A Very British Ending (Catesby Series) Read online

  ‘You know something, Catesby?’ Fournier smiled. ‘You might be right. I understand Mr Cripps isn’t very well – too much tea and not enough meat. I believe he suffers from colitis which is aggravated by stress – and has been on sick leave.’

  Catesby knew that Fournier was showing off. The CIA and FBI had a reputation for ‘black bag ops’ – burglaries – and getting medical records was one of their favourite pastimes. But sex smears were even better.

  ‘Nah,’ said Fournier, ‘the guy we’re really looking at is the real Commie who succeeded Cripps – the one who actually went to Moscow to seal the jet engines deal with his comrades over generous libations of vodka. You know who I mean – Harold Wilson.’

  Catesby laughed. ‘If your boss thinks that Wilson is a spy, he is absolutely barking.’ Catesby could see that Fournier didn’t know English slang. ‘Barking – it also means mad, crazy.’

  The American smiled. ‘Why are you assuming that it was my boss who told me that Wilson was a Communist? Maybe you should look closer to home?’

  Catesby felt a frisson of doubt run down his spine. Fournier wasn’t the American naïf he seemed.

  ‘I’m surprised, William, that they haven’t shown you the file.’

  Catesby felt a twinge. A drop of sweat had begun to form on his spine. He had just remembered that in a short time he would be carrying out an execution, but there was also something in Fournier’s voice that was sinister and worrying.

  The American was smiling. ‘Would you like to know more about this file?’

  Catesby didn’t answer.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Fournier, ‘going to copy it down for you. It’s not the sort of thing I want in my own handwriting. But I’m sure you can remember it. There’s a report dated 26 March 1947 entitled East-West Trade. And it’s a purely British file – parallel red stripes and all. It’s classified top secret and was compiled by MI5. Maybe if you ask in a nice way and say please, they’ll let you have a peek.’

  Catesby put his right hand in the pocket of his trench coat and touched the cold steel of the Webley.

  ‘I know,’ said the American, ‘you’re just dying to ask me how I know about it. But you don’t have to ask, I’ll tell you. One of your colleagues showed it to me last time I was in London. If you think I’m full of bullshit, Catesby, ask some questions next time you’re home in Limey Land.’

  ‘You’re playing games, Kit.’

  ‘If they let you have a look – and I don’t think they will – you ought to read MI5’s comments about the Russian Wood Agency. It’s a cover story for getting Soviet intelligence officers into Britain posing as timber merchants – and you need wood to build houses.’ Fournier paused. ‘Why don’t you tell me more about Harold Wilson? We know that you were a socialist candidate in the 1945 election – you must have been close comrades.’

  ‘We were Labour candidates.’ Catesby smiled bleakly. ‘And I got beaten. By the way, no Labour Party insider would ever describe Wilson as a socialist, much less a Communist. He’s being smeared. Mark that top secret and put it in your files.’

  Fournier kicked a piece of rubble, which set rats scurrying. He could see that he wasn’t getting anywhere. ‘In any case, Wilson ought to be arrested for trading with the enemy.’

  Catesby smiled. ‘I’ll pass your suggestion on to London.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Are you going to turn him over?’ said Catesby. He was getting pretty close to playing the blackmail card.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your German friend.’

  ‘Christ, I almost forgot. Stay here. I’ll fetch him.’ Fournier paused. ‘But before I get him, isn’t there anything else you can tell me?’

  Catesby shook his head.

  ‘Fine. You’re like squeezing water out of a rock.’ The American turned to leave.

