over the odd combination of French general and German spy and very conscious of his own failure to think imaginatively earlier that afternoon. At last O’Gilroy drifted in, shining pink around a small, private smile.

“Captain, did ye notice a funny smell about the bathrooms?”

Ranklin might have done, but expected foreign bathrooms to smell funny.

“Chemicals,” O’Gilroy said, watching him.

“Well, that’s a step in the right direction. What bothers me – ”

“So I took a shufti around the other bedrooms …”

“You didn’t!”

“Is that not in our code of conduct, then? And I found one being used, with them big brown bottles of chemicals a fella I worked for in Ireland had for his photography, and a wooden case with a big camera in it …”

“They’re going to photograph the code!”

“I thought ye might be interested,” O’Gilroy said dryly.

That made the whole thing more feasible. They could photograph two pages of the book at a time just as fast as they could change plates. It also meant that O’Gilroy was right yet again. By way of congratulation and apology, Ranklin said: “Um.”

O’Gilroy smiled faintly and began to dress. “And what was that about downstairs with His Majesty stuff, then? – and me thinking France didn’t have kings at all.”

“She doesn’t, but in the last century she’s had an emperor, a king, president-turned-emperor and president again. With passing help from the Paris mob and the Army. The General’s obviously a monarchist, believes in having a king again. Quite a lot of the officer corps feels the same way.”

There were some things O’Gilroy didn’t know.

“So he wants the code for plotting agin the government?”

“That’s what bothers me. He might want to overthrow this government, but why should a general turn traitor?”

O’Gilroy’s look said plainly what he thought of the idea that Military Gentlemen just did not do Certain Things. And Ranklin read it clearly. “No, just consider: he must have spent at least forty years working to become a general. I just don’t believe any man can spend that time pretending. Life’s far easier if you believe in what you’re doing.”

Ranklin probably knew what he was talking about there, O’Gilroy reflected. “Money, mebbe?”

“D’you really think so?”

O’Gilroy considered: the Chateau might be run down, but it was still a chateau, still with land around it, with servants and the big motorcar. Perhaps it was the car that convinced him. “Mebbe not,” he conceded. “But ye said he was agin the government.”

“For patriotic reasons. Not to betray his own Army to the Germans.”

“Do we know that fat German’s working for Germany, ’cept him being German?”

Come to think of it, Ranklin didn’t.

“Or mebbe,” O’Gilroy finished tying his necktie and paused to gloat at himself in the mirror, “the whole shebang’s German spies and acting at General and servants, with the big house and motorcar all hired.” He wasn’t being very serious; to O’Gilroy an enemy was an enemy and he didn’t trouble overmuch with asking why.

“Now,” he went on, “would that ‘repas’ he was talking about have anything to do with food? Me stomach’s asking if me mouth’s emigrated.”

Ranklin, who had never learnt to dress as fast as a private soldier must, was still working at his own tie. “Now we know they’re going to photograph the code we can afford to seem in more of a hurry. But see if you can’t make it easier for them. Can you undo the package a bit, without it seeming obvious?”

Nobody had done anything to make the parcel obviously tamper-proof: that hadn’t been the objective. O’Gilroy picked apart the knots on the string and the brown paper fell loose. Inside was a plain manilla envelope with a criss-cross of government red tape (actually pink) held in place with a blob of sealing wax. Perhaps somebody in the War Office thought that was secure; O’Gilroy took just two seconds to bend a corner of the envelope and slip a loop of the tape free of the lightly gummed flap.

Then, since Ranklin still wasn’t ready, he peeled the flap open with his penknife. It wasn’t a clean job, but the enemy wouldn’t be looking for signs that the envelope had already been opened.

“Captain,” he said, “there’s a mite of a problem here.”