The Poison Tide Read online

  1915

  1

  London

  A SPLINTER OF WINTER sun was forcing its way through the curtains on to the wall at an angle that suggested to Wolff he should rouse himself at once.

  ‘Are you awake, Mrs Curtis?’

  Drunk, in a hurry, they’d fallen apart with no thought to the morning. Violet’s face was lost behind a tousled curtain of hair. There was lipstick on the sheet she had pulled to her chin and she’d chipped her nail varnish. Wolff reached a cold hand to her breast, then thought better of waking her. A shave, a shallow tepid bath, sweeping back his dark-brown hair, a splash of discreet cologne. From his dressing-room wardrobe, a black wool suit, stiff white collar and dark-blue tie. Before the mirror, for the world to see in time, a businessman of means in his late thirties, who, to judge by his dark eyes, was burning too much midnight oil. Slipping on his coat, he was searching for his hat when Violet called to him: ‘You are taking me to dinner, Sebastian darling, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’ll try.’ Wolff wasn’t sure what he would want to do by the evening.

  The cab dropped him in Trafalgar Square. He walked briskly into Northumberland Avenue and at the corner with Great Scotland Yard he stopped to light a cigarette, turning to face the way he’d come as if sheltering the guttering flame. Satisfied, he walked on into Whitehall Court. Number 2 was an eight-storey apartment block in the French renaissance style, directly behind the War Office and next to the National Liberal Club. An MP had financed the building with money swindled from those he had described on election day as ordinary hard-working families. Thousands had been left penniless to provide a brash home at the heart of government for civil servants and wealthy businessmen. Its façade of Portland stone and pitched green slate towered over the Embankment, drawing the eye of commuters crossing the river into Charing Cross Station.

  In its polished hall the porter slid a register and pen across the desk to Wolff without comment.

  ‘You’re new.’

  ‘Three months, sir.’

  Wolff pushed it back unsigned: ‘I’m visiting Captain Spencer. I know my way.’

  The captain’s private lift was little more than the width of a man’s broad shoulders. The grille slid into place with a rattle and clunk that always reminded Wolff of earth falling on a coffin lid. Apartment 45 was a maze of passages and oddly shaped rooms beneath the eaves of the Court, so difficult to find from the stairway that few residents had any inkling it was there. Its occupant, a short, thickset naval officer, was occasionally seen crossing the entrance hall with companions or walking in the direction of Whitehall. Neighbours who tried to engage him in conversation received no more than the time of day. Only a man with a perfect understanding of the deep reserve of upper-middle-class London and its slavish attachment to the proprieties would have had the temerity to hide the Bureau in genteel Whitehall Court.

  ‘He’s waiting for you, Lieutenant Wolff.’ The captain’s secretary stepped away from the door to let him enter. ‘You’re late. I telephoned your apartment . . .’ A censorious frown was hovering between Miss Groves’ finely plucked eyebrows. ‘And I spoke to your . . . friend.’ The word fell to its ‘end’ as if Miss Groves had pushed it from the Tarpeian for sexual impropriety. The captain’s nice ‘gels’ cared a great deal about such things.

  The naval gentleman whom the other denizens of the Court called ‘Spencer’ – Captain Mansfield Cumming – was leaning heavily on sticks in his outer office. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ He glared at Wolff through his gold-rimmed monocle. ‘You’re still a naval officer, you know? My office in five minutes.’ He turned too smartly and one of his sticks locked beneath a chair.

  ‘Damn it!’

  Wolff stepped forward to help. ‘No, damn it, man, I can manage,’ he said, jerking it free. ‘And bring us some coffee, Miss Groves. Lieutenant Wolff looks as if he could do with some.’

  He stomped slowly towards his office, hunched like a grizzly bear.

  ‘He’s doing very well,’ whispered Miss Groves reverentially. Pinned in the wreckage of a car, it was rumoured he had hacked off his own foot with a penknife in order to crawl to his dying son. ‘It’s only been three months. Flinty, isn’t he?’

  ‘He loves his work.’

  The captain was breathing heavily when Wolff entered, his face a little sallow, elbows resting on a copy of The Times. With a curt nod he indicated the chair on the opposite side of his desk. It was a large airy office, simply decorated with naval charts and a picture of French villagers before a Prussian firing squad. He had placed some of the mechanical gadgets he enjoyed tinkering with at idle moments on a table beneath the window. The largest piece of furniture in the room was a huge steel Dartmouth-green safe where he kept his ‘eyes only’ files. Two of these were on the desk in front of Wolff.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ Cumming tapped the newspaper with his forefinger. ‘For some extraordinary reason, they launched their first air raid on your part of the world. Killed a boy in King’s Lynn.’

  ‘Yes, my mother thought she heard the Zeppelin; it passed over her farm.’

  ‘Quite a coincidence – I mean, after your visit to the factory at Friedrichshafen. That was a fine piece of work.’

  Wolff didn’t reply.

  ‘No one took the damn things seriously until they read your report,’ Cumming continued. ‘The PS at the War Office reminded me of that the other day; wanted to know how you’d managed it. Told him to mind his own bloody business.’

  Get to the point, for goodness’ sake, thought Wolff. He’d been one of C’s scallywags for almost as long as there’d been a Bureau, so they could dispense with the customary overture. The captain didn’t play it well anyway, too soapy, too obvious.

  ‘It was the reason I was able to get you back from Turkey, of course. That was a bad business.’ Cumming shook his head sympathetically. ‘But it’s been a while now, hasn’t it? Nine months?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Do you think you’re ready now?’

  ‘Ready for what, sir?’

  ‘It’s the Irish, you see. Or should I say the Irish problem . . .’ He was interrupted by a knock at the door and Miss Groves entered with the tray. They sat in silence as she poured the coffee, Cumming polishing his monocle with a handkerchief. It was his favourite prop. It made him look villainous, like a spymaster in a shilling shocker. Without it he was the sort of stout, elderly military gentleman you passed in the street without a second glance: mid fifties, with thin white hair, a Punch-like chin, a small mouth and keen grey eyes. They had liked and respected each other once. Cumming had described him as ‘a born spy’ and he’d meant it as a compliment. There’d been disagreements, difficult times, but Wolff had trusted him in almost all things. In rather too much, as it turned out. Manipulative and as unscrupulous as Genghis Khan, he had reflected in the leisure of his Turkish prison cell, unfettered by personal loyalty, just as he was required to be by the custom and professional practice of his role. The door closed behind Miss Groves.

  ‘What do you know about Roger Casement?’

  Wolff shrugged. ‘No more than I read in the papers. Champion of native rights in Africa and elsewhere, celebrated servant of the Crown turned Irish rebel—’

  ‘Traitor,’ interrupted Cumming. ‘He was in America, now he’s in Germany. Gave our fellows the slip. New papers, new face – he shaved his beard . . .’ He reached for his cup, cradling it in large calloused sailor’s hands. ‘There’s no doubt about what he wants, of course. Guns and men. Force Irish independence at the point of a German bayonet, and succeed or fail, they know that civil unrest at home would draw men from the fighting in France . . .’

  ‘. . . and set a poor example to the rest of the Empire?’

  C put down his cup deliberately. ‘Do you believe that, or is it the cynicism you effect as one of your clever disguises?’

  ‘Merely an observation, sir.’

  ‘Do you have views on Ireland?’

  �
�I’m not very interested in politics.’

  He nodded approvingly. ‘It’s enough to be a patriot. We’re at war.’

  ‘As you say, sir.’

  ‘Which is why I hope you’ll agree to my proposition.’

  ‘You haven’t made one yet, sir.’

  ‘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, tha
t 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.