Jack Higgins - Night of the Fox

‘None at all. Ridiculous though it may seem, Martineau and that flight are still covered by some wartime security classification.’

The old man frowned. ‘After forty years?’

‘There’s more,’ I said. ‘I had this kind of problem last year when I was researching. Ran into roadblocks, if you know what I mean. I discovered that Martineau was awarded the Distinguished Service Order in January 1944. One of those awards that appears in the list without explanation. No information about what he’d done to earn it.’

‘But that’s a military award and a very high one at that. Martineau was a civilian.’

‘Apparently civilians have qualified on rare occasions, but it all begins to fit with a story I heard when researching at Oxford three years ago. Max Kubel, the nuclear physicist, was a professor at Oxford for many years and a friend of Martineau’s.’

‘Now I have heard about him,’ Cullen said. ‘He was a German Jew, was he not, who managed to get out before the Nazis could send him to a concentration camp?’

‘He died in nineteen seventy-three,’ I said. ‘But I managed to interview the old man who’d been his manservant at his Oxford college for more than thirty years. He told me that during the big German offensive in nineteen forty that led to Dunkirk, Kubel was held by the Gestapo under house arrest at Freiburg, just across the German border from France. An SS officer arrived with an escort to take him to Berlin.’

‘So?’

‘The old boy, Howard his name was, said that Kubel told him years ago that the SS officer was Martineau.’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘Not at the time. He was ninety-one and senile, but one has to remember Martineau’s background. Quite obviously he could have passed for a German any time he wanted. He not only had the language but had the family background.’

Cullen nodded. ‘So, in view of more recent developments you’re prepared to give more credence to that story?’

‘I don’t know what to think anymore.’ I shrugged. ‘Nothing makes any sense. Martineau and Jersey, for example. To the best of my knowledge he never visited the place and he died five months before it was freed from Nazi occupation.’ I swallowed the rest of my whisky. ‘Martineau has no living relatives, I know that because he never married, so who the hell is this Dr Drayton of yours? I know one thing. He must have one hell of a pull with the Ministry of Defence to get them to release the body to him.’

‘You’re absolutely right.’ Canon Cullen poured me another Scotch whisky. ‘In all respects, but one.’

‘And what would that be?’

‘Dr Drayton,’ he said, ‘is not a he, but a she. Dr Sarah Drayton, to be precise.’ He raised his glass to toast me.

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.

Cullen sounded even more Irish as he lifted his voice bravely against the heavy rain. He wore a dark cloak over his vestments and one of the funeral men stood beside him holding an umbrella. There was only one mourner, Sarah Drayton, standing on the other side of the open grave, an undertaker behind her with another umbrella.

She looked perhaps forty-eight or fifty although, as I discovered later, she was sixty, small and with a figure still trim in the black two-piece suit and hat. Her hair was short, expertly cut and iron gray. She was not in any way conventionally beautiful, with a mouth that was rather too large and hazel eyes above wide cheekbones. It was a face of considerable character with an impression of someone who had seen the best and worst that life had to offer, and there was an extraordinary stillness to her. If I had seen her only in passing, I’d have turned for a second look. She was that sort of woman.

She ignored me completely and I stayed back under what shelter the trees provided, getting thoroughly damp in spite of my umbrella. Cullen concluded the service, then moved toward her and spoke briefly. She kissed him on the cheek and he turned and moved away toward the church, followed by the funeral men.

She stayed there for a while at the graveside and the two gravediggers waited respectfully a few yards away. She still ignored me as I moved forward, picked up a little damp soil and threw it down on the coffin.

‘Dr Drayton?’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to intrude. My name is Alan Stacey. I wonder if I might have a few words? I’m not a reporter, by the way.’

Her voice was deeper than I had expected, calm and beautifully modulated. She said, without looking at me, ‘I know very well who you are, Professor Stacey. I’ve been expecting you at any time these past three years.’ She turned and smiled and suddenly looked absolutely enchanting and about twenty years of age. ‘We really should get out of this rain before it does us both a mischief. That’s sound medical advice and for free. My car is in the road outside. I think you’d better come back for a drink.’

The house was no more than five minutes away, reached by a narrow country lane along which she drove expertly at considerable speed. It stood in about an acre of well-tended garden surrounded by beech trees through which one could see the bay far below. It was Victorian from the look of it, with long narrow windows and green shutters at the front and a portico at the entrance. The door was opened instantly as we went up the steps by a tall, somber-looking man in a black alpaca jacket. He had silver hair and wore steel-rimmed glasses.

‘Ah, Vito,’ she said as he took her coat. ‘This is Professor Stacey.’

‘Professore.’ He bowed slightly.

‘We’ll have coffee in the library later,’ she said. ‘I’ll see to the drinks.’

‘Of course, Contessa.’

He turned away and paused and spoke to her in Italian. She shook her head and answered fluently in the same language. He went through a door at the rear of the hall.

‘Contessa?’ I asked.

‘Oh, don’t listen to Vito.’ She dismissed my query politely, but firmly. ‘He’s a terrible snob. This way.’

The hall was cool and pleasant. Black and white tiled floor, a curving staircase and two or three oil paintings on the wall. Eighteenth-century seascapes. She opened a double mahogany door and led the way into a large library. The walls were lined with books, and French windows looked out to the garden. There was an Adam fireplace with a fire burning brightly in the basket grate and a grand piano, the top crammed with photos, mostly in silver frames.

‘Scotch all right for you?’ she asked

‘Fine.’

She crossed to a sideboard and busied herself at the drinks tray. ‘How did you know who I was?’ I asked. ‘Canon Cullen?’

‘I’ve known about you since you started work on Harry.’ She handed me a glass.

‘Who told you?’

‘Oh, friends,’ she said. ‘From the old days. The kind who get to know things.’

It made me think of Tony Bianco, my CIA contact at the embassy, and I was immediately excited. ‘Nobody seems to want to answer any of my questions at the Ministry of Defence.’

‘I don’t suppose they would.’

‘And yet they release the body to you. You must have influence?’

‘You could say that.’ She took a cigarette from a silver box, lit it and sat in a wing chair by the fire, crossing slim legs. ‘Have you ever heard of SOE, Professor?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Special Operations Executive. Set up by British Intelligence in 1940 on Churchill’s instructions to coordinate resistance and the underground movement in Europe.’

‘“Set Europe ablaze,” that’s what the old man ordered.’ Sarah Drayton flicked ash in the fire. ‘I worked for them.’

I was astonished. ‘But you can’t have been more than a child.’