  There was, however, one piece of intelligence that Catesby had withheld and would never let Fournier anywhere near. It was a toxic intelligence pill that would have sent the Pentagon into paroxysms of mass rage and carpet chewing. The MiGs over Korea were largely flown by elite Russian pilots. Catesby had first heard the rumour via a bribed and honey-trapped Soviet cipher clerk in East Berlin – and later had the information confirmed by a piece of used toilet paper. Soviet troops on exercise in East Germany were not provided toilet rolls and had to use whatever paper was available – training manuals, code books and unit rosters. The beshitten paper was an intelligence treasure trove and Catesby employed a small army of scavengers to collect them up under cover of foraging for mushrooms. At first, Catesby had been sceptical about the cipher clerk’s info, but an excrement-covered page from a Soviet flying manual resolved his doubts. The page contained a list of Korean-language flying terms spelled out phonetically in Cyrillic characters – just the sort of thing a Russian pilot pretending to be a Korean pilot needed. Catesby reported his find to London who quickly decided not to share it with Washington. They didn’t want to give an excuse to trigger-happy US generals. World War III was not in Britain’s national interest.

  Catesby listened to the American’s footsteps echoing around the U-boot bunker. He suspected that Fournier was an actor playing a role he didn’t much like – and working for people he secretly despised. Fournier’s diaries had revealed more than his secret sex fantasies for a member of his own family. At one point, probably after a late-night drinking session, Fournier had written a comment about the PAPERCLIP war criminals that he was supposed to be helping escape – Hang them all! Perhaps Kit wasn’t as reluctant about handing one over as he pretended.

  The sound of muffled voices and footsteps jolted Catesby back to the business at hand. He was now in a cold sweat. For the first time he was sorry that he had got involved – but it had to be done. The silhouettes of the two men appeared like one-dimensional cut-outs against the light from the hole in the roof. Fournier was speaking to the war criminal in bad German explaining that Père Roux was going to take him away in a boat to a ship that was embarking for Cartagena. Catesby touched his Roman collar and tried to put on a priestly air as the two stumbled across the rubble towards him.

  The German spoke first in French, ‘Good evening, Father.’

  Catesby answered in German. ‘Have you got your passport?’

  As the German reached into his pocket, Catesby addressed Fournier in English: ‘You can leave us now. Everything is taken care of.’

  Catesby listened to the echo of Fournier’s receding footsteps as he left the bunker. He turned to the German. If the German had been perturbed by hearing Père Roux speak English, he didn’t show it. He held up a passport. It carried his own photograph, but the name and details were false.

  ‘I’ll need that,’ said Catesby. ‘It is best that you have as little contact with the crew as possible – and important that none of them see your passport. It will be safe with me.’

  The German handed over the document. Catesby would have a close look at it afterwards. He wanted to see how good the Americans were at forgeries.

  ‘Are you coming with me?’ said the German.

  ‘No.’

  It took the German a second to realise that a revolver was pointing in his face. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m taking you to the boat. I’ve heard you are a dangerous man.’

  ‘This is nonsense.’

  ‘Turn around and keep walking until I tell you to stop.’ Catesby didn’t want to have to drag the body through the bunker. ‘It isn’t far.’

  The German stumbled through the rubble for thirty paces. There was a sound of flowing water.

  ‘Don’t fall in,’ said Catesby.

  They had come to a massive man-made channel that diverted water from the Weser into the bunker. It was where they had intended to launch and hide the completed submarines. The German had reached the edge and was staring into the abyss at the fast ebbing dark water.

  ‘Kneel down,’ said Catesby.

  ‘There isn’t a boat and you’re going to kill me.
’ The German’s voice was strangely devoid of emotion.

  Catesby was trying to hold the revolver steady, but his hand was shaking.

  ‘Are you really a priest?’

  ‘Yes,’ Catesby lied.

  ‘Will you hear my confession before you kill me?’

  ‘I can’t give you absolution unless you tell me everything.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Bless me, Father, for have I sinned. It has been ten years since my last confession. I have frequently failed to go to Mass on Sundays and other holy days of obligation…’

  ‘Tell me about your other sins.’

  ‘I was unfaithful to my wife on three occasions…’

  ‘They are sins of the flesh. Tell me about what you did in Russia and France.’

  ‘I carried out my duties as a soldier.’

