To Love a Traitor (2 page)

“I rather think you left it by the front door, when you took my things,” George said, jumping up hastily to fetch it. As he’d thought, the tin dish—somewhat dented from age and banging on walls—was perched on the hall windowsill. On his return, the cat immediately sprang from Matthew’s lap and started winding itself around George’s legs, apparently doing its level best to knock him over.

Matthew sighed heavily. “Cupboard love—that’s the only sort he knows, I’m afraid. Mrs. Mac, would you mind?” He smiled winningly at the landlady, who tutted, but obligingly took the dish from George’s hand and filled it with a generous helping of scraps before setting it on the floor. “Come along, George—he’ll have no more use for us for a bit!”

Matthew led the way into the sitting room, which was comfortably if plainly furnished. It would be rather cramped if all the house’s occupants were to attempt to relax there at once, but George supposed that seldom, if ever, happened.

The fire in the grate had burned down to a feeble glow, and Matthew busied himself with the fire irons, poking the ashes until they looked a little livelier and putting on more coal. “There, that’s better.” He turned suddenly with a grin. “You know, I’ve just worked out who you remind me of. It’s been niggling at me since I first saw you.”

George’s heart seemed to pause mid-beat. “Oh?” he said as casually as he could.

“Isn’t it obvious? Dark hair, green eyes, svelte figure—you’re the image of Marmaduke!”

George’s laughter was probably a shade too loud, but relief tended to have that effect on him.

The rest of the evening had passed agreeably enough. Miss Lewis, a nurse, had returned from her shift at the hospital and had revealed herself to be a sensible, pleasant young lady whose affections, it transpired, were already engaged by a young postman, so George felt himself in no danger of unwanted attentions from that quarter. Mrs. Mac’s cooking had proved to be as tasty as her portions were generous, and when George at last took his leave to return to his hotel for the final night, it was with a warm, pleasant feeling in his belly.

By midnight, however, the warmth had largely seeped away, replaced by an ice-cold sensation in the pit of his stomach that was no more welcome for being familiar. As he lay in the lumpy hotel bed, listening to the gurgling of the pipes, George wondered what on earth he thought he was doing. In all likelihood, Matthew Connaught was exactly what he seemed—a pleasant, engaging young man who’d sacrificed a limb in the service of his country.

And who’d no doubt utterly despise George for what he’d done, and for what he was now doing.

It had been freeing, at first, taking the name George Johnson and leaving Roger “Conchie” Cottingham far behind him. He’d thought he could leave the shame behind too.

Now, though, he wondered if it would ever leave him, whatever name he bore.

Chapter Two

Four Months Previously

“Please take a seat. I’ll tell Sir Arthur you’ve arrived.” The secretary was an ice-cool blonde in her mid-thirties, with the sort of figure that suggested she exercised iron control over her appetite and, by extension, every other aspect of her life. Her skirt suit, although of a soft, modern cut, was a sober dove grey, and the blouse she wore almost mannish in its simplicity. She gave Roger a sharp, assessing look as he unbuttoned his jacket and perched upon the leather upholstery of the chair set against the wall. No doubt she was thinking what a waste of her employer’s valuable time he was about to be.

Then, unexpectedly, she smiled. “Mr. Cottingham? Sir Arthur tells me you were one of his cryptographers in the Admiralty.”

Startled to hear his old wartime Naval Intelligence work so openly spoken of, Roger nodded. “Yes—you were…?”

“I’m Sheila Pendleton. I was on the other side during the war—that’s MI5, I should clarify, not the Bosch.”

Roger grimaced. The rivalry between Naval and Military Intelligence had been a thorn in all their sides during his time in the Admiralty. “I thought it was all one big happy family these days?”

“Not so big, and not so happy either, from what I hear. I should have liked to stay on even so, but the government seems to think intelligence a quality that’s no longer required now we’re at peace, more’s the pity. Still, the colonel was kind enough to recommend my services to Sir Arthur. One moment, please.” She stood and click-clacked on her low heels to the door behind her, knocking and then opening it a crack without waiting for any kind of response Roger could hear. Poking her head into the room, she spoke a few words to its occupant, then turned.

“Sir Arthur will see you now, Mr. Cottingham.”

Roger stood, buttoned his jacket and stepped through the door.

Sir Arthur’s office was larger than the one he’d had in the Admiralty, and the furnishings, in mahogany and deep green leather, appropriate to a director of one of England’s most prestigious banks. The impression given was one of warmth, comfort and intimidating opulence.

It had been over a year since Roger had last seen Sir Arthur “Wall-eye” Walmesley, and he hadn’t been entirely certain of his welcome, but the old man’s expression, although not quite a smile, was genial enough as he rose from his chair to stretch out a hand. “Cottingham. Good to see you. Settled in all right at that…what was it? Stockbroker’s?”

Roger gave the hand a quick shake. Sir Arthur’s hair might have thinned and his jowls thickened since last Roger had seen him, but his grip was as firm as ever. Roger found himself slipping easily back into the trick of focussing on the man’s good eye and ignoring the glass one that tended to slip, disconcertingly, to one side. “Ah… No. That is, you remembered correctly, but, well, I no longer work there. It didn’t suit.” He hadn’t much liked the ruthlessness required in his new profession—and he’d liked his colleagues’ low opinion of his sort, which had been at best poorly concealed, even less.

