Stalin's Gold (2 page)

Sonia looked at him shyly from under her eyelashes. “You don’t have to go, you know.” Sonia ruffled Merlin’s smooth black hair and then traced her finger down over his high forehead, his patrician nose and over the lips of his generous mouth. As she stroked his chin, Merlin’s stubble rasped against her touch. She stared into his warm, green eyes and then caressed his cheek. “You are a beautiful man, Frank. But you are working too hard. Look here. These lines under your eyes are growing and you are too thin. I will have to feed you up. We must try some nice Polish stew with much potato. I will have to see if Jan can use his charms to get me some good meat from the base. He managed it a few weeks ago, but you didn’t get to taste any as you were too busy.” Sonia sighed and kissed Merlin’s neck. “Please stay, Frank.”

Merlin hugged Sonia tight. “I’m sorry, I can’t. I have something to do very early tomorrow morning. Something not very nice. We’ll try and get together during the week. I’ll call you on Wednesday. Alright?”

Sonia nodded. The two embraced for a few seconds more and then pulled apart and Merlin slipped through the doorway into the dark. As the door closed behind him he looked up. The stars shone brightly in a clear sky. He couldn’t see or hear any aeroplanes above, but, as he came out of the mews onto the main street, he saw a red glow in the southern sky.

Chapter 2

Monday, September 2

Merlin walked slowly down the corridor behind the Governor and his assistant. Two uniformed warders followed him. There was a faint smell of urine mingled with the smell of cooking – was it boiled cabbage or something else? Merlin was happy for his mind to wander and think about anything other than what he was about to witness.

The small party turned a corner and then climbed some stairs. At the top was another corridor, which they followed to its end. Faint early morning light permeated through a prison window high above them as they entered a room on the left. Merlin couldn’t understand why he had agreed to do this. He’d been dog-tired at the end of a long day and he just hadn’t been able to resist the Assistant Commissioner’s browbeating – “Of course you should be present, Frank. You were the chief investigating police officer and you brought this disgusting man to justice. I think you owe it to the victims to see the penalty being paid, not to mention to yourself – after all, the man did shoot you!”

Merlin couldn’t see how the dead victims could feel any better for his attendance in Wormwood Scrubs this morning and he himself had no particular desire for personal revenge, but there he was. And so he took up his position on one side of the room next to the Governor. It was ten minutes to six. In front of him the infamous Albert Pierrepoint and his assistant fiddled with the noose of thick rope that hung down in the centre of the room. Someone had told Merlin that Pierrepoint’s assistant was his own son.
A funny sort of family business if that was the case
, he thought, as the assistant knelt down to check that all was in order with the trapdoor.

The Governor pulled a watch from his waistcoat pocket. “Should be here now,” he whispered to no one in particular.

One of the two warders, who had taken up position by the door, stepped into the corridor briefly and then returned. “Coming now, sir.”

Merlin could hear the sound of footsteps echoing outside and suddenly four men entered. Merlin’s eyes were naturally drawn straight to the man who was at the centre of the proceedings. Flying Officer Peter Harrison seemed to have shrunk a little during his stay in prison. Merlin had not seen him for a month. His head was closely cropped and thus the long cowlick of fair hair he had used to cover his incipient baldness was gone. Without his curls, his ears stuck out even more prominently than they had before. In his grey prison overalls he struck a sorry figure compared with the debonair, confident, smartly uniformed man about town whom Merlin had first encountered.

Flying Officer Harrison had been convicted in July at the Old Bailey of four murders. All the murders had followed a similar pattern. Harrison had picked up a prostitute on the London streets or in a pub, had engaged in sex with her in some back alley and had then slit her throat. The murders had taken place between February and May. Through a combination of good police work and luck, Harrison had been arrested at his base in Kent in June. In attempting to escape he had fired his service revolver and hit Merlin in the shoulder. It could have been a lot worse as the bone was only slightly chipped, but it still caused him some pain. Harrison had been a cocky little chap through the trial proceedings, but little of that spirit remained as Pierrepoint motioned to Harrison’s two accompanying prison officers to bring the man forward. The other man who’d arrived with Harrison was the prison padre, who now opened his bible and began reading.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Harrison’s motive for the murders was still unclear. He had come from an apparently warm and loving family in Tunbridge Wells. His father owned a grocer’s shop in which his son had happily worked with his parents and his two sisters during the school holidays. He had benefited from a good grammar school education and after taking his school certificate had started out as a clerk in a medium-sized stockbroking firm in the City of London. Joining the forces at the outset of the war, he had swiftly risen to a responsible ground staff job at Biggin Hill. Medical evidence at the trial hinted at some strain in his relationship with his mother, but no convincing reason was given for the killings. Merlin inclined to the simple view that Harrison was evil and committed the murders because he enjoyed doing so. In any event, whatever his motive had been, Harrison stood before him now within seconds of paying the ultimate penalty.

