Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

‘Did you want something else, sir?’

‘The Political Warfare Executive are going to reactivate the Link. They need you to go back out into the field for a spell.’

‘But, sir, I can hardly do that.’

‘Come here! Look. He’s got one.’

She joined M at his vantage point and saw another figure approach the man in the shabby raincoat.

‘I mean,’ Miller went on, ‘I’ve been compromised with the Link and the Right Club, sir. I gave evidence in court for goodness’ sake.’

‘Wait.’

M held up his hand for her to be quiet and they both watched the little vignette below. As the two men drew close, the one in the raincoat produced a cigarette and placed it in his mouth with a flourish, allowing his other hand to rest on one hip with a slight twist of his torso. The other produced a match and cupped the sulphur flame. With the briefest exchange of words, the smoker passed on, then his companion, flicking away the match and glancing furtively around for a moment, followed.

‘Yes,’ M hissed. ‘The dirty buggers.’

M had pointed out this little dance between men to Joan Miller before. She had been his assistant for nearly a year now and had spent weekends with him at the safe-house he had set up Camberley. He had declared his love for her and she had supposed that he had wanted her as his mistress. Except nothing had happened beyond the diligent choreography of romance. They would always sleep in separate rooms. At first she had thought that this was somehow her fault. But the war had brought an end to all innocence. He turned to her.

‘Political are being rather insistent on this one, I’m afraid,’ he told her.

‘I see.’

‘But I wouldn’t want to order you on a job like this, Joan,’ he said.

There was an odd expression on his face. She couldn’t tell if he was smiling or baring his teeth.

‘M—’

‘You will volunteer, won’t you?’

There seemed a soft threat in his words, as if he was implicating her in something unknown. She had come to know all his little prejudices. He had toned down his anti-semitism, at least for the duration, but he often voiced his vehement dislike of homosexuals. It seemed part of his brutal and ruthless side, which included a strange insistence that she conspire in his own self-loathing. He seemed to be goading her, testing her to discover whether she knew the truth or not. He stared at her.

‘Well?’ he demanded.

She knew now that he feared blackmail, disgrace. It would be unendurable for such an arrogant man to be in another’s power. He would do anything to protect himself.

‘Of course, M,’ she said. ‘Just concerned about security, that’s all.’

‘Good,’ he rejoined, with a cold smile.

There had been the odd business with the chauffeur who had been hastily dismissed. That time she had spotted him hanging around a cinema tea room. And, of course, the young bus driver from Leicester who had come up to Camberley to help fix M’s motorbike. He had once pointed out with disdain the particular demeanour of male prostitutes in Piccadilly, yet as Joan had been shocked to observe when she spied M from the bedroom window, he had walked towards the garage, and the bus driver, in precisely the same manner. From then on many things about her boss had become clear to her.

Room 39 was a vast office on the ground floor of the Admiralty, crammed with desks and filing cabinets, resounding with telephone bells and the constant clatter of typewriters. Fleming sat at the far end of it, next to the glass door that led to the inner sanctum of Naval Intelligence. He had called up NID’s file on the Magician and was shuffling through the pile of papers in front of him. He glanced at an old memorandum of his that had finally been returned to him. ‘Operation Ruthless’ had been a plan of his to seize one of the new high-speed German launches that patrolled the Channel, to overpower its crew and steal its code devices.

I suggest we obtain the loot by the following means:

1 Obtain from Air Ministry an airworthy German bomber.

2 Pick a tough crew of five, including a pilot, W/T operator and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German air force uniforms, add blood and bandages to suit.

3 Crash plane in the Channel after making SOS to rescue service in plain language.

4 Once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring boat back to English port.

He had even volunteered to lead the operation personally. Anything to get out of Room 39, to prove himself more than a mere staff officer. And there was, after all, a desperate need to crack the enemy’s codes. The Government Code and Cypher School was building a mechanical brain somewhere in the Home Counties. His project had eventually been rejected.

Fleming had begun to see himself as merely a component in a vast thinking machine. So much of intelligence seemed to be about generating obscure ideas and intellectual exercises. Departmental subsections and research units were springing up everywhere. Operation Mistletoe had emerged from this arcane world of speculation and second-guessing.

The Magician’s file made for fascinating reading. The subject had worked for Naval Intelligence in New York during the last war, posing as an Irish Nationalist and a German sympathiser, disseminating scurrilous and extreme propaganda that was aimed at discrediting both these professed causes. This was, as M said, what was now being called ‘black propaganda’. The Magician also had significant contacts with German occult organisations and individuals. He was just what they needed at this point in the operation. Fleming had heard of him, of course, from bohemian gossip circles and newspaper exposés. Intrigued, he arranged to visit him the next day at his rooms in Jermyn Street.

The mournful wail of the air-raid siren was giving its nightly call to prayers as he got back to his own house in Ebury Street, a converted chapel with a book-lined gallery — a special library containing his dearest possessions, which, despite all his years in the City, were also his wisest investment. He had started his collection over five years before but instead of merely buying first editions of literary novels, he sought out works of social and scientific significance that the rare-book dealers often overlooked. He had one of the few remaining copies of Madame Curie’s doctoral thesis of 1903; Koch’s paper on the tubercle bacillus; first editions of Freud’s On the Interpretation of Dreams and Nils Bohr’s Quantum Theory . But the strangest volume he possessed was splayed out on the dining table where he had left it the night before.

The book’s red dust jacket was stamped with the provocative motto: LEFT BOOK CLUB EDITION. NOT FOR SALE TO THE PUBLIC. Not an imprint he would usually subscribe to; indeed, he was outspokenly conservative (though in private far more liberal than he seemed). It was titled Swastika Night by Murray Constantine and it contained a premonition of the plan that he was forming, shaped by the meetings he had had with M, the rumours that had come to light from a German anti-fascist underground organisation known as the Red Orchestra, and his rendezvous at the Café Chiado in Lisbon. It was a faint glimpse of the scheme that had been unfolding over the past few weeks, which might turn the course of the entire war.

The setting of the book was peculiar enough: a dystopian tale, though quite unlike the playful satire of Huxley, it presented a dark, horrible vision of what might lie ahead. A stark warning from a possible future, in which the Nazis had won, the Jews had been exterminated and the Christians were then being rounded up. Women were considered subhuman and kept in camps for the purposes of breeding. But amid this scenario of doom was a storyline far more disturbing to Fleming, involving a high-ranking Nazi called Hess who leaves the inner circle and travels far to the north, to Scotland. Somehow the author seemed to have predicted Operation Mistletoe. He would have to find out who this Murray Constantine was. Someone in the Political Warfare Executive might know. They had more contact with left-wing circles than any other department.