Serpent in the Heather Read online

  Even with all the work, he’d rather be at Wrenfell than anywhere. Maybe Miss Kim would let him stay for the school year. Somehow, he’d have to prove himself.

  “ ‘Youth murder shocks Cambridgeshire.’ ” Kim slowly lowered the Daily Telegraph onto the lead-topped kitchen table, staring ahead, not focusing.

  Mrs. Babbage saw her reaction and nodded at the headline. “Another young lad, it’s ’orrible, miss.”

  It was. The idea that a lunatic was running free and had cut short a boy’s life sickened her. Two boys’ lives. So, the first one might not have been an isolated act of rage or madness.

  “They will find him, Mrs. Babbage,” Kim said. “You can be sure of that.”

  Mrs. Babbage furrowed her brow, turning back to her biscuit dough on the pastry table.

  Sitting next to Kim, Martin patted his mouth with a napkin over an empty plate. He picked up the newspaper.

  The authorities weren’t giving out details but had confirmed that the murder shared “certain characteristics” in common with the murder of an adolescent four days earlier in Portsmouth. Styled the “second grisly youth murder,” the article said the boy had been found near the River Ouse in Ely, Cambridgeshire, after having gone missing overnight. The thought of what these murders might become stirred darkly in Kim. Would the killer be content with two?

  Mrs. Babbage put a second bacon sandwich in front of Martin. It disappeared quickly, with the boy hardly stopping to breathe. Kim exchanged glances with Mrs. Babbage, who had earlier opined that with hands and feet as big as Martin’s, he was a lad in need of proper meals, fare obviously lacking in the Lister household.

  Martin looked up from reading the article. “So, it’s the same killer, the one that murdered that student in Portsmouth.”

  “Yes, it might be.”

  “It is. You don’t just get two grisly murders all the same month.”

  Grisly. She wondered if Martin even knew what that word meant. And in what way were the murders grisly? It was almost worse not knowing. How awful, just to hope that the youngsters died swiftly. She pushed away her plate with its half-eaten sandwich.

  “Two boys gone.” Kim shook her head. “It’s very sad.”

  “I don’t feel sad,” Martin said. “Just angry.” He picked up a butter knife and turned it in his hand, as the flatware gleamed in the afternoon light from the window.

  Kim looked at him a moment. “Actually, I am too.” They made eye contact for a split second, and then Martin shied away and stood to take his plate to the sink.

  “So, you’ll not be wantin’ puddin’, then,” Mrs. Babbage said, straight-faced.

  Martin sat back down.

  How the families would cope, Kim didn’t know. Or maybe she did. She could still hear her mother’s wails from long ago, when the news had come from the battlefront. The way war deaths went, the authorities would drive up to the homes and bring a letter. Sometimes, the parents couldn’t open it for their hands shaking. But Julian had slid the letter opener through the top. They noticed Kim in the doorway and asked Mrs. Babbage to take her to the kitchen, and she had held Kim to her bosom as her mother sobbed so loudly that the house itself seemed wracked with pain.

  Perhaps it was common that, facing the worst, women wailed and men did not. She wondered, not for the first time, if her father might have turned out differently if he had cried for Robert. Maybe he had stayed silent for Kim and her mother’s sake, because someone had to batten things down and keep people from losing their grip. Steady on, she’d heard him tell her mother. That had been in the hallway upstairs after the letter had been opened and read. Steady on. How strange to urge this on someone in the throes of grief. Perhaps it was the English way, even if your beloved older brother or son died horribly on the Ypres Salient. Above all, one must remain steady.

  That night, Martin came downstairs to the pile of newspapers and cut out the article on the River Ouse murder. He was just slipping it under the blotter in his room to join the other one when Rose came by. She stood in the door until he invited her in.

  “Wha’s tha’ on your wrist, then?” she asked.

  “Just a wavy line.” He’d inked it so many times, it was a part of his skin.

  Rose nodded doubtfully. Martin didn’t think girls could be in Adders, even if they did have a Talent. The subject had never come up, and besides she wasn’t in school, or not in Coomsby St. Mary’s, anyway. But that had never come up, either.

