The Poison Tide (3 page)

‘Haven’t I? No, well I know it won’t be easy but we need to know what he’s doing in Berlin, you see. Need someone in his circle.’ He peered at Wolff intently through his monocle as if hoping to force instant acquiescence.

Wolff returned his gaze with a stony face.
He wants me to go to Germany
. Lifting his cup slowly, he examined then swirled the dregs of his coffee before returning it to the saucer. Really too bitter a blend for his taste.

‘Different from your last assignment, of course,’ C remarked, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. ‘You know Germany. It’s your patch.’

‘We shoot their spies now, don’t we? And they shoot ours.’

‘Everything’s tighter in war, you know that.’

‘Will you explain that to my widow?’

‘Isn’t she somebody else’s wife?’ C enquired tartly.

‘Have you been spying on me?’

Cumming dismissed the question with a wave of the hand. ‘Won’t be easy, I know,’ he repeated, with a little less sympathy, ‘but no one has your experience of operating in Germany. I still trust you to do a good job.’

‘Should I be grateful for your trust? What about Landau or Bywater?’

‘You’re a spy, Wolff. This is what you’re supposed to do. Are you refusing to consider it?’

Am I
? Wolff wondered.
Did he have a choice
? The room seemed darker suddenly. He turned his head a little to gaze out of the window. It was a miserable grey January day, miserable. Drops of rain were beginning to trickle down the pane. Sooty London rain. ‘No, I’m not refusing. I’ll consider it,’ he said flatly.

‘It’s all we have on Casement.’ Cumming leant across the desk to push the ‘eyes only’ files closer. ‘Use the scallywags’ room. Speak to Miss Groves if you need anything else. Two days is enough. We’ll meet again on Thursday. But not here – the Clapham safe house. Will you be awake by ten?’

Wolff picked up the files, and rose quickly from his chair. He was almost at the door when Cumming spoke again: ‘Perhaps you’ve no longer the stomach for this sort of work.’ His voice was harder. There was a steely glint in his eye, the old pugilist preparing to lead with his remarkable chin. ‘I could order you to go.’

‘I thought it was a proposition?’

‘You’re not the only one, you know,’ and he lifted
The Times
and shook it at Wolff. ‘Don’t you read the casualty list? These fellows are only just out of short trousers.’ He glanced away, thin lips white with righteous anger. ‘The thing is, your country bloody well needs you, Wolff, they need you – don’t forget it.’

Bugger Kitchener. Wolff knew he had earned the right to say so. He’d thought nothing of his own safety when he’d accepted his first assignment – nor had anyone else. He’d learnt a lot in ten years.

He was a tall man with the lean, muscular physique of a distance runner. As a boy, he had run in his grandfather’s fields, and as a youth, along fenland dykes to the sea, before him always a seamless Lincolnshire sky. At Cambridge, he’d won a blue; as an officer cadet he’d represented the Navy and earned grudging respect from those who didn’t consider a grammar-school engineer a proper gentleman. Wolff drank too much, he smoked too much, but he was still in good condition. He wore his suits well and took trouble with his appearance, a practical man but not without vanity. Clean shaven, with the Dutch face of his father’s people, women judged him handsome and often mistook him for younger than his thirty-seven years. Something in his demeanour suggested he had seen a good deal of the world and he was often taken for a ‘foreigner’; it was an impression he’d found it useful to cultivate.

He read the Casement files carefully, making notes in his own shorthand as an aide-memoire. After lunch, he spent an hour sheltering from the rain in a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road and bought a handsome edition of Conan Doyle’s
The Poison Belt
. In Trafalgar Square, a recruiting officer and his sergeants were shouting ‘Duty’ and ‘Honour’ at passers-by.

A month before, there had been no need for raised voices; the crowd was five deep at the base of the Column. Now the rush to glory was over. He walked on into St James’s Park, the bare branches drip-dripping on his hat and overcoat, a mist thickening to a late-afternoon pea-souper. Somewhere on the still lake a duck struggled to take flight and from the direction of the Palace, the dreary echo of a regimental band playing an imperial favourite. At the bridge Wolff stopped and leant on the wet rail to consider C’s ‘proposition’, but poisonous memories kept looming in and out of his mind like people passing in the fog.