  Catesby was sick inside and boiling with rage. ‘At Tulle. What happened at Tulle? You were there – you were in command.’ Catesby knew that every man between the age of sixteen and sixty had been arrested. Ninety-nine had then been chosen at random for torture and hanging. Another 150 were sent to the death camp at Dachau. The terror reprisals spread throughout the Limousin.

  ‘I carried out General Lammerding’s orders.’

  Catesby knew it was pointless to explain that what he had done was murder and a crime against humanity. He was pointing his gun at a clockwork military puppet. But one more try. ‘And Oradour – tell me about Oradour.’

  ‘The action at Oradour-sur-Glane was an act of passion.’

  Catesby blinked – language had lost all meaning. ‘Does passion mean evil?’

  ‘I believe, Father, that you are from that part of France and that is why you are doing this to me.’

  At last, a glimmer of understanding. ‘Yes, I was there.’

  ‘You know then that the officer who commanded the troops at Oradour was Otto Diekmann?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Otto Diekmann was in love with Helmut Kämpfe.’

  Catesby felt he was drowning in a pool of sick and excrement with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde blasting away in the background.

  The German’s voice turned wistful. ‘Helmut was a beautiful man and such a brave soldier. When Otto heard that Helmut had been executed by the resistance he carried out an act of revenge.’

  ‘Against innocent women and children; burning them alive.’

  The German shrugged. ‘Otto wasn’t following anyone’s orders. He was killed two weeks later in Normandy – you could say that his death was suicide.’

  Catesby had heard enough. Understanding did not mean forgiving. And this wasn’t genuine understanding – it was an attempt to sentimentalise and romanticise evil.

  ‘Helmut was married and had three children.’

  Catesby frowned. The mystery of what happened to Helmut Kämpfe had finally been resolved. Or had it? Some said Kämpfe had been shot trying to escape, others said that he had been executed. But was the German’s story true? Was the Oradour atrocity a reprisal for Kämpfe’s execution? Catesby knew it would still keep him awake in the dark watches of the night. What could he have done? Could he have persuaded the Maquis to keep Kämpfe alive as a hostage for bargaining? Would that have prevented the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane? Or not made any difference at all? Nothing had been resolved.

  The German was muttering an Act of Contrition.

  ‘Stop that,’ said Catesby.

  ‘Are you going to give me absolution, Father?’

  Catesby smiled. He still remembered the words from his childhood: Ego te absolvo – and, hey presto, your soul is as fresh and clean as a new pin.

  ‘Have I time to do penance?’

  ‘No,’ said Catesby. He pointed his pistol at the base of the Nazi’s skull and pulled the trigger.

  Kensington, London: 30 October 1951

  ‘How much of this slum do your parents actually own?’ Catesby was well into the bottle of sparkling Portuguese rosé that he had bought in an off-licence on the way to his wife’s flat.

  ‘They own the whole house.’

  ‘Well, they must be breathing a sigh of relief.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Now that the Tories are back in power, there’s no longer any danger of it being confiscated and turned into council flats.’

  ‘That’s not fair, William, you know my parents are Labour supporters – and, in fact, wouldn’t mind having this house off their hands.’

  ‘What a shambles.’

  ‘You mean the house?’

  ‘No, I mean the election.’ Labour had won the popular vote, but had taken fewer seats owing to boundary changes, which benefited the Tories and returned an elderly Churchill to power.

  Catesby’s wife got up and straightened her skirt. ‘I think the lamb is nearly done.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Frances, I really apologise.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For being a shit husband, a shit step-dad – and I was also a shit Army officer and now I’m a shit intelligence officer. Je suis simplement une grosse merde.’

  ‘I think we need to flush you down the toilet. But I’ll serve the food first.’

  As Frances padded off to the kitchen, Catesby surveyed the flat. It badly needed redecorating and repairing. There were botched repairs from wartime bombing that still needed putting right. The Regency ceiling was water damaged from burst pipes and loose-hanging plaster was concealed with wallpaper. The house was a five-storey terrace divided into flats overlooking Stanhope Gardens. Catesby knew that his parents-in-law hadn’t the money to put things right. They were shabby genteel idealists.