  “Looks like a snake, though, don’ it?” she said.

  “Don’t you ever draw on yourself?”

  She grinned, covering her mouth, as though she couldn’t imagine such a thing. Rose was four years older than him, but she seemed much younger. That was nothing to make fun of, Miss Kim had said.

  “My da says you got a way wi’ ’orses.”

  “He said that?”

  “Aye.”

  He tried to act like it was nothing big, but he liked hearing that.

  “So, what’s cold cell, then?”

  “It’s ’ow a big pocket o’ cold comes up an’ sometimes a lil’ storm, too. It dinna last long.”

  He looked at her, impressed. “You can make a storm?” With that one, she could have got into Adders for sure.

  “I guess. ’Cept not when I try.” She pursed her lips, thinking. “It’s like there’s birds flyin’ high, an’ they look down an’ think, There she is, let’s go visit.”

  He knew storms weren’t like birds, but he got what she meant. “That’s like me. When I see things that went on, it’s never when I want to. Like they’re hovering there, and one picture steps forward all of a sudden.”

  She nodded. “Aye, just like tha’. Like a visitor.”

  When Rose heard her mother calling her, she got up to leave. Stopping at the door, she turned to look at him. “I’m awfu’ glad you’ve coom, Martin.” Then she made a curtsy, pulling her white apron to the side like it was a party dress.

  9

  SIS HEADQUARTERS, LONDON

  FRIDAY, JULY 31. “Night Owl?” E repeated. He leaned back in his leather button chair, commanding an imposing desk in front of bay windows with a view of St. James’s Park in the distance.

  Julian nodded. “Nachteule. Polish intelligence has been tracking the operation for months.”

  “Anything from Woodbird?” Their man in the Abwehr.

  “He’s digging.” They’d sent a wireless query out the night before to their asset, who sat smack in the middle of the German army’s intelligence section.

  E turned a page over in the file before him. “In your opinion this Polish operative—Gustaw Bajek—is reliable? Caught you red-handed, and just drops state secrets in your lap?” Although on the one hand pleased, E was always watchful for misdirection, betrayal, and lies, every secret service’s best weapons.

  “I think he’s playing straight with us. He shared with me that they have a small lead on the assassin, or one of them. A man with a Dutch accent. I think that showed good faith. As for the English benefactor, they’d like us to shut down the funding source, naturally.”

  E splayed the loose papers of the report on his desk, frowning. “How much money?”

  “They don’t know, but over a billion Reichsmark have been funneled into the Nazi front company, MEFO, the Society for Metallurgical Research. Some of that’s been converted from pounds sterling.”

  “I don’t care if it’s the German orphans’ fund or the Berlin Philharmonic,” E said. “We’ll put a stop to it as soon as you find the British donor.”

  “Giving money to the Nazis is not against the law,” Julian pointed out.

  “We’ll leave it to Whitehall once we have our man.” E closed the file. “And what about our own Talents? We may be at risk from this Nachteule.”

  “We could be,” Julian said. Hitler’s Nachteule targets had been Continental so far, but Bajek’s claim of a program to exterminate Talents there was troubling. And believable, in keeping with German exploitation of their severa
l years’ head start with research on meta-abilities. From the beginning of the Talent outbreak during the war, the Germans had fielded a top research team to find military uses of Talents. Much to E’s and Julian’s dismay, England had let their war apparatus dribble away, nor were they playing catch-up yet. Except for Monkton Hall. That was something, at least.

  “Extra security up on the moors, then,” E said. “For HARC.” Monkton Hall’s code name, the Historical Archives and Records Centre.

  Julian nodded. “At the very least a new security fence, and sentries posted, I should think.”

  “And Churchill?” E flashed a prism of light on the wall from his paperweight, a souvenir from the battle of the Marne. It looked like a piece of shrapnel floated in the glass. Julian imagined it had been dug out of his boss, but he had not asked. They were friends from their Eton days, but as with most people, they seldom discussed the Great War.