He had resolved to finish with the Bureau. He’d spent almost a year in the Sultan’s special prison in Istanbul contemplating an escape to something better, a return perhaps to the sub-marine service he had helped to pioneer. But by the time the Foreign Office had decided it was worthwhile negotiating his release he’d recognised the impossibility of settling to his old life again. Then the Kaiser had put paid to other possibilities by marching his armies into Belgium. Wolff ran his forefinger along the rail of the bridge, impatiently stroking raindrops into the lake. ‘Honour’, ‘duty’, ‘sacrifice’ were on everyone’s lips these days. He’d been doing his bit for ten years. He’d made sacrifices. Violet liked to trace some of them on his skin.

Wolff turned and crossed the bridge, strolling back along the lake towards Whitehall. Bowler-hatted civil servants hurried past on the way to Victoria Station and their tidy homes in the suburbs. The lights in the Foreign Secretary’s office were still burning brightly even if they’d gone out in the rest of Europe. Wolff wondered if he’d taken tea there with Casement and listened to his tales of Africa and South America. Casement had been a hero for the new century. Proof in person of Great Britain’s civilising influence on the rest of the world. Knighted by his king, as conquerors were before him, but for his work on behalf of Negroes and Indians. Whitehall didn’t hold Wolff in very high regard and his work was not of the civilising sort. He didn’t give a fig for the Foreign Secretary’s good opinion but the irony of being asked to spy upon a man who’d received so much of his approbation made him smile.

Crossing Horse Guards Road, he walked briskly on up the steps into Downing Street. A group of senior army officers was adjusting hats and sticks on the pavement outside Number 10. He followed them into Whitehall and stood beneath the streetlamp in front of the Foreign Office in the hope of attracting the attention of a passing cab. Parliament was lost in the fog and he could only distinguish a muddy halo of office windows on the opposite side of Whitehall. Am I to risk my life in Germany because Casement has so thoroughly disappointed them all? he wondered. ‘Here.’ The taxi wheezed to the kerb a few yards beyond him. ‘Take me to Devonshire Place.’

The trouble with Sir Roger Casement, he reflected as he swung on to the taxi’s seat, is that he’s no longer the conscience of the Empire but a challenge to its existence.

Mrs Violet Curtis had invited her younger brother and two of his friends to join them for dinner at Rules. A striking figure in pale lavender satin, daringly décolleté, she moved with a graceful swing of the hips that drew the gaze of the gentlemen in the restaurant. There was something carnal in her obvious wish to please.

‘You’re lucky, you know,’ she’d told Wolff a few weeks into their affair. ‘My friends can’t understand what I see in you.’

He was fifteen years her senior and only a year younger than her husband.

‘Why don’t you say you love me?’ she often asked him.

But she wanted him because he refused to and trusted him because he never spoke of the future. When Major Reggie Curtis returned from Belgium she would be waiting to fall into his arms.

Wolff sensed, even before the waiter dropped a napkin into his lap, that it was going to be an unpleasant evening. Violet had taken the seat opposite him and was bubbling noisily, drawing more hungry looks from the gentlemen at adjoining tables. Violet’s brother and his friends were in uniform and conversation turned to the war before they’d finished with the menu.

‘Do you think they’ll bomb London?’ they wanted to know.

‘Sebastian’s mother heard a Zeppelin, didn’t she, darling?’

‘They killed a fourteen-year-old boy. You see – that’s what we’re fighting against.’

‘They say the war won’t last more than another six months . . .’

‘Long enough for us to get out there, I hope.’

They talked like rugby-club hearties before a game. It put Wolff in a bad humour. Violet frowned at him as if to say, ‘Buck up, why don’t you?’ She was an astute judge of men’s moods and she’d seen him like this before. She smiled and sometimes she giggled but there were anxious little lines on her brow as if she also sensed that the evening would end badly.

He was a portly junior officer with the sort of sly moustache the war had made fashionable. He had been staring at Violet from the moment she’d entered the restaurant but it had taken time and wine for him to find the courage to approach her. Out of the corner of his eye, Wolff watched the man make excuses to his party, rise from his chair and walk unsteadily towards their table. His fleshy face was the colour of a Weissherbst rosé and he was perspiring profusely. Violet was too caught up in her own story to notice him at her shoulder, even when he’d secured the attention of her audience. He cleared his throat nervously and then again with more determination.

‘Oh, hello,’ she half turned to look up at him.

‘Mrs Curtis? My name’s Barrett. I have the honour of serving with Major Curtis.’

‘Oh? How wonderful.’ She blushed and her tiny hands began to wrestle with a napkin. ‘Did you hear that, everyone? Join us, Lieutenant, please,’ and she tried to summon a waiter for a chair.

‘No. Thank you. No, Mrs Curtis.’ The lieutenant took a deep shaky breath. He was preparing to step off his precipice.

