Sam Bourne - Pantheon

London

The afternoon passed slowly, the work laborious. No matter how often Taylor Hastings looked up at the clock, it insisted on advancing with slow, heavy steps. He looked down at the pile of documents awaiting decoding. He could gallop through it, but a new pile would take its place: it wouldn’t make the time pass any quicker.

He needed another excuse to go back into his briefcase. He had already retrieved a pencil sharpener from there; he couldn’t pull that stunt again, not without his beetle-eyed colleague becoming curious. Yet he was desperate to look inside.

Help came in the form of a phone call, the distraction allowing him to bend low and retrieve what he wanted from his case. It was a card in an envelope, the card stiff, both in a rich shade of cream. He slipped it in among his papers, so that when, a few minutes later, the beetle-eyes were averted, he could steal another look at it.

Embossed at the top was the green, portcullis crest of the House of Commons. On the right, in the blue ink of an expensive fountain pen, today’s date, the month rendered in roman numerals. Below that, the time of writing: ten am, an indication, along with the missing postmark on the envelope, that this message had been hand-delivered. Had Reginald Rawls Murray taken a risk by despatching it here, of all places? A calculated risk, Taylor concluded. Using the Royal Mail would have been far riskier, given the likelihood of surveillance and interception: thanks to Regulation 18B, Murray’s mail was surely opened and checked routinely. Hand delivery by courier was much safer. If Murray had delivered it himself, so much the better.

On the other hand, if minimizing risk had been the MP’s objective it would have been better to have dropped off the card at Taylor’s home rather than here. But not if the message was urgent: Taylor wouldn’t have seen it till late this evening. Very late, most likely, since he had ‘dinner’ plans with Anna (though it was not food that was on the menu). It wouldn’t have surprised him if Murray knew as much and so had opted to get this message to him at work. Looking at it again, it certainly seemed urgent.

Meet me tonight, House of Commons terrace. 7.30 pm. RRM.

The evening was close and sticky. Taylor Hastings had known a thousand such humid nights, the air choking with ragweed pollen, in Washington. But the Brits seemed to find it unbearable. Murray was constantly running his finger along his shirt collar, as if breaking a seal formed by the sweat on his neck.

But perhaps it wasn’t just the weather that made him agitated. After ten minutes of chit-chat on the terrace — admiring the view over to the South Bank, eyeing up County Hall, watching the river in the still-bright evening — Murray finally got down to business. What was it with the English, always feeling obligated to pretend that a transaction between parties was really a conversation among friends?

‘The situation’s getting awfully tight for us, Hastings, I’m sure you appreciate that. Awfully tight. They’ve banged up Diana and Oswald under the bloody 18B and they’ve done the same with Norah. Pretty soon, there’ll be more of us inside than out,’ he said, knocking back what was left of his gin and tonic. ‘Which is why we need you.’

‘Me?’

‘Well, they can’t damn well put you in choky, can they? Against the rules. Immunity and what have you. Which is why I have a little gift for you.’

‘That’s very kind, Mr Murray.’

‘You haven’t seen what it is yet,’ the MP said sharply, a hint, Taylor decided, of the boarding school bully in his voice. He was unzipping a slim, leather portfolio case that Taylor hadn’t noticed. Perhaps it had been tucked under Murray’s suit jacket. ’On the count of three, take this from me and put it inside your briefcase, all right? Ready? One… two… three.’

Taylor took the object Murray had removed from the portfolio and put it in his bag, without looking at it. Touch told him that it was leather and had a metal lock on the front. It had the weight of a book and was roughly the size of a large desk diary. He wouldn’t have sworn to it, not in the fading twilight of a terrace with no lamps, but he was almost certain it was red.

He should have waited, but he couldn’t help himself. In the back of a taxi, his briefcase on his lap, safely out of sight of the driver’s rearview mirror, he removed Murray’s gift and let it sit on his knees for a second or two while he gazed at it. Yes, red. Red leather worn through use, the binding grown soft. The sides were ragged, like a diary stuffed with scraps of paper and odd receipts. There were so many extra leaves inserted into this book that it appeared to have bloated to what Taylor guessed was twice its regular size.

He probed inside his breast pocket, feeling the outline of the tiny metal key that Murray had given him as they said goodbye. ‘I am not only trusting you with my life, Mr Hastings. I am trusting you with the lives of many others. Don’t let us down.’

Taylor took his time, examining the Bramah lock on the side of the book. Little more than a small brass tab, it would surely not be too hard to break — though Murray had assured him that appearances were deceptive, that the mechanism was tougher than it looked. Gingerly he inserted the key, no bigger than a coin, and turned it.

To any observer, including the cab driver, it would have looked like an ordinary address book. Pages and pages filled with names. Instantly his eye picked out the familiar ones: the Blackshirt propagandist AK Chesterton and the fascist agitator Arnold Leese were, he knew after just a few short months in London, permanent fixtures in the country’s Jew-hating scene. Lord Redesdale he had already met and there was Lord Lymington. Taylor had heard about him: an eccentric by all accounts, who yearned to turn back the clock and dreamt of an England populated solely by ruddy-cheeked farmers and blonde-haired milkmaids, tilling the land and eating only the purest food. ‘Organic’, he called it. Anna had laughed, deliberately mishearing, and had declared that she quite liked the sound of ‘orgasmic food’.

He flicked through the pages until one caught his eye. The name — Colonel GG Woodwark of Kings Lynn — was new to him, but there was an intriguing scribbled note in the margin: judge of the Fuhrer’s Special Prize for Best of Breed at the Cologne Dog Show in November 1938. Another annotation appeared by the name of Captain George Henry Drummond of Pitsford Hall: Diana M.’s bank manager, bottom of swimming pool decorated with swastika.

Diana M, he thought. Must be Diana Mitford, now Mrs Oswald Mosley. The pair of them were legendary: they’d got married four years ago in Goebbels’s home and Hitler had been a guest.

Such elevated company. And to think that he, Taylor Hastings, had been entrusted as keeper of their secrets. He would take one more peek, then close and lock the book, leaving plenty of time before the cab reached his home.

He had come across what he presumed was a list of affiliated organizations. A few leapt out: Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was there, obviously, along with the Anglo-German Fellowship, the Imperial Fascist League and the Nordic League. He strained to read Murray’s handwriting before deciphering something called the January Club, followed by the White Knights of Britain and an outfit that seemed to be called the English Mistery, whatever that might be. And now an individual’s name, though it was included in the list of groups: Lady Alexandra Hardinge.

Then he spotted a name that surprised him. He read it twice to make sure he had it right, but there could be no doubt. How interesting.

He closed the book and locked it carefully, looking up to see the driver, his head turned, staring at him. Only then did he realize the cab was still. It was parked outside his building, on Cadogan Square.