  “We ought to put him in the picture,” Julian said. “With his conceptor Talent he could be a target, even if he is out of government.” Churchill, a great fan of new styles of weapons, had been tested at Monkton and astonishingly, had been rated a 10.

  E nodded. “I’ll suggest Whitehall contact him. Put him on alert, though I doubt he’ll want security, not on the evidence we have so far.”

  “And the rest of our strong Talent assets are scattered all over the country,” Julian said. “We can’t watch everybody.”

  “Not concerned about Sparrow, then?” Sparrow, the code name for Julian’s daughter.

  Her Talent of the spill was quite strong at 6, with no British asset any higher in her category. Julian shook his head. “No. She’s trained. And I have my foreman on watch at Wrenfell, as always.” He’d tell Owen Cherwell to alert her to possible danger. Of course, Julian himself couldn’t have that talk with her. She might be SIS, but the only case officer she knew was Owen. It was standard compartmentalization, but it played hell with his relationship with his daughter.

  Owen had suggested that Kim was restless for an assignment. Nothing to give her right now, but at least she had her new charge, a boy she’d taken in at the farm. He’d rung her up when he’d returned from Poland. She had brought him up to speed on the lad, Martin, and had also wanted to talk about the murdered boys. He hoped the crimes wouldn’t haunt her, with her soft spot for youngsters.

  E reached again for his glass paperweight and turned it over in his hand, regarding it. “You’ve been saying that Sparrow is ready for a bigger assignment. What about the Continent? That dust-up in Geneva? Or attach her to the Paris station. Just to listen. Could have some benefit, don’t you think?”

  He very much did think. But E continued to think of her as a passive spill asset, a damned limited perspective. Kim was on her way to demonstrating excellent operational judgment. In fact, if Kim hadn’t been relentless in the Prestwich Affair, Germany could have secured a foothold in country. Or rather more than a foothold. It remained unclear if Erich von Ritter, heading up the German operation, had had time before his death to tell Berlin about Kim’s ability and her role as a spy. Since von Ritter had spared Kim from his suicidal end at Rievaulx Abbey, perhaps he had kept her identity secret. It would make a European mission more likely for Kim.

  “I’m keeping my eye out for the right posting,” Julian said.

  E nodded. “Carry on, then. Inform me immediately if you get a lead on the Nachteule funds.”

  “Chief.”

  E planned on staying in the city. Most of Whitehall would abandon London for the month of August, but E preferred his London flat to the estate at Litchfield. His wife preferred Litchfield, and that was reason enough.

  ALBEMARLE STREET

  THAT EVENING. “We could meet tonight,” Julian said, cradling the phone receiver to his ear while undoing his tie. It was last-minute to ring up Olivia, but he thought perhaps she’d come. He was free until around eleven, when he was meeting with his team, but he hoped he could take her out somewhere discreet for supper.

  “Oh, Julian, I can’t. I promised Mum I’d have dinner at their place. She’s having some people over.”

  “Then a drink.” He hadn’t seen her since his return. “The King’s Head?”

  A long pause. “Yes, all right. The Savoy, though?”

  Closer to her flat, maybe too public. But: “Yes.”

  He made sure he got there before her so she could slip in and they would not be left standing looking for a table.

  She wore a flowered dress with a little jacket. Red lipstick, for his benefit, he thought. He picked her out immediately, with her hair rolled forward in that elegant updo for which she was justly famous in the head office.

  “I hope you don’t think this is”—she looked around—“too public.”

  “No. Just this once.” In fact, he hadn’t liked her choice of the Savoy. Their affair had not stayed under wraps as E had wanted. It had come up more than once with the chief. He ordered a sloe gin for her, whisky for himself. When the waiter left, he added, “We have five hundred other watering holes left in London.” This remark put a damper on their mood, that they had to scurry from one clandestine place to the next.

  “How was Berlin?”

  “It went hard.”

  A little furrow between her eyes. “Berlin can be that way.” She didn’t say, Did you kill someone? Or, Did someone try to kill you? “I’m glad you’re back. Sorry this is all rushed. I don’t have long.”