Everything happened very quickly. The padre completed his prayers and the Governor asked Harrison if he had anything to say. Harrison shook his head jerkily and then in a swift movement Pierrepoint pulled a hood over Harrison’s head. For a few seconds the only sound was the faint rustling of Harrison’s urine trickling from his trousers onto the wooden planks of the trapdoor as his self-control left him. Pierrepoint stood back, pulled a lever and the trapdoor opened. Despite himself, Merlin joined the others in looking down through the trapdoor at the jerking and twitching form below. The stench of Harrison’s soiled trousers floated up. Merlin closed his eyes, took a deep breath and walked out of the room.

* * *

Merlin leaned out of the open window in his office at Scotland Yard, looked down at the Thames twinkling beneath him and took a deep breath of the smoggy London air. He still couldn’t rid his nostrils of the smell of the gallows room. Returning to his desk, he fell heavily into his chair and looked vacantly around the office. The décor remained the same – the white walls, the Swiss cuckoo clock, his beloved pair of Van Gogh prints, the large map of London, the picture of a 1924 police football team featuring a young F Merlin, centre half, the brightly patterned Persian rugs enlivening the standard issue linoleum floor. To the left of the frosted glass office door was his Goya print of a firing squad somewhere, probably Spain. This seemed particularly apposite to his morning’s early appointment.

The door opened. “So how was it, sir?”

“It was bloody awful, as you’d expect, Sergeant. That’s the last one of those I’m going to even if I end up arresting Adolf himself and he’s up for the chop.”

Detective Sergeant Samuel Bridges, a tall man with a burly rugby player’s build, bright blond hair, red cheeks and a countenance that was almost incapable of being other than cheerful, thought it prudent to postpone further conversation for the moment and left Merlin alone in his room. He returned ten minutes later with a cup of tea and found his boss staring quietly out of the window. Merlin’s office gave him a good view of the river and of the London County Council building opposite. A number of barrage balloons were spaced out at regular intervals along the river, as Merlin could see as he leaned again out of the open window and extended his gaze to St Paul’s and the City beyond.

Bridges deposited the cup and saucer on the only available space on the crowded desk to which Merlin now returned.

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

Merlin noticed a new pile of files, which his sergeant must have placed next to the old stack of files heaped on his desk. He groaned and sat down. “Anything happening?”

“Plenty, sir, but nothing urgently requiring your personal attention.” Bridges looked meaningfully at Merlin’s desk.

“You mean that I might like to get on with reading all this bumf you’ve dumped on my desk?”

“Well, sir, it might be wise to take this opportunity to clear the decks. Everyone’s out and about dealing with their various jobs and you might find today relatively, um, uninterrupted.”

“I came in yesterday to try and catch up, but I wasn’t up to it.” Merlin leaned back in his chair and hoisted his feet onto the desk. He steepled his hands in front of him and blew on them. In days past when his boss adopted this habitual pose, Bridges had been able to take note of which of his boss’ shoes had a hole in it. Today, however, as for the past few months, Merlin’s shoes were properly intact.
That girl taking him in hand
, Bridges noted again to himself.

“Something funny, Sergeant?”

“No, sir, no.”

“Thinking of your beloved, perhaps? And how is Iris? What is it now, four months to go?”

“Nearer three, sir. If all goes well, that is.”

“I’m sure it will, Sam.” Merlin swung his legs down and pulled his chair closer to the desk. “Now, when you say I might find this day ‘relatively uninterrupted’, as you put it, you are not taking into account possible interruptions from airborne visitors, I presume?”

“No, sir. Well, who’s to know when that’s going to get going.”

