"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. "Marti-neau 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.
/ 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 flre. "I worked for them."
I was astonished. "But you can't have been more than a child."
"Nineteen," she said. "In 1944."
"And Martineau?"
"Look on the piano," she said. "The end photo in the silver frame."
I crossed to the piano and picked the photo up and her face jumped out at me, strangely unchanged except in one respect. Her hair was startlingly blond and marcelled- that's the term I think they used to use. She wore a little black hat and one of those coats from the wartime period with big shoulders and tight at the waist. She also wore silk stockings and high-heeled shoes and clutched a black patent-leather bag.
The man standing next to her was of medium height and wore a leather military trenchcoat over a tweed suit, hands thrust deep into the pockets. His face was shadowed by a dark slouch hat and a cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. The eyes were dark, no expression to them at all, and his smile had a kind of ruthless charm. He looked a thoroughly dangerous man.
Sarah Drayton got up and joined me. "Not much like the Croxley Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford there, is he?"
"Where was it taken?" I asked.
"In Jersey. Not too far from here. May nineteen forty-four. The tenth, I think."
"But IVe been in Jersey long enough to know that it was occupied by the Germans at that time," I said.
"Very much so."
"And Martineau was here? With you?"
She crossed to a Georgian desk, opened a drawer and took out a small folder When she opened it I saw at once that it contained several old photographs. She passed one to me. "This one I don't keep on top of the piano for obvious reasons."
She was dressed pretty much as she had been in the other photo and Martineau wore the same leather trench-coat. The only difference was the SS uniform underneath, the silver death's-head badge in his cap. "Standartenftihrer Max Vogel," she said. "Colonel, to you. He looks rather dashing, doesn't he?" She smiled as she took it from me. "He had a weakness for uniforms, Harry."
"Dear God," I said. "What is all this?"
She didn't answer, but simply passed me another photo. It was faded slightly, but still perfectly clear. A group of German officers. In front of them stood two men on their own. One was Martineau in the SS uniform, but it was the other who took my breath away. One of the best-known faces of the Second World War. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. The Desert Fox himself.
I said, "Was that taken here too?"
"Oh yes." She put the photos back in the desk and picked up my glass. "I think you could do with another drink."
"Yes, I believe I could."
She got me one, handed the glass to me, and we moved to the fire. She took a cigarette from the box. "I should stop, I suppose. Too late now. Another bad habit Hany taught me."
"Do I get an explanation?"
"Why not?" she said, and turned as rain drummed against the French windows. "I can't think of anything better to do on an afternoon like this, can you?"
I t started, if one can ever be certain where anything starts, with a telephone call received by Brigadier Dougal Munro at his flat in Hasten Place, ten minutes' walk from the London headquarters of SOE in Baker Street. As head of Section D at SOE he had two phones by his bed, one routed straight through to his office. It was this that brought him awake at four o'clock on the morning of April 28,1944.
He listened, face grave, then swore softly. "I'll be right over. One thing, check if Eisenhower is in town."
Within five minutes he was letting himself out of the front door, shivering in the damp cold, lighting the first cigarette of the day as he hurried along the deserted street. He was at that time sixty-five, a squat, powerful-looking man with white hair, his round, ugly face set off by steel-rimmed spectacles. He wore an old Burberry raincoat and carried an umbrella.
There was very little of the military in either his bearing or his appearance, which was hardly surprising. His rank of brigadier was simply to give him the necessary authority in certain quarters. Until 1939, Dougal Munro had been an archaeologist by profession. An Egyptologist, to be more precise, and fellow of All Souls at Oxford. For three years now, head of Section D at SOE. What was commonly referred to in the trade as the dirty tricks department.
He turned in at the entrance of Baker Street, nodded to the night guard and went straight upstairs. When he went into his office, Captain Jack Carter, his night duty officer, was seated behind his desk. Carter had a false leg, a legacy of Dunkirk. He reached for his stick and started to get up.
"No, stay where you are, Jack," Munro told him. "Is there any tea?"
"Thermos flask on the map table, sir."
Munro unscrewed the flask, poured a cup and drank. "God, that's foul, but at least it's hot. Right, get on with it."
Carter now got up and limped across. There was a map of the southwest of England on the table, concentrating mainly on Devon, Cornwall and the general area of the English Channel.
"Exercise Tiger, sir," he said. "You remember the details?"
"Simulated landings for Overlord."
"That's right. Here in Lyme Bay in Devon there's a place called Slapton Sands. It bears enough similarities to the beach we've designated Utah in the Normandy landings to make it invaluable for training purposes. Most of the young Americans going in have no combat experience."
"I know that, Jack," Munro said. "Go on."
"Last night's convoy consisted of eight landing craft. Five from Plymouth and three from Brixham. Under naval escort, of course. They were to do a practice beach landing at Slapton."
There was a pause. Munro said, "Tell me the worst."
"They were attacked at sea by German E-boats, we think the Fifth and Ninth Schnellboote Flotillas from Cherbourg."
