Len Deighton - SS-GB

Huth had walked over to his desk and now stood with head bent towards the earpiece of the phone.

‘I’m sure that the General…’ Huth tried to grab the phone but Douglas held on to it long enough to say, ‘The Standartenführer has just come in, sir.’

Huth took the phone, cleared his throat and said, ‘Huth here, General Kellerman. What is it you want?’

‘I’m so pleased to locate you at last, my dear Huth. I want to tell you –’

Huth interrupted Kellerman’s greeting. ‘You’re in a nice warm house, General, in a nice warm bed, with a nice warm woman. You stay there and let me continue my work without interruption.’

‘It’s simply that my switchboard couldn’t seem –’ the phone clicked as Huth dropped the earpiece back on to its rest.

Huth looked at Douglas. ‘Who gave you permission to discuss the workings of this office with an outsider?’

‘But it was General Kellerman…’

‘How do you know who it was? It was just a voice on the phone. I’m reliably informed that your drunken friend here…’ he jabbed a thumb at where Harry Woods was blinking at him, ‘…can manage a fairly convincing imitation of General Kellerman’s English.’

No one spoke. Any of Harry Woods’s previously stated intentions to tell Huth straight about the decorum of having the little Major along to the mortuary had been put aside for another time.

Huth tossed his peaked cap on to the hook behind the door and sat down. ‘I’ve told you once, and now I’ll tell you for the last time. You’ll discuss the work of this office with no one at all. In theory you can speak freely with the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler.’ Huth leaned forward with his stick and jabbed Harry Woods playfully. ‘You know who that is, Sergeant? Heinrich Himmler?’

‘Yes,’ growled Harry.

‘But that’s only in theory. In practice you won’t even tell him anything, unless I’m present. Or if I’m dead, and providing you’ve satisfied yourselves personally that my life is extinct. Right?’

‘Right,’ said Douglas quickly, fearing that Harry Woods was working himself up to a physical assault upon Huth who was now waving his stick in the air.

‘Any breach of this instruction,’ said Huth, ‘is not only a capital offence under section 134 of the Military Orders of the Commander-in-Chief Great Britain, for which the penalty is a firing squad, but also a capital offence under section 11 of your own Emergency Powers (German Occupation) Act 1941, for which they hang offenders at Wandsworth Prison.’

‘Would the shooting or the hanging come first?’ said Douglas.

‘We must always leave something for the jury to decide,’ said Huth.

Long ago Seven Dials had been a district noted for vice, crime and violence. Now it was no more than a shabby backwater of London’s theatreland. Douglas Archer got to know this region, and its inhabitants, during his time as a uniformed police Inspector, but he little thought that one day he would live here.

When Archer’s suburban house – situated between two prongs of the German panzer thrust at London – had been demolished, Mrs Sheenan had offered him and his child bed and board. Her husband, a peacetime policeman, was an army reservist. Captured at Calais the previous year he was now in a POW camp near Bremen, with no promised date of release.

The table was laid for breakfast when Douglas Archer got back to Monmouth Street and the little house over the oil-shop. Mrs Sheenan’s son, Bob, and young Douggie were being dressed in front of a blazing fire, in a room garlanded with damp laundry. Douglas recognized the striped towel that cloaked his son. It was one of the few items he’d managed to salvage from the wreckage of his house in Cheam. It brought back happy memories that he would have preferred to forget.

‘Hello, Dad! Did you work all night? Is it a murder?’

‘It’s a murder in an antique shop, isn’t it, Mr Archer?’

‘That’s right.’

‘There, told you so, Douggie,’ said young Sheenan. ‘It said so in the newspapers.’

‘Hold still,’ said Mrs Sheenan as she finished buttoning her son’s cardigan. Douglas helped her dress young Douggie. That finished, she reached for a pan on the hob. ‘You like them soft-boiled, don’t you, Mr Archer?’ She kept their relationship at that formal stage.

‘I’ve had my eggs this week, Mrs Sheenan,’ said Douglas. ‘Two of them fried on Sunday morning –remember?’

The woman scooped the boiled eggs with a bent spoon and put them into the egg cups. ‘My neighbour got these from her relatives in the country. She let me have six because I gave her your old grey sweater to unravel for the wool. All the eggs should be yours really.’

Douglas suspected that this was just a way of letting him have an unfair share of her own rations but he started to eat the egg. There was a plateful of bread on the table too, with a small cube of margarine, the printed wrapper of which declared it to be a token of friendship from German workers. What about a gesture of friendship from German farmers, said the wags who preferred butter.

‘Suppose there was a murder in a French aeroplane flying over Germany, and the murderer was Italian and the man murdered was…’ Bob thought for a moment ‘…Brazilian.’

‘Don’t speak with your mouth full,’ said his mother. On the radio the announcer played a Strauss waltz, requested by a German soldier stationed in Cardiff. Mrs Sheenan switched the music down.

‘Or Chinese!’ said Bob.

‘Don’t pester the Superintendent. You can see he’s trying to eat his breakfast in peace.’

‘That would be for the lawyers to decide,’ he told Bob. ‘I’m only a policeman. I just have to find out who did it.’

‘Mrs Sheenan is going to take us to the Science Museum on Saturday,’ said Douggie.

‘That’s very nice of her,’ said Douglas. ‘Be a good boy and do as she tells you.’

‘He always does,’ said the woman. ‘They both do; they’re both good boys.’ She looked at Douglas. ‘You look tired,’ she said.

‘I’m just getting my second wind.’

‘You’re not going back there again, without a rest?’

‘It’s a murder inquiry,’ said Douglas. ‘I must.’

‘Told you so, told you so, told you so!’ shouted Bob. ‘It’s a murder! Told you so!’

‘Quiet, boys,’ said Mrs Sheenan.

‘I have a car here,’ said Douglas. ‘I’ll pass the school – in about half an hour – will that be all right?’

‘A car. Have you been promoted?’

‘I have a new boss,’ said Douglas. ‘He says he likes his men to have the best of everything. His own car has a wireless in it. He can send messages straight to Scotland Yard while he’s driving along.’

‘Listen to that!’ said Bob. He pretended to use the phone. ‘Calling Scotland Yard. This is Bob Sheenan calling Scotland Yard. Like that, Superintendent? Does it work like that?’

‘It’s morse code,’ explained Douglas. ‘The wireless operator has to be able to use a morse key but he can receive speech messages.’

‘What will they think of next?’ said Mrs Sheenan.

‘Can we see your car?’ said Bob. ‘Is it a Flying Standard?’

‘The police have all sorts of cars, don’t they, Dad?’

‘All sorts.’

‘Can we go to the window and look at it?’

‘Finish your bread and then you can.’

With whoops of joy the two children went into the front room and raised the window to look down into the street at the car.

‘The bath water is still warm,’ said Mrs Sheenan. ‘Only the boys have used it.’ She looked away, embarrassed. Like so many people, she found the social degradation of the new sort of poverty more difficult to bear than its deprivations.