“Indeed, Sergeant, who’s to know.”

German bombers had been attacking Britain since August 13
^th,
or “Eagle Day” as Hermann Goering had designated it according to the Assistant Commissioner. From that Monday morning throughout August, hundreds of German bombers supported by swarms of fighter planes had crossed the Channel every day to attack airfields, aircraft factories and radar installations mostly in southern England. The London suburbs had been hit heavily, but, with one exception, central London had remained unscathed – on the Saturday of the week before, August 24
^th
, the East End had been hit by bombs and a number of fires had broken out.

As Merlin stared out of his window at another sunny, warm day, both he and Bridges knew that this situation was unlikely to obtain for much longer. After the August 24
^th
bombing, which Jack Stewart, Merlin’s friend in the Auxiliary Fire Service, said was probably accidental, the RAF had launched retaliatory raids on Berlin. While everyone agreed that central London was going to be a target sooner or later, these raids suggested it would be sooner.

Merlin took off his jacket. “Very well, Sergeant. You might as well leave me alone to get on with it. Off you go. No doubt you’ve got paperwork to attend to as well.”

“Yes, sir.”

Frank Merlin was a lean six-footer with a full head of jet-black hair. Piercing green eyes complemented a narrow aristocratic nose and a full and generous mouth, and he had seldom encountered a woman who failed to admire his charms. He was no lothario though, unlike his friend Jack Stewart. Despite the odd wrinkle, he looked younger than his forty-three years. Born to a Spanish exile father and an East End mother, he was brought up in a Limehouse chandlery store with his younger brother and sister. From his father he had acquired, amongst other things, a love of history and poetry. He had fought bravely in the Great War, survived and joined the police on his return, rising steadily through the ranks. A brief, loving marriage had been ended by the leukaemia that killed his wife, Alice. At the beginning of 1940 he had attempted to join up for this new Great War, but had been thwarted by his superiors.

Merlin picked up the nearest file. When the war had started, almost a year before, Frank Merlin had been in charge of the Yard’s Violent Crimes Unit. As the year passed and the ranks of the Yard had been depleted by officers joining the forces, being seconded to Special Branch or other specialist government units, or otherwise being siphoned off from domestic crime duties to assist in the war effort, Merlin’s responsibilities had become more diversified. Effectively his “Violent Crime” Unit had become an “Any Serious Crime” Unit. The file he’d picked up concerned a non-violent crime. It was immaculately neat and Merlin knew without looking at the name on top of the front cover that it was the work of Inspector Peter Johnson. For several weeks, Johnson had been investigating a racket that was becoming increasingly common in wartime Britain. A deluge of forged ration books and identity cards was flooding through London and Merlin had given Johnson the task of stemming the flow. Johnson had succeeded in identifying several different gangs and had made a number of arrests. Merlin had in his hands the latest report on his investigation, in which Johnson reported that although there was still a good deal of false documentation circulating, the flood of new documentation had been reduced to a trickle by the arrests, for the present at least. There were still forgers out there, but Johnson felt he’d got most of the big players. Merlin was pleased. He’d had the Assistant Commissioner on his back about this for quite a while. He made a note in pencil on the file for it to be forwarded straightaway to the A.C.

The next file concerned the spate of violent robberies in Paddington. His eyes were beginning to strain at the small print and he opened one of the drawers in his desk. Sonia had noticed him reading a newspaper the other day with the print only a few inches away from his eyes. He had not wanted to admit to any failing, but Sonia had been insistent and he’d slipped away one lunch hour the previous week to visit an optician. A mild case of presbyopia had been diagnosed and he had walked away with a pair of not particularly attractive, heavy-rimmed spectacles. Merlin did not think himself a vain man and was surprised to find that he was damned if he was going to reveal the existence of these reading glasses to his colleagues. He kept his eye on the door as he furtively withdrew the glasses from the desk and put them on. It was a lot better, he admitted to himself, as the letters immediately loomed larger on the page. His brow furrowed as he concentrated and began to read.

* * *

The heavily powdered jowls of Sonia Sieczko’s customer quivered as she shook her head. “No, no, my dear. That’s simply not my colour. I told you that earlier when you brought out one of the other dresses. I’m looking for a pale lavender. That’s really a purple. That’s not what I want. What else is there?”