  He was more disappointed than he had realized that she’d be busy tonight. “I was three days too late,” he said.

  She raised her chin in that way she had of saying, I understand. Under the table she took his hand.

  He thought Olivia Hennessey was perhaps the only woman he could speak to about his life. Not that he had said much, even now, but still, he felt that she understood, if not the facts, then the upshot of it all. What remained when you came home and tried to sort it out.

  When she removed her hand to check her watch, he said, so directly it surprised him, “Would you ever leave the service, Olivia?”

  She looked around the room as though searching for an escape route. “Oh, I don’t know. . . .”

  It was the wrong thing for him to have said, he knew it. Where had it come from? They had known each other for twelve years, been lovers for two and a half months. He wished he hadn’t said it, and then he didn’t care. He was sixty-two years old, not some youngster afraid of a woman saying no.

  “Darling, I have to go.”

  “I know you do.” He called for the tab. “Who will be at your parents’?”

  Her gaze slid sideways. “A friend of the family’s.”

  So, just one other. “A friend of yours?”

  “You’re not free to ask me that.” They faced off now. “We work for E,” she said, simply stating the bare fact of the impediment to their relationship. She collected her purse, but before getting up, she turned back to him. “Would you ever leave?”

  It was more than fair to ask. Eventually, their affair would become common knowledge in the Office, and then, likely one of them would have to go. It couldn’t automatically be her, was unlikely to be her. She had been with E longer, had built her life around that suite of offices on Broadway.

  “Would you?”

  He couldn’t answer her, or didn’t. She smiled forgivingly, resignedly, then gathered her purse and gloves and went for her taxi.

  A SAFE FLAT

  LATER THAN NIGHT. Behind shuttered and curtained windows in a flat near Piccadilly, Julian met with his best team, Elsa Rampling and Fin Hewitt. The room was appointed with four mismatched chairs, a desk, a single bed, and a cigarette-burned coffee table that doubled as a dining surface and a table for maps and case files.

  On designated evenings, their eleven-fifteen meetings usually lasted until midnight, punctuated by the eleven-thirty wireless transmission from their man in Berlin, Woodbird.

  In readiness for the transmission, the wireless set was turned on, spitting static and the
faint whine of electromagnetic interference. Elsa sat in the best chair, wearing a dowdy hat and a shapeless chintz dress. At fifty-six, her prematurely white hair added the perfect finish to her little-old-lady role—as well as the excellent befuddled expression that belied her cool nerves and deadly aim with a pistol.

  Fin, their best man on Morse code, sat with his feet on the table next to carry-out sacks of scones, smoking another Woodbine. Small and muscular, he was also a superb street fighter, a skill more than one foreign agent had discovered to their chagrin.

  He blew a stream of smoke out the side of his mouth. “Birdie’s had nothin’ for two weeks. Maybe tonight we get lucky.” All quiet nothing to report was the sign-of-life notice that came in unless there was intel to report.

  It hadn’t been much over twenty-four hours since SIS sent the query to their mole in the Abwehr. Not much time for Woodbird to search out patrons of Nachteule, but he fiercely hoped for a little luck. With more than professional interest, he wanted to flush out the British collaborator. It would give Julian special pleasure to staunch the flow of British pounds to Nazi Germany, even if it didn’t go far enough to avenge Tilda Mazur.

  A few minutes to go before Woodbird’s transmission. Fin pulled his feet off the desk, sitting up straight and donning the headset, turning the dials to home in on the frequency.

  “I wonder,” Elsa said, “why an Englishman would support killing Talents in Poland? It’s not as though the Poles could put up much of a fight anyway, if Hitler comes calling.” She shifted in her chair, wincing. Since last spring she’d been on light duty after being thrown from a moving train in pursuit of German agents. This exploit had burnished her reputation in the Office; she had lost, but she had also survived.

  Julian shrugged. “There were French murders too. They can put up a fight.”

  Fin snorted at the idea of the French army. The radio band whistled in the background like a profoundly submerged scream. He lit another cigarette from the last of the old one.