William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

Lysander interviewed the officers of the Directorate over the next three days in the cramped and antiseptic quarters of Room 205. All were conducted in the same tone of apologetic tedium and polite routine — he wanted to make no one remotely suspicious or alarmed. He asked for their understanding — he knew he was wasting precious time — and strove to be as amiable as possible, but the men he saw were uniformly wary and resentful — sometimes even contemptuous. Osborne-Way had obviously been at work preparing the ground.

He ended up with a list of six key names, including the Director, Osborne-Way, himself. All these men were capable, theoretically, of reproducing the specific type of information contained in the Glockner letters. Four of them were responsible for ‘Movement and control of war material and stores to France’. One dealt with control of ports, one with railway material — ’tanks, road metal, timber, slag and coal’. One was a rare civilian in the Directorate who was solely concerned with the compilation of shipping statistics — so every fact ended at his desk. Apart from Osborne-Way (an unlikely suspect, though Lysander refused to rule him out — unlikely suspects were more suspect in his opinion) the two men who most interested him were a Major Mansfield Keogh (Royal Irish Regiment) who was the Assistant Director of Movements — Osborne-Way’s number two — and a Captain Christian Vandenbrook (King’s Royal Rifle Corps) who supervised the ‘despatch to France of ammunition, ordnance, supplies and Royal Engineers’ stores’.

In principle the Directorate of Movements retained no more responsibility once stores were landed at Le Havre, Rouen or Calais; at that moment the Quartermaster General’s department at headquarters in St Other took over. However, in practice, there were always problems — trains went missing, ammunition found itself in the wrong depots, ships were sunk in the Channel. Significantly, Lysander thought, both Keogh and Vandenbrook had been to France independently on three occasions in 1915 (Osborne-Way had been twice) to liaise with the Director of Railway Transport and his staff and to supervise the construction of marshalling yards and sidings behind the lines. There was ideal opportunity to discover everything the Glockner letters contained.

Keogh was a quiet, earnest, efficient man who seemed consumed by some private sadness. He was civil and prompt with his answers but Lysander felt he regarded him as a mere nothing — a buzzing fly, a crumpled piece of paper, a leaf on the pavement. Keogh looked at him with empty eyes. By contrast, Vandenbrook was the most open and charming of his interviewees. He was a small, lithe, handsome man with perfect, even features and a fair moustache with the ends dashingly turned up. His teeth — he smiled regularly — were almost unnaturally white, Lysander thought. Vandenbrook was the only person he talked to who asked him about himself and who seemed happy to acknowledge that he’d seen him on stage before the war. Lysander knew his past life was common knowledge in the Directorate — he had overheard Osborne-Way refer to him as the ‘bloody actor-chappie’ more than once — but only Vandenbrook made overt and unconcerned reference to his stage career and Lysander liked him for it.

The War Diary of the Directorate had revealed the facts about Keogh’s and Vandenbrook’s trips to France. Tremlett supplied him with the ledger that detailed all the departmental ‘travelling claims by land’. Keogh had responsibility for the port of Dover; Vandenbrook for Folkestone. Both men visited the ports every few days, where the Directorate kept branch offices, and their expenses — train tickets, hotels, taxis, porters, meals and refreshments — were docketed, copied and filed. Lysander decided to investigate Keogh first, then Vandenbrook, then Osborne-Way. Save the biggest beast for last.

♦

Lysander saw Keogh come out of the Annexe and walk through to Charing Cross. He followed at a safe distance though he thought it unlikely he’d be recognized. He was wearing a false moustache, a bowler hat and was carrying a briefcase. He had chosen an old dark suit and made it short in the arms to expose the frayed cardboard cuffs of his shirt, looking, he hoped, like one of the thousands of clerical workers who spilled out of the great ministries of state in Whitehall at the end of the working day and began their routine journey homewards by the various means of public transport — omnibus, tram, and Underground and Tube railway. He followed Keogh on to the Underground at Charing Cross and sat at the far end of the compartment from him as they rattled along the District Line and over the Thames to East Putney. He watched Keogh plod up Upper Richmond Road and then turn off into a street of semi-detached brick villas. Keogh went into number 26. From inside the house Lysander could hear the faint barking of a dog, quickly silenced. He saw that the blinds of every window were drawn down. It was still light — perhaps he was one of the few London households that observed a proper blackout against the Zeppelin raids, but there seemed little point in that if your neighbours were lax. A death in the family?…

He spotted a woman pushing a pram up the pavement on the other side of the road and so crossed and came up behind her. Putting on a slight cockney accent he asked if she knew which house Mr and Mrs Keogh lived in.

“I been knockin’ on the wrong door, missus, it seems.”

“You want number 26, dear,” she said. “But don’t go asking for Mrs Keogh, though.”

“Why’s that, then?”

“Because she died two months ago. Diphtheria. Very sad, terrible shame. Lovely young woman. Beautiful.”

Lysander thanked her and walked away. So, a recent widower — that explained the vacant, indifferent stare. Did that rule him out? Or did the meaningless death of a beautiful young wife provoke feelings of nihilism and rage against the world? He would have to find out more about Major Keogh. In the meantime he would turn his attention to Captain Christian Vandenbrook.

♦

Vandenbrook was rich enough to take a taxi home from work. Lysander sat in the back of a cab at the end of the afternoon outside the Annexe, watched Vandenbrook flag down a passing taxi and followed it to his club in St James’s. Two hours later he emerged, hailed another cab and was driven home to Knightsbridge to a large white stucco house in an elegant sweep of terrace off the Brompton Road. Vandenbrook was doing very well for a captain in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps.

Lysander dismissed his taxi and walked up and down the smart crescent of large houses. Through a window he caught a glimpse of Vandenbrook accepting a cut-crystal tumbler from a silver tray held by a butler. Staff, as well. Twenty minutes later another taxi pulled up and a couple — dressed for dinner — descended and rang the doorbell. Lysander returned to his small hotel in Pimlico, conscious that someone with Vandenbrook’s manifest privileges had no real need to turn traitor. Osborne-Way was next.

At the hotel he found he had a postcard, sent from St Austell, Cornwall. It read, “Arriving Friday evening. Have booked room at White Palace, Pimlico. Vanora.”

♦

Tremlett fetched him the ledger of ‘Travelling claims by land’ and stood there waiting for further instructions as Lysander flicked through the pages.

“Colonel Osborne-Way hasn’t filed any expenses claims.”

“No, sir. He sends his direct to the War Office. He was on the General Staff — seconded here, like.”

“Seems odd. Can we get them?”

Tremlett sucked his teeth.

“We can try but it might take a while. We may need you to go yourself with your magic letter.”