He tried not to let the painful memories show on his face and must have succeeded, for Sir Arthur simply nodded. “There are a lot of men, I’m afraid, who’ve found it hard to adjust to peacetime.”

“You seem to have the trick of it, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir.” Roger made a vague gesture towards Sir Arthur’s mahogany desk, epitomising as it did his exalted position within the bank. “I trust you’re well?”

“In excellent health, thank you. You?”

“Yes, fine, sir. I, ah, was very sorry to hear about Lady Walmesley. My condolences.”

Sir Arthur nodded, and sighed. “That damned Spanish flu. Still, perhaps it was a mercy in the end. She’d suffered enough, poor old girl.” The old fellow looked down at his desk for a moment, then back up at Roger. “You did some damn fine work for the Admiralty. If it’s a job you’re after, I’ll see what I can do.”

“That’s not why I’m here, sir,” Roger interrupted. “It’s about my brother. Hugh. You remember he was killed back in ’17, just after I started with you?”

“Bad business, that.”

He’d been very kind at the time, Roger recalled. Had taken Roger into his office and shared a brandy with him after he’d come to work one morning still dazed from the bad news. Then again, Sir Arthur had known his own wartime tragedy—his only son had been killed in 1914, just before Christmas. It had been then, or so he’d heard, that Lady Walmesley’s health had first started to decline. Roger took a deep breath. “I think it was worse than we thought. I—well, it wasn’t I who first started to question it. It was Hugh’s fiancée, Mabel.”

Sir Arthur nodded encouragingly. He, Roger reminded himself, was unlikely to dismiss Mabel’s concerns as a bereaved woman’s hysterics, having employed not a few highly intelligent women in his days with the Admiralty.

“She—well, obviously, she was laid pretty low at the time, and then the poor girl came down with the flu in ’19. Hardly surprising, as she nursed so many cases. But after she recovered… Well, she started getting curious. Wanted to know exactly how it happened. Hugh’s death, I mean. Frankly, I thought it was rather ghoulish of her, when first I heard about it, but as it’s turned out… She managed to track down some of the men from his platoon and got them to tell her about it. You know the bare facts?”

“Shot and killed while on daylight patrol in no-man’s-land, is what I heard.”

Roger’s mouth twisted. “You can add ‘the bloody reckless idiot’ if you like. Going over in daylight? Might as well have waved a bloody flag to let the Germans know they were coming. There were three of them. Disguised themselves as trees, would you believe it? And the thing is, it worked. They were able to get right up to the German trenches somehow, and came back with a good deal of information, and no one the wiser.” He paused. “The first time.”

“And the next time, they didn’t come back at all?”

Roger shook his head. “They’d hardly made it a few yards beyond the lines before they were mown down. Do you know what one of the men back in the trenches said? ‘It was almost as if old Fritz knew they were coming’.”

“I see.” Sir Arthur looked grave. “And your conclusion is?”

“I, well, I agree with Mabel. We believe they were betrayed. We think someone in their company was passing secrets to the enemy. As you can imagine, all the sentries had to be told of the patrol beforehand—wouldn’t want them shooting our own men—so obviously it was common knowledge on our side what was going on.”

Sir Arthur steepled his fingers. “And you want me to look into it? I assume that
is
why you’re here? I’m sure I don’t have to remind you I’ve no longer any official standing in the unholy marriage they’ve made between our department and the army fellows.”

Roger leaned forward. “But I’m sure doors would still be opened to you, should you choose to knock on them. I—” He looked away for moment, his jaw tight. “I tried making enquiries myself. But the army—well, the men there look at my file and see I spent time in gaol as a conscientious objector, and suddenly Major Such-and-such is
terribly
busy, sorry, couldn’t possibly spare the time
.”

“Hm. Yes, it’s unfortunate so few of our chaps stayed on when the war ended. It’s a different department now, I’m afraid.”

“But they have all the old files, don’t they? If there were any suspicions at the time about information being passed, it’d be in there.”

“That’d rather depend on whether the suspicions went far enough to warrant Military Intelligence getting involved. But not to worry. As you say, I’m not without my contacts. I’ll see what I can do for you.” He paused. “These men your brother’s young lady spoke to—did they have any suspicions of foul play themselves?”

“Well… No. But you can understand them not wanting to accuse a comrade in arms. Not without proof.” Roger hesitated. Should he mention the name that had, in fact, come up in more than one of the stories? But he’d agreed with Mabel that it would be best to let Sir Arthur reach his own conclusions. As she’d said, a doctor who expected to see influenza might easily miss a case of consumption.

Sir Arthur was nodding and seemed not to have noticed Roger’s moment of indecision. “I’m afraid proof may be even thinner on the ground after all this time. But I’ll do my best for you.”

“Thank you, Sir Arthur. It’ll mean a lot to Mabel. And to me.”

“Hmph. Touch of Deuteronomy there, eh, Cottingham?”

Roger flushed. “I—no. That is, Mabel is a dear friend, but I’ve no intentions towards her.”

“Well, well. I shall do what I can. And you’re quite certain about the position?”

“Thank you, but I feel I should take some time to find a profession that will suit me, rather than take the first place offered as I did last time.” Roger gave a twisted smile. “I’m living back at my parents’ house in Buckinghamshire for now, so I don’t suppose I shall starve.” He had some savings and a small amount of money in trust, but it had seemed foolish to exhaust his resources for no reason by keeping on his London apartment. And besides, Mabel was in Buckinghamshire.

“That’s the spirit. Go home to your young lady—yes, yes, I know, but from what you’ve told me of her, you could do a damn sight worse—and start thinking of the future, not the past.”

To his horror, Roger began to laugh. It was a bitter sound, and although it pained him, he couldn’t seem to stop. “The future? Living with a mother who weeps at the sight of me, and a father who won’t even acknowledge my presence?”

“No.” Sir Arthur snapped it out like an order, shocking Roger into silence. “If that’s how it is, then you need to get away from that place. Come back to London, get yourself a job and leave that narrow-minded village mentality behind. Maybe when you’re no longer there, your parents will start to remember how lucky they are that one son, at least, survived the war. There are plenty of families that don’t have that comfort.”

“I—I’ll think about it,” Roger promised, feeling it was all very well for Sir Arthur to exhort him to “get a job”. He’d had no need to peruse the Situations Vacant columns in the newspapers, or to go to the Employment Exchange.

He probably wasn’t even aware just how many job advertisements came with the proviso, whether openly stated or not,
No C.O.s need apply.

Roger spent a wretched few months in Buckinghamshire. He’d hoped his parents’ animosity towards their only remaining child would have lessened over time, but their almost palpable disappointment and shame at his refusal to fight in the war remained. And every room in the house he’d grown up in seemed in deep mourning for his brother Hugh. The gloom oppressed Roger’s spirits powerfully.

When he ventured to express surprise at his parents’ lack of society, his mother’s lips tightened. “We can hardly invite the Bellinghams or the Trowbridges. They both lost sons in the war. And as for the Whartons—do you expect them to wheel their boy over in his bath-chair to dine with a man who wouldn’t fight?”

Until then, Roger had had some vague hopes of Mother coming round, at least. Afterwards, he began to think his father’s policy of refusing to speak to him was, on the whole, less painful. They merely politely ignored each other at table, or when they passed in the hall, his father’s walking stick thudding dully on the parquet flooring—his own hopes of military glory had been tragically ended by a bad fall from his horse only days before he’d been due to ship out to the Transvaal.

If it hadn’t been for Mabel, Roger would have gone straight back to London and lived under a bridge, if it had come to it. “You can’t expect them to understand,” she’d tell him, and he’d marvel anew at how she herself managed to understand him so effortlessly. Then again, they’d been friends from childhood. Hugh had had his own friends, a boisterous, fun-loving lot. To a shy, bookish child like Roger, they’d seemed like pagan gods—tall, handsome and thrillingly dangerous. Neither they nor Hugh had taken any notice back then of either Hugh’s odd, dark little brother or the girl he played with.

One Christmas ball had been all it had taken to change that. Mabel had been radiant in a dark red gown and Hugh, on leave from the Front, straight-backed and resplendent in his military best. When they’d danced together, they’d seemed of a different order to all the more prosaic couples around them, and nobody had been surprised—given that it was wartime—when their engagement had been announced at the turn of the year. Roger had been jealous at first. Could he have
nothing
for himself? But he’d known, in his heart, that he wasn’t the marrying kind, and didn’t Mabel deserve the happiness of a husband and children? And at least, if she married Hugh, Roger would have her forever as a sister.

Then had come the dreadful news from the Front. Mabel had thrown herself into her nursing and kept at it ever since, refusing to give up her work even when Armistice came. Roger… Roger had carried on as he was, telling himself he was doing valuable work in the Admiralty. Trying to push aside the guilt and shame he felt at not having been out there in Hugh’s place.

Roger spent much of his time reading, those few months after calling on Sir Arthur. He’d hide himself away in his room, sitting on the wide, low sill of his window with a book as he had as a child. When he raised his head from his book, he could look out at the trees in their rich autumn clothing—but now there was no chance of spying a glimpse of Hugh and his friends, swaggering back from the hunt or larking about in the leaves.

Having lost his taste for adventure stories and for histories, Roger found himself turning instead to books of law. It was a fascinating subject to a logical mind—and, well, he needed a profession. Law was something that might be practised anywhere he chose, and the life of a solicitor seemed much more suited to Roger’s tastes than that of a stockbroker.

After a couple of months, a letter came from Sir Arthur. Roger opened it in high excitement but was disappointed to find only a reassurance that “matters were in hand”, whatever that meant, and a not-so-gentle reminder of Sir Arthur’s previous advice to move back to London, couched as an expression of surprise at not having received word yet of Roger’s change of address.