Violet must have sensed it too because she began to chatter like a small child before an angry parent. ‘When did you last see him? My husband, I mean. It’s been so long . . .’ Her right hand strayed to her lip. ‘This is my brother, Adam . . .’

‘Out of respect for your husband, I must say, your behaviour, well, he deserves better,’ Barrett stammered.

Violet’s face began to crumple.

‘It isn’t my place—’ he continued.

‘You’re right. It isn’t,’ interrupted Wolff. ‘Your place is over there.’ He nodded to the lieutenant’s table. ‘I suggest you rejoin your companions at once.’

Barrett’s jaw dropped like a marionette’s at rest. ‘Who the devil –’ he said at last. ‘Who the devil are you, sir? My business—’

‘Sit down before you make a fool of yourself, why don’t you?’

‘Please, Sebastian.’ Violet gave him a desperate look. Her eyes were shining with tears. ‘Please, let him just say what he wants to say and go.’

‘Are you the fellow?’ Barrett’s dander was up, flushed with wine and a righteous resolve to have it out, his right hand in a fist at his side. ‘What are you smiling at? Not in uniform, I see,’ and he snapped his fingers theatrically in front of Wolff’s face.

‘Look, steady, old chap . . .’ This from Violet’s brother. He had dumped his napkin on the table and was rising. Wolff was conscious of a hush in the restaurant, broken only by the tinkle of knives and forks on china and the mumble of waiters serving the tables. The manager was moving swiftly towards them.

‘Leave now, Lieutenant,’ said Wolff quietly. But Barrett wasn’t going to surrender an inch of polished floor to someone in white tie and tails. ‘What is your name, sir?’ he demanded loudly. ‘It is my intention to write to Major Curtis . . .’

‘Please, sir.’ The manager touched Barrett’s elbow and he began to turn towards him. ‘I must ask—’

But his words were drowned by a clatter of plates.

‘No, Sebastian,’ Violet squealed.

It was too late. Wolff was on his feet and lunging for the lieutenant’s wrist. Grasping it in his left hand, he thrust at Barrett’s head with his right, as if trying to jerk it from his shoulders. The lieutenant whimpered with pain and bent double as Wolff twisted his arm and locked it at right angles to his body, the pressure on the elbow. Then, with a deft turn, Wolff forced Barrett’s arm behind his back, pulling him upright by the collar. No one had moved. There had been no time to cry out in protest. It was over in the blink of an eye, accomplished with a sleight of hand worthy of Houdini the handcuff king.

Violet buried her face in a lace handkerchief. Her brother was still hovering over the table with an expression of complete astonishment on his face. Wolff caught his eye. ‘Settle our bill, will you?’

‘Let me go at once, do you hear.’ Barrett had found his voice.

There was a rumble of disapproval as the restaurant began to stir at last.

‘Really, I say,’ one man shouted.

‘This is Rules,’ ventured another. ‘Let the fellow go.’

Wolff didn’t reply. Eyes front, he frog-marched Barrett across the floor, weaving between tables with the rough confidence of an East End landlord at closing time. Manager and waiters fussed about him, a young army officer made a half-hearted attempt to block his way – Wolff brushed him aside – but no one was willing to lift a finger to prevent him reaching the door.

Rain was beating on the restaurant’s awning, gusting down Maiden Lane and chasing couples on their way home from the theatre into the shelter of shopfronts. Within seconds Wolff’s trousers were clinging to his legs. A passing car sloshed into the gutter and a sheet of dirty water swept across the pavement on to Lieutenant Barrett’s perfectly polished boots. The button had come off one of his shoulder boards and it was flapping like a broken wing.

‘Let me go, do you hear?’ He was almost weeping. ‘You haven’t heard the last of this, you coward.’

Wolff twisted his arm tighter until he gasped with pain. It would be a simple thing to break it, Wolff thought, and for a moment he wanted to. Why shouldn’t Barrett be made to pay?

‘Let him go,’ screamed Violet, and she tugged at his arm. ‘For God’s sake, are you mad?’

‘How could you?’ she asked Wolff repeatedly. She cried and shouted – he had humiliated her in front of ‘everyone’ – but she refused to go home with her brother. She sat in smouldering silence in the taxicab to his apartment, and fell on him with her tiny fists as soon as he had closed the door, biting, scratching, then kissing – the desperate passion of those who wish to forget. Later, in crumpled sheets, her small round face pressed in sleep to his shoulder, he wondered if it was the darkness she’d glimpsed in him at the restaurant that had aroused her so.