Andrew Taylor - The Second Midnight

Michael flushed. He was twenty-five; he was two stone heavier and six inches taller; but Uncle Claude could still make him feel like a schoolboy who hadn’t washed behind the ears.

‘I haven’t actually interviewed him yet. I telephoned him yesterday; we’ve arranged to meet tomorrow.’

‘I see. And why this unseemly haste, may I ask?’

‘You haven’t heard? Farrar’s dead. Apparently he killed himself – sealed the draughts and turned on the gas in his hotel room. The signal came in from Vienna on Friday night.’

Dansey said nothing. He appeared to be concentrating on adjusting the red carnation in the buttonhole of his dark blue suit.

Michael swallowed. ‘William McQueen talked to a waiter at the hotel. He said that Farrar might have had a couple of visitors in his room the evening before he died. Probably Gestapo, though we’ve had no confirmation of that. You know how difficult it is to get hard information out of Austria these days.’

Dansey gave a scarcely perceptible shrug. ‘It’s immaterial. Farrar couldn’t have told them anything. He hadn’t been briefed.’

In the pause which followed, Michael sipped his wine to cover his confusion. It was brutally obvious to him that Dansey didn’t care that Farrar had in all likelihood been killed. It was at most an inconvenience. A newly-recruited courier was of little weight in Uncle Claude’s professional scale of values. If this was professionalism, Michael thought bitterly, he wished he was an amateur.

‘Do go on,’ Dansey suggested. ‘You were about to explain why you found it necessary to circumvent the standard recruitment procedure.’

‘Farrar was due to return to London and then go on to Prague at the end of the week. You said the Prague trip was vital, sir. I would have contacted you, but you were on a train somewhere between Zurich and London. I thought I’d better act on my own initiative.’

‘And how did your initiative lead you to this man Kendall?’

‘We need someone with a bona fide reason to go to Prague – preferably a commercial one. I thought Prague – Bohemia – glass; and then I remembered Sir Basil Cohen.’

‘You know Basil?’ Dansey said sharply. ‘How did that come about?’

‘I was at Cambridge with his younger son. I stayed with his people down in Gloucestershire once or twice.’

‘I see.’ For once Dansey sounded almost amiable.

Michael’s mind immediately made a connection. Cohen had been very helpful, right from the start. Dansey had been cultivating the friendship of the wealthy and the powerful for nearly half a century. Many of them were now unobtrusively helping Dansey’s Z Organization in a variety of ways. It was not inconceivable that Cohen was among them. In that case, Sir Basil must have derived a great deal of private amusement from Michael’s claim that he was working for the Foreign Office trade section.

A muscle twitched in Dansey’s cheek. In a lesser man, it might have been a grin.

‘I telephoned him – luckily he was in town. He was dining at White’s, but he said he could spare me a few minutes there after dinner.’ Michael glanced quickly at Dansey and hurriedly continued: ‘I – well – implied I had some sort of FO connection. I said we needed an unofficial trade representative in Prague – someone who made regular trips there and could combine his own work with a little confidential work for us. Sir Basil asked a few questions, of course, but I was as discreet as possible.’

A waiter moved tentatively towards the table. Dansey waved him away. ‘What do you know about Kendall?’

‘He works from an office in the City. He buys mainly from Czechoslovakia. His main customers in this country are provincial department stores. It’s an old-fashioned firm, run on pre-war lines. Apparently Kendall’s in a bad way financially – Sir Basil reckons he must be on his last legs.’

‘Does Basil know him personally?’

‘They’ve met, sir, but that’s about all. I rather gathered that Kendall isn’t quite …’ Michael’s voice trailed away. He believed that all men were equal but had long since discovered that most of his friends and colleagues paid only lip-service to the notion. He despised snobbery; but he was intelligent enough to realize that it couldn’t be ignored.

Dansey nodded understandingly. ‘Any war record?’

‘Yes, sir; I checked with the War Office. Enlisted in the Pay Corps in 1915 as a private. Commissioned in 1918. He ended the war as an acting captain, after four years behind a desk in Whitehall.’ Michael made his voice as neutral as possible. ‘It seems that he likes to be called Captain Kendall.’

Dansey’s eyebrows rose. ‘Despite the fact he never held a regular commission?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The eyebrows fell back into place. Dansey poured out the last of the burgundy and signalled to the waiter to bring their coffee. He was not in the mood for pudding or cheese and he assumed, correctly, that Michael would be content to follow his lead. By now they were almost alone in the big dining room, except for tail-coated waiters who swooped like swallows among the empty tables, clearing them with deft, darting movements. Michael could feel the hard edges of his sketchbook in the pocket of his jacket. He had a sudden urge to draw what he could see, to record an instant in the life of the Savoy in black and white. He would use lots of heavy shading and soften the outlines as much as possible.

He grinned into his burgundy at the thought of what Dansey would say if he started to draw. It was well known that Dansey considered that the chief purpose of art was to be a tool of espionage: it was a convenient means of creating a visual record of enemy installations. The old man knew that Michael had once wanted to be an artist. What he didn’t know was that Michael still did.

The waiter brought their coffee and withdrew. Dansey produced a cigarette case and offered it to Michael. As Michael lit their cigarettes, he noticed that Dansey’s hand was speckled with brown liver spots and trembled slightly. The hand reminded him that Dansey had already reached the age when most men were thinking of retirement.

‘I’m dining with your godfather tonight,’ Dansey said abruptly.

It was not a social observation. Michael’s godfather, Admiral Sinclair, was head of SIS, the sponsor of Z Organization. If it hadn’t been for Sinclair, it was unlikely that Michael would now be at the Savoy with a decent suit on his back. In all probability he would have been teaching history, art and games at some godforsaken little prep school. Sometimes Michael wished he was.

‘Do give him my regards,’ Michael said.

As always, Dansey’s words had at least two layers of meaning. He was hinting that he would take the opportunity to protect himself in the event of something going wrong with Kendall: Michael was the precooked scapegoat, ready for eating if the need should arise. But there was another implication: Dansey was tacitly accepting what Michael had done; it was the first time that Michael had been allowed to make an independent decision; and that, he supposed, might be construed as progress.

‘You’re meeting Kendall tomorrow?’

‘Yes, sir – for lunch.’

‘If you do decide to take him on, you are to act as his sole control. I want him to have no contact with anyone else in London. He’s not to be given the emergency addresses in Vienna or Budapest or Zurich – is that clear? You can offer him his expenses plus fifty pounds; he can have fifteen pounds now and the rest when he returns. And get receipts.’

‘How much should I tell him?’

‘As little as possible, of course.’ Dansey’s eyebrows rose once more. ‘My dear Stanhope-Smith, surely your artistic temperament hasn’t prevented you from grasping that simple principle? All the man has to do is take something to Prague and bring something back. Unless you’re even more foolish than you look, you won’t mention Hase to him. Just teach Kendall one of the standard recognition drills and tell him to go to his usual hotel. You can then inform Hase of the arrangements independently by telegram. I’m sure you will be able to resist the temptation to wire direct; it really would be much wiser to route it through Zurich and Budapest.’