  As his wife came back into the dining room bearing a steaming casserole, Catesby lifted his glass of semi-sweet sparkling rosé, ‘Votes for women!’

  ‘You’re out of date, William. Women now have the vote.’

  ‘But if wasn’t for your brave cousin, you wouldn’t have the vote.’

  ‘She was my father’s cousin – and I’m not sure that throwing herself under the King’s horse made much of a difference.’

  ‘I was also being ironic, not about your cousin, but about you doing all the work. What can I do to help?’

  ‘You can pour me a glass of wine.’

  ‘It’s ghastly – I apologise.’

  ‘Stop apologising, William. Once again, your Roman Catholic guilt is driving me mad.’

  ‘And once again, Frances, I am not a Roman Catholic – I am an atheist and a socialist. I lost my… Why are you yawning?’

  ‘Because I’ve heard that line so many times before: “I lost my faith when I found my brain”.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s clever?’

  ‘I did the first time you said it. But, in any case, I don’t think it’s true: once a Catesby always a Catesby.’

  ‘The Catesby jibe is as tiresome as my repetitions – my name is just a coincidence.’

  ‘You get teased a lot about it in SIS, don’t you?’

  Catesby sighed and nodded. The fact that he bore the surname of the fanatical recusant Roman Catholic who led the Gunpowder Plot wasn’t lost on his colleagues. Catesby, like most British working class, couldn’t trace his family tree back further than his grandparents, but the name came to haunt him. Catesby had never heard of his alleged ancestors until he studied Shakespeare’s Richard III at the grammar and discovered that a William Catesby had been one of the hunchback king’s henchmen:

  The Cat, the Rat and Lovell the Dog,

  Rule all England under a Hog.

  A few weeks later a history master, using an embarrassed Catesby as a cue card, recounted the story of Robert Catesby, a direct descendant of William ‘The Cat’. Catesby had masterminded the plot to blow up Parliament, but Guy Fawkes was more famous because he had been so publicly hung, drawn and quartered for high treason. Catesby, on the other hand, had escaped to Holbeche House in Staffordshire where he had been shot in a last-ditch stand and died clutching an image of the Virgin Mary. B
ut had, dreamed Catesby, that really happened? Could the man killed have been another? And had the real Robert Catesby escaped to the Suffolk coast where he had waited in vain for a rescue ship from the Spanish Netherlands? Then, finally realising that no ship was going to appear and aided by undercover Jesuits, Catesby had disappeared forever into the Suffolk countryside. For a year or two, Catesby relished the romanticism of a famous rebel as an ancestor, but then came to realise that Catesby-the-recusant-Catholic was even more reactionary than those he had plotted against. He became ashamed of his adolescent fantasy.

  ‘This lamb,’ said Frances, ‘comes from a flock that grazes on the marshes near Aldeburgh. Dad knows the farmer.’

  Catesby put his fork down. ‘If your father didn’t buy it with his ration book I’m not going to eat it. I won’t eat black market meat.’

  ‘William, meat rationing ended in 1945.’

  ‘I was joking. You never laugh at my jokes.’

  ‘I do when they’re funny.’

  ‘This is delicious – you can taste the samphire from the marshes where they were grazing.’

  ‘Would you like some Algerian red? I found a case left over from the war.’

  ‘Don’t you like the rosé?’

  ‘It is a bit sweet, maybe we should save it for the pud.’

  ‘As I said, I never get anything right.’

  ‘Would you like this casserole poured over your head?’

  ‘Then I hope you would lick it off.’

  ‘Don’t be rude.’

  ‘You look very fetching tonight.’ Catesby had felt pangs of desire ever since he walked in the door. It had been so long.

  ‘How’s your mother?’

  Catesby stared at his wife; then laughed aloud.

  ‘What is so funny, William?’

  ‘You are a master of the passion-killing reply. Sorry, ignore that. My mother is a mystery. I don’t even